Introduction

The System Cannot Change From Within

Curated By

Unlearning Capitalism

A curated directory of educational resources for radical political education focused on building a better world beyond capitalism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

In the present moment, much is said in leftist movements about the need to define effective strategy. But what does that look like in our current reality?

Many of these movements concern themselves primarily with strategies like electoralism or trying to "move establishment parties to the left". However, these strategies fail to accurately grasp the function of liberal democracy within the overall structure of capitalism. Without genuinely altering the economic base of society - and thus its class relations - movements seeking to be revolutionary will inevitably fail to meaningfully move society in a more just direction.

When the stakes are as high as they are, we cannot afford incremental or superficial change: climate change and imperialist war - both driven by capitalism - are existential threats. These resources provide varied critiques of liberalism - from foundational Marxist texts to the sheepdogging of Zohran Mandani, identity politics, the dead end of electoralism and more.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/the-system-cannot-change-from-within

9 articles · 3 books · 2 podcasts · 2 videos

This ebook is about 132 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. From Liberalism to Fascism: An Analysis of the Social Basis of Fascism

27 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2026/01/14/from-liberalism-to-fascism-an-analysis-of-the-social-basis-of-fascism/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Adam Watson

Publication Date: January 14, 2026

Analyzes fascism as a historically intelligible response of capital in crisis when liberal forms of rule fail to contain class contradictions.

2. The Fission of the Global Ideological Spectrum and 21st-Century Re-Globalisation

33 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-2-global-ideological-spectrum-re-globalisation/

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

By Eric Li

Publication Date: December 12, 2025

The global left-right ideological spectrum has fractured as post-Cold War globalization declined, creating a new ideological landscape with China reshaping the 21st-century world order.

3. Can the United Nations be used as a practical tool to advance the African revolution?

7 pages

https://abasimperialism.substack.com/p/can-the-united-nations-be-used-as

Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

Publication Date: July 28, 2026

The United Nations, historically unable to prevent imperialist destabilization in Africa, can only serve liberation struggles when anti-imperialist forces build independent military, economic, and diplomatic power outside its framework.

4. Challenging Liberalism: Unpacking the Limits of Partyism

14 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2026/05/14/partyism-and-the-limits-of-liberalism/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Haig Kisherian

Publication Date: May 14, 2026

Critiques Partyism as a Marxist repackaging of liberalism that reproduces its limitations and fails to provide an effective alternative for communist organizing.

5. Mending the Antisocial

7 pages

https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/mending-the-antisocial

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

Publication Date: July 12, 2026

The author argues that Western socialists must overcome liberal individualism and nihilism by embracing a materialist, progressive patriotism that unites diverse groups against capitalism.

6. Electoralism Is The New Opportunism

29 pages

https://monotheistmusings.substack.com/p/electoralism-is-the-new-opportunism

Proletarian Polemics

Publication Date: May 22, 2026

The author critiques American Marxist-Leninist parties for participating in bourgeois elections, arguing that such electoralism is a form of revisionist opportunism that betrays revolutionary theory.

7. Identity Politics as Divide and Conquer

6 pages

https://blog.socialrightsireland.com/t/identity-politics-as-divide-and-conquer/198

Social Rights Ireland

Publication Date: July 25, 2026

Argues that identity politics, as practiced by Western progressives, divides the working class and serves bourgeois interests by replacing material class struggle with symbolic recognition and moral posturing.

8. Mamdani and The Liberal Repackaging of Power

5 pages

https://voxummah.com/2025/11/mamdani-and-the-liberal-repackaging-of-power/

Vox Ummah

By Marwa Yousuf K.

Publication Date: November 9, 2025

Zohran Mamdani's mayoral victory exemplifies liberalism's co-optation of resistance, where representation replaces real confrontation with imperial power.

