The question of the decline of Western civilisation cannot be approached sentimentally, nor can it be framed as a clash of cultures or civilisations in the bourgeois sense. From the standpoint of scientific socialism, civilisation is not an abstract moral achievement but a historically determinate form of social organisation rooted in a specific material base. What is commonly referred to as “Western civilisation” is, in essence, the civilisational form of capitalism — first in its progressive bourgeois phase, later in its monopolistic, imperialist, and parasitic stage. Its rise was inseparable from the development of productive forces, the dissolution of feudal relations, and the universalisation of commodity production; its decline is inseparable from the exhaustion of those very historical functions. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels repeatedly emphasised, no social formation collapses because it is “challenged” from outside, but because the internal contradictions of its mode of production reach a point where further development becomes impossible within existing relations. Capitalism, having once revolutionised the productive forces, now survives only by arresting the development of humanity itself.

The transition of capitalism into imperialism marked a decisive civilisational rupture. With the concentration and centralisation of capital, the fusion of bank capital and industrial capital, and the emergence of monopoly finance capital, the Western bourgeois order ceased to be historically progressive. As Vladimir Lenin demonstrated with scientific precision, imperialism is not merely a policy but a stage — the highest and final stage of capitalism — characterised by parasitism, decay, and violence. From this point onward, Western civilisation no longer expands through productive development but through plunder, unequal exchange, and militarised domination. Its apparent prosperity is sustained not by internal vitality but by the systematic transfer of surplus from the non-Western world. Thus, the “strength” of the West in the twentieth century already concealed a profound weakness: its dependence on the arrested development of others. This parasitic relationship forged a specific social compact within the imperial metropoles, whereby sections of the proletariat were granted relative privileges financed by super-profits extracted from the colonies and neocolonies. This material basis for class compromise, however, was always contingent upon the uninterrupted flow of imperial rent.

What makes our present conjuncture historically unprecedented is that this external condition of Western survival is now eroding. The non-Western world — long reduced to a reservoir of cheap labour, raw materials, and imperial rent — has begun to develop its productive forces outside the direct command of the imperial centres. Crucially, this development has not followed the classical liberal-capitalist path, which merely reproduces dependency under new forms, but has increasingly taken place through state-led, planned, and socialist-oriented strategies. This is why socialism in the Global South appears to imperial ideology not simply as an alternative model, but as an existential threat. It undermines the very mechanism through which monopoly finance capitalism reproduces itself. Once surplus is retained, planned, and reinvested domestically, imperialism loses its oxygen. The consequent squeezing of imperial rent triggers a cascading crisis within the core, forcing its internal contradictions to the surface with a new and terrible intensity.

It is at this juncture that we must engage in a more dialectical analysis of the class dynamics within the imperial heartlands. To state that decades of imperial rent have politically disarmed large sections of the Western working classes, integrating them into the imperial order, is to describe a concrete historical reality. Yet a dialectical understanding demands we see this integration not as a static, permanent condition, but as a relation itself riven with contradiction and vulnerable to the very laws of motion of the capitalist system it seeks to stabilise. The erosion of the external tap of super-profits initiates a violent process of internal recomposition. The ruling monopoly-finance capital, facing a falling rate of profit and heightened global competition, has no choice but to launch a sustained assault on the very living standards it once used to pacify its domestic population. Austerity, deindustrialisation, the casualisation of labour, the privatisation of social provision, and inflationary spirals are not merely policy choices but systemic necessities for a bourgeoisie fighting to retain its dominance. The material basis of the old class compromise is being dismantled by finance capital itself.

Consequently, the political consciousness of the proletariat in the core is not frozen in a state of perpetual passivity. It is a field of struggle, subject to recomposition under the lash of crisis. The inevitable result is a complex and uneven fracturing. One section, still ideologically captured by bourgeois nationalism and racism, may be mobilised by the ruling class towards reaction, fascistoid politics, and support for ever more desperate imperial wars, misdirecting its rage against migrants or rival nations rather than the capitalist class. Simultaneously, another section, particularly amongst the precariat, the declassed youth, and those sectors most brutally exposed to the collapse of social democracy, begins to experience a radicalisation. Their objective material trajectory is one of proletarianisation in its most acute form, stripping away the illusions of privilege. They face a system that can no longer grant concessions but only administer decay. This creates an objective basis for the re-emergence of class struggle, however nascent and fragmented, within the belly of the beast. The revolutionary horizon in the core, while undoubtedly narrowed and obscured by decades of ideological mystification, is not extinguished. It is, rather, being painfully re-forged in the fires of a deteriorating social reality.

Thus, the tragic irony deepens. Monopoly finance capitalism cannot be defeated from within the West under the prevailing conditions of consciousness and organisation. The revolutionary energy of history has indeed shifted decisively toward the periphery, where the contradiction between nation and imperialism is most direct and explosive. Yet, the systemic crisis accelerated by the socialist-oriented development of the non-Western world simultaneously corrodes the foundations of stability within the core itself. This produces a dual motion: the advanced detachment of the periphery from the imperial system, and a gathering storm of internal contradiction within the metropole. The latter does not automatically generate a revolutionary subject; it generates a profound crisis of legitimacy and intensifying class antagonisms which must be organised and given political direction. The absence of a mass revolutionary party in the West commensurate with this task is the subjective weakness that objectively sustains the ruling class. But the material basis for that weakness is now under siege from the very dynamics of imperialist decay.

Here the question of “Western survival” reveals its true ideological content. There is no path by which Western civilisation can survive as an imperial civilisation once the non-Western world breaks free from dependency. Its survival would require a radical internal transformation: the expropriation of monopoly capital, the dismantling of finance domination, and the reintegration of Western societies into an egalitarian world system of planned development. Such a transformation would amount to the negation of Western imperial identity itself. The West could survive only by ceasing to be what it historically became. This is why, from the standpoint of the ruling classes, socialism anywhere is perceived as a threat everywhere. Their strategy is to forestall this historical negation by any means necessary, unleashing barbarism both externally and, as required, internally.

Deprived of its progressive function and increasingly incapable of internal renewal, imperialism gravitates toward barbarism as both logic and policy. Permanent war, militarisation, ecological devastation, and nuclear blackmail are not policy errors but structural tendencies of a system confronting its historical limits. The danger, therefore, is not that the West will “decline peacefully,” but that it will attempt to universalise its collapse — dragging humanity into catastrophe rather than relinquishing domination. This is the real content of contemporary imperial aggression: not confidence, but desperation. A civilisation that once claimed universality now threatens annihilation precisely because it can no longer universalise progress. Its internal class struggle is now mirrored in a global struggle between the forces demanding a socialist restructuring of human society and those clinging to a moribund order, a struggle where the ruling class of the core exhibits a growing willingness to sacrifice its own co-opted populations on the altar of profit and power.

Yet history is not a morality play, nor is it mechanically predetermined. The global balance of forces has shifted irreversibly. Imperialism is no longer hegemonic in the full sense; it is contested economically, encircled strategically, and hollowed out ideologically. The emergence of multiple centres of socialist-oriented development limits the capacity of the imperial core to dictate the terms of world history. Even in its decline, capitalism does not operate on an empty stage. The existence of alternative systems of planning, cooperation, and development introduces a material counter-tendency to barbarism. It does not guarantee victory, but it constrains catastrophe. Furthermore, the very barbarism unleashed by imperialism becomes its own grave-digger, educating new millions in the core and periphery alike in the brutal logic of the system, potentially accelerating the dissolution of ideological hegemony and forging new instruments of class struggle.

From this standpoint, the future of humanity cannot be framed as a choice between the survival of Western civilisation and its defeat by the East. That framing itself belongs to bourgeois ideology. The real question is whether humanity can transcend capitalism before capitalism renders civilised life impossible. Socialism appears here not as a regional or cultural project, but as the only mode of production capable of consciously regulating humanity’s metabolic relation with nature, rationally planning global development, and subordinating production to human need rather than profit. The decline of the West, insofar as it signifies the decline of imperial capitalism, is not a tragedy for humanity; the tragedy would be capitalism’s ability to prolong itself through destruction.

Thus, the historical alternative remains what Marxism has always insisted it is: socialism or barbarism. Western civilisation cannot be saved on imperial terms, and it does not deserve to be. What can be saved — and what must be saved — is humanity itself. If socialism advances unevenly, experimentally, and through struggle, it opens the possibility of a post-capitalist civilisation beyond East and West, beyond core and periphery. This struggle is now unified across the globe, though its forms differ: in the periphery, it is the direct anti-imperialist fight for sovereignty and development; in the core, it is the arduous task of breaking the imperial chain at its strongest, yet most internally rotten, link. If capitalism prevails through force, it risks leaving no civilisation at all. History has narrowed the field of possibilities, but it has not closed it. The outcome depends not on the moral awakening of the West, but on the organised, revolutionary praxis of the world’s oppressed majority, which now necessarily includes those within the fortress whose privileges have turned to dust.

"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question." Karl Marx, Second Thesis on Feuerbach.

The entire pre-Marxist history of philosophy can be reread as the history of a systematic displacement: the displacement of social practice into the realm of eternal ideas, cosmic order, metaphysical necessity, and ontological destiny. What was presented as theoria—the contemplation of Being, Truth, or the ultimate structure of reality—was never an innocent or autonomous intellectual activity floating above history. It was a determinate form of social labour, arising within specific material conditions, and returning to those conditions as a legitimating force. Theoria did not merely accompany practice; its inner telos was always praxis, understood not as abstract activity but as the concrete organisation and regulation of life. Philosophy, even at its most rarefied heights, was always already practical. The decisive question, however, is: what kind of practice?

In class societies, practice was never neutral. It was structured by relations of domination, hierarchy, and exploitation. Praxis meant the reproduction of a social order divided between rulers and ruled, command and obedience, mental and manual labour. Once this is grasped, theoria appears in a radically different light. Its function was not simply to “understand the world,” but to render a particular form of social practice intelligible, legitimate, and necessary. Theoria thus functioned as a justificatory moment for practice, and because practice itself was class practice, theoria necessarily took the form of class theorisation. What later appeared as metaphysics—cosmology, ontology, teleology—was, in its social function, ideology at its highest level of abstraction.

Metaphysics was the most powerful ideological form of class society precisely because it did not appear as ideology. By translating historically specific relations of domination into the language of Being, Nature, Reason, or Cosmic Order, it transformed contingent social arrangements into expressions of ultimate reality itself. Hierarchy became ontology; domination became teleology; obedience became harmony; inequality became necessity. This was not a philosophical accident or an intellectual error, but a structural effect of societies in which philosophy emerged as a specialised activity of strata materially freed from direct productive labour. Metaphysical universals were the sublimated forms of particular social relations, stripped of their historical content and re-presented as eternal truths.

When the Eurocentric frame is abandoned and the plurality of historical trajectories is taken seriously, this ideological function of metaphysics becomes even clearer. Different civilisations, organised around different modes of production and ecological conditions, produced different metaphysical systems—but the structural role of those systems remained strikingly similar. Whether expressed through divine kingship, moral cosmology, natural hierarchy, or teleological order, metaphysics consistently served to stabilise existing relations of power by embedding them in the structure of the cosmos. The content varied historically; the function did not. Wherever class domination existed, metaphysics tended to obscure it by presenting it as an expression of the natural or cosmic order.

Here the metaphor of camera obscura is not merely illustrative but theoretically precise. Metaphysics inverted social reality. It presented the effects of historical relations as their causes, the outcomes of struggle as the foundations of Being. The ruling class appeared not as a historically constituted power, but as the bearer of reason, virtue, or cosmic alignment. The dominated appeared not as exploited subjects, but as naturally subordinate, incomplete, or destined for obedience. History dissolved into eternity; struggle into order; transformation into permanence. Metaphysics did not simply misrecognise reality—it systematically inverted it, and in doing so rendered domination both intelligible and legitimate.

Dialectical materialism emerges historically as the immanent negation of this entire ideological formation. It does not oppose metaphysics with a new metaphysics, nor does it offer a competing ontology of ultimate reality. Its rupture is more radical: it abolishes the metaphysical form itself by grounding theory in social practice and historical movement. It refuses to ask what reality “is” in abstraction from how human beings collectively produce and reproduce their lives. In doing so, it reveals metaphysics as a historically specific form of class ideology rather than a timeless mode of thought. What metaphysics presented as the structure of the cosmos is exposed as the mystified structure of class society.

For this reason, dialectical materialism must be understood as post-metaphysical in a precise historical sense. It does not abandon totality, causality, or objectivity, as liberal and postmodern thought claim to do; rather, it abolishes the need for metaphysical guarantees by rooting knowledge in transformative praxis. It does not seek to justify an existing order by appealing to eternity or cosmic purpose. Instead, it articulates a worldview adequate to a world in transition, a world shaped by contradictions, struggles, and historical change. Where metaphysics sought to freeze reality into necessity, dialectical materialism insists on process, mediation, and transformation—not as abstract principles, but as expressions of lived historical movement.

This post-metaphysical character is inseparable from the historical horizon of socialism. As long as class domination persists, ideology will tend to reproduce itself in increasingly sophisticated forms, including philosophical ones. But a socialist orientation, directed toward the abolition of class antagonism, has no need to disguise domination as cosmic order or epistemic humility. Its legitimacy does not rest on hierarchy, but on collective self-emancipation. Theory, in such a context, ceases to function as a justificatory apparatus for power and becomes instead a conscious moment of social self-understanding. Theoria is no longer mystified praxis; it becomes praxis aware of itself.

It is at this point that the true historical meaning of liberal and postmodern philosophy becomes visible. These currents present themselves as the great critics of metaphysics, yet they represent not its overcoming but its afterlife—metaphysics emptied of ontology but preserved in function. Where classical metaphysics universalised class domination by projecting it into Being and Nature, liberalism and postmodernism universalise it by dissolving history into discourse, power into language, and material relations into fragmented narratives. Having abandoned the category of totality, they do not abolish domination; they render it unthinkable. Exploitation persists materially, while theory declares the very concepts needed to grasp it—class, mode of production, historical direction—to be obsolete, dangerous, or authoritarian.

Postmodern relativism thus functions as the most refined ideological form of late capitalism and neo-colonial order. By severing theory from practice, it reduces critique to interpretation and resistance to style. Domination appears neither necessary nor contingent, but simply endless—without cause, subject, or direction. Liberal philosophy complements this by replacing collective emancipation with moral individualism, rights discourse, and procedural ethics, all of which presuppose and stabilise existing material relations. Together, liberalism and postmodernism do not negate metaphysics; they complete its ideological mission under new historical conditions.

Against this theoretical exhaustion, dialectical materialism stands not as a return to grand metaphysical systems, but as their historical supersession. It restores the scandalous idea that history is structured, that domination has determinate material causes, and that emancipation is not a discourse, identity, or ethical posture but a material possibility rooted in collective praxis. The true end of metaphysics is therefore not epistemic humility or pluralism, but the conscious refusal to mystify class domination in any form—cosmic, moral, linguistic, or cultural. In this sense, dialectical materialism is not merely a philosophy of critique, but the theoretical self-consciousness of a world struggling to be born beyond class society, ideology, and the need for metaphysical alibis altogether.

(Note: This essay is dedicated to the enduring legacy of our beloved comrade Michael Parenti, whose dialectical materialist method remains a weapon against imperialism and bourgeois ideology. It is simultaneously a ruthless critique of those who, in a state of theoretical decomposition, selectively disinter the words of great Marxist thinkers. These zombie-like epigones wrench quotations from their living historical and textual context, mummifying dynamic analysis to propagate a filthy, dogmatic, and ultimately anti-materialist creed. Their practice is not scholarship, but a form of ideological necromancy that betrays the very science it claims to serve.)

The contemporary imperialist stage, characterised by the acute crisis of hegemonism and the undeniable resurgence of socialist-oriented states as poles of geopolitical and economic power, has occasioned not a strengthening of revolutionary theoretical clarity within certain petty-bourgeois strata of the Western ‘Left’, but rather a retreat into the most barren forms of metaphysical dogma. This retreat manifests as a peculiar but persistent intellectual pathology: the reduction of Marxist critique to a sterile museum of decontextualised quotations, where fragments of analysis, violently torn from the living tissue of their historical moment and concrete conjuncture, are embalmed as sacred relics and paraded as eternal, unchallengeable verdicts on dynamic social processes. This practice, a form of theoretical necromancy, achieves its most consummate and politically damaging expression when it cloaks itself in the borrowed authority of serious Marxist thinkers whose work is, in fact, dialectical and historical to its core. The case of Michael Parenti is here paradigmatic. His incisive writings on empire, fascism, and the contradictions of post-revolutionary states are now routinely subjected to a vulgar, ahistorical plundering, with lengthy excerpts from works such as Against Empire (1995), Blackshirts and Reds (1997), and his essay “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” (2007) presented not as contributions to a specific historical analysis, but as frozen tablets of law delivering a final condemnation of contemporary China. This is not scholarship, nor is it polemic; it is, in essence, a form of intellectual dishonesty that substitutes the easy certitudes of dogma for the demanding labour of materialist analysis, and in so doing, actively obstructs a scientific understanding of the most significant socialist project of our epoch.

To comprehend the profundity of this distortion, one must first recover Parenti’s authentic method, which was resolutely historical, conjunctural, and materialist. He was never a metaphysician of politics, trafficking in abstracted moralisms, but a sharp analyst of imperialist political economy and the gritty, contradictory realities of class struggle. His examinations of China in the 1990s and early 2000s were precisely that: examinations of a specific, turbulent, and highly contradictory phase in China’s post-reform trajectory. This period was objectively marked by the explosive, uneven forces unleashed by market-oriented reforms: rampant commodification, the creation of vast new property-owning and managerial strata, severe regional and social inequality, endemic bureaucratic corruption, and profound ecological degradation. Parenti’s work captured the intense friction between the persisting socialist superstructure—the Party, the state, the PLA—and the rapidly expanding base of capitalist relations of production. To lift his descriptions of this fraught moment from their historical context and proclaim them as timeless, definitive judgments on the Chinese social formation as a whole is to commit a fundamental category error. It is to deny history itself, to petrify a moment of motion and contradiction into a static caricature. True Marxism, as Lenin tirelessly emphasised, demands the concrete analysis of concrete conditions; it proceeds not by embalming reality but by tracing its ceaseless motion, its internal contradictions, its ruptures, and its emergent counter-tendencies. To fossilise Parenti’s snapshot of the 1990s is therefore not to apply Marxism but to annul its very epistemological foundation.

