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Introduction

Capitalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries assumed the colonised world as the background for its development and reproduction. The real theatre of history was assumed to be in Europe, in the West; the rest was background. This assumption carried with it the premise that the peoples of the colonised world were not fully human, that they lacked full political being, that they existed in a condition of perpetual backwardness. They were not even fully present on the stage of history. To an extent, this idea was reflected even in the writings of Karl Marx, who — though he wrote about India, Algeria, and Russia towards the end of his life — remained in many ways a prisoner of the milieu in which he was born. The primary theatre of revolution, for him, was Europe.

The twentieth century overturned this assumption. The peoples who had been cast as the background of the drama took over the stage. From that point forward, the story of Marxism has been, in a sense, off-script. If Marx had theorized that the binary division between the worker and the capitalist bourgeoisie was the primary contradiction, the course of revolutionary history would help evolve and transform his theories, revealing a much more complex tapestry of contradictions — led by the peoples of the colonized world. With these background actors forcing themselves to the fore, new categories had to be developed, and that remains a task even today. This is not to say that Marxism was made irrelevant, but that it evolved. Our understanding of it must evolve, too.

In a 1975 speech, Walter Rodney questioned the taken-for-granted framing of debates about Marxism’s relevance. Why, he asked, must we always argue for Marxism’s relevance? Why do people so readily discard Marxism as Western-centric, or outdated?

For Rodney, questions about Marxism’s relevance emerge in two conditions. The first condition is that there is a struggle that the dominant ideology can no longer guide. People seek out alternative explanations for the phenomena they see in their lives. The second condition is that people have been indoctrinated by capitalist ideology. They have been conditioned to see the world in terms that continue to support capitalism. Since that is their starting point, they find it necessary to ask: Why is Marxism relevant?

The Marxism we need is precisely the Marxism that speaks to what Rodney called a condition of struggle. The crisis intensifies. Predominant ideological frameworks cannot accurately describe what is happening, and therefore produce strategies that are incapable of resolving the crisis. Instead, the working class movement requires what Vladimir Lenin called the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” — an analysis of the objective situation facing workers and the oppressed. It requires a strategy for struggle, theoretical clarity that reflects the most urgent and strategic needs of the people, and a revolutionary organisation or party of the proletariat.

In his speech on Marxism and the African revolution, Rodney contrasted Marxist materialism with idealist perspectives that prioritise ideas and concepts over material conditions. He argued that Marxism’s focus on material conditions and social relations provides a more nuanced understanding of society and history, and he emphasised the need to understand the specific historical and cultural context of each society when applying Marxist methodology. He cited the examples of Lenin, Mao, and Amilcar Cabral, all of whom applied Marxist theory to their respective societies by taking into account the unique conditions and experiences of each.

Leninism as Marxism in the Era of Imperialism

The continuing legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution shaped the political situation and struggles of the post-World War II period. Vladimir Lenin theorized that because imperialism was the "highest stage of capitalism", which allowed a handful of wealthy capitalist countries to exploit the majority of the world’s people, the struggles of oppressed countries have become part of the world proletarian revolution. If before the slogan was “Workers of the world, unite — you have nothing to lose but your chains,” in the era of imperialism the slogan became “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite — you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Therefore, Leninism is Marxism in the era of imperialism.

History has proven this thesis right. The first proletarian revolution occurred in Russia, which Lenin described as a country with “islands of capitalism surrounded by an ocean of feudalism.” The next proletarian revolutions took place in China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Here lies one of the most interesting paradoxes of the twentieth century, one that many miss: Marxism is the only Western or European concept that never fully won in the West, yet it led to revolutions in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Nicaragua and beyond. It is very difficult to understand the history of the twentieth century or the history of the Global South without studying Marxism’s impact on these societies.

This was never, as is always the case with historical development, a one-way stream. It was not simply that people in the Global South learned from Marxism. The reverse was also true: Marxism and Marxists had to learn from the practitioners of Marxism in the Global South. We must challenge the canon and attend to those thinkers who were not at universities but in the fields as guerrilla fighters, in prisons, in the underground, in exile — people who were radically rethinking theory and who made major contributions to Marxism.

Leninism addressed the strong currents of reformism and social democracy in the workers’ movement in imperialist countries. Lenin explained that the super-profits imperialism extracted from its colonies enabled the monopoly capitalists to set aside a portion of those profits to bribe a section of the proletariat — the labour aristocracy. This enabled them to mislead the working class and lead them away from revolution towards reformism: a state of being content with the crumbs that fall from the capitalist table.

This produced another important thesis: that revolution would most likely happen first at the weakest links in the imperialist chain, and those weakest links were in the exploited and oppressed countries of the Global South. A logical corollary followed: it was in the interest of the working class in the imperialist countries to support revolutions in the South, because doing so would weaken imperialism and create better conditions for the struggle of the working class at home against its own class enemies.