9. On "No Kings" and Liberalism: Analysis

4 pages

https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/no-kings-and-liberalism

Voice of the Proletariat

By Park Jee-hoon

Publication Date: March 29, 2026

Critiques 'No Kings' protests as performative liberalism, arguing that such demonstrations fail to address material issues like imperialist wars and capitalist exploitation, ultimately upholding the status quo.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

Unity and Struggle

Resource Not Added

By Amilcar Cabral

This collection of Amilcar Cabral's speeches and writings details the anti-colonial liberation struggle in Portuguese Africa, emphasizing revolutionary theory, cultural identity, and the strategic practice of the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

The State and Revolution

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

Marxists Internet Archive

By V.I. Lenin

The state, a product of class antagonisms, is an instrument for exploiting the oppressed class, and must be smashed by violent revolution before it can wither away. Drawing on the Paris Commune and revolutions of 1848-51, it outlines replacing bourgeois parliamentarism and criticizes opportunists who vulgarize Marxism, ultimately depicting the transition to communism.

Guerrilla Warfare

https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/09/guerrilla-warfare.htm

Resource Not Added

By Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

Che Guevara's manual theorizes guerrilla warfare as an agrarian revolutionary struggle, outlining strategy, tactics, and organization for armed resistance against established power, emphasizing popular support and the path to social justice.

Podcasts

Building an Internationalist Left in a New Era of Global Politics

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/intlsolidarity/episodes/Building-an-Internationalist-Left-in-a-New-Era-of-Global-Politics-w-Breht-OShea-from-Revolutionary-Left-Radio-e36umm8

Journal of International Solidarity

By Breht O'Shea

Examines the state of the anti-imperialist left in the global north, global political shifts, and the role of spirituality in revolutionary politics during challenging times.

Burn Your Ballots

https://prolespod.libsyn.com/special-release-the-tolerant-left-ep-1-burn-your-ballots

ProlesPod

By Proles of the Round Table

Argues that electoral politics is a distraction from effective resistance and that resources should be directed toward direct action in communities.

Videos

A Socialist Perspective on Liberalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxEQrykB8eo

Red Pen

Analyzes liberalism through historical materialism, tracing its origins from feudalism to capitalism and arguing that liberal rights fundamentally serve private property interests.

Liberalism is a death cult

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjt51bMHnXA

Hakim

Hakim argues that liberalism functions as a tool for imperialism, colonialism, and economic exploitation through mechanisms like structural adjustment programs.

From Liberalism to Fascism: An Analysis of the Social Basis of Fascism

The System Cannot Change From Within — From Liberalism to Fascism: An Analysis of the Social Basis of Fascism

From Liberalism to Fascism: An Analysis of the Social Basis of Fascism

Article 1 of 9

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Adam Watson

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2026/01/14/from-liberalism-to-fascism-an-analysis-of-the-social-basis-of-fascism/

Publication Date: January 14, 2026

If the first part of this essay was destructive—dismantling Eco’s Eternal Fascism and the historiography of “totalitarianism”—the task before us now is constructive. Having cleared away the mystifications, moral abstractions, and ahistorical typologies that obscure the phenomenon, we can now begin to grasp fascism as a determinate historical formation: a product of specific class contradictions, emerging under identifiable conditions, and performing a definite function within the capitalist system.

1. The Central Contradiction that Gives Rise to Fascism

Within the schemata of liberal ideology, fascism usually appears as a sudden eruption of barbarism, a grotesque and inexplicable departure from the norms of parliamentary democracy, as though nations awoke one morning to find themselves in the grip of madness. That perception of spontaneity performs crucial ideological work. It is a triumph of both liberal and fascist propaganda: the latter because it lends credence to fascist mythologies of national rebirth; the former because it conceals the continuity between fascism and liberalism. To demand the precise moment of transition—when a society “becomes” fascist in this or that respect—is to imagine a rupture that never actually occurs. In the annals of capitalist historiography, entire careers have been spent searching for this imaginary moment.