Nowhere is this inversion clearer than in the grotesque misuse of Parenti’s seminal work, Against Empire. The central thrust of that text was not a moralistic denunciation of China, but a forensic excavation of the structural logic and hypocritical ideologico-political superstructure of U.S. imperialist policy. His illustrative comparison between Cuba and China served to expose the raw class content beneath liberal humanitarian rhetoric. The United States maintained a punishing blockade against Cuba precisely because its revolution refused integration into the imperialist world-system on capitalist terms, whereas it embraced—or at least tolerated—market reforms in China because, at that specific juncture, they appeared to open a colossal new frontier for capital accumulation and the potential restoration of capitalism through internal corrosion. Parenti’s analysis was a lesson in the relativity of imperialist ‘principle’ to the objective of class domination. To pervert this into an argument that China had therefore irrevocably ceased to be a socialist state is to stand Parenti on his head. It replaces his clear-eyed class analysis, which located agency in the structures of imperial power, with a passive, metaphysical judgement on China’s ‘essence’. It is a textbook example of bourgeois idealism masquerading as radical critique.

A similar and equally telling distortion plagues the citation of Blackshirts and Reds. Parenti’s observation that China had experienced a significant capitalist restoration within a communist political framework was a diagnosis of a complex, ongoing contradictory process, not a funeral oration for socialism. His crucial, and analytically decisive, distinction was between the catastrophic collapse of the socialist state in the USSR and Eastern Europe—where the Party and state apparatus were dismantled—and the Chinese situation, where these instruments of proletarian power remained intact, albeit under severe strain. For any Marxist worthy of the name, this distinction is not incidental; it is everything. The form of state power is the concentrated expression of class relations. Capitalist relations developing under the ultimate political authority of a socialist state, a state constitutionally committed to the leadership of the working class through its Communist Party and backed by a People’s Liberation Army, exist in a qualitatively different field of force than capitalist relations established after the smashing of that state. The former contains within it the constant possibility of political correction, restriction, and reversal; the latter represents a definitive class defeat. To blur this distinction, to pretend China’s path was merely a slower version of the Yeltsin shock therapy, is not merely incorrect; it is an abandonment of the most basic Marxist-Leninist teaching on the nature of state power.

The most glaring empirical void in these fossilised polemics is any serious engagement with the profound transformations that have characterised the Chinese political economy since 2012. Historical materialism is impossible without rigorous periodisation. The China of the rampant, often anarchic market expansion of the 1990s is not the China of the present day. The consolidation of a new political line, emphasising Party discipline, the recentralisation of strategic state authority, an anti-corruption campaign of unprecedented depth and scope, the explicit reassertion of state and Party control over the commanding heights of the economy and financial system, the successful mobilisation to eradicate absolute poverty on a civilisational scale, and a marked shift towards ecological planning and green industrial policy—these are not minor adjustments. They represent a significant rebalancing of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, a deliberate political project to re-subordinate capital to socialist objectives. One can, from a Marxist standpoint, critically interrogate the limits, contradictions, and potential reversals of this project, but to dismiss it a priori by brandishing twenty-year-old quotations as magical talismans is to retreat from materialist analysis into theological incantation. It is to declare reality invalid because it contradicts a rigid dogma.

The social and ecological contradictions Parenti documented with such clarity—the environmental degradation, the exploitation of migrant labour, the regional disparities—were not secret scandals unknown to the Chinese Party-state. They were the manifest, and indeed predicted, antagonisms generated by a particular developmental strategy adopted under conditions of extreme external pressure and internal backwardness. The Marxist question, however, is not whether such contradictions arise in the arduous transition from scarcity to abundance; they necessarily must. The scientific question is whether the political superstructure has succumbed entirely to the economic base it helped to transform, or whether it retains sufficient autonomy, coherence, and coercive capacity to regulate, constrain, and ultimately redirect that base in accordance with long-term socialist goals. To claim that the mere existence of capitalist forms, labour discipline in low-tech sectors, or environmental damage automatically negates the socialist character of the project is to adopt a liberal-utopian conception of socialism as a state of spotless moral purity, not a Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism as a protracted, bitter, and contradictory stage of class struggle conducted under the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is to prefer the comforts of a clear conscience to the difficult task of analysing actual power dynamics.

The manipulation of the Tibet question exemplifies this theoretical confusion raised to the level of emotional propaganda. Parenti’s demolition of the ‘friendly feudalism’ myth was a necessary intervention against Western romanticism, a stark materialist expose of the theocratic-slave social formation that existed prior to liberation. His warning that capitalist development without socialist regulation risked generating new forms of alienation was a conditional, prescient critique aimed at the reform process, not a lament for the lost ‘paradise’ of serfdom under the Dalai Lama’s theocracy. To twist this into an implied nostalgia for feudal barbarism is a grotesque misreading. It represents a wholesale rejection of Marx’s fundamental historical schema, which posits that humanity progresses through determinate socio-economic stages, propelled by the development of the productive forces, not according to the aesthetic or moral preferences of petty-bourgeois intellectuals sitting in imperial metropoles.

Beneath these specific distortions lies a deeper, more systemic theoretical failing: a refusal, or an inability, to think dialectically about the process of socialist construction within a savagely hostile world system. China did not develop in a laboratory. Its path has been shaped at every turn by relentless imperialist encirclement, crippling technological embargoes, financial warfare, and the traumatic collapse of the Eastern block and the Soviet Union . To insist that socialism under such conditions of siege must conform to an abstract, ahistorical, and pacific ideal-type—an ideal drawn overwhelmingly from the historical experience of the advanced West—or else be declared fraudulent, is to abandon science for sentiment. It is to substitute a comforting moralism for the hard truths of political and military struggle. Marxism-Leninism, in contrast, understands that transitions between social systems are never linear, pure, or guaranteed. They are uneven, reversible, saturated with risk, and defined by constant struggle between the emergent and the moribund, between the forces of socialist construction and the immense, persistent pressure of global capital. Socialism is not a finished condition to be achieved; it is, as Lenin and Mao taught, a living process of struggle, a relentless battle on economic, political, and ideological and cultural fronts.

The supreme irony of selectively citing Parenti to attack China is that this method perfectly mirrors the liberal anti-communist technique he devoted his life to dismantling: the isolation of negative phenomena, the systematic erasure of their historical causation and imperialist context, and their presentation as conclusive proof of systemic illegitimacy. A genuinely Parenti-inspired, and thus genuinely Marxist, analysis would proceed from entirely different questions, questions of power and class: Which class, in the final analysis, holds state power in China? Which class commands the army and the means of violence? How is the motion of capital politically constrained and channelled by the Party-state? What are the specific counter-tendencies within the system that work against wholesale capitalist restoration? And most critically, how has the balance of these internal and external forces shifted over the past decades? These are the materialist questions.

To treat China as a static, fossilised object, forever defined and condemned by a curated selection of quotations from the 1990s, is not evidence of radicalism. It is the hallmark of intellectual stagnation and political sterility. Historical materialism, as a scientific tool of the working class, imposes upon us the duty to analyse China as it actually is: a living, dynamic, and fiercely contradictory social formation, shaped in the fiery crucible of its own immense internal class struggle and the relentless, corrosive pressure of a global imperialist system. Any analysis that shirks this duty, that prefers the dead letter of decontextualised text to the living reality of struggle, is not Marxism. It is its petty-bourgeois caricature, and objectively, it functions as an ideological auxiliary to the very imperialist forces it claims to oppose. The task is not to agree blindly with every policy, but to analyse with methodological integrity. Marxism does not fear complexity and contradictions; it is the only tool capable of mastering them. To weaponise the words of Michael Parenti against the dialectical heart of historical materialism is, therefore, to betray both the man and the method.

One of the most revealing paradoxes of socialist discourse in colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial societies is the extraordinary disjunction between the radicalism of its vocabulary and the poverty of its historical experience. Socialism is spoken of with fluency, emotional intensity, and often with an air of moral self-certainty; yet its most elementary historical foundations—its conditions of emergence, its inescapable entanglement with national liberation, its dependence on the conquest and exercise of state power, and its necessarily uneven, conflict-ridden process of construction—remain either weakly understood or consciously disavowed. This gap cannot be explained simply by intellectual laziness or insufficient reading, as is often suggested by liberal critics or even by some self-styled Marxists. Rather, it is a structural outcome of societies that have never traversed the decisive historical experiences through which socialism became intelligible, not as an ethical horizon or discursive posture, but as a concrete political project rooted in struggle. Where there has been no genuine national liberation, no revolutionary rupture in the state form, no sustained confrontation with imperial power, and no attempt—however partial or contradictory—to reorganise production under socialist conditions, socialism inevitably appears as abstraction. It is encountered not as history lived and fought over, but as theory consumed and repeated.

Marxism, understood seriously, is not a doctrine of ideals but a science of historical motion. Its central claim is that social systems do not arise from intentions, moral commitments, or philosophical blueprints, but from material conditions, class struggles, and historically specific contradictions. Socialism, in this sense, is not a timeless aspiration hovering above history, but a determinate phase of development emerging from the internal contradictions of capitalism itself. Yet in much of the colonial and neo-colonial world, capitalism did not develop as a relatively autonomous system through the organic unfolding of bourgeois social relations. It arrived through conquest, plunder, and external domination; it was imposed violently by imperialism and structured from the outset to serve metropolitan accumulation rather than domestic development. Pre-capitalist relations were not superseded but selectively preserved and articulated to imperial needs, producing hybrid formations marked by extreme unevenness. The outcome was neither a completed bourgeois society nor an independent capitalist economy, but a dependent social formation in which the local ruling classes functioned largely as intermediaries—administrators of extraction rather than organisers of development. In such conditions, the historical experiences through which socialism became thinkable as a practical alternative in other contexts—mass proletarianisation, bourgeois state formation, revolutionary rupture—were truncated or displaced. Socialism thus entered these societies not as the immanent negation of lived capitalism, but as an imported theoretical object, detached from a corresponding historical process.

This absence of formative historical experience has profound intellectual and political consequences. Where there has been no decisive revolutionary break, no seizure and restructuring of the state apparatus, and no prolonged exercise of power by a revolutionary class under conditions of scarcity and external pressure, socialism is easily imagined as something that exists above history rather than within it. The state appears only as an abstract machine of oppression rather than as a contradictory terrain shaped by class struggle; political power is treated as a moral contamination rather than a material necessity; and contradiction itself is experienced as failure rather than recognised as the normal condition of historical development. Socialism, stripped of its real history, is thus transformed into a vision of harmony, immediacy, and ethical transparency—precisely the inverse of how it has ever existed in practice. What is lost is the understanding that socialism is not the abolition of struggle, but its reorganisation on a higher historical plane.

It is in this context that the centrality of national liberation to the real history of socialism must be insisted upon, precisely because it is so often marginalised, trivialised, or dismissed in contemporary socialist discourse in the Global South. National liberation is not a matter of flags, anthems, or juridical sovereignty. It is a profound historical process in which the inherited colonial state is shattered or radically transformed, the coercive apparatus is seized and reoriented, the economy is reorganised under new priorities, and society is mobilised against both external domination and internal collaborators. It is through this process that the masses acquire not only political agency but historical experience—an experience of power, sacrifice, discipline, and collective struggle. Where independence takes the form of a negotiated transfer of authority from imperial administrators to a local comprador elite, this transformative process does not occur. The fundamental structures of domination remain intact, the economy continues to serve external accumulation, and political life is reduced to the circulation of elites within parameters set elsewhere. Under such conditions, socialism cannot appear as a historical necessity emerging from struggle; it can only appear as a moral protest against an otherwise unaltered reality.

It is precisely at this juncture that the peculiar appeal of Trotskyism and various currents of Western Marxism within neo-colonial societies must be located. These traditions did not emerge from successful processes of revolutionary construction but from moments of defeat, marginalisation, and political impotence within the imperial core. As a result, they tend to conceptualise socialism in forms that systematically evade the burdens of power: revolution without consolidation, democracy without state authority, critique without responsibility, and purity without victory. For intellectuals in dependent societies—who have never faced the concrete tasks of building a state, defending sovereignty under imperial pressure, or organising production in conditions of siege—such frameworks are deeply seductive. They allow one to inhabit a posture of radicalism without confronting the historically unavoidable questions of coercion, discipline, compromise, and endurance. In this sense, these currents function less as theories of revolution than as ideologies of non-power.

The socialist tradition forged through actual revolutionary victories presents a radically different conception. For Lenin, socialism was inconceivable outside the seizure of state power and its disciplined exercise under conditions of economic backwardness and relentless imperialist hostility. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not an ethical ideal but a historical necessity imposed by the balance of class forces and the realities of civil war, sabotage, and intervention. Likewise, for Mao Zedong, socialism could not be abstracted from the concrete tasks of national liberation, agrarian transformation, and prolonged revolutionary struggle in a predominantly peasant society encircled by imperialism. In both cases, socialism was never imagined as a finished form or moral endpoint. It was understood as a protracted, contradictory process marked by improvisation, error, coercion, retreat, and renewal—a process whose success depended not on purity of intention but on the ability to learn from struggle and transform material conditions.

The experience of neo-colonial societies stands in stark contrast to this historical tradition. Here, the absence of revolutionary rupture has produced a peculiar intellectual condition: socialism without history. Political discourse oscillates endlessly between moral outrage and theoretical formalism, while the decisive question—how power is seized, organised, and defended—is either ignored or condemned in advance as inherently authoritarian. Socialism becomes something to be affirmed rather than something to be built, an identity rather than a strategy, a language rather than a programme of action. It is discussed incessantly precisely because it is never seriously pursued as a historical project. The avoidance of power thus masquerades as radicalism, while impotence is recoded as virtue.

Yet the material reality remains stubborn and unforgiving. Socialism does not arise from correct definitions, ethical commitments, or even theoretical sophistication alone. It arises from historical struggle—from the violent, uneven, and often tragic process through which oppressed classes and nations confront and attempt to overturn existing relations of domination. Where that struggle has been absent, deferred, or aborted, socialist thought will necessarily assume abstract, utopian, and moralised forms. The task before us, therefore, is not to refine ever more elegant definitions of socialism, but to restore the primacy of history to socialist analysis—above all, the unresolved and unfinished question of national liberation. Until this is confronted squarely, socialism in much of the Global South will remain what it too often already is: a discourse of aspiration without agency, critique without power, and theory without history.

From the vantage point of the Global South, the apparent inter-imperialist dramaturgy/ spectacle (not the split or rivalry) unfolding between the European Union and the United States cannot be analysed in isolation from the structural rebalancing of the world-system itself. What appears as a quarrel within the Atlantic bloc is, at a deeper level, a response to a historical reality that imperialism can neither openly acknowledge nor reverse: the relative decline of Western monopoly capitalism and the erosion of its uncontested global hegemony. The “Greenland affair,” the NATO theatrics, and the sudden European rediscovery of militarisation are symptoms of a system under pressure, not signs of its fragmentation.

The decisive fact shaping this moment is not Trump’s temperament, nor Europe’s moral posturing (which is totally absent when it comes to the Global South) but the material rise of non-Western centres of accumulation and state power, most notably People’s Republic of China and, in a different historical and structural register, Russian Federation. From a Marxist-Leninist standpoint rooted in the Global South, these formations cannot be understood through liberal binaries of “democracy versus authoritarianism,” nor through Cold War nostalgia. They must be analysed in terms of their objective position within the imperialist world-system and their role in destabilising Western monopoly control over production, trade, finance, and geopolitics. China’s significance lies not merely in its economic scale, but in the form of its integration into the world economy. Unlike classical capitalist powers, China emerged from a socialist revolution, retains a decisive role for the Communist Party and the state, and subordinates capital — however imperfectly and contradictorily — to long-term developmental planning. For the Global South, China represents not a benevolent saviour, but a structural breach in Western imperial exclusivity. Its existence alone disrupts the ideological claim that there is no alternative path to development outside neoliberal subordination. This is precisely why China is framed as an “existential threat” rather than a normal competitor: it demonstrates, in practice, that late-developing societies need not accept permanent dependency.

Russia occupies a different, more tragic, but still destabilising position. As a post-Soviet state that underwent catastrophic capitalist restoration, Russia is not an anti-imperialist project in the classical Marxist sense. Yet, its reassertion of strategic autonomy — particularly in energy, military capacity, and regional influence — directly obstructs Western imperialism’s drive toward unipolar consolidation. From the Global South perspective, Russia’s importance is not ideological alignment but negative power: the capacity to say no, to block, to complicate Western interventionism. This alone is sufficient to provoke relentless demonisation. What unites China and Russia, despite their profound differences, is not a shared worldview but their objective role in accelerating the transition from unipolar imperial domination to a more fragmented, contested world order. It is this transition that produces panic within the Atlantic ruling classes. The EU–US “split” must therefore be read as an intra-core adjustment to a world in which imperialism can no longer rely on consent alone. Militarisation, sanctions, information warfare, and ideological coercion replace welfare, diplomacy, and developmental rhetoric.

From the Global South, this shift is experienced not as abstract geopolitics but as heightened pressure. As Western imperialism loses ground economically, it compensates politically and militarily. Hence the renewed focus on strategic choke points, resource corridors, and peripheral theatres of conflict. Europe’s militarisation is not aimed at defending European workers; it is aimed at preserving Europe’s place within an imperialist hierarchy increasingly threatened by the diffusion of power toward Asia, Eurasia, and the broader South.