The binary division of workers versus bourgeoisie, while theoretically still correct, becomes more complicated historically when we enter a situation where the intuitive anger of the people is directed at the denial of their humanity, the denial of sovereignty, and the denial of an independent state. As Frantz Fanon argued, Marxism has to be extended every time it enters the non-European world.

Here, the question of sovereignty becomes important. If we look at the national liberation struggles of the twentieth century, it is the destruction of sovereignty that lies at the heart of the genocidal policies of imperialism. Today, the destruction of Arab and Palestinian sovereignty lies at the heart of the genocidal policies of Zionism and imperialism. The very complicated relationship that emerges — between being against the state in one sense while recognising that state formations are necessary for defensive purposes and for ensuring the political being of the people — is a contradiction that presents itself objectively in history.

The enemy understands this more clearly than anyone: the policy across Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Palestine, and beyond has been to destroy state sovereignty. Sanctions and siege against China, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela are part of that same policy. This takes us back to the beginning of capitalism, which could assume the colonised world as mere background precisely because the colonised had no state capacity — their state capacities had been destroyed and taken over by Europeans.

If the primary task in the peripheries is the struggle for state sovereignty — for political being against imperialism — what is the use of Marxism for people in the Global South? Here a creative dimension appears. Marxists like Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro were primarily dealing with the question of empire. But the appeal of Marxism was precisely that it gave them a theory of class conflict, and hence pushed those who wanted national liberation to align it with social liberation. The national revolution must become a social revolution if it is to succeed in fighting empire.

The Comprador Bourgeoisie and the Patriotic Bloc

In the context of peripheral revolutionary movements, it is crucial to understand the role of the comprador bourgeoisie. This is a term heard constantly in the Global South but rarely among Western Marxists. The comprador bourgeoisie represents those bourgeois elements completely dependent on colonial or imperialist capital: people closest to the IMF and the World Bank, whose predecessors were in league with colonialism. They benefit from empire. A division thus runs through the heart of the nation: not everyone is fighting for the nation. There are those on the side of global capital, and it is only through an understanding of capitalism on a global scale that one can map this social division.

The comprador bourgeoisie is broadly opposed by the patriotic bloc, which can be made up of workers, peasants, and also members of the nationally-oriented bourgeoisie. Within this bloc, there are elements that are consistent and those that are vacillating. From Lenin to Mao to Ho Chi Minh, revolutionaries focused extensively on the vacillating elements who at times stand with the cause of national liberation but, when their own social status is threatened, move back into the camp of reaction. The strategic thinking required of revolutionary movements — whether guerrilla movements or mass fronts — involves understanding how these elements move across time, because this is a dynamic relationship, not a static one.

Mao’s experience illustrates this vividly. In the 1920s, all Chinese communists worked alongside the nationalists. The falling-out between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1920s led to massacres in Shanghai and elsewhere in 1927, followed by civil war and the heroic yet tragic Long March. But the moment the Japanese invaded China, Mao argued for the necessity of realigning with the nationalists, on the grounds that what was under threat at that moment was not the interest of the Chinese working class alone but the political being of the people of China — the very existence of the Chinese state. At that point, the principal contradiction was the Japanese imperialist invasion.

This idea of the principal contradiction at any given point in history is a creative theoretical contribution that must be taken seriously, because it allows us to view social conflict in a dynamic way. One can give qualified support to an Arab state under attack from Zionism without thereby endorsing everything that state does. One can fight against the state in the most radical manner possible on internal questions. This is not a contradiction in the minds of Third World Marxists — it is the contradiction that presents itself objectively in the actual movement of history. The path to truth, in that sense, is contradictory. These debates are visible most clearly in the Arab world, where Marxists gave complete support to governments they were otherwise critical of — including the Ba’athist states of the 1960s and 1970s — when those governments came under attack from Zionism. This is intuitive for Marxists in the Third World. Western Marxists, by contrast, tend to compile lists of a government’s mistakes as reasons never to align with it — a static approach to politics that our reading of history seeks to avoid.

The Peasantry as Revolutionary Subject

One category of revolutionaries that became critically important in the twentieth century and must be recognised is the peasantry. In classical modernisation theory and even in some strands of Marxist theory, the peasantry is a social class representing the past, destined to be swept away by capitalism. The future would be industrial, and the contradiction would lie between the bourgeoisie and the workers. But because of the nature of imperialism, it was precisely the appropriation of the peasantry, the land, and the resources that fuelled the development of the imperialist core while producing mass misery and underdevelopment in the Global South. The peasantry therefore became a central vehicle for revolutionary movements from the Philippines to India, to China, and most heroically to Vietnam, where the peasantry defeated the most powerful military machine known to humanity after a struggle lasting over a decade.