Because it cannot accurately elucidate fascism’s origins without undermining its own narratives, liberalism must dismiss fascism as an accident or moral failure. Consequently, liberal analysis cannot reveal the structural pressures that propel history forward through crisis and transformation; it cannot explain why a crisis in one nation yields fascism while the same crisis in another nation yields reform, or why Germany’s humiliation in the First World War produced Nazism while France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War did not engender its own fascist movement.

What, then, is the central contradiction that gives rise to fascism? It takes shape at the moment when the liberal-democratic machinery of capitalist rule—parliament, legality, constitutionalism—ceases to perform the work for which it exists: the reliable organisation of accumulation, the containment of class struggle, and the reproduction of capital. When the legal and parliamentary framework can no longer reliably secure the conditions necessary for the capitalist class to reproduce itself, the contradiction reaches its breaking point; the capitalists must either cede power to the working class or preserve their domination by violently discarding legality. Fascism emerges, not as an accident or moral collapse, but as the decisive and historically intelligible response of capital in crisis.

Socialist advance within the legal framework does not create this contradiction so much as it reveals it. When working-class organisation, electoral success, and reformist pressure converge with economic stagnation, imperial strain, or mass unemployment, legality begins to obstruct rather than facilitate the reproduction of capitalist power. At that point, the very institutions designed to naturalise and legitimise bourgeois rule become sites of paralysis, concession, and uncertainty. The question confronting the capitalist class is no longer whether legality is just, but whether it still works. Fascism emerges at precisely this juncture, not as an eruption of irrational hatred, but as a response to the exhaustion of liberal forms of rule.

This is the insight offered by Friedrich Engels in his 1895 introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850. Decades before Mussolini’s squadristi marched on Rome or Hitler’s Brownshirts terrorised Munich, Engels grasped with remarkable clarity the conditional nature of bourgeois legality:

If [the Social-Democratic vote] continues in this fashion, by the end of the century we shall have the greater part of the middle strata of society, petty bourgeoisie and small peasants, and we shall grow into the decisive power in the land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like it or not.

[…] We, the “revolutionaries”, the “overthrowers” – we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité nous tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we [socialists], under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal. […] In the end there is nothing left for [the capitalists] to do but themselves break through this dire legality.¹

Engels’ point is not that legality fails because it is too democratic, but that it is tolerated only so long as it functions as an effective instrument of class rule. When it no longer does so, it is abandoned without hesitation. Fascism names this moment of abandonment: the transition from consent to coercion, from parliamentary management to open counter-revolution. This is exactly the resolution which Engels foresaw: “Breach of the constitution, dictatorship, return to absolutism, regis voluntas suprema lex!”² Soviet leader Yuri Andropov once quipped that, “Marx was an even better judge of future events than some present-day ‘critics’ are of events of the past”—an appraisal that may justifiably be extended to Engels as well.³

Neither are communists the only observers to recognise that fascism is an emergency measure to protect capitalist property relations. Ludwig von Mises, a fiery advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and one of the 20th century’s most influential economists, acknowledged the anti-communist function of fascism with remarkable candour:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.⁴

Despite his glowing admiration for fascism, even von Mises understood that it was only a temporary solution—a desperate, last-resort measure deployed to uphold the crumbling social and political order of capitalism. Though he was a leading architect of free market economics and vehemently rejected all socialist analysis, he arrived at the same ‘emergency measure’ insight that Engels had anticipated many decades earlier because von Mises was concerned primarily with fascism’s objective class function—the distinction being that he assessed fascism from the standpoint of a capitalist rather than a socialist. This is why, instead of treating it as a moral aberration or an inexplicable eruption, von Mises could praise fascism as a historically intelligible response of the capitalist class, the violent convulsion through which capitalism preserves itself at the brink of its own dissolution.

Fascism, however, is not capitalism’s preferred mode of rule. It is costly, volatile, and politically dangerous even for the ruling class that deploys it. Liberal-parliamentary forms are far more efficient at securing consent, regulating conflict, and reproducing domination over time. Fascism becomes preferable only when those mechanisms can no longer contain class antagonism, when parliamentary mediation fails to secure capitalist rule and no revolutionary alternative has yet consolidated the power to replace it.