This is why the Trump figure is so functional. Trump performs the violence openly that the liberal centre can no longer fully conceal. He names territories, demands tribute, threatens annexation, and treats sovereignty as a commodity. Europe pretends to recoil in horror, but immediately uses the shock to restructure its own societies along militarised, authoritarian lines. Meanwhile, China and Russia are invoked as external demons to discipline domestic populations and suppress class struggle. The working classes of Europe are told that social sacrifice is necessary not for capital, but for “security” in a dangerous multipolar world.

For Marxists of the Global South, the crucial task is to refuse the false choice offered by imperialist dramaturgy: Atlantic liberalism versus Atlantic barbarism. Neither represents emancipation. The real historical movement lies elsewhere — in the slow, uneven, contradictory breakdown of Western monopoly over the world-system, and in the reopening of historical space for alternative developmental paths. This does not guarantee socialism; it merely restores possibility, which imperialism had sought to foreclose. In this context, China’s rise and Russia’s resistance do not abolish imperialism, but they limit its reach. They fracture the ideological and material unity that once allowed the West to universalise its particular interests as human destiny. For the Global South, this fracture is not a solution but a condition of struggle — a terrain on which revolutionary forces may once again act without being immediately crushed by a single, unified imperial centre.

Thus, the Greenland spectacle, the EU–US theatrics, and the sudden European rush to rearm must be understood as imperialism adapting to loss, not preparing for peace. The fog of “inter-imperialist rupture” conceals a deeper truth: Western capitalism is entering a phase where it can no longer afford generosity, illusion, or delay. It must rule more nakedly, more violently, and more desperately.

To see through this fog is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is a political necessity for the Global South, whose liberation has always depended on recognising that the real enemy is not this or that imperial actor, but the imperialist system as a totality — and that every crack in that system, however contradictory, is a historical opening that must be grasped with clarity, discipline, and revolutionary patience.

The plaintive cry of Alexander Dugin for a lost “real West,” a civilisational ideal now supplanted by a nihilistic parody, is a spectacle of reactionary despair that demands not mere philosophical rebuttal but precise ideological unmasking. From the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist theory and the lived reality of the Global South, Dugin’s entire project reveals itself not as a radical alternative to the present world disorder, but as a particularly sophisticated form of false consciousness. It is a geopolitical mystification that seeks to channel the justifiable anger against Atlanticist, liberal imperialism into a dead-end struggle between rival imperialist models, thereby obscuring the only path to genuine liberation: the transcendence of the capitalist-imperialist world-system itself through socialist revolution and construction. His work constitutes a warning, not a guide; it illustrates the perilous allure of civilisational and idealist discourse which, by ignoring the primacy of the material base—the forces and relations of production—inevitably ends up serving one ruling class or another. For the billions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have borne the brutal brunt of colonial plunder and neocolonial dependency, the choice is not, and can never be, between a liberal hegemon and a traditionalist one. It is the fundamental choice between continued subjugation within the imperialist chain, in whatever cultural guise it appears, and the total liberation offered by a socialist modernity dedicated to the sovereignty of peoples and the common prosperity of all.

To understand the specific danger Dugin poses to anti-imperialist thought, one must first dissect the idealist core of his “Fourth Political Theory.” His narrative is one of metaphysical decline: a fall from a sacred “Tradition” embodied by a mythical “Christian West” of Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel, into the abyss of modern liberal materialism. This framework, borrowed from the murky wells of Julius Evola and Martin Heidegger, deliberately transplants the motor of history from the concrete arena of class struggle and economic exploitation to the nebulous realm of spirit and philosophy. For Dugin, the crisis of modernity is not the crisis of capitalism in its imperialist stage, with its falling rates of profit, its rampant financialisation, and its relentless drive for new markets and resources. It is, rather, a crisis of wrong ideas—the ideas of humanism, individualism, and progress. Consequently, his solution is not the revolutionary transformation of the economic base, but a “conservative revolution” aimed at restoring the “right” ideas: hierarchy, organic community, and geopolitical destiny. This idealist inversion is his first and greatest betrayal of a materialist analysis. It leads him to fight a phantom—the spectre of liberal ideology—while leaving the very real, material machinery of imperialist capital accumulation utterly unscathed. His quarrel with the Atlanticist West is not that it exploits, but that it exploits in a vulgar, un-sacred manner. He offers, in essence, a spiritual and geopolitical management consultancy for imperialism, proposing to run the extractive enterprise with more solemn rituals and a different civilisational brand.

This flaw becomes catastrophic when applied to his analysis of the Global South. Dugin’s geopolitical vision, his famed tellurocracy versus thalassocracy dichotomy, casts the world’s peoples not as agents of their own history but as pawns in an eternal, archetypal struggle between the maritime “Atlanticist” power and the continental “Eurasian” heartland. In this schema, the nations of the Global South are reduced to “traditional civilisations”—static, spiritual monoliths whose historical purpose is to form a multipolar coalition under Russian leadership against the United States. This is a breathtaking erasure of history and agency. It ignores the very material processes that created the “Global South” as a category: namely, five centuries of European and later American colonial and imperialist predation that systematically underdeveloped entire continents, destroyed their indigenous productive forces, and integrated them into a capitalist world-economy as dependent peripheries. The wealth that funded Dugin’s “real West” was extracted directly from our lands and through the labour of our enslaved and indentured peoples. To now be told that our liberation lies in aligning with a “Eurasian Empire” promising to restore sacred order is to be subjected to a new, more poetic form of imperial paternalism. It replicates the very logic of the colonial civilising mission, merely swapping the white man’s burden for the Eurasianist’s spiritual burden. Our goal, however, is not to become a supporting actor in someone else’s civilisational epic, but to be the authors of our own socialist future, free from all imperial poles, whether anchored in Washington, Brussels, or Moscow.

The materialist analysis, grounded in the Leninist theory of imperialism, provides the only coherent framework for understanding our predicament and our path forward. Imperialism is not a policy choice or a cultural attitude of the West; it is the monopoly stage of capitalism, a systemic condition defined by the export of capital, the division of the world among monopolies and great powers, and the consequent transformation of independent nations into dependent appendages of a global exploitative system. The “nihilism” Dugin decries in the modern West is the cultural superstructure of this decaying, parasitic stage. From this standpoint, Dugin’s “Eurasian” project can be clearly seen for what it is: not an alternative to imperialism, but the aspiration to establish a rival imperialist pole. His magnum opus, The Foundations of Geopolitics, is a cold-blooded manual for a new Eurasian Empire and its objective is not to dismantle the imperialist world-system but to win dominance within it. This would merely replace a unipolar structure with a multipolar one of competing imperialist blocs—a scenario that, as history teaches, may alter the forms of competition and conflict but does nothing to abolish the fundamental relation of exploitation between capital and labour, or between the imperialist core and the global periphery. For the Global South, multipolar inter-imperialist rivalry often means being fought over as a prize, not fought for as comrades. Our liberation cannot be found in the space between competing predators.

The genuine antithesis to this bleak cycle is found in the theory and practice of socialist construction, as exemplified by the path of China and other progressive forces in the Global South. This path understands that true sovereignty is impossible without economic sovereignty, which in turn requires breaking the chains of imperialist dependency. It involves not the romantic restoration of a mythical past, but the scientifically planned development of the productive forces under socialist relations of production. This means building comprehensive industrial and technological capacity, advancing agricultural modernisation, and prioritising education and healthcare—all directed towards the goal of common prosperity. This project is inherently anti-imperialist, as it seeks to delink from the hierarchical global division of labour imposed by capital. Crucially, it is also distinct from the autarkic models of the past; it involves engagement with the global economy on the basis of mutual benefit and respect for sovereignty, not subordination. The Chinese concept of a “community with a shared future for mankind” stands in diametric opposition to Dugin’s vision of eternal civilisational conflict. One is based on material development and win-win cooperation; the other on metaphysical essentialism and zero-sum geopolitical conquest. The socialist project offers the Global South a way out of the dialectic of master and slave, not by becoming a new master in an old game, but by changing the game itself.

This understanding also reframes the catastrophic event of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, a historical trauma often weaponised by both liberals and reactionaries like Dugin to declare the end of socialist possibility. From our standpoint, the collapse was not a failure of socialism, but a tragic failure to continue socialism. It was the result of a profound internal betrayal, where a section of the bureaucratic nomenklatura, having lost its revolutionary-class consciousness, transformed itself into a comprador bourgeoisie. The policies of “shock therapy” and neoliberal privatisation imposed in the 1990s were not the culmination of socialist logic but its violent negation—a deliberate, counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalist relations. The advanced productive forces built over decades were not rendered obsolete by socialism; they were deliberately dismantled, asset-stripped, and integrated as subordinate elements into the periphery of the global capitalist system. This process caused a humanitarian and developmental catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime, a stark lesson in the brutal realities of capitalist restoration. To blame “socialism” for this is an ideological fraud. The lesson for the Global South is not that socialist modernity is impossible, but that its defence requires constant vigilance against both external imperialist pressure and internal class degeneration. It reaffirms that the struggle is unending: first to seize revolutionary power, and then, even more dauntingly, to wield it consistently in the long-term project of building a new, post-imperialist world.

Therefore, the summons of Dugin’s Eurasianism must be met with resolute rejection by all revolutionary forces in the Global South. His is the seductive voice of a would-be imperial sirens, offering the comforts of a pre-ordained identity and the thrill of resentment in exchange for our revolutionary autonomy and our future. Our struggle is of a different, more arduous, and ultimately more liberating kind. It is the struggle to complete the unfinished project of de-colonisation, to move from formal political independence to full economic, political and ideological independence. This requires not aligning with one pole against another, but dismantling the very architecture of poles. It requires the building of broad, anti-imperialist fronts across the developing world, based on concrete solidarity and shared material interests, not on civilisational essentialism. It demands that we master science and technology, that we industrialise and modernise on our own terms, and that we deepen the socialist orientation of our societies wherever possible. The horizon of our endeavour is not a multipolar world of competing empires, but a world in which the very category of imperialism has been consigned to the history books, replaced by a voluntary association of peoples building socialist modernity in accordance with their own conditions. Against Dugin’s empire of nostalgia, we counterpose our future of liberation—a future we must, and shall, win for ourselves.

The history of philosophy is punctuated by confrontations that are not merely academic disputes but seismographs of deeper historical and political cataclysms. Among these, the silent, asymmetrical, yet profoundly consequential confrontation between Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx—or more precisely, between the ontological project of Being and Time and the revolutionary-historical materialism of Capital and the Theses on Feuerbach—stands as one of the most critical for our epoch. To stage this encounter from the standpoint of the Global South, armed with the methodological imperatives laid out previously, is to move beyond comparative philosophy and into a domain of critical judgment, where thought is weighed on the scales of its concrete historical commitments and consequences. There exists a superficial, and therefore treacherous, point of apparent convergence: both thinkers execute a radical pivot away from the primacy of abstract consciousness, of disembodied reason and a priori essence, towards the concrete, the practical, the existential. Yet, to mistake this tactical negation for a strategic alliance is to fall prey to the very kind of idealist, dehistoricised reading that both, in their own ways, sought to destroy. The truth of this convergence is revealed only in the stark light of its ultimate, irreconcilable divergence—a divergence that leads one into the heart of the struggle for human emancipation, and the other into the abyss of the Nazi Gleichschaltung. Our task here is not synthesis, but dialectical unmasking: to answer Heidegger’s charge of Marx’s metaphysical entrapment, to levy our own charge of a clandestine idealism and political nullity against Heidegger, and finally, to trace the terrifyingly logical line from the lofty heights of the Question of Being to the blood-soaked soil of the Volksgemeinschaft.

I. The Illusory Convergence: Praxis, Being-in-the-World, and the Primacy of the Concrete

It is undeniable that a certain philosophical atmosphere is shared. Marx’s declaration in The German Ideology that “life determines consciousness, not consciousness life” is a revolutionary manifesto against the entire edifice of German Idealism. The human essence is not “an abstraction inherent in each single individual,” but is, in its reality, “the ensemble of the social relations.” This is not a contemplative proposition but a call to arms, rooting all theory in the sensuous, material activity—praxis—through which humanity produces and reproduces its historical life. Philosophy must descend from the heaven of speculation to the “earthly family,” to the contradictions of the mode of production. Similarly, Heidegger, in his dismantling of Cartesian and Husserlian subjectivity, insists that the primordial condition of Dasein is not that of a detached spectator (vorhandenheit) but of an always-already engaged agent, “thrown” into a world of concern, tools, and projects (zuhandenheit). Dasein is “Being-in-the-world,” and its understanding is not cognitive representation but a practical, pre-reflective familiarity. Its “essence lies in its existence.” This emphasis on existence over essence, on practical involvement over theoretical gaze, creates a resonant echo.

Yet, this echo is the sound of profound difference masquerading as similarity. For Marx, the concrete, practical world into which we are “thrown” is not a neutral, ahistorical structure of care. It is, from the outset, a world sculpted by class antagonism, defined by the specific, oppressive organisation of labour under capital. The “tools” we encounter are not abstract implements of a generic “concern”; they are machines in a factory, private property, commodities—nodes in a vast social relation of exploitation. Praxis is not merely purposeful activity; it is, under alienation, activity that is turned against the worker, producing a world that dominates him. For Heidegger, however, the analysis of Dasein’s average everydayness deliberately abstracts from these historical-material determinations. The “world” of Being and Time is a world of anonymous das Man, of inauthenticity, of fallenness, but it is a world curiously devoid of capitalists and proletarians, of colonies and metropoles, of imperialism and national liberation. The concrete here is rendered philosophically concrete only by being stripped of its most concrete historical content: the class struggle. Thus, the convergence is revealed as a mirage. Marx plunges into the bloody specificity of history to find the lever for its revolutionary transformation. Heidegger performs a phenomenological epoché on history itself to uncover the transcendental structures of a Dasein that, in its ontological purity, could be anywhere and anytime, yet is, in its historical facticity, unmistakably the anxious heir of a crisis-ridden German bourgeoisie.

II. The Heideggerian Indictment: Metaphysics, Labour, and the Ontic-Ontological Divide

Heidegger’s critique of Marx, though sporadic, is devastating in its philosophical ambition. He does not accuse Marx of being wrong about economics or history; he accuses him of not being philosophical enough, of failing to ascend to the truly primordial question. In the Letter on Humanism and later seminars, Heidegger positions Marx as the culmination of a certain trajectory within Western metaphysics. By defining man as the “essence of labour” or situating humanity within the realm of social production, Marx, in Heidegger’s view, merely translates the traditional metaphysical understanding of man as animal rationale (the rational animal) into the modern key of animal laborans (the labouring animal). Humanity is still defined by an “essence” (now, social labour), and the world is conceived as a standing-reserve (Bestand) of material for this labouring subjectivity.

Crucially, Heidegger classifies Marx’s work as a superior, but ultimately “ontic,” science. It provides a masterful analysis of one particular region of beings (das Seiende)—namely, human beings in their economic and historical relations. But it does not, and cannot, ask the “ontological” question: what is the meaning of Being (Sein) that allows beings, including those analysed by Marx, to appear as they do? What is the horizon of intelligibility for concepts like “matter,” “production,” “history,” and “alienation” themselves? For Heidegger, Marx’s materialism remains a metaphysics of subjectivity—the collective human subject of history—and thus participates in the very “forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) that characterises the nihilistic destiny of the West, culminating in the planetary domination of technology. Marx’s call to change the world is, from this rarefied height, merely a more frenetic activity within the same oblivion.

III. The Marxist-Leninist Counter-Indictment: The Idealism of the Abyss and the Nullity of the Political

From our standpoint, this Heideggerian indictment is not a refutation but a confession. It confesses to the profound political and historical nullity of a philosophy that believes it can stand above the “ontic” fray. To claim that the question of the meaning of Being is more primordial than the question of starvation, exploitation, and colonial genocide is not philosophical depth; it is a philosophical abdication of catastrophic proportions. Heidegger’s rigid ontic/ontological distinction is a sterile formalism that protects philosophy from the messiness of history, effectively rendering it a bystander to—and, as we shall see, a potential accomplice in—barbarism. His critique of Marx as a metaphysician of labour ignores the dialectical core of historical materialism: labour is not an ahistorical “essence” but a metabolic process with nature that assumes specific, historically mutable social forms (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). Marx’s analysis is not a static anthropology but a dynamic theory of social formation and transformation.

Heidegger’s retreat from the ontic, however, is incomplete and dishonest. It smuggles a specific, reactionary ontic content back in through the ontological back door. By failing to ground his analysis of Dasein’s “thrownness,” “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit), and “destiny” (Geschick) in a materialist analysis of productive forces and relations, Heidegger leaves these categories empty vessels. Into this vacuum flows not the concrete history of class struggle, but the mythic, pre-modern, and ultimately racialised substance of the Volk. His philosophy, for all its seeming depth, lacks a materialist theory of ideology, of power, of the state. It is therefore “apolitical” only in the sense that it refuses the emancipatory politics of the proletariat; it remains intensely susceptible to, and indeed craves, a politics that can fill its existential categories with collective, fateful content. This is the clandestine idealism of Heidegger’s project: an idealism of Geist (spirit) and Schicksal (fate) divorced from the economic base, which is precisely the philosophical breeding ground for the irrationalist, volkish ideologies that fascism exploited.

IV. From the Question of Being to the Führerprinzip: The Fatal Synthesis

The trajectory from Being and Time (1927) to Heidegger’s embrace of the National Socialist “revolution” as Rector of the University of Freiburg (1933-34) is not an accidental biographical lapse; it is a philosophical possibility latent within the structure of his thought. When the concrete historical crisis of German capitalism—the Weimar Republic’s collapse, mass unemployment, the threat of communist revolution—exploded, Heidegger’s abstract ontological categories demanded concretion. His critique of inauthentic “idle talk” (Gerede) and “curiosity” (Neugier) found its ontic enemy in parliamentary democracy and “liberal” discourse. His call for Dasein to resolutely seize its ownmost possibility of Being-towards-death found its collective analogue in the Volk heroically embracing its historical destiny. His disdain for “vulgar” time and his appeal to an authentic, fateful temporality dovetailed with the Nazi myth of a thousand-year Reich rising from ancient roots.