The peasantry became both a symbol of the past and the vehicle for entering a liberated future. This contradictory position is shared by other social elements, including indigenous peoples in Latin America, who were not seen as revolutionary subjects for the longest time. One of the most significant contributions of Latin American Marxism has been the ability to see indigenous populations and the peasantry not as relics from the past but as gateways to the future. Similarly, the question of gender and feminism — the refusal to erase women and their labour — matches this broader trajectory of the twentieth century, in which those who were forgotten and assumed to be in the background forced themselves onto the front stages of history.

The Philippine Revolution

An example of the application of Marxism in the era of imperialism is the revolutionary movement in the Philippines, one of whose founding pillars was Jose Maria Sison. In his seminal work Specific Characteristics of the People’s War, Sison outlined the strategy of the revolutionary forces. The people’s war in the Philippines is protracted, involving the gradual build-up of forces and popular support to surmount the asymmetrical power relationship between imperialism and its puppets in the Philippine oligarchy. It is rural-based, focusing on the mobilisation of peasants and workers. It employs guerrilla tactics utilising mobility and surprise. It is mass-based, building a strong popular foundation. And it stresses the unity of patriotic forces — the coming together of nationalist and progressive groups.

The Philippine struggle for sovereignty continues the unfinished revolution of 1896. The Katipunan Revolution was the first victorious revolution against Spanish colonialism in Asia, a fact that most people, even in the Philippines, have forgotten. At the time, revolutionaries from China and Japan gathered in Yokohama to support the Katipunan while the revolution was being hijacked by US imperialism. There was an attempt by progressives in Japan and China to provide arms and financial assistance. But this history is not taught; people are not trained to think in terms of revolutionary rupture in relation to their pride and dignity, and national pride is reduced to culturalism.

The revolution in the Philippines today entails completing the unfinished revolution: a revolution that is nationalist in the sense that it is anti-imperialist, and democratic in the sense that it lifts up the interests of the popular classes — particularly the peasants and workers who comprise the majority of the population — with the participation of the progressive forces.

This national-democratic revolution, pursued with a socialist perspective, asserts the need to defend bourgeois freedoms that even the comprador bourgeoisie in power seek to suppress. It aims to build political and economic independence, to produce a national surplus, and to develop national industries where none exist. Genuine agrarian reform is the precondition: without it, there can be no sovereign, autonomous national economy that can later be developed into a socialist economy capable of planning redistribution. The revolutionary subject in the Philippines is one who thinks in terms of breaking with imperialism and building a national industry, with a special focus on the specific oppressions experienced by women, indigenous peoples, and national minorities.

Global Trajectories

Many radicals across the world were mobilised and organised by the global impact of the Russian Revolution. One of the main consequences of the effort to understand the first socialist revolution in the Third World was the goal of combating European capitalism and imperialism — a goal that persists to this day, with the United States at the helm of maintaining a global imperialist system.

The global influence of the Chinese Revolution shaped various radical movements. China’s massive publication of revolutionary texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in different languages played a significant role in the dissemination of revolutionary thought and the development of cadres committed to communist party-building worldwide. But even more influential and inspiring, up to the present, was China’s revolutionary and systematic programme of land reform and collectivisation from 1950 to 1953, its campaigns to combat illiteracy from 1950 to 1956, and its elections of workers’ and peasants’ councils from 1950 to 1955.

The pan-African and Bandung trajectories also shaped this historical context. Pan-Africanism, born as an ideology and movement in the United States and founded by African-Americans and African-Caribbeans like Henry Sylvester Williams, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James, underwent a transformation after World War II — from a cultural and racial ideology to an ideology of national liberation. The Bandung Conference, held in April 1955 in Indonesia and hosted by the Sukarno government, was a historic meeting of leaders from Asian and African countries that gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement and the concept of the Third World. Mutual interest, solidarity, and respect for national sovereignty were its basic principles. As Samir Amin described it, Bandung represented the first awakening of the South. Richard Wright, who attended the conference as an observer, described it in The Color Curtain as “a meeting of the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed — in short, the underdogs of the human race.”

The Cuban Revolution played a remarkable role in the spread and deepening of revolutions, especially in Africa. Fidel Castro visited Algeria in 1961, two years after the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. By 1962, Cuban ships docked at Casablanca to deliver weapons to Algerian revolutionaries. In his three-month trip to Africa, Che Guevara saw the guerrillas of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique fighting the Portuguese. As governments in the Congo declared radical sympathies and Zaire revolted against US-installed regimes, Che with Cuban military instructors began fighting alongside the rebels of Angola, Zaire, and the Congo. By the summer of 1965, there were four hundred Cuban soldiers in central Africa. They did not win, but these African and Cuban guerrillas took stock. By 1966, Cuban military instructors joined the rebels of Guinea-Bissau and never left until the end of the war. In November 1975, Bissau’s newspaper Nô Pintcha declared: “The Cubans’ help was decisive.”