Yet the capitalist class is not a monolith, nor does it act as a unified subject. Different sectors of capital experience crisis differently and therefore favour different political solutions. Its factions all desire a counter-revolution, but they diverge sharply over its method, pace, and scope. Each section of capital manoeuvres to secure its own interests at the expense of all the other sections. One faction pleads for concessions and temporary regulation, another for austerity and moral discipline. But the most powerful and internationally entangled strata—large banks, finance capital, and monopolised industrial interests—face a more immediate danger. Their wealth depends on vast, continuous circuits of value: stable credit systems, predictable legal regimes, disciplined labour, and the unimpeded mobility of capital. Banks cannot absorb prolonged stoppages; investors cannot tolerate immobilised capital; currency speculators panic at instability. Prolonged strikes, expropriations, currency instability, or political paralysis threaten not merely profits but the very mechanisms through which their power is exercised.

For this section of the ruling class, therefore, restoration must be decisive and sustained. Modest reforms cannot adequately restore accumulation or reassure creditors. Their preferred solution is more comprehensive: the crushing of disruptive labour movements, the reconstruction and re-normalisation of property rights, and the establishment of political authority capable of imposing order until accumulation resumes with predictable certainty. In crisis conditions, efficiency of extraction and geopolitical security quickly outweigh attachment to procedural niceties. Fascist forms of rule thus emerge not as ideological aberrations, but as instruments through which capital seeks to re-secure the conditions of its own reproduction when other means have failed.

2. Fascism by another name: the Comintern’s “Social Fascism” thesis

Any materially grounded account of fascism’s origins and class function must engage with the Communist International’s Social Fascism thesis. In the early 1920s, communist movements across Europe set out to analyse the emergent fascist phenomenon not as a moral aberration but as a political response to deepening capitalist crisis, examining its class base, its function, and its relation to the balance of forces between capital and labour. As social-democratic parties entered government and assumed responsibility for managing crisis on behalf of capital, their objective role became unmistakable. Rather than opening a path beyond capitalism, Social Democracy worked to contain, deflect, and ultimately suppress revolutionary possibilities at the very moment they became historically viable.

This containment did not operate solely through parliamentary reform or ideological persuasion. Where mass strikes, workers’ councils, and armed uprisings threatened bourgeois rule, social-democratic governments repeatedly relied upon the coercive apparatus of the capitalist state: police, army, courts, and prisons. The crushing of the German Revolution of 1918–19 under Social Democratic leadership—carried out through emergency decrees, paramilitary repression, and judicial terror—was not an anomaly but a paradigm. In such moments, Social Democracy’s reformism functioned as only one element of a broader strategy whose purpose was to stabilise capitalist domination by breaking the revolutionary movement.

For its unceasing efforts to preserve capitalism and suppress revolution, Stalin concluded in 1924 that Social Democracy was functioning as the “moderate wing of fascism,” the legal form of a broader counter-revolution whose extra-legal, terroristic form was the fascist movement itself. Whether or not one embraces every aspect of the Comintern’s official line, the objective function of Social Democracy within a crisis-ridden capitalist order is extraordinarily difficult to deny. Even Hitler himself, observing from the opposite pole of counter-revolution, recognised this dynamic. Seething with resentment, he recounted how Germany’s ruling class had allied with Social Democracy to suppress the German Revolution, writing in Mein Kampf with bitter sarcasm: “The political German bourgeoisie had received the high honor of being permitted to sit down at the table with the accursed Marxist [Social Democratic] leaders to combat the Bolshevists.”⁵