The Volk becomes the collective Dasein, and the Führer becomes the voice of its historical-spiritual destiny, the agent who awakens it to its authentic resoluteness. In his rectoral address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” ontology becomes ideology: the “question of Being” is tied explicitly to the “spiritual mission” of the German people, and philosophy is subordinated to the service of the state. This is the horrifying Aufhebung of Heidegger’s own project: the ontological quest, having refused the materialist and internationalist ground of Marx, finds its ontic fulfilment in the most barbaric, imperialist, and racially exclusive politics of the twentieth century. His support was not for a shallow politician; it was, in his mind, for the historical “truth” and “greatness” of the National Socialist movement as the answer to the nihilism of technological modernity—a nihilism he, unlike Marx, could only lament, not transform.

V. The Partisan Verdict: Historical Materialism as the True Primordiality

Confronted with this abyss, the Marxist-Leninist verdict is clear. Heidegger’s charge that Marx remains within metaphysics is not a transcendence of Marx but a flight from history. The truly “primordial” question is not an abistorical inquiry into the meaning of Being, but the historical-materialist inquiry into the social being that produces all thought, including Heidegger’s own. The “forgetfulness” that matters is not of Sein, but of the exploitative relations of production that structure the lived experience (Erlebnis) of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Marx’s so-called “ontic” analysis—of surplus value, of primitive accumulation, of imperialist rivalry—reveals the fundamental ontological violence of capitalism: a system that reduces Being itself (human and natural) to a quantifiable, exchangeable abstraction. This is a more profound ontology than Heidegger’s, for it is an ontology of struggle.

Our engagement with Heidegger, therefore, is not to seek a synthesis, which would be a philosophical and political catastrophe, but to understand the anatomy of a powerful form of bourgeois thought in its moment of crisis—a thought that, in its very attempt to be radical, exposes the reactionary dead end of any philosophy that tries to think above the class struggle. Heidegger’s profundity is real, but it is the profundity of the siren song that leads onto the rocks. Against it, we reaffirm the fighting unity of depth and direction. Marx’s “ontology” is the ontology of praxis, of revolution, of the struggle to create a world where the question of a truly human existence can be posed by all, not just contemplated by a few in a Schwarzwald hut. In this confrontation, there is no neutral ground. One must choose: either the resolute Dasein hurtling towards its fateful, solitary death, or the revolutionary class consciously making its own history. The philosophical chasm between Freiburg and the Global South is unbridgeable, for it is the chasm between the conscience of imperialism and the theory of its gravediggers.

The question of the American empire today is not whether it remains powerful—power, in its coercive, destructive, and parasitic sense, it still possesses in abundance—but whether this power corresponds to a historically progressive role or merely prolongs a mode of existence whose material foundations are already exhausted. From a Marxist standpoint, empires do not fall because they are immoral, nor because their leaders are foolish, nor because rival powers “outplay” them diplomatically; empires fall when the social relations they universalise cease to generate sufficient material surplus to sustain the political, military, and ideological superstructure erected upon them. In this precise sense, the United States is no longer an ascending capitalist civilisation but a late-imperial formation whose survival increasingly depends on force, financial manipulation, and the externalisation of crisis to the Global South. The real question, therefore, is not whether the American empire will decline—it already is—but whether this decline will unfold as a slow, violent, and reactionary descent into permanent war, or whether the internal and external contradictions of US monopoly finance capitalism can be resolved through a socialist rupture that reconstitutes society on new foundations.

To grasp this problem, one must begin from political economy rather than spectacle. The United States sits atop an unprecedented mountain of debt, fictitious capital, and financialised claims on future value. Yet this is not a “debt crisis” in the peripheral sense. The US does not face insolvency as Pakistan, Argentina, or Sri Lanka do; its debt is denominated in its own currency, its treasury bonds remain global safe assets, and its military guarantees the circulation of the dollar through coercion rather than confidence. What confronts the US is something more profound: a crisis of value production. Manufacturing hollowed out, infrastructure decayed, labour disciplined through precarity rather than productivity, and surplus increasingly generated not through expanded reproduction but through rent, speculation, and monopoly control. In classical Marxist terms, the US increasingly consumes more value than it produces, compensating for this imbalance by appropriating global surplus via the dollar system, sanctions regimes, intellectual property monopolies, and military-backed access to resources. This is not sustainable accumulation; it is imperial rentierism, and historically such formations do not renew themselves without radical transformation.

This is why war appears not as an aberration but as a structural necessity. The militarisation of US foreign policy is not driven primarily by ideology or moral panic, but by the material requirement to enforce the conditions under which imperial accumulation remains possible. Control of energy corridors, sea lanes, and strategic chokepoints; containment of Eurasian integration; destabilisation of sovereign states that attempt independent development; and the prevention of alternative financial architectures—all of this is inseparable from the survival of American capitalism in its present form. When peaceful economic expansion no longer suffices, imperialism resorts to coercion, exactly as theorised by Vladimir Lenin in his analysis of monopoly capitalism. The multiplication of proxy wars, sanctions, colour revolutions, and hybrid conflicts is thus not evidence of strength but of exhaustion: the empire must constantly intervene because it can no longer allow history to move on its own terms.

Yet decline does not mean immediate collapse. This is a critical point that vulgar anti-imperialism often misses. Empires, especially those with global monetary privileges, can rot for decades. The British Empire after the First World War remained formally powerful even as its industrial base eroded and its colonies rebelled; its decline was slow, violent, and deeply reactionary. The United States today exhibits similar features: an overextended military apparatus, internal political polarisation, decaying public goods, and an elite increasingly disconnected from productive social life. Inflation substitutes for reform, repression for consent, and culture war for class politics. None of this suggests an imminent “bankruptcy” in the technical sense; it suggests a long imperial twilight in which crisis is managed through externalisation and force.

At the same time, the global environment has changed in ways that sharply constrain imperial manoeuvrability. The rise of alternative centres of accumulation, regional trade arrangements, and non-Western development models has weakened the ability of the US to dictate the terms of the world economy unilaterally. De-dollarisation, though uneven and partial, reflects not a sudden collapse of the dollar but a gradual erosion of its absolute dominance. States increasingly seek to reduce vulnerability to sanctions and financial warfare by diversifying reserves, settling trade in local currencies, and building parallel institutions. This does not end imperialism overnight, but it transforms the terrain on which it operates, raising the costs of coercion and reducing the returns of domination. In historical-materialist terms, the world-system is entering a phase of multipolar tension in which no single imperial centre can stabilise accumulation globally.

From the perspective of the Global South, this matters enormously. For peripheral and semi-peripheral societies, American decline does not automatically mean liberation. On the contrary, periods of imperial contraction are often the most dangerous, as declining powers lash out to preserve privileges they can no longer reproduce organically. The intensification of sanctions, regime-change operations, and militarised borders is not accidental; it is the politics of a system attempting to freeze history. For this reason, anti-imperialism cannot be passive or celebratory. It must be organised, sovereign, and materially grounded, capable of defending national development, regional integration, and popular power against imperial retaliation. The weakening of US hegemony opens space, but space must be filled by conscious political projects, not wishful thinking.

This brings us to the second pole of the title: socialist transformation. Is it conceivable that the United States itself could resolve its crisis through socialism rather than imperial decay? In principle, yes. Marxism has never argued that socialism is the destiny of “other” countries only. The United States possesses a vast working class, immense productive capacity, and a history—often suppressed—of labour struggle, anti-racist resistance, and socialist organising. The problem is not objective possibility but subjective and political conditions. American capitalism has historically integrated sections of its working class through imperial rents, racial hierarchy, and consumerism, blunting revolutionary consciousness while exporting exploitation abroad. As long as imperial privilege remains materially operative, even in declining form, socialist transformation faces immense obstacles.

Nevertheless, history does not stand still. As imperial rents shrink and internal contradictions sharpen, the ideological foundations of US capitalism erode. The promise of endless upward mobility collapses; public services decay; inequality becomes obscene; and political institutions lose legitimacy. In such conditions, class struggle inevitably intensifies, even if it initially appears in distorted, reactionary, or confused forms. The choice before American society is not between stability and socialism, but between reactionary decay and revolutionary reconstitution. Either the system continues to cannibalise itself through militarism, surveillance, and repression, or a break occurs that reorients production toward social need rather than imperial dominance.

From a Marxist–Leninist standpoint, socialist transformation in the United States would not be a moral redemption of the empire but its historical negation. It would require dismantling the military–industrial complex, abolishing the imperial dollar regime, and reconstituting the state as an instrument of popular power rather than global coercion. Such a transformation would not only liberate American workers; it would fundamentally alter the balance of forces worldwide, removing the central pillar of imperialist domination. Yet precisely because the stakes are so high, the resistance of the ruling class would be ferocious. No empire voluntarily abolishes itself; it must be compelled by organised mass struggle.

Thus, when posed rigorously, the question “Whether American Empire?” does not admit a simple answer. The United States is already in decline, but decline is not destiny. It can persist for decades as a militarised, parasitic, and increasingly authoritarian formation, exporting crisis and violence to the rest of the world. Or it can be transformed through socialist rupture, a path that remains historically possible but politically difficult. For the Global South, the task is not to wait for either outcome but to act: to build sovereignty, solidarity, and socialist alternatives that weaken imperial power regardless of how the American contradiction resolves itself internally.

In the final analysis, empires do not end because time runs out; they end because new social forces render them obsolete. Whether the American empire collapses under the weight of its own contradictions or is transcended through socialist transformation will depend not on prophecy, but on struggle—class struggle within the United States, and anti-imperialist struggle across the world-system. History has posed the question. The answer will be written not in forecasts, but in praxis.

Introduction

The relationship between philosophy, politics, and geopolitical orientation constitutes a foundational battlefield for any revolutionary theory that aspires not merely to interpret the world but to change it. The proposition that philosophical profundity and political-geopolitical correctness exist in separate, non-communicating spheres presents a profound challenge—and indeed, a potential pitfall—for the Marxist-Leninist tradition, particularly as it is lived, theorised, and fought for in the crucible of the Global South. To posit, as has been suggested, that one can be a “very mediocre and shallow thinker” yet hold a correct anti-imperialist position, while a “deeply profound thinker” can champion Eurocentric and pro- imperialist politics, is to initiate a problematic divorce between theory and practice, between the depth of comprehension and the direction of transformative action. This essay, from the perspective of the historically oppressed and revolutionary Global South, argues against such a schism. It contends that while the stated disjunction descriptively exists within bourgeois intellectual history (the case of Heidegger standing as a stark monument to this betrayal), to accept it as an organic or necessary condition is to disarm ourselves theoretically at the very moment imperialist hegemony demands our utmost intellectual and practical rigour. For us, philosophy is neither a fetishised object of detached contemplation nor a neutral toolkit of abstract concepts. It is, as Marx, Lenin and Mao embodied, the theoretical front of the class war, a weapon that must be forged, selected, and wielded with a ruthless dialectical critique that unmasks all class content, Eurocentric biases, and civilisational blind spots. Our task is to reclaim, deepen, and weaponise philosophy from our standpoint, engaging both the Western canon and our own millennia-old traditions not with passive reverence but with the active, critical, and synthesising spirit of Aufhebung, subsuming them into our revolutionary project of achieving socialist modernity and total decolonisation.

I. The Indissoluble Unity of Philosophical Depth and Revolutionary Position: Against the Fetish of Disjunction

To grant the premise that profound philosophy and correct politics can be radically separated is to concede a critical territory to bourgeois idealism. It implicitly accepts that the realm of “deep thought” operates in an ethereal space above the material fray of class struggle, imperialism, and colonial subjugation. This is precisely the illusion that historical materialism seeks to shatter. The examples of Heidegger or various Frankfurt School thinkers are not proof of an organic separation; rather, they are glaring evidence of the class character and geopolitical situatedness of all philosophy, no matter its apparent depth. Their profundity, often real in dissecting certain aspects of bourgeois alienation or technological modernity, remains imprisoned within the horizons of the imperialist metropole, failing to make the dialectical leap to the standpoint of the colonised, the proletarianised, and the globally exploited. Their “depth” is thus a partial depth, a depth that meticulously explores the cave but refuses to acknowledge the sun outside, or worse, rationalises the chains that bind the cave’s occupants. Conversely, a “shallow” thinker with a correct anti-imperialist position likely grasps, intuitively or through lived experience, a fundamental truth of our epoch that the “profound” philosopher mystifies: the fundamental antagonism of imperialism. However, to leave this intuition at the level of shallowness is a profound strategic weakness. Without deep, systematic, philosophical grounding, correct political positions risk becoming dogmatic, inflexible, and vulnerable to co-optation or theoretical corrosion. They lack the explanatory power to navigate complex, shifting realities and to wage an effective war of position in the ideological sphere.

Marx, Lenin, and Mao never engaged with philosophy in this fetishised, disconnected manner. Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, his lifelong engagement with Hegel, and his critiques of Proudhon, Feuerbach, and the Young Hegelians were not the hobbies of a polymath. They were surgical operations to extract the rational kernel from the mystical shell, to weaponise dialectics for the analysis of capital. Lenin’s immersion in Hegel while exiled in Switzerland during the catastrophe of the First World War, resulting in the Philosophical Notebooks, was not an academic retreat. It was a desperate and rigorous effort to deepen his—and the movement’s—understanding of dialectics to comprehend the unprecedented collapse of the Second International and the revolutionary opportunity it presented. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” he insisted, and this theory had to be philosophically robust. Mao’s On Practice and On Contradiction are not abstract philosophical treatises; they are philosophical deep-dives born from the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, aimed at rectifying dogmatic (“mechanical materialist”) and subjectivist (“idealist”) errors within the Party itself. Their attitude was one of dialectical critical engagement: studying bourgeois philosophy voraciously but filtering it through the ruthless sieve of class analysis and revolutionary praxis. To study without this filter is to risk theoretical contamination; to refuse to study deeply for fear of contamination is to guarantee theoretical poverty and political vulnerability. The unity of depth and correctness is not a given; it is a fighting unity achieved through relentless critique and synthesis.

II. Philosophy as the Theoretical Front in the War of Ideas: The Marxist-Leninist Dialectical Method

For the Marxist-Leninist tradition, philosophy is explicitly understood as “class war in theory.” This is not a metaphorical flourish but a materialist axiom. The battlefield of ideas is not a salon for polite disagreement; it is a terrain where hegemony is secured or challenged, where the legitimacy of the existing order is fortified or undermined. Every philosophical system, every grand narrative, every epistemological framework carries, often in coded form, the fingerprints of specific class interests and geopolitical projects. The task of the revolutionary intellectual is therefore twofold: to engage with these ideas to understand the enemy’s terrain and to plunder its useful arms, and simultaneously to unmask them, to perform a dialectical critique that exposes their social function. The wholesale, abstract rejection of “Actually Existing Socialism” by various Western Marxist and Trotskyist tendencies is a prime example of an idea that must be unmasked. Presented as a defence of “pure” socialism or humanist ideals, this critique often functions, objectively, as an ideological accessory to imperialist encirclement and destabilisation. Its “profound” criticisms of bureaucracy or degeneracy, detached from the concrete, besieged, and scarred material reality of building socialism in the semi-periphery and periphery—under constant threat of invasion, sabotage, and blockade—reveal a Eurocentric bias that privileges a certain ideal model over the bloody, difficult, and non-linear process of historical transformation in the Global South.

This unmasking is not a simple act of negation. It is a dialectical Aufhebung: to overcome and preserve, to negate the reactionary class content while elevating and incorporating any rational insights into a higher, more concrete synthesis. When Marx critiqued Hegel, he did not discard the dialectic; he rescued it from its idealist mystification and reposited it on a materialist foundation. When Lenin critiqued empirio-criticism, he was defending the possibility of objective revolutionary knowledge against subjective idealism. When Mao critiqued dogmatic Marxism within the CCP, he was fighting for the living, adaptable soul of the doctrine against its dead, formalistic shell. This is the ruthless dialectical critique we must employ. It means engaging with a Heidegger not to marvel at his analysis of Dasein and “forgetfulness of Being” in a vacuum, but to ask: How does this profound inquiry into Being relate to his active support for the Nazi project, a project of racial imperialism and colonial expansion? What in his philosophical structure, for all its depth, made it compatible with such barbarism? The unmasking reveals the reactionary political ontology at its core. Our engagement is never for philosophical appreciation alone; it is for strategic intelligence in the total war of liberation.

III. Philosophy as Its Own Time Apprehended in Thoughts: The Historical Specificity of Global South Thought

Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is “its own time apprehended in thoughts” provides the crucial historical-materialist key to decolonising philosophical engagement. Philosophy is not the pursuit of timeless, placeless, abstract universals—a notion that is itself a Eurocentric universalisation of a particular historical experience. Rather, it is the most concentrated, conceptual expression of the specific historical, cultural, and social contradictions of an era. From the standpoint of the Global South, this means first recognising that the grand narrative of “Western Philosophy” from the Greeks to postmodernity is the philosophical apprehension of the time of Europe: its internal class dynamics, its Renaissance, its Enlightenment bourgeois revolutions, its imperial conquest, its capitalist modernity, and its subsequent crises. Its claims to universality are the ideological corollary of its global imperial domination. To study it as universal is to unconsciously adopt the perspective of the conqueror. Therefore, our engagement must begin with this act of situating: reading Hegel not as the culmination of human thought, but as the philosophical apprehension of the modernising, bourgeois, and still-rising European nation-state. His dialectic of master and slave, for instance, takes on a radically different, more literal resonance when read from the vantage point of the colonised slave.

For us, then, philosophy must be the apprehension of our own time in thought. Our time is the time of deferred modernity, of combined and uneven development, of the enduring scars of colonial borders, of extractivist economies, of national liberation struggles, of the painful construction of sovereignty, and of the quest for an alternative, socialist modernity that does not replicate the ecological and social depredations of the capitalist core. A Marxist-Leninist of the Global South does not become a mere commentator on Marx, Lenin, or Mao. The task is to become the Marx, Lenin, or Mao of our own historically specific conditions. This means applying their method—the living, dialectical, materialist method—to the concrete analysis of our concrete realities: the neocolonial structures in Africa, the legacy of dependencia in Latin America, the civilisational-state rejuvenation projects in Asia, and the complex interplay of class, nation, religion, and ethnicity in our societies. Our universality emerges not from aping Western categories, but from the concrete analysis of our particularities, contributing to the internationalist understanding of the global class struggle. In this spirit, internationalism is not uniformity, but “socialist unity in historically specific diversity.”