The Counterrevolution

The paradox of the Global South is that the historical task of the bourgeoisie in Europe — building national industries, developing national economies, defending bourgeois liberties — cannot be fulfilled by the bourgeoisie in the periphery. Under colonial modernity, the bourgeoisie that developed was truncated from the very beginning. The colonised world was never imagined as a space for competitors but as a space for the extraction of resources and labour. It falls to the left, to the communist parties, to fulfil these tasks.

There is no internal bourgeoisie in the Third World with the capacity to industrialise at the scale required. State-directed industrialisation is necessary, and this is exactly what occurred in the Soviet Union, in China, and in many other parts of the world. Consider the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s: a society destroyed by the First World War and civil war, under sanctions from all the imperialist powers, whose leadership knew that a massive attack from the West was inevitable. If, at that moment, the leadership had decided to dissolve the state rather than build its industrial and military capacity, history would have been very different. The annual celebrations of the victory over fascism would not occur. Nazism was defeated by the Red Army — not purely through the commitment of its soldiers, though that was an enormous part of the story, but also through the industrial policies that built the capacity and technological strength that bewildered the Nazis inside Russia.

Today, the destruction of sovereignty across countries is a deliberate policy of empire. The IMF, the World Bank, and the regime of sanctions constitute a pattern: every country that experiences a revolution also witnesses sanctions, support for counterrevolutionary forces from within, and military siege by imperialist powers. If this is what the counterrevolution will do — and the twentieth century has demonstrated that it will — then it is necessary to develop popular sovereignty, to build an economy not fully dependent on empire, to create an independent sovereign path of development, and — a bitter pill for many Western Marxists — to construct strong armed forces within revolutionary states. One cannot expect revolutionaries to dissolve the state, give up central planning, or relinquish the monopoly of violence while their revolutions are surrounded from within and without by counterrevolutionaries.

Within our canon of heroes, we should therefore also place those soldiers and military figures who fought in the Second World War, in China, in Angola, in Vietnam — those officers who were rethinking Marxism in practice without necessarily calling it that. If one of the greatest achievements of Marxism in the twentieth century is the defeat of Nazism and colonialism, it cannot be understood without those military officers aligned with the Marxist camp who were rethinking and demonstrating sovereignty in practice.

Expanding the Dialectic

The question of expanding the dialectic — expanding the social and revolutionary subjects, expanding the idea of contradictions — is urgent in the present moment. Any revolutionary process that tries to think about transition will have to pass through a tortured and even contradictory path. Lenin was clear that a certain kind of state capitalism would be necessary for the transitionary process in underdeveloped regions moving towards socialism. The problem with many of our friends in the West is that they offer blueprints of what the revolution should look like — a messianic vision in which all contradictions dissolve and complete people’s power is exercised through workers’ councils. This is a great idea. But when you complicate history and introduce an underdeveloped country with peasant societies, a weak state, and the massive siege organised by the global counterrevolution — NATO, the CIA, the IMF, the World Bank, sanctions, bombs — things become far more complicated.

It is nothing but arrogance to dismiss projects like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, or China as deviations from some original Marxism. Rather than adopting the language of deviations, it is important to see how these societies have managed under conditions of siege. How did Cuba create some of the best social indicators in the Third World? How did China, despite propaganda, siege, and sanctions, lift over eight hundred million people out of poverty? Rather than clinging to an original text as though it were religious doctrine, we need to examine how the practice of Marxism in the Third World has reshaped the coordinates of Marxist theory. That should be the beginning of any politics of communism in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

As the crisis deepens, people find it more difficult to accept the dominant ideology, the dominant narrative. One of the defence mechanisms of the dominant order, particularly in the imperialist countries, is to concede that things may be bad while insisting that the people resisting the system are worse — that the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed are terrorists, that they are violent, that they will bring authoritarianism. This is to ignore the class basis of the global struggle, and to erase the extraordinary violence of imperialism as it seeks to destroy any alternative.

The task of international solidarity is to identify where the revolutionary subject can be found and how to support, work alongside, and struggle together with that subject. The construction of military and defensive capacity to a point of parity with imperialism produced the dynamic we call the Cold War — a war that could not be fought on an East-West axis because of the existence of nuclear weapons, but that instead became deeply hot for large parts of the world, from Korea to Congo to Indonesia to Guatemala, where imperialism, unable to defeat the socialist bloc in direct military confrontation, turned its destructive energies elsewhere. Understanding that global counterrevolution, and how movements have survived and resisted it, is the next chapter in this history — and in ours.