Yet the Social Fascism thesis has not survived in public memory as the product of concrete analysis. It has instead been reduced to a cartoonish emblem of left-wing sectarianism—a “Stalinist” dogma invoked whenever one wishes to portray communist strategy as irrational, self-destructive, or self-serving. The thesis is seldom read, seldom contextualised, and almost never examined in the unfolding process through which it was formulated. Its historical function has been buried beneath its polemical afterlife, revealing how post-war narratives of fascism came to be organised around a sharp division between “good” anti-fascism (liberal, parliamentary, Western) and “bad” anti-fascism (communist, revolutionary, anti-imperialist). Accordingly, any analysis that rooted fascism in class relations rather than moral psychology had to be discredited. The Social Fascism thesis, because it identified Social Democracy as part of a broader counter-revolutionary process, posed a direct challenge to post-war liberal mythmaking. It was therefore recoded as merely a sectarian artifact of the Stalin era, one that sprang forth from the supposedly paranoid and egotistical mind of Stalin himself.

This retrospective fable, repeated uncritically across many anarchist, liberal, Trotskyist, and left-communist currents, obscures the thesis’s actual origin and function. It emerged not from sectarian impulse but from close observation of how capital adapted to the breakdown of parliamentary governance. It was forged through practical confrontation with a rapidly mutating reactionary landscape and refined through international exchange within the Comintern. Its accuracy was not proclaimed retroactively but confirmed, again and again, by concrete political developments happening on the ground. Conversely, the caricature of Social Fascism that persists in public memory performs an ideological service: it detaches fascism from the class strategies that nourished it and sanitises the role of social-democratic parties whose function, in crisis, was to preserve capitalist order long enough for extra-parliamentary forces to consolidate power through open violence. To retrieve the Social Fascism thesis from beneath its mythologised afterlife is therefore not to litigate old disputes but to restore clarity to the historical process it sought to describe—a process in which legality and illegality, reform and terror, parliament and street violence, formed a single continuum of bourgeois class power under conditions of systemic breakdown.

But there are also those who use the Social Fascism thesis to extrapolate a strategic line opposite to bourgeois dismissal but no less debilitating: the flattening of all capitalist formations, parties, and state forms into an undifferentiated bloc. All the differences in the capitalist camp, we are told, are merely aesthetic, because all capitalist formations serve the same end and therefore merit the same disdain. In its function, this error serves only to convince the oppressed that no struggle within the conjuncture is meaningful because every path forward involves a confrontation with an impossibly vast capitalist totality. Yet the capitalist state is not a puppet with only a single string. It is a complex of class relations moulded by conflicts between different sections of capital, tensions between accumulation and legitimacy, contradictions between coercion and consent, and the inertia of institutions sedimented by earlier struggles. Capitalist parties emerge as organising forms for these contradictions, not as interchangeable shells.

This is why, even within a single capitalist state, the organs of power do not operate in harmony but grind against one another. Finance ministries seek austerity to reassure creditors even as interior ministries warn that such measures inflame unrest and require expanded repression; central banks demand insulation from political turbulence generated by those same policies; and the courts, in turn, are compelled to legitimise and restrain coercion in order to prevent capitalist rule from dissolving into naked force. The capitalist state survives only by forcing antagonistic imperatives into temporary alignment, and it breaks where that alignment fails.

Precisely because bourgeois rule exists only as the unstable unity of antagonisms, any attempt to reduce its political forms to mere theatrics mistakes the movement of contradiction for static identity. This type of vulgar equivalence is usually motivated by desire to inoculate revolutionary politics against liberal co-optation, yet in doing so it sacrifices the very distinctions upon which anti-imperialist strategy depends. Capitalist class rule does not confront the working class with a fixed, unchanging guise. It advances, retreats, and mutates as conditions demand. Capital may discipline the state, but it governs through different political forms, at different moments, for different tasks. An anti-imperialist politics that refuses to track these shifts does not become more uncompromising, it becomes strategically impotent.

From this follows two strategic determinations.