IV. The Double Engagement: Critiquing the West, Reclaiming the Indigenous

Adapting Marxism-Leninism to our civilisational contexts is a task of immense philosophical depth that requires a double, simultaneous engagement. On one front, we must continue and deepen the critical dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, from their classical foundations to their contemporary Eurasian or reactionary modernist offshoots (e.g., Dugin). This critique is not an exorcism but a strategic sorting. We must identify conceptual tools that can be dialectically retooled—for instance, certain aspects of dependency theory or world-systems analysis, themselves products of critical Global South and Western radical thought that broke with Eurocentrism. We must also confront directly the philosophies that provide intellectual fuel for neo-imperialism or reactionary particularism, from the Nietzschean will-to-power appropriated by fascisms to the postmodern scepticism that, in some iterations, undermines the very possibility of collective revolutionary projects and meta-narratives of liberation.

On the other, and this is the profoundly neglected front, we must embark on a deep, critical, and dialectical engagement with our own philosophical and cosmological traditions: African Ubuntu philosophy with its emphasis on communality and interconnectedness; the complex materialist and idealist strands of Indian philosophy from Lokayata to Advaita; the rich Chinese traditions of Confucian statecraft, Daoist dialectics, and Legalist realism; the sophisticated cosmological systems of pre-Columbian Americas; and the philosophical dimensions of Islamic civilisation that grappled with reason, revelation, and justice. This engagement is not a nativist return or a romantic retrieval. It is a rigorous, materialist critique that identifies both the progressive, communitarian, and dialectical elements that resonate with socialist aims, and the feudal, hierarchical, or metaphysical aspects that must be transcended. As the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui argued, socialism in Latin America had to be a “heroic creation,” not a copy or a replica, forged from both the scientific socialism of Europe and the indigenous communal traditions of the Andes. This synthesis enriches the Marxist tradition, moving it beyond its specific European historical origins and allowing it to speak in the cultural and philosophical idioms of our peoples, grounding it in our historical memory and moral universe. It is a process of making Marxism truly universal by deepening its roots in all of humanity’s philosophical soil.

V. Marxism-Leninism as a Theoretical Weapon for Socialist Modernity

Ultimately, for the Global South, Marxism-Leninism is not an academic philosophy for interpretation. It is a theoretical weapon for total transformation. Its goal is concrete: the completion of the decolonisation project through national liberation and full political-economic sovereignty; the development of the productive forces to overcome poverty and dependency; the construction of a socialist society that ensures common prosperity, dignity, and cultural flowering; and the strengthening of internationalist solidarity against imperialism. In this total war, we must choose and forge our philosophical weapons wisely. We engage with various philosophical traditions not to become erudite scholars of Heidegger or expert exegetes of the Upanishads, but to enrich our own theoretical arsenal. We study Nietzschean perspectivism or Heideggerian phenomenology to better understand the ideological underpinnings of late bourgeois subjectivity and crisis, and to sharpen our own counter-arguments. We study our indigenous cosmovisions to find conceptual resources for ecological socialism and non-individualist social organisation.

This is the spirit of critical giants like Domenico Losurdo, who meticulously excavated the liberal tradition’s complicity with slavery and colonialism, and Enrique Dussel, who constructed a “Philosophy of Liberation” from the perspective of the excluded. They exemplify the engaged, partisan intellectual of the Global South who raids the philosophical armouries of the world, subjecting every weapon to the stress-test of dialectical materialist critique and the urgent needs of liberation. Our aim is to overcome our historically specific condition of subjugation. Therefore, our philosophical praxis is one of strategic synthesis: becoming the Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao of our own time and place, armed with the deepest possible understanding of both the global structures of oppression and the local reservoirs of resistance and wisdom, all subsumed into the relentless pursuit of a socialist future.

Conclusion

The premise that profound philosophy and correct anti-imperialist politics are easily separable is, from the trenchant viewpoint of the Global South, a dangerous concession to theoretical complacency. It risks fostering a generation of revolutionaries who are politically committed but theoretically disarmed, unable to comprehend the sophisticated ideological assaults of imperialism or to navigate the complex philosophical terrain of their own societies. We reject this false dichotomy. We insist on the fighting unity of theory and practice, of depth and direction. Our path is the demanding, dialectical path charted by the masters of our tradition: a ruthless critique of everything existing, which includes a ruthless critique of philosophy itself, whether Western or indigenous. We engage with all thought as historically situated, class-bound, and geopolitically marked. We unmask it to reveal its service to empire or to liberation, and we synthesise its insights into a higher, more potent revolutionary theory. For us, philosophy is the spearhead of the war of ideas. In our hands, Marxism-Leninism is that spearhead, constantly sharpened by critical engagement, continuously reforged in the fires of our diverse civilisational experiences, and eternally aimed at the heart of imperialism and the construction of a sovereign, socialist modernity. This is our comprehensive thesis, our method, and our unwavering commitment in the long struggle for total liberation.

Fascism is not an aberration, not a deviation from the normal functioning of capitalism, and certainly not a historical accident produced by charismatic madmen or culturally backward populations. It is, rather, the necessary political form assumed by capitalism at the point where imperialism—understood in the strict Leninist sense as monopoly finance capitalism—enters a phase of historical exhaustion. When the mechanisms through which imperialism previously managed its contradictions—parliamentarism, liberal legality, ideological pluralism, and limited social compromise—cease to function, capital does not abdicate power; it reorganises it through naked coercion. Fascism is precisely this reorganisation: the moment when the bourgeois state sheds its liberal skin and reveals its true class essence as an apparatus of organised violence in defence of capital accumulation. To speak of fascism as the “last stage of imperialism” is therefore not rhetorical excess but a materialist description of capitalism at the point where history has cornered it and forced it to rule without illusions.

Imperialism, as elaborated by Vladimir Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is characterised by the domination of monopolies, the fusion of industrial and banking capital into finance capital, the export of capital rather than commodities, and the division and redivision of the world among competing capitalist powers. What is often misunderstood—deliberately so in liberal historiography—is that this stage already contains within it the political tendency toward authoritarianism. As monopoly capital concentrates economic power into fewer and fewer hands, political democracy becomes increasingly incompatible with the real relations of production. Liberal institutions persist only so long as they do not obstruct accumulation; once they do, they are discarded with remarkable ease. Fascism emerges at precisely this conjuncture: when monopoly finance capital can no longer rule through consent, mediation, and ideological mystification alone, and must therefore rule through terror, militarisation, and the total subordination of society to the imperatives of accumulation and imperialist expansion.

This is why fascism must be understood not as the negation of liberalism, but as its historical consummation. Liberalism is the preferred mode of bourgeois rule during periods of expansion, when surplus can be distributed unevenly yet sufficiently to stabilise society, when imperial plunder abroad allows concessions at home, and when parliamentary forms can mask the dictatorship of capital. Fascism appears when these conditions evaporate: when crises become permanent rather than cyclical, when markets are saturated, when imperial competition intensifies into existential rivalry, and when the working classes threaten—whether actually or potentially—to politicise the crisis in revolutionary directions. At that point, liberalism reveals itself as a temporary luxury, while fascism becomes the emergency form of bourgeois governance. The historical trajectories of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were not deviations from European modernity but its logical outcomes under conditions of imperialist breakdown.

The fetishisation of fascism as “evil ideology” serves an important ideological function: it moralises what is in fact a structural necessity of decaying capitalism. By reducing fascism to racism, antisemitism, or irrational hatred—real and horrific as these elements were—liberal discourse obscures the class forces that produced it. Fascist ideology is not the cause of fascism; it is its cultural expression. The real motor is monopoly finance capital in crisis, seeking to smash labour organisations, annihilate communist movements, militarise society, and redirect internal class antagonisms toward external enemies. Racism, nationalism, and civilisational mythology function here as political technologies, not philosophical foundations. They are tools through which capital reorganises mass consciousness in order to survive its own contradictions.

Crucially, fascism also represents the collapse of bourgeois universalism. The liberal promise of equality before the law, individual rights, and rational governance is quietly abandoned and replaced by an openly hierarchical, exclusionary, and violent social order. Yet this abandonment does not represent a betrayal of capitalism’s “values,” because capitalism has no values beyond accumulation. When universalism obstructs accumulation, it is discarded; when it facilitates it, it is celebrated. Fascism is therefore not capitalism’s moral failure but its political honesty. It is capitalism stripped of its Enlightenment rhetoric, ruling openly in the interests of monopoly capital, no longer pretending to represent society as a whole.

To name fascism as the terminal political form of monopoly finance capitalism is also to recognise its historical specificity. Fascism does not emerge in ascending capitalism, nor in societies where imperialist plunder still provides sufficient material basis for reformist stabilisation. It emerges in periods of decline, when imperialism turns inward, when the external frontiers of expansion close, and when violence becomes the primary means of managing surplus populations, surplus capital, and surplus contradictions. In this sense, fascism is not merely reactionary; it is necrotic. It governs not to build a future, but to prolong a system whose historical legitimacy has already expired.

This understanding has decisive implications for the present. The contemporary resurgence of authoritarianism, militarised nationalism, permanent war, surveillance states, and the criminalisation of dissent is not a return to some pre-liberal past, but the forward motion of imperialism in decay. What we are witnessing is not the failure of liberal democracy but its historical limit. Where monopoly finance capital dominates without restraint, where imperialist competition sharpens under conditions of stagnation, and where the Global South refuses subordination, fascist tendencies reappear—not always under the same symbols, but with the same class content. The costumes change; the function remains.

Against this backdrop, anti-fascism divorced from anti-imperialism is not merely insufficient; it is fraudulent. One cannot meaningfully oppose fascism while defending the imperialist system that generates it. Liberal anti-fascism, which condemns fascist aesthetics while preserving the material relations of monopoly finance capital, functions as an ideological safety valve rather than a challenge to power. Genuine opposition to fascism must therefore be revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist, aimed not at restoring liberal normalcy but at abolishing the conditions that make fascism necessary.

In the final analysis, fascism is capitalism’s admission of historical defeat. It is the political scream of a system that can no longer reproduce itself through consent, legality, or progress, and must therefore rely on violence, myth, and terror. To understand fascism as the last stage of imperialism is to strip it of its mystique and expose it as what it truly is: not the enemy of capitalism, but its most truthful expression at the point of terminal decline. Only the transcendence of monopoly finance capitalism itself—through socialist transformation—can close the door that history has repeatedly forced open.

The second quarter of the twenty-first century began with a calculated act of terror-pedagogy, a spectacle carefully staged by a decaying empire that senses, at the deepest material level, that the age of unipolar domination and the so-called rules-based order has already slipped through its fingers. The abduction and public parading of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in New York was not a legal act, not an anti-drug operation, not a matter of “justice” in any meaningful sense of the word. It was a psychological operation of imperial scale, a message written not in law books but on the bodies and dignity of a sovereign leadership, addressed above all to the Global South: do not be fooled by talk of multipolarity, do not imagine that history has turned in your favour, do not believe that you have escaped your condition of subordination. You are still our slaves, and when we decide to make an example, no one will come to save you.

This spectacle must be understood precisely in the context of the crisis of American hegemony. After decades of financialisation, deindustrialisation, endless imperial wars, and the hollowing-out of its own material and social base, the American empire no longer rules through consent, development, or ideological attraction. Its liberal vocabulary has lost credibility and legitimacy; its institutions no longer inspire confidence even among its own population. In such a situation, imperialism reverts to its most primitive and most revealing form: naked force transformed into theatre. The kidnapping and courtroom parade were not meant to convince the world of American power—too many already know its limits—but to demoralise the Global South, to break the psychological momentum that had begun to form after the visible erosion of unipolarity. The message was brutally simple: the talk of a post-American world is premature, and those who act on it will pay the price.

This is why the operation was not primarily directed against Venezuela as a state, nor even against its leadership as such. Its true audience lay far beyond Caracas. It was aimed at Africa, Asia, Latin America; at every society in the Global South that had begun, cautiously and unevenly, to believe that the decline of U.S. unipolar power might open historical space for autonomous development, for strategic manoeuvre, for partial emancipation from imperial discipline. By dragging a sitting president into the imperial metropolis, the United States was staging a lesson in global hierarchy: sovereignty without imperial approval is a mirage, legality is subordinate to power, and resistance will be answered not only with sanctions and coups, but with public humiliation designed to crush collective morale.

Historically, this logic is neither new nor accidental. It belongs to the classic repertoire of empires in decline. The analogy with the Roman Empire is therefore not metaphorical excess but material analysis. Rome, when it could no longer rule purely through expansion and incorporation, turned increasingly to spectacle. Defeated kings, foreign leaders, and rebel generals were chained and paraded through Rome in triumphal processions, not simply to punish them, but to inscribe imperial supremacy into the consciousness of both the centre and the periphery. These rituals were psychological operations avant la lettre, designed to communicate a single message: resistance is futile, hierarchy is eternal, and Rome remains the axis of the world. The modern empire reproduces this logic through contemporary forms; courtrooms instead of forums, media saturation instead of marble arches, but the essence remains identical. It is domination performed as theatre.

What makes this spectacle particularly revealing is the historical moment in which it occurs. The United States resorts to such open acts of coercive display not at the height of its power, but at a moment when the material foundations of its hegemony are visibly eroding. The rise of alternative centres of production, finance, and political coordination—above all China, but also Russia and broader South–South alignments has already shattered the illusion of an eternal unipolar order. Yet imperialism does not retreat gracefully. Faced with structural decline, it seeks to compensate through over-demonstration, through spectacular assertions of power meant to arrest historical motion at the level of perception, if not reality. The psy-op, in this sense, is a substitute for hegemony: where consent fails, fear must take over.

Crucially, this operation was also designed to discipline illusions within the Global South itself—above all the illusion that multipolarity automatically equals protection. The kidnapping of a sovereign leader was meant to say, loudly and unmistakably: do not expect China or Russia to risk nuclear confrontation for you; do not imagine that alignment or rhetorical friendship will shield you from regime-change operations; do not mistake shifts in the global balance for guarantees of safety. In Marxist-Leninist terms, this is a lesson in the primacy of material interests over sentiment. States, including anti-imperialist ones, act according to their own strategic calculations. No great power will serve as a messiah for the Global South. The empire knows this and weaponises this knowledge to produce demoralisation.

But dialectics cuts both ways. The very necessity of such a spectacle reveals the empire’s weakness. A system confident in its historical role does not need to kidnap leaders to prove its relevance. A hegemon secure in its legitimacy does not need to humiliate so publicly. These are the actions of a power that senses the ground shifting beneath it, that fears not merely rivals abroad but the slow evaporation of belief in its inevitability. In this sense, the spectacle is not proof of strength but a symptom of decay. Rome’s triumphs multiplied as its contradictions deepened; they did not prevent collapse, they accompanied it.

For the Global South, the political conclusion must be drawn with absolute clarity and without illusions. Sovereignty is not granted by international law, nor guaranteed by diplomatic alignments; it is a relation of forces rooted in class power, state capacity, and material deterrence. Without the organised power of the masses, without a state apparatus freed from comprador control, without the capacity to impose real costs on imperial aggression, sovereignty remains a decorative fiction, easily revoked, easily violated, easily turned into spectacle. The psy-op of the decaying empire is meant to kill hope, to convince us that resistance is pointless and that submission is rational. Yet in exposing the naked logic of imperial domination, it also strips away the last ideological veils.

What the American empire staged in New York was not the future of world order, but the past repeating itself under new technological conditions. It was the language of an empire that no longer believes in its own universalism and therefore must rely on fear. History teaches us that such moments are not the end of struggle, but its clarification. Empires that rule by spectacle have already lost the war of legitimacy. And while the road ahead for the Global South will be long, uneven, and costly, one thing is already clear: the age in which humiliation could permanently demoralise entire peoples is over. The spectacle was meant to freeze history. Instead, it has revealed, with brutal honesty, that the empire itself is running out of time.

The analogy with a “Fourth Reich” is not a journalistic exaggeration but a historical-materialist diagnosis. Like interwar Germany, the contemporary United States confronts the contradiction of immense military power combined with relative economic decline, deindustrialisation, financial parasitism, and a hollowed-out social base. Unable to restore accumulation through productive expansion, it turns outward with renewed aggression and inward with intensified authoritarianism. The difference, of course, lies in scale: Nazi Germany sought Lebensraum in Eastern Europe; the United States seeks hemispheric Lebensraum across Latin America and the Caribbean, reviving the old colonial grammar of the Monroe Doctrine under twenty-first-century conditions. What we are witnessing is not fascism as theatrical aesthetics, but fascism as geopolitical necessity for a decaying imperial core—fascism as the foreign policy of decline.

In this sense, hemispheric recolonisation is not optional for the United States; it is structurally compelled. The Global South, and particularly Latin America, functions as the empire’s nearest and most violently accessible reservoir of surplus value, cheap labour, strategic resources, and political subordination. When global expansion stalls—when China refuses subordination, when Eurasia resists encirclement, when Africa diversifies its partnerships—the empire turns back to its “backyard.” Coups, sanctions, colour revolutions, lawfare, narcotics militarisation, IMF blackmail, and direct military threats are not policy choices debated in Washington think tanks; they are the automatic reflexes of a system that can no longer reproduce itself through consent. Trump merely accelerated and vulgarised what Obama refined and Biden bureaucratised. The continuity is imperial; only the tone changes.

The language of “America First,” so often misunderstood as isolationist, is in fact profoundly expansionist. It does not mean withdrawal from the world; it means the violent re-hierarchisation of the world. It means that international law applies only to the weak, sovereignty is conditional, and human rights are a weapon to be deployed selectively against disobedient states. Under Trump, this logic achieved a clarity that liberal imperialism prefers to obscure: Latin American states are not partners, they are vassals; governments are legitimate only insofar as they submit; and any attempt at autonomous development is framed as a security threat. This is imperial realism stripped of its humanitarian costume.