The first is that fascism must be understood as a specific form of bourgeois class rule, not as capitalism’s inevitable endpoint nor as a mere intensification of liberal governance. To collapse fascism into an undifferentiated category of “authoritarianism,” or to treat all bourgeois regimes as functionally identical is to erase the contradictions within capitalism itself. This mistake carries with it the potential for lethal miscalculations because it casts capitalism as a static monolith rather than a vast system containing competing trends, pressures, conflicts, and projects, and instead transforms the historical unfolding of capitalism into an inevitable march towards fascism.

The second is that united fronts against fascism must be evaluated historically, not mechanically. Strategic alliances, whether proposed by communist or capitalist forces, cannot be accepted or rejected on principle alone. As the most reactionary, dangerous, and paranoid form of bourgeois class rule, fascism is a historical possibility (not inevitability) that arises from specific crises and class alignments. Because the triumph of fascism in one nation reverberates internationally—threatening existing socialist projects and intensifying exploitation in the Global South—an anti-imperialist strategy must be adaptable enough to confront fascism without severing it from the global dynamics that produce it. The task is neither moral purity nor mechanical unity, but determining which forces materially weaken fascism and which only suppress it temporarily while preserving the class relations that demand it.

3. The Social Basis of Fascism: The Class Composition of a Fascist Movement

There is a tendency among left-wing formations to imagine fascism as a malignant growth that, once rooted, expands with a kind of dreadful inevitability. This is yet another triumph of fascist propagandists, who desperately want us to believe that they are constantly going from strength to strength, that the trajectory they have followed has been plotted from the very beginning, and that every setback they face is merely another contour in their ascent. Fascism always dresses itself in the garb of flawless unity and unstoppable momentum. Its ideologues proclaim that the fascist ranks are free from contradiction, that they march in perfect step, that history itself bends obediently to their iron will. Fascist propaganda is so consistent and determined in trying to project strength and unity for the simple reason that fascists possess so little of either. They are desperate for people to think that fascism is practically invincible and that combating it is too perilous, too ineffectual. They would much prefer that their propaganda, which fights most of their battles for them, never be put to the test.

Yet the real social basis of fascism is anything but stable (it is certainly not unstoppable). In reality, fascism rests on highly unstable strata—the ruined petty bourgeoisie, the de-classed, the downwardly spiralling layers of society who vacillate between enthusiasm and despair as they are crushed between the big capitalists and the working class. They swing violently between fantasies of restoration and the dread of total collapse. This mass is volatile because its economic position is volatile, and this volatility is what renders it susceptible to fascist mobilisation. But this characteristic also ensures that it can never form a reliable social basis. The most reactionary sections of the capitalist class may succeed in harnessing this mass, drilling it, arming it, and disciplining it, but they can never stabilise it without abolishing the very conditions that produce it.

This contradiction is internal, structural, and unresolvable. It is a major reason why fascist parties and leagues flash so brightly and die so quickly. The fundamental instability of their social base means that fascist organisations are constantly being formed, split, collapsed, re-formed, rendered inactive, and dispersed again, often within the span of mere months. Survivorship bias leads us to recall only the rare formations that clung to life for decades, such as the Italian Social Movement, while the overwhelming majority disappeared almost as soon as they emerged. To even estimate the sheer number of fascist formations that have come and gone like a flash in the pan, it becomes necessary to consult the catalogues of scholars like Roger Griffin, Mattias Gardell, and Robert Soucy, whose works serve partly to document the innumerable fascist attempts that collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions, leaving barely a shadow of a trace.

Seen in the light of the historical record, the myth of fascist unity dissolves rather quickly. Once we shift from fascism’s self-presentation to its actual social anatomy, a different picture emerges, one marked not by cohesion but by perpetual fracture. Far from being uniform and without internal disagreements, there is near-permanent conflict both within and between fascist movements. Personal resentments, ideological antagonisms, scandals, and financial woes occur amongst fascists with equal (if not greater) regularity and intensity as any other movement. Fascists are not immune to the centrifugal forces that tear through petty-bourgeois politics, and they often experience these forces in sharper form. Their defeats tend to be catastrophic precisely because their base is so precarious—economically, psychologically, and morally. This base consists primarily of the resentful discards of capitalism: those social strata whose material decline has shattered their inherited expectations of status and authority, and who subsequently oscillate between compensatory fantasies of domination and the terror of social marginalisation and oblivion. A movement built atop such terrain can burst forth with immense violence, but is incapable of constructing lasting strength.

This is most obvious in those cases where fascists managed to attain state power. When Palmiro Togliatti (1935) surveyed the developmental trajectory of Italian fascism, he witnessed first-hand the constant instability that defined its politics. In practice, fascism reveals itself as a frantic balancing act performed atop a rapidly putrefying class structure. Its social base—anxious petty-bourgeois strata in accelerated decline—is unstable, prone to flight, and incapable of sustained allegiance to any cause. Fascism’s political life therefore becomes a sequence of manoeuvres designed to leave this volatile mass with nowhere else to go, a logic that it later extends across the whole of society, and which liberal commentators refer to as “totalitarianism.” Fascism’s measures at eliminating dissent—the Acerbo Law of 1923, the exceptional laws of 1924 to 1926—were not products of ideological fanaticism but of political necessity. Democratic forms were systematically dismantled not because fascism despised them in principle, but because its adherents vacillate so easily: for fascism to survive, every institution capable of offering its flight-prone mass base an alternative political home had to be methodically neutralised.

4. The Politics of Fascism

Fascism’s allegiance to capitalism is often asserted by Marxist commentators, yet it is rarely explained in a clear, concrete, and accessible manner. Between what is left unsaid and what is presumed to be common knowledge, scepticism and confusion can quickly take root.

In this context, the instability of fascism’s social base should raise a crucial question: if fascist movements are as volatile, fragmented, and internally contradictory as the historical record demonstrates, how can they ever survive long enough to smash labour movements, seize power, or reorganise political life? The answer lies in the material structures outside fascism: not in its ideology or organisation, but in its relationship to the economic and coercive power wielded by the ruling class, which fascism both serves and depends upon. Without this alignment, fascist movements are incapable of sustaining themselves, stabilising their followers, or translating mass energy into political authority.

How and why do fascist movements serve the capitalist class? At the heart of fascism’s mass base lies the precarious petty bourgeoisie: small business owners, mid-level managers, independent professionals, and skilled tradespeople. These are individuals who possess some property, training, or authority, but whose livelihoods and social standing remain highly exposed to the fluctuations of markets and the pressures of both capital and labour. In times of crisis, these strata experience downward mobility, the steady collapse of their livelihoods, and the erosion of expectations of social status, professional respect, and personal security. The dreams they had long cultivated—home ownership, secure employment and pension, a gradual ascent towards “financial freedom”—lay shattered around them. And without an understanding of the structural forces that have produced their immiseration, they channel their resentment towards social actors such as immigrants, women, and minority groups. It is this combination of aspiration, anger, and economic insecurity that makes them particularly receptive to fascist mobilisation, which promises restoration, renewed authority, and national glory.

Yet precisely because their class position is so vulnerable, they cannot constitute a stable foundation for enduring political power. The fascist movement can promise them salvation and national glory, but it cannot pay salaries, extend loans, or service debts—those powers remain monopolised by the capitalist class and the state.

This is not an accidental deficiency, but a structural limitation. Because the survival of its precarious and downwardly mobile mass depends on economic mechanisms that fascism itself does not command, fascist movements are incapable of reproducing themselves independently. They can generate mobilisation, intimidation, and spectacle, but not security, wages, or livelihoods. Left to themselves, fascist movements exhaust their base as quickly as they ignite it. Their only route to durability is therefore to attach themselves to the forces that do control economic life: finance capital, industrial conglomerates, landed property, and the state apparatus that enforces their rule. It is this structural dependence that binds fascist politics to the priorities of the ruling class. Fascism is thus permanently governed by two imperatives: to discipline its volatile mass and keep it from drifting away (or worse still, defecting to revolutionary alternatives), and to do so in a manner that translates the strategic priorities of capital into mass politics.