The fascistic dimension of this project lies not only in foreign policy but in the internal reorganisation of American society itself. As monopoly finance capital cannibalises the remaining productive base, the social contract collapses. Infrastructure decays, life expectancy falls, opioid epidemics ravage the working class, and racialised surplus populations are policed rather than integrated. Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric—his contempt for institutions, his flirtation with violence, his open racism—is not an ideological deviation but the cultural superstructure corresponding to these material conditions. When consent can no longer be purchased through relative prosperity, it must be extracted through fear, spectacle, and permanent mobilisation against internal and external enemies. Fascism, here, is not a foreign import; it is endogenous to late-stage imperial capitalism.

Yet what liberal commentators consistently miss—and what the imperialist-compatible left refuses to confront—is that this “Fourth Reich” is already structurally weaker than its predecessors. Unlike earlier imperial expansions, the United States today confronts a world in which alternative centres of accumulation, technology, and political legitimacy exist. China’s rise, the re-emergence of Eurasian integration, and the growing assertiveness of the Global South represent not moral challenges to empire, but material limits. Hemispheric recolonisation, therefore, is a strategy of desperation, not confidence. It is the attempt to seal off a shrinking zone of domination in the face of an increasingly multipolar world system.

From the standpoint of historical materialism, this moment clarifies rather than confuses our tasks. The Global South cannot interpret Trumpism as an anomaly to be corrected by a return to liberal normalcy, because liberal normalcy itself was always imperial violence rendered polite. Nor can it afford the illusion that “better Democrats” or “multilateral reform” will restrain an empire whose survival increasingly depends on coercion. The choice imposed by history is stark: either submission to hemispheric recolonisation or the construction of real sovereignty through popular power, socialist transformation, and strategic deterrence. There is no third way, no ethical shortcut, no NGO-mediated escape from the laws of imperial decline.

In this sense, Trump’s America performs an unintended historical service. By tearing away the ideological veil, it exposes the United States not as a flawed democracy, but as what it has long been: the central organ of monopoly finance capital, prepared to burn the world to preserve its privileges. The “Fourth Reich” is not a future threat; it is a present reality, unevenly articulated, violently enforced, and increasingly unstable. And as with all such regimes, its apparent strength conceals profound weakness. Empires do not collapse when they are challenged rhetorically; they collapse when the material conditions that sustain them are negated by organised, conscious, and sovereign alternatives.

History, as always, is not neutral. It is aligning forces. And in this alignment, Trump’s America stands not at the beginning of a new imperial century, but at the convulsive end of an old one—thrashing, brutal, and desperate, while the world beyond it slowly, unevenly, and painfully moves toward a post-imperial horizon.

The recurring lament—why did China and Russia not come to rescue Venezuela, why did they not intervene decisively, why did they not confront U.S. imperialism on behalf of a besieged nation—reveals less about China, Russia, or Venezuela than it does about a deep and persistent ideological confusion within large segments of the Global South itself. This confusion is rooted in a residual messianism inherited from colonial modernity: the belief that salvation must come from outside, that history advances through benevolent external guardians, that sovereignty can be subcontracted to friendly great powers. Against this ideological residue, a Marxist–Leninist position—grounded in historical materialism rather than moral sentiment—must insist on a harder, but infinitely more emancipatory truth: the sovereignty of the Global South cannot be gifted, guaranteed, or defended by others; it can only be produced, defended, and consolidated by the Global South itself, through its own class power, its own state form, and its own material capacity for deterrence. Anything else is a return, in new ideological garb, to the old colonial relation of dependence.

When Domenico Losurdo spoke of “proletarian nations,” he was not indulging in poetic metaphor; he was naming a concrete historical reality produced by imperialism itself. Just as capitalism divides societies into antagonistic classes, imperialism divides the world into dominant and dominated nations, into imperialist cores and exploited peripheries. The Global South, in this sense, occupies the position of the proletariat at the world scale: dispossessed of surplus, structurally subordinated, and subjected to permanent coercion—economic, political, and military. To expect that emancipation for these proletarian nations will arrive through the voluntary sacrifice of other states, however friendly, is to misunderstand the nature of the international system under imperialism. States do not act as moral abstractions; they act as historically situated concentrations of class forces, constrained by their own survival, contradictions, and strategic limits.

This is precisely why the question “Why didn’t China and Russia come to save Venezuela?” is itself wrongly posed. China and Russia, whatever their contradictions and internal trajectories, are sovereign states operating within a world order still dominated by imperialist violence. They can provide diplomatic cover, economic cooperation, limited military-technical assistance, and strategic balancing—but they cannot, and will not, risk a direct nuclear confrontation with United States in order to substitute for the internal class power that alone can secure Venezuelan sovereignty. To demand such a sacrifice is not internationalism; it is political infantilism masquerading as radicalism. Genuine internationalism strengthens the capacity of oppressed nations to stand on their own feet; it does not turn them into permanent wards of external protectors.

The brutal lesson that imperialism has taught, again and again, is that sovereignty without power is fiction. Formal independence without a revolutionary class state is merely a change of flag over the same comprador structure. This is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an ideological fetish but a historical necessity for the Global South. Without the decisive political exclusion of the comprador bourgeoisie—those classes whose material interests are organically tied to imperial capital—no anti-imperialist project can survive. The comprador class is not simply corrupt; it is structurally counter-revolutionary. In moments of crisis, it will always prefer foreign domination to domestic transformation, dollar hegemony to national planning, imperial “stability” to popular sovereignty. A state that tolerates this class as a co-ruler is a state that has already surrendered its future.

Yet political power alone is insufficient in an international system where imperialism ultimately speaks through missiles, sanctions, blockades, and regime-change operations. Here the second hard truth asserts itself: without strategic deterrence, sovereignty remains permanently conditional. Imperialism respects no legal principle, no electoral mandate, no humanitarian rhetoric when its material interests are threatened. It respects force—or, more precisely, the credible capacity to impose unacceptable costs. History is unambiguous on this point. States that lack deterrence are disciplined; states that possess it are negotiated with. This is not a moral endorsement of militarisation; it is a materialist diagnosis of the world as it exists under monopoly finance capitalism and imperialist decay.

This is also why the expectation that external powers will fight our battles for us is not merely unrealistic but politically disabling. It externalises responsibility, weakens internal mobilisation, and allows the comprador class to present dependency as realism. The Global South must grasp that no one will risk annihilation on its behalf unless its own people have already demonstrated the capacity and will to defend their revolution. China and Russia can support, balance, and complicate imperialist aggression—but they cannot replace the internal foundations of sovereignty. To demand that they do so is to misunderstand both geopolitics and Marxism.

The real task, then, is neither lamentation nor moral outrage, but revolutionary clarity. The Global South must abandon the fantasy of external messiahs and return to the central Marxist insight: emancipation is a process, not a gift. It requires a revolutionary state rooted in the organised power of the working masses; it requires the dismantling of comprador domination; it requires economic planning oriented toward social need rather than imperial integration; and it requires the material capacity to deter imperialist coercion. These are not optional add-ons to sovereignty—they are its very substance.

In this sense, Venezuela’s predicament is not an exception but a warning. It exposes the limits of half-measures, the dangers of underestimating imperialist violence, and the fatal illusions of dependency. The question is not why others did not come to save Venezuela; the question is whether the Global South is prepared to complete the historical tasks that sovereignty demands. Until it does, every crisis will be accompanied by the same confused lament, and every defeat will be misattributed to betrayal rather than to unfinished revolution. History, however, is mercilessly clear: the emancipation and sovereignty of the Global South must be the work of the Global South itself—or it will not be at all.

From the vantage point of the Global South, what Western theory celebrates as epistemological humility or ethical sophistication reveals itself as something far more banal and far more political: privilege elevated into principle. The loud rejection of totality, necessity, and systemic explanation—so fashionable within post-structuralist and post-Marxist circles in the imperial core—is not born out of historical suffering or revolutionary defeat, but out of insulation. It is the theoretical posture of societies that inhabit the commanding heights of the capitalist–imperialist world system, where exploitation is externalised, violence is mediated, and domination rarely appears in its naked form. In such locations, fragmentation can be mistaken for complexity, contingency for freedom, and theoretical indeterminacy for emancipation. But for those of us living in the periphery and semi-periphery—where capitalism is not an abstraction but a daily material assault—the world does not present itself as fragmented, plural, or decentered. It presents itself as brutally unified, coherently organised, and relentlessly hierarchical. One does not theorise totality here; one lives it.

Western anti-totality ideology rests on a profound misrecognition of reality. It confuses the ideological appearance of decentralisation within imperial core societies with the structural logic of the global system itself. Because power in the metropolis is bureaucratised, displaced across institutions, and often exercised indirectly, it can be imagined as diffuse, elusive, or omnipresent in a Foucauldian sense. Yet this apparent diffusion is only possible because power is violently centralised elsewhere. What appears as pluralism in the core is purchased through enforced unity in the periphery: unified markets subjected to imperial trade regimes, unified debt structures imposed through financial institutions, unified supply chains disciplined by monopoly capital, and unified political obedience ensured through sanctions, coups, proxy wars, and military intimidation. From the Global South, capitalism does not look like a swarm of micro-powers; it looks like a world system with identifiable centres of command and unmistakable lines of force. To deny totality from this position is not intellectual caution—it is empirical denial.

It is precisely here that anti-totality theory performs its deepest ideological labour: it renders imperialism theoretically unintelligible. Imperialism cannot be grasped as a loose constellation of discourses, identities, or local power relations. It is a structured global relation—between nations and classes, between core and periphery, between monopoly capital and dependent economies—anchored in unequal exchange, financial domination, and organised violence. Once totality is abandoned, imperialism dissolves into vague geopolitics, cultural encounters, or moralised “international relations,” emptied of its material logic. The system disappears, leaving behind an endless catalogue of symptoms. This is not an innocent mistake. It is the theoretical price paid for intellectual respectability within institutions that are themselves embedded in imperial power. One can describe oppression endlessly, provided one never explains it.

From a Third World perspective, the Western fetishisation of fragmentation appears less as radical critique and more as a systematic evasion of responsibility. The same theorists who announce the “end of grand narratives” do so at the very historical moment when billions of people are forcibly absorbed into a single narrative not of their choosing: the narrative of global capitalism. Structural adjustment programmes, debt conditionalities, trade agreements, intellectual property regimes, and military alliances do not operate locally or contingently; they function as an integrated totality. When theory insists that this unity is merely a “discursive construct,” it reproduces the very mystifications that allow the system to reproduce itself with minimal resistance. What is denied in theory is imposed in practice. The refusal to name totality becomes a condition for its uninterrupted operation.

Even more damaging is the political effect of this ideology on struggles in the Global South. Anti-totality theory systematically delegitimises the very forms of thought required for liberation. National liberation movements, anti-imperialist struggles, and socialist revolutions have never emerged from fragmented perspectives; they have always required a grasp of totality—an understanding of how local exploitation is tied to global structures, how domestic ruling classes are organically linked to imperial capital, and how political independence without economic transformation merely reproduces dependency in new forms. To reject totality is to reject strategy. To reject necessity is to reject organisation. To reject contradiction is to reject rupture. Western theory can afford this rejection because it does not bear the consequences. The Global South cannot.

This is precisely why Marxism—especially in its Leninist, Maoist, and anti-colonial articulations—has remained indispensable outside the imperial core. Lenin’s theory of imperialism is not an abstract schema but a concrete theory of totality, revealing how monopoly capital, finance capital, colonial domination, and inter-imperialist rivalry form a single global system. Mao’s theory of contradiction does not erase difference but organises it, distinguishing principal from secondary contradictions in specific historical conditions. Fanon grasps the colony as a total social fact, where economy, culture, psychology, and violence converge into a single structure of domination. None of this is possible without totality. Fragmentation, by contrast, offers only paralysis disguised as nuance, despair masquerading as sophistication.

Western anti-totality discourse often accuses Marxism of authoritarianism, as if systemic analysis necessarily leads to political domination. From the Global South, this accusation is almost obscene. What dominates our lives is not theory but capital; not totality as a concept but totality as a lived reality. To refuse to name this reality in the name of theoretical ethics is not an act of resistance—it is an objective alignment with the status quo. There is nothing emancipatory in refusing to see the system that structures one’s unfreedom. On the contrary, clarity is the first condition of liberation. Marxism insists on totality not because it seeks closure, but because it seeks transformation.

The final irony is decisive. Western anti-totality theory presents itself as pluralist and anti-authoritarian, yet it universalises its own provincial experience while denying the epistemic authority of those who have confronted imperialism directly. It accuses Marxism of Eurocentrism while reproducing a deeper Eurocentrism of its own—one that assumes the historical experience of the imperial core can dictate the limits of theory for the rest of humanity. In doing so, it erases centuries of revolutionary practice, anti-colonial struggle, and socialist experimentation that have repeatedly demonstrated the necessity of totality not in theory seminars, but in history itself.

From a Third World Marxist standpoint, the conclusion is unavoidable. Anti-totality fetishism is not radical critique; it is imperial ideology in theoretical form. It flourishes where capitalism appears stable, where exploitation is outsourced, and where revolution can be treated as an abstract moral question rather than a material necessity. Against this ideology, dialectical materialism reasserts itself not as dogma but as realism—the realism of a world system that must be grasped as a whole if it is to be overcome.

The Global South does not need fewer totalities; it needs the courage to confront the one that already exists. Capital has unified the world through violence, extraction, and hierarchy. To fragment this unity in theory is to mystify it in practice. Marxism insists, soberly and without apology, that the world is one—not in harmony, but in contradictions—and that these contradictions can be resolved only through collective, organised, revolutionary transformation.

One of the most revealing symptoms of the present historical conjuncture is the profound parallel between the internal decay of capitalism at its imperialist stage and the intellectual degeneration of the Western Left that claims, at least nominally, to oppose it. Monopoly finance capital—capital that no longer organises production but feeds parasitically upon it, capital that multiplies itself through speculation, debt, rent, and fictitious claims upon future surplus—has become the dominant form of accumulation in the imperial core. At precisely the same historical moment, the dominant Left in those same societies has transformed into something equally abstract, equally detached from material reality: a Left without political economy, without a theory of imperialism, without a concrete understanding of class power, and ultimately without any capacity to grasp the real movement of history. This is not coincidence. It is correspondence. The fictitious Left is the ideological reflection of fictitious capital.

Marx’s analysis of fictitious capital was never merely a technical observation about financial instruments; it was a warning about mystification at the highest level of capitalist development. When capital appears to generate value independently of labour and production, social relations are fully inverted, and exploitation becomes invisible even to those who imagine themselves its critics. Monopoly finance capitalism universalises this inversion. Entire national economies are subordinated to credit systems, speculative bubbles, and debt regimes, while productive capacity is either destroyed or relocated to the periphery under conditions of extreme super-exploitation. What we are witnessing today is not the “financialisation” of a healthy system, but the decomposition of capitalism into a form that increasingly survives by cannibalising both past accumulation and future labour.

It is here that the decisive importance of Lenin reasserts itself. Imperialism, as Lenin demonstrated, is not a policy error, a moral deviation, or a contingent excess; it is a structural stage of capitalism defined by monopoly, finance capital, capital export, and the violent division of the world. Once capitalism enters this stage, decay is not accidental—it is systemic. The destruction of productive forces, the militarisation of accumulation, and the permanent instability of the world economy are not anomalies but necessities. Any Left that does not begin from this material foundation is not merely incomplete; it is fundamentally disoriented.

The Western Left, however, has largely abandoned this terrain. Instead of confronting monopoly finance capital as the organising principle of the contemporary world system, it retreats into cultural critique, discourse analysis, ethical posturing, and endless internal moral arbitration. Class struggle is displaced by identity management; imperialism is dissolved into “geopolitics” or “authoritarianism”; political economy is treated as an optional specialisation rather than the backbone of Marxist analysis. What presents itself as sophistication is, in reality, a flight from material determination.

This retreat has a history. Western Marxism emerged not as a triumphant theoretical advance but as an intellectual response to political defeat. The failure of revolutionary movements in Europe, the stabilisation of capitalism in the imperial core, and the material integration of large segments of the Western working class into imperialist super-profits produced a Left increasingly severed from revolutionary praxis. Instead of analysing these developments through the lens of imperialism and uneven development, Western Marxism increasingly turned inward—toward philosophy, culture, pessimism, and abstraction. Marxism was transformed from a science of social transformation into a language of critique divorced from the organisation of power.

The result is a Left that speaks endlessly about domination while refusing to analyse its material foundations. It condemns power in the abstract while remaining silent about monopoly finance capital in the concrete. It denounces “states” generically while reserving its greatest hostility for those states that actually attempt, however imperfectly and contradictorily, to escape the gravitational pull of imperialist capital. In this way, the Western Left becomes not simply mistaken but structurally compatible with imperialism itself. It does not need to consciously support empire; its idealism performs the task automatically.

This compatibility is most visible in the obsession with false equivalence. Imperialist states that dominate the world through finance, military violence, and control over global value chains are placed on the same moral plane as countries struggling to preserve sovereignty, develop productive forces, or resist subordination within a hostile world system. History, power, and material asymmetry disappear, replaced by symmetrical denunciations and ethical theatrics. What remains is a Left that feels radical while functioning as an ideological safety valve for the existing order.

Here the analogy with fictitious capital becomes complete. Just as fictitious capital imagines accumulation without production, the fictitious Left imagines emancipation without political economy. It imagines socialism without planning, anti-imperialism without state power, and revolution without the dictatorship of the proletariat. It fears organisation, discipline, and authority more than it fears monopoly finance capital. It treats the seizure of power as inherently suspect while treating imperialist domination as a regrettable but abstract condition. This is not Marxism. It is liberal idealism draped in radical language.

Marxism-Leninism stands in uncompromising opposition to this degeneration. It insists, against every form of idealist evasion, that material conditions determine consciousness, that classes are formed in production, and that the state is an instrument of class rule. It insists that socialism is not a moral horizon but a transitional process rooted in the development of productive forces under new property relations. And it insists that imperialism cannot be opposed through discourse, lifestyle politics, or ethical purification, but only through organised power, strategic state action, and internationalist struggle.

From the standpoint of the Global South, the bankruptcy of the Western Left is impossible to ignore. For those societies that have lived through colonial extraction, underdevelopment, debt regimes, and military coercion, the refusal to analyse imperialism materially is not an academic error—it is a political betrayal. The Western Left’s hostility toward actually existing anti-imperialist projects, its obsession with internal purity, and its allergy to historical concreteness reveal a Left that has made peace with the imperial order, even when it speaks the language of opposition.

The conclusion, therefore, is unavoidable and must be stated without euphemism. The fictitious Left is a historical product of imperialist decay, just as monopoly finance capital is a product of capitalism’s terminal contradictions. Both thrive on abstraction, both fear material grounding, and both will be swept aside by history. What remains necessary—now more than ever—is a return to ruthless dialectical and historical materialism, to a Leninist analysis of imperialism, and to a Marxism rooted not in the comfort of the imperial core but in the struggles of those forced to confront capitalism in its most violent and naked form.

History does not advance through moral refinement or theoretical elegance. It advances through contradiction, struggle, and the reorganisation of material life. Any Left that forgets this condemns itself to irrelevance. And irrelevance, in an age of imperialist decay, is not neutrality—it is complicity.

I. Rockhill’s crime: applying historical materialism to Western Marxism itself

Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism represents a qualitative rupture within contemporary Marxist debate, not because it invents a new doctrine, but because it commits what is, for the imperialist-compatible left, the ultimate theoretical sin: it applies historical materialism to the producers of Western Marxist theory (imperial theory industry), to their institutions, their funding streams, their circuits of prestige, and their geopolitical embeddedness within imperial power. Western Marxism and Trotskyism, which have long enjoyed the privilege of presenting themselves as eternal critics standing above history, suddenly find themselves dragged into history—into class struggle, into the Cold War, into imperial strategy, into foundations, universities, journals, and cultural fronts. This is why the reaction has been so hysterical. Rockhill has not merely criticised Western Marxism; he has de-sacralised it, stripping it of its moral halo and revealing it as a historically produced ideological formation that emerged, matured, and consolidated itself within the imperial superstructure of monopoly capitalism. The fury of figures like Sebastian Budgen is therefore not accidental, nor is it merely personal: it is the reflex of a class fraction whose symbolic capital has been placed under materialist scrutiny.

What Rockhill demonstrates—systematically, archivally, and theoretically—is that Western Marxism’s defining features are not random errors or unfortunate deviations, but functional traits: its hostility to actually existing socialism, its obsession with “authoritarianism,” its evacuation of political economy in favour of culture and discourse, its moralism in place of organisation, its allergy to state power, sovereignty, and revolution. These traits rendered it not only tolerable but useful to imperialism. This is what it means to say that Western Marxism is imperialist-compatible: not that every individual theorist consciously served the CIA, but that the tradition as a whole was cultivated, rewarded, circulated, and canonised precisely because it neutralised Marxism as a revolutionary science and transformed it into a critical aesthetic, an ethical posture, or a scholastic discourse safely quarantined from power.

II. Sebastian Budgen’s outburst: panic, not critique

Sebastian Budgen’s grotesque outburst—replete with sneers, class contempt, biographical mockery, and open boasts of censorship—confirms, far more eloquently than any footnote, that Rockhill has struck a nerve. Instead of engaging the book’s arguments, archival evidence, or theoretical framework, Budgen resorts to the classic repertoire of a threatened gatekeeper: pathologisation (“paranoid style”), guilt-by-association (chemtrails, 9/11 trutherism), sneering psychologism (“midlife crisis campism”), and, most revealingly, institutional intimidation (“permanent life-ban from all HM spaces”). This is not Marxist polemic; it is ideological policing. It is the language not of theory, but of power—of someone who knows that the terrain he occupies cannot withstand open materialist examination.

Budgen’s slur is especially revealing in its open contempt for the masses. The imagery of “unwashed American basement-dwellers,” “peasant consciousness,” and “credulous forms” betrays the deeply elitist and colonial unconscious of Western Marxism. Here we see the real class character of this milieu: an academic–journalistic stratum embedded in metropolitan institutions, whose radicalism is carefully curated so as never to threaten imperial interests, and whose disdain for popular, revolutionary, or Global South Marxism is barely concealed beneath layers of irony. It confirms Rockhill’s thesis that Western Marxism functions through gatekeeping, exclusion, and the monopolisation of legitimacy, rather than through open scientific debate.

III. Why they cannot refute Rockhill (and therefore must slander him)

The reason Budgen and his circle do not refute Rockhill is simple: they cannot. To refute him, they would have to do precisely what they have been trained never to do: analyse foundations, state institutions, Cold War cultural strategies, imperial geopolitics, and the class location of intellectual labour. They would have to abandon the comfort of moral critique and descend into the dangerous terrain of political economy and state power. They would have to explain why Marxism that defends China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, or the Soviet experience is systematically marginalised, while Marxism that denounces these projects is endlessly platformed, funded, translated, and promoted. They would have to explain why “anti-authoritarian” Marxism flourishes in the imperial core while revolutionary Marxism flourishes in the Global South. In short, they would have to explain their own existence as a privileged intellectual stratum within empire.

Unable to do this, they resort to slander. Rockhill is not wrong; he is “delirious.” His evidence is not inaccurate; it is “paranoid.” His politics are not anti-imperialist; they are “neo-tankie.” This rhetorical strategy is as old as bourgeois ideology itself: when materialism threatens legitimacy, pathologise it. When critique exposes power, delegitimise the critic. What is remarkable is how openly this is now done, without even the pretence of scholarly engagement. The mask has slipped. The imperialist-compatible left no longer even tries to appear democratic or pluralistic; it simply bans, excludes, sneers, and moves on.

IV. A Global South Marxist verdict: nothing new, and everything confirmed

From a Global South Marxist perspective, none of this is surprising. For us, Western Marxism has long appeared as a strange and sterile phenomenon: endlessly critical, perpetually sophisticated, and utterly incapable of producing or defending revolution. While our peoples fought colonialism, imperialism, sanctions, coups, and underdevelopment, Western Marxists wrote essays about discourse, pessimism, and negativity, often aligning—explicitly or implicitly—with imperial narratives against socialist states. For us, Marxism was never a lifestyle or an identity; it was a weapon of survival, a theory of development, a guide to state-building, and a science of sovereignty. That Western Marxists should recoil in horror at Marxism that actually takes power, builds states, disciplines capital, and defies empire is therefore entirely logical. Their Marxism was never meant to win.

Rockhill’s intervention is thus profoundly important for the Global South, because it re-legitimises our historical experience against decades of metropolitan condescension. It names Western Marxism not as the universal standard of Marxist thought, but as a regional, historically specific, and politically compromised formation. It restores Marxism to its real protagonists: the revolutionary movements, socialist states, and anti-imperialist struggles of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the broader periphery of capitalism. From this standpoint, Budgen’s tantrum is not offensive; it is diagnostic. It reveals the fear of a tradition that knows its hegemony is cracking, that the Global South no longer seeks validation from Jacobin, Verso, or Historical Materialism, and that Marxism is once again becoming what it always was meant to be: a science of revolution, not a parlor game of critique.

V. Conclusion: the verdict of history, not journals

In the final analysis, the significance of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism lies not in whether Gabriel Rockhill is liked, published, or invited into “HM spaces.” Those spaces, as Budgen himself admits, are policed precisely to prevent such interventions. Its significance lies in the fact that it marks a shift in the balance of theoretical forces: the re-emergence of anti-imperialist, state-oriented, Global South–aligned Marxism as a confident intellectual current that no longer seeks approval from the imperial core. The hysterical reaction of the imperialist-compatible left is the sound of a monopoly losing control.

Rockhill has not merely embarrassed Western Marxism; he has historicised it. And once historicised, it can no longer pretend to be universal, innocent, or radical. That is why the slurs are so vicious, the bans so open, and the tone so nakedly authoritarian. History, however, is not written in editorial boards or podcasts. It is written in struggles, revolutionary states, and social transformations. On that terrain, the imperialist-compatible left has nothing to show—and Rockhill, whatever they may call him, has told the truth they most feared hearing.

(More power to yo comrade Gabriel Rockhill ✊️✊️✊️✌️)

In the epoch of monopoly finance capitalism, when imperialism not only rules merely through naked force but also through ideology, discourse, and managed dissent, the most valuable servants of empire are not open liberals or reactionaries, but those organisations that speak in the language of Marxism while performing the political work of imperialism. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) stands today as one of the clearest and most instructive examples of this phenomenon. Draped in the cloak of so-called “orthodox Marxism,” loudly proclaiming fidelity to Lenin while methodically hollowing out Leninism of its revolutionary content, the KKE has become an imperialist chauvinist pet dog — not despite its rhetoric, but precisely through it. Its systematic denunciation of both China and Russia as “imperialist powers,” its obsessive invocation of “inter-imperialist war,” and its abstract moralism masquerading as class analysis function not as resistance to Western imperialism, but as an ideological service to it, with particularly destructive consequences for anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South.

At the theoretical core of the KKE’s degeneration lies a mechanical, anti-dialectical, and profoundly non-Leninist conception of imperialism. Imperialism, in Lenin’s analysis, was not a generic synonym for “capitalism with guns,” nor a timeless attribute of any state that exercises force. It was a historically specific stage of capitalism characterised by the domination of monopoly capital, the fusion of industrial and banking capital into finance capital, the export of capital on a world scale, the subordination of entire regions to financial oligarchies, and the division of the globe among a handful of imperial centres. The KKE empties this analysis of all material specificity and converts it into a scholastic formula: if a state is capitalist and militarily active, it is declared imperialist; if it asserts sovereignty, it is condemned as a rival empire; if it resists Western domination, it is accused of pursuing its own imperial project. This is not Marxism. It is formalism, and formalism in politics always serves the strongest power.

By placing the United States, NATO, China, and Russia on the same analytical plane, the KKE performs a theoretical erasure of the real hierarchy of the world system. The United States is not simply one capitalist state among others; it is the central organiser of global monopoly finance capital, commanding the dollar system, enforcing sanctions as a weapon of mass economic destruction, maintaining hundreds of military bases, orchestrating regime-change operations, and disciplining the Global South through debt, trade regimes, and financial blackmail. China, by contrast, is a post-revolutionary society emerging from colonial devastation, pursuing large-scale industrial development, technological upgrading, and long-term planning under constant imperial pressure. Russia, whatever its bourgeois and oligarchic distortions, is a sanctioned, encircled, capital-importing state resisting NATO’s eastward expansion and existential subordination. To call all three “imperialist” in the same breath is not radical honesty; it is imperialist equalisation, the favourite ideological trick of empire when it wishes to conceal its own centrality.

This false symmetry has a precise political function, especially in a country like Greece, whose ruling class is fully integrated into NATO and the European Union. By denouncing Russia and China alongside the United States, the KKE creates the illusion of balance while leaving the imperial structure in which Greece is embedded entirely intact. It allows the Greek bourgeoisie to pursue its NATO commitments, host military infrastructure, and participate in imperial logistics, while pointing to the “communists” and saying: even they agree that Russia and China are just as bad. This is not accidental. It is social-chauvinism updated for the era of managed dissent, where radical language is tolerated precisely because it no longer threatens power.

The consequences of this position are catastrophic for the Global South. Anti-imperialist struggles in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East do not confront an abstract capitalism floating in space; they confront a concrete imperial order dominated by Western monopoly finance capital. For these societies, China’s role as a source of infrastructure, industrial capacity, technological cooperation, and development financing — without the political and military conditionalities imposed by the IMF and World Bank — is not an “imperialist threat,” but a material breach in the imperial siege. Russia’s resistance to NATO, similarly, disrupts the unipolar discipline that has allowed the United States to bomb, sanction, and starve entire populations with impunity. When the KKE declares these counter-hegemonic forces “imperialist,” it does not enlighten the oppressed; it disarms them ideologically, telling them that no contradiction within the system can be exploited, that every power is equally reactionary, and that resistance itself is ultimately meaningless.

This is how Marxism is transformed from a theory of revolution into a theology of despair. The KKE’s version of “orthodoxy” demands absolute purity while refusing to engage with living history. It dismisses all actually existing struggles as insufficient, all state-led development as capitalist deviation, and all geopolitical resistance as imperial rivalry. In practice, this means waiting — endlessly — for a perfect revolutionary situation that never arrives, while the real world burns under sanctions, war, and ecological collapse. This posture is not revolutionary defeatism in Lenin’s sense; it is revolutionary abstentionism, a refusal to intervene in real contradictions coupled with moral superiority toward those who do.

The party’s repeated promotion of misleading narratives about “communist repression” in Russia must be understood within this broader framework. By conflating unrelated cases, erasing wartime conditions, and echoing Western liberal talking points under a red banner, the KKE functions as an ideological relay for imperial narratives at precisely those moments when imperial legitimacy is weakening. As popular trust in mainstream media collapses, empire increasingly relies on organisations that appear oppositional to launder its worldview. In this context, the KKE’s interventions are not acts of courage but of political accommodation, helping to sustain the permanent-war consensus while claiming revolutionary credibility.

What we are witnessing, then, is not the persistence of Marxist orthodoxy but its institutional neutralisation. The KKE preserves the language of Marxism while stripping it of its strategic and historical content. It speaks endlessly of capitalism while refusing to name the imperial centre. It denounces power everywhere except where power is concentrated. It scolds the oppressed from within the camp of the oppressor. And in doing so, it renders itself extremely useful to Western imperialism — a barking dog that appears hostile, but never bites the hand that feeds it.

A genuinely scientific Marxism begins not with abstract schemas but with the real movement of world history. In our time, the principal contradiction is between U.S.-led monopoly finance capital and the struggle of states and peoples for sovereignty, development, and survival. Any “communism” that denies this contradiction, that collapses imperialism into a flat moral category, and that refuses to take sides in a world structured by domination ceases to be revolutionary. It becomes what the KKE has become: an imperialist chauvinist pet dog in the cloak of orthodox Marxism, performing ideological services for empire while preaching purity to the victims of that very empire.

Any scientific Marxist analysis of Zionism must begin with a decisive rupture from the ideological confusion deliberately cultivated by bourgeois discourse: Zionism is not Judaism, and Judaism is not Zionism. Judaism is an ancient religious–ethical tradition with diverse theological, cultural, and historical expressions developed over millennia across multiple civilisations. Zionism, by contrast, is a modern, secular, bourgeois political ideology that emerges in late-nineteenth-century Europe under the specific historical conditions of imperialism and monopoly capitalism. To conflate the two is not only theoretically false but politically reactionary, since such conflation serves the double function of shielding imperial power from critique while simultaneously exposing Jewish communities worldwide to racialised hostility for crimes committed by capital and empire. Scientific Marxism therefore insists, without ambiguity, that Zionism is not the continuation of Judaism but its instrumental negation, transforming a rich ethical tradition into an ideological alibi for settler colonialism, permanent war, and finance-capital domination.

The greatest ideological victory of bourgeois thought in the late and declining phase of capitalism has been its ability to localise, personalise, and ethnicise what is in fact a systemic and global relation of domination. Zionism, in its dominant popular representation, is reduced to Israel; Israel is reduced to Jews; and Jews are then falsely imagined as the causal agents of a planetary catastrophe whose real author is monopoly finance capital itself. This ideological operation is not accidental. It functions precisely as what Marx called a camera obscura: a distorted inversion in which appearances conceal the real movement of material relations. The task of scientific Marxism is therefore not to denounce images, but to invert the inversion, to reveal the hidden totality behind the fetishised form. When this is done rigorously, one arrives at a decisive conclusion: Israel is not “Zion” in the real historical sense; Israel is only a refracted, partial, and distorted political superstructure. The real “Zion” is U.S.-led monopoly finance capitalism as a global imperial system.

Zionism, when stripped of its theological residues and nationalist mythology, must be analysed as a secular ideology of capital, not as an expression of religion, ethnicity, or culture. Its historical emergence coincides not with ancient scripture but with the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism, from industrial accumulation to finance-dominated accumulation, from bourgeois progress to imperial stagnation. This is the historical terrain Marx only glimpsed in On the Jewish Question, where he was not analysing Jews as a people but money as a social power — the reduction of human relations to exchange value, the domination of society by abstraction, and the transformation of emancipation into mere juridical equality within alienated social relations. What Marx named polemically and metaphorically in the 1840s becomes, in the 20th and 21st centuries, an objective global structure: fictitious capital ruling over living labour, speculation over production, war over development, and financial rent over the reproduction of civilisation itself.

In this sense, Zionism must be grasped not as a national project but as an imperial logic — a logic whose defining features are settler-colonial displacement, permanent militarisation, racialised hierarchy, and the sanctification of violence in the name of “security.” But this logic reaches its highest, most universal, and most abstract form not in Israel, but in the United States itself. The United States is the fully realised empire of fictitious capital: a settler-colonial state founded on genocide, expanded through slavery, consolidated through imperial war, and now sustained through the global rule of the dollar, sanctions, debt regimes, and military encirclement. Here Zionism sheds its local costume and appears in its real content: the political theology of monopoly finance capital, which presents its domination as moral necessity, historical destiny, and civilisational mission.

Israel, then, is not the essence but the optical illusion. It is a concentrated image through which the system becomes visible, yet also distorted. Like the commodity form analysed by Marx, Israel appears as an autonomous subject, an actor with its own will, when in reality it is a node, a militarised outpost embedded in a global imperial totality whose centre of gravity lies elsewhere. To attack Israel alone while leaving intact the empire of finance capital that sustains it is to remain trapped within the camera obscura — mistaking reflection for source, effect for cause, superstructure for base. This is why liberal critiques of Israel endlessly fail: they moralise symptoms while leaving untouched the material relations that continuously reproduce those symptoms.

The real Zion — monopoly finance capitalism — is defined by its hostility to productive forces. Unlike classical capitalism, which expanded industry, science, and social wealth (while simultaneously exploiting labour), monopoly finance capital increasingly survives by destroying the very conditions of human reproduction. Deindustrialisation, speculative bubbles, ecological collapse, permanent war, and the hollowing out of social life are not policy mistakes but structural imperatives of a system that can no longer valorise itself through production. Zionism, in this sense, is not simply colonialism; it is colonialism after progress, colonialism without development, colonialism as pure domination. Palestine is devastated not to build a new civilisation, but to maintain a dying one. The same logic operates globally: Iraq reduced to rubble, Libya destroyed, Afghanistan abandoned, sanctions strangling Venezuela and Cuba, and now an open imperial confrontation aimed at containing China — the last great barrier to the universalisation of fictitious capital.

This is why the struggle against Zionism cannot be reduced to a regional or ethnic conflict. It is a world-historical contradiction between monopoly finance capital and humanity itself. The Palestinian question becomes emblematic not because Palestinians are uniquely oppressed, but because their dispossession reveals the naked truth of the system: accumulation without production, sovereignty without legitimacy, violence without future. In this sense, Palestinians stand not only for themselves but for the Global South as a whole — for all societies whose productive forces, cultures, and ecologies are being sacrificed to maintain the abstract supremacy of capital.

To state this clearly and without apology: this analysis is neither racist nor antisemitic. On the contrary, it is the only framework that liberates Jewish workers and intellectuals from the ideological prison of Zionism, which falsely presents imperial violence as collective self-defence and binds Jewish identity to the fate of a collapsing imperial order. Scientific Marxism insists that humanity is one, divided not by race or religion but by class and by its relation to the means of production. Zionism, like all bourgeois ideologies, thrives precisely by obscuring this truth, by converting structural domination into cultural destiny and historical contingency into eternal conflict.

This brings us to the central theoretical inversion that the essay insists upon: Israel is not the real “Zion”; Israel is the superstructural chimera through which the real Zion appears in distorted form. The real Zion is U.S.-led monopoly finance capitalism, the most advanced historical expression of fictitious capital ruling over living labour, productive forces, and nature itself. The United States is the fully realised Zionist empire in material terms: a settler-colonial state founded on genocide, consolidated through slavery, expanded through imperial war, and now sustained through the global dictatorship of the dollar, sanctions regimes, and militarised financial extraction. Israel functions as a concentrated political image of this logic, but the systemic centre lies elsewhere. To fixate on Israel alone is therefore to mistake reflection for source and superstructure for base.

Thus, when we speak of the destruction of productive forces, of civilisations, and ultimately of the planet itself, we are not engaging in apocalyptic rhetoric. We are describing the logical endpoint of monopoly finance capitalism, whose reproduction now requires endless war, ecological devastation, and social regression. Zionism is not the cause of this catastrophe; it is one of its clearest ideological expressions, one of its sharpest political instruments, one of its most revealing symptoms. The real enemy is the system that turns land into real estate, life into debt, knowledge into patents, and the Earth itself into a disposable input.

The struggle against Zionism, therefore, cannot be confined to opposition against its most visible and spectacular manifestation — the chimerical Zionist superstructural entity implanted in West Asia — for such a struggle, if isolated from the totality of capitalist social relations, risks remaining trapped within the very ideological inversion it seeks to overcome. The real battlefield lies elsewhere. It lies in the confrontation with the real Zion concealed behind this political mirage: the global empire of monopoly finance capital, which elevates fictitious accumulation above living labour, speculation above production, militarisation above social reproduction, and permanent war above civilisational continuity. Zionism, in this sense, is not merely a regional colonial project but a condensed ideological expression of a system that has exhausted its historical function and now survives by devouring the material, ecological, and human foundations of life itself.

Only the transcendence of monopoly finance capitalism — through conscious socialist planning, the reassertion of internationalism against imperial fragmentation, and the restoration of production for collective human need rather than private profit — can abolish Zionism in its real, material sense. Without such a rupture, anti-Zionism risks degenerating into moral protest against appearances while leaving untouched the underlying relations that incessantly regenerate those appearances in ever more violent forms. Until the material foundations of fictitious capital are dismantled, the ideological camera obscura will continue to invert reality, projecting distorted images that invite humanity to wage endless battles against shadows, symbols, and symptoms, while the real structure of domination silently consolidates its grip on the world. The task of scientific Marxism, therefore, is not merely to denounce the image (which which also necessary), but to shatter the lens itself, thereby opening the path toward genuine human emancipation.

Monopoly finance capitalism is not merely a “stage” of capitalism; it is capitalism in its terminal phase, capitalism turned against its own historical function, capitalism surviving only by cannibalising the very productive forces that once justified its existence. In classical Marxist terms, capitalism was historically progressive insofar as it unleashed the productive forces shackled by feudal relations, generalised commodity production, socialised labour, and created the material preconditions for socialism. But once capital ceases to expand production and instead expands claims upon production—once money begets money without passing through the furnace of material transformation—it becomes not a mode of development but a mode of obstruction. Monopoly finance capitalism represents precisely this inversion: a system no longer rooted in the expansion of real value but in the hypertrophy of fictitious capital—stocks, derivatives, futures, debts, asset bubbles, and speculative rents—claims on surplus-value that far exceed the capacity of society to actually produce that surplus. What we are witnessing, therefore, is not “late capitalism” in some neutral chronological sense, but decadent capitalism, capitalism as a historically reactionary force, capitalism that must destroy in order to survive.

At the heart of monopoly finance capitalism lies a profound contradiction between the socialisation of production and the private monopolisation of appropriation, now intensified to an unprecedented degree. Production today is global, integrated, technologically sophisticated, and collectively organised across continents; yet the surplus generated by this vast social labour is siphoned upward into a tiny stratum of financial oligarchs whose wealth grows not through productive investment but through speculative manipulation, rent extraction, and debt imperialism. Lenin already grasped this tendency when he identified imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, marked by the fusion of bank capital and industrial capital into finance capital and the dominance of monopolies. But what we confront today goes even further: finance capital has increasingly detached itself from industrial capital, parasitising production rather than organising it. The result is a capitalism that no longer even pretends to expand the productive forces universally, but instead concentrates wealth through asset inflation while entire societies stagnate, deindustrialise, and decay.

This is why monopoly finance capitalism is structurally compelled to destroy productive forces—not accidentally, not through mismanagement, but as a necessity of its logic of destruction. When surplus capital cannot find profitable outlets in productive investment due to overaccumulation, falling rates of profit, and saturated markets, it turns to speculation, militarisation, enclosure, privatisation, and war. Factories are shut down not because society does not need goods, but because goods cannot be produced at a profit acceptable to finance. Labour is rendered “surplus” not because humanity has transcended work, but because capital has no use for human beings except as instruments of valorisation. Entire regions are plunged into poverty, infrastructure collapses, public services are dismantled, and ecological systems are ravaged—all while stock markets soar and billionaire wealth explodes. This grotesque coexistence of abundance and misery is not a paradox; it is the normal functioning of monopoly finance capitalism.

The concept of fictitious capital, developed by Marx in Capital Volume III, is absolutely central here. Fictitious capital does not represent real, newly created value; it represents titles to future surplus-value—claims that may or may not ever be realised. In earlier phases of capitalism, fictitious capital remained tethered, however loosely, to expanding material production. Under monopoly finance capitalism, this tether is snapped. Trillions of dollars circulate daily in financial markets with no relation to the production of use-values; debt expands faster than GDP; asset prices inflate independently of wages or productivity; and entire national economies are subordinated to the imperatives of bond markets, credit ratings, and speculative confidence. Capital becomes increasingly self-referential, feeding on expectations, confidence games, and monetary manipulation rather than on the transformation of nature through labour. This is why crises under finance capitalism are not cyclical corrections but systemic convulsions—moments when the fictitious economy collides violently with material reality.

Yet monopoly finance capitalism cannot simply float forever in the ether of abstraction. Because fictitious capital ultimately represents claims on real surplus-value, the system must continually find ways to force reality to conform to financial expectations. This is where austerity, structural adjustment, privatisation, and imperialist coercion enter the scene. Public wealth is expropriated to service debt; pensions, education, healthcare, and housing are commodified; Global South economies are locked into dependency through dollar hegemony and unequal exchange; and states are transformed from instruments of social organisation into enforcers of financial discipline. The state under monopoly finance capitalism does not “withdraw”; it intervenes massively—but always on behalf of finance, always to socialise losses and privatise gains. Thus, neoliberalism is not a retreat of the state but its reconfiguration as a guarantor of fictitious capital.

The destructive logic of monopoly finance capitalism reaches its most extreme expression in militarism and permanent war. When productive investment stagnates and social contradictions sharpen, war becomes a mechanism for absorbing surplus capital, disciplining labour, destroying excess productive capacity, and reasserting imperial hierarchy. Arms production, reconstruction contracts, and geopolitical destabilisation become profitable outlets for capital that cannot be valorised peacefully. This is why contemporary imperialism is inseparable from endless conflict—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to Ukraine, from Palestine to the encirclement of China and Venezuela. War is no longer an exception; it is a structural necessity of a system that can no longer reproduce itself through development. Monopoly finance capitalism thus carries within it not only economic irrationality but civilisational nihilism.

From a scientific socialist standpoint, the decisive point is this: a system that destroys its own material base forfeits any historical legitimacy. Capitalism once justified itself by expanding productivity, raising social labour power, and revolutionising the forces of production. Monopoly finance capitalism does the opposite: it throttles innovation unless immediately profitable, hoards technological potential behind patents and monopolies, degrades human labour into precarious survival, and accelerates ecological collapse. Climate catastrophe is not an external “environmental problem”; it is the metabolic rift of a system that treats nature as an infinite sink for profit and an expendable input for accumulation. The destruction of ecosystems, species, and climate stability is the ultimate proof that capitalism has become objectively anti-human and anti-planet.

In this context, socialism re-emerges not as a moral ideal or utopian dream, but as a historical necessity. The contradiction between the socialised forces of production and the private appropriation of surplus has reached such intensity that only conscious, planned, and collective control over production can prevent the civilisational collapse. The task of socialism in the twenty-first century—particularly from the perspective of the Global South—is not merely to redistribute wealth, but to re-anchor economic life in material reality, to subordinate finance to production, to reintegrate human labour with social need, and to restore the metabolic relation between humanity and nature. This is why socialist projects that retain strong state control over finance, prioritise real industrial development, and resist imperialist financial integration—most notably China—represent not “deviations” from Marxism but its contemporary vindication.

To conclude, monopoly finance capitalism is capitalism after its progressive mission has expired. It is a system living on borrowed time, borrowed value, borrowed futures, and borrowed lives. Its apparent dynamism is the convulsion of decay; its technological spectacle masks social regression; its financial sophistication conceals material hollowness. By resting increasingly on fictitious capital divorced from production, it undermines the very foundations of social reproduction. History teaches us that no mode of production survives such a contradiction indefinitely. Either humanity consciously transcends monopoly finance capitalism through socialist transformation—or finance capitalism, in its death agony, will drag the productive forces, the planet, and civilisation itself into barbarism.

Western Marxism, in its historical emergence and theoretical trajectory, functions not as a scientific illumination of capitalist reality but as a camera obscura—an inverted apparatus that projects distorted images of the world while concealing the material relations that generate them. Rather than clarifying the structural logic of monopoly finance capitalism, imperialist accumulation, and state power, Western Marxism systematically displaces analysis away from political economy and revolutionary praxis into the safer terrains of culture, discourse, ethics, subjectivity, and textual interpretation. This displacement is not accidental, nor merely an intellectual error; it is a historically conditioned response of Marxism domesticated within the imperial core, severed from revolutionary state power, and reconciled—often unconsciously, sometimes openly—with the permanence of capitalist domination. What presents itself as “critical theory,” “cultural critique,” or “radical philosophy” thus becomes, in effect, a theoretical flight from reality, an escape into idealism precisely at the moment when capital itself has reached its most violent, concentrated, and globalised form.

At the heart of Western Marxism lies a profound abandonment of Marxism as a science of social formation. Marx’s project was never reducible to critique as moral denunciation or cultural commentary; it was a materialist analysis of modes of production, class struggle, and historical development grounded in political economy. Lenin did not “add” politics to Marx; he completed Marxism under imperialism, transforming it into Marxism-Leninism by theorising monopoly capitalism, finance capital, imperialist war, the revolutionary party, and the state as an instrument of class rule. Western Marxism, by contrast, emerges precisely where this Leninist rupture is rejected. Its thinkers—whether Lukács after retreat, the Frankfurt School, post-Althusserian culturalism, or contemporary academic radicals—systematically detach Marxist categories from their material base and reinsert them into a philosophical space where capitalism becomes a background assumption rather than an object of overthrow. The result is a Marxism that endlessly interprets the world while renouncing the conditions of its transformation.

This theoretical inversion mirrors Marx’s own critique of ideology. Like the camera obscura, Western Marxism presents consciousness as autonomous, culture as determinant, discourse as primary, while the real movement of capital—the concentration of ownership, the dominance of finance, the imperial extraction of surplus from the Global South, and the militarised state that secures it—recedes into abstraction or disappears altogether. Monopoly finance capitalism, the defining reality of our epoch, is rarely confronted head-on. Instead, it is refracted through analyses of alienation, reification, biopolitics, identity, desire, language, or “late capitalism/modernity.” These analyses may produce insights at the level of symptoms, but they systematically evade causality. Capital becomes a metaphysical presence rather than a concrete system of exploitation backed by armies, sanctions, debt regimes, and comprador elites. In this sense, Western Marxism does not demystify capitalism; it aestheticises and intellectualises its effects, rendering them safe for consumption within bourgeois academia.

The social function of this theoretical formation cannot be ignored. Western Marxism thrives in universities, publishing houses, NGOs, and cultural institutions of the imperial core precisely because it poses no strategic threat to the existing order. By rejecting the dictatorship of the proletariat, dismissing the revolutionary party as “authoritarian,” caricaturing socialist states as “bureaucratic” or “totalitarian,” and reducing revolution to an ethical stance or cultural resistance, Western Marxism transforms Marxism from a revolutionary and transformative "weapon" into a discourse. Its hostility to Marxism-Leninism is therefore not primarily philosophical but political. Leninism is dangerous because it insists on organisation, state power, revolutionary violence/force as a historical necessity, and the seizure of the means of production. Western Marxism, terrified of these conclusions, retreats into a purified theory where failure becomes virtue and impotence is rebranded as critical sophistication.

This retreat is most evident in Western Marxism’s relationship to actually existing socialism. Rather than analysing socialist states dialectically—as historical attempts to build socialism under conditions of imperial encirclement, backwardness, and class struggle—Western Marxism approaches them morally, idealistically, and abstractly. The Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and others are judged not in relation to the concrete alternatives available to them but against utopian standards detached from material conditions. In this way, Western Marxism reproduces bourgeois ideology at a higher level of abstraction: socialism is condemned not because capitalism is superior, but because socialism fails to conform to an imagined, non-historical purity. The result is paralysis. If every real attempt at socialism is dismissed as betrayal, then socialism itself becomes permanently postponed—always desirable, never achievable.

Marxism-Leninism, by contrast, begins precisely where Western Marxism retreats. It takes monopoly finance capitalism as its starting point, not as an abstract system but as a global structure of domination rooted in imperialism. It understands that capital does not rule through markets alone but through states, militaries, financial institutions, ideological apparatuses, and coercive force. It recognises that the bourgeois state cannot be “democratised” into socialism but must be smashed and replaced by a proletarian state—a transitional dictatorship whose purpose is the suppression of the exploiting classes and the reorganisation of society. This is not a moral preference but a scientific conclusion drawn from history itself. Every ruling class defends its power through force; to deny this is not humanism but illusion.

Moreover, Marxism-Leninism refuses the Western Marxist separation of theory and practice. Theory is not a refuge from struggle; it is a guide to action. Lenin’s insistence on the vanguard party was not elitism but realism: spontaneous consciousness under capitalism reproduces bourgeois ideology, and revolutionary consciousness must be organised, disciplined, and educated. Western Marxism’s fetishisation of spontaneity, horizontalism, and cultural resistance reflects not radicalism but petty-bourgeois fear of authority and commitment. It prefers endless critique to decisive rupture, discussion to organisation, and moral purity to historical responsibility.

In the Global South, the bankruptcy of Western Marxism is even more evident. For societies subjected to colonialism, neo-colonialism, debt imperialism, and underdevelopment, Marxism cannot be a cultural posture; it must be a strategy of survival and liberation. Marxism-Leninism, enriched by Mao, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, and contemporary socialist experiences, understands that national liberation, state sovereignty, and socialist construction are inseparable. Western Marxism, largely blind to imperialism as lived reality, treats nationalism as reactionary, sovereignty as obsolete, and the state as inherently oppressive—luxuries afforded only to those whose imperialist states already dominate the world. In this sense, Western Marxism is not merely unscientific; it is provincial, masquerading as universalism while reflecting the specific conditions of the imperial core.

It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Marxism-Leninism is the only alternative possible. Not in the liberal sense of TINA, which naturalises capitalism as eternal, but in a scientific sense rooted in historical materialism. Either humanity confronts monopoly finance capitalism through organised class power, socialist states, and international anti-imperialist struggle—or it descends further into barbarism, war, ecological collapse, and fascist degeneration. There is no third way, no cultural shortcut, no ethical capitalism, no discursive revolution. Western Marxism’s refusal to accept this reality does not make it less real; it only disarms those who cling to illusion.

Marxism-Leninism is thus the real TINA: not because it forecloses imagination, but because it aligns theory with the actual movement of history. It alone grasps capitalism as a totality, understands the state as a class instrument, recognises violence/force as a historical constant, and affirms revolutionary praxis as the condition of emancipation. Against the camera obscura of Western Marxism, Marxism-Leninism restores vision—not by comforting the intellect, but by arming the masses. And in an age of imperialist decay, that clarity is not optional; it is a matter of survival.