It is precisely its instability that renders fascism useful to the capitalist class. Fascism does not need to be economically self-sustaining; it needs only to be politically effective. Its function is not to govern accumulation, but to clear the terrain for it: to smash labour organisations, terrorise the left, preserve social hierarchies, and dissolve forms of working-class solidarity when legality and parliamentary management falter. The organisation of accumulation itself remains firmly in capitalist hands. Because fascism draws its energy from a volatile, downwardly mobile mass, it can be activated rapidly and directed violently, then restrained, reshaped, or discarded once its task is complete. Capital does not entrust fascism with economic command; it subsidises, tolerates, and channels it as an auxiliary force, intervening directly whenever fascist mobilisation threatens to escape its intended limits.

Consequently, fascist ideology and practice are never fixed, but continuously recalibrated to reflect the strategic orientation of the ruling class at any given historical moment. This is also why, contrary to liberal mythology, fascism does not possess an abstract hatred of “democracy” or “dissent.” Italian Fascism entered political life proclaiming the very opposite: its 1919 program was openly republican and bourgeois democratic, demanding universal suffrage, proportional representation, and a catalogue of social-democratic reforms. The Nazi Party’s 1920 program likewise echoed an array of similar demands. These postures did not reflect principled commitments to democracy, but the wider political conjuncture itself: in both Italy and Germany, the immediate post-war and post-crisis periods saw the ruling class initially favour reform as a means of stabilising accumulation and suppressing socialist advance.

The question of how fascism could begin as social-democratic only to suddenly lurch towards “extremism” is resolved by tracing the sections of capital that sustain the fascist movement. Seen in light of its function and concrete motion, the historical developments of fascism become instantly more intelligible. Because reformist approaches in Italy failed repeatedly between 1919–22, the leading strata of Italian capital—large banks, northern landowners, and industrialists—began to lose faith in parliamentary forms of domination and instead favoured overt counter-revolution.⁶ And because fascism is structurally beholden to the decisive strata of capital, any shift in the ruling class’s strategy is quickly mirrored in fascist ideology and practice.

This does not mean, however, that every fascist grouping enjoys immediate or continuous backing from the ruling class. Most do not. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of fascist movements remain marginal, fragmented, and frequently repressed by the very states they seek to serve. This is not a contradiction but a confirmation of fascism’s function. So long as parliamentary management, reform, or ordinary repression suffice to stabilise capitalism, fascist movements are disposable—useful as street pressure, intimidation, or ideological noise, but unnecessary and cumbersome as a governing solution. They are tolerated, surveilled, banned, or smashed according to circumstance and the changing needs of the ruling bloc.

The German case illustrates this clearly. The Nazi Party was repeatedly suppressed, its newspapers banned, its organisations outlawed, and its leaders imprisoned during the early 1920s. These measures did not express principled hostility to fascism, but confidence that existing institutions could still contain crisis. Only when mass unemployment, political paralysis, and the exhaustion of parliamentary rule converged did the balance of forces shift. At that point, repression gave way to accommodation and sponsorship. What changed was not the character of fascism, but the needs of capital. When fascism ceased to be a liability and became a solution, it was invited into power.

Fascism’s relationship to the ruling class is therefore not one of permanent patronage but of conditional utility. It is summoned, discarded, or unleashed according to the rhythm of crisis. Its loyalty to the capitalist class is structural: it cannot cross the threshold of power—or stabilise itself once there—without the active consent of those who control the economy, the state, and the instruments of coercion.

5. Four Errors in Responding to Fascism

People typically experience one of two initial reactions to fascism. The first is to plunge immediately into a panic at the emergence of any fascist phenomenon: to treat any fascist stirrings as a civilisational emergency, to sink into prophetic fatalism (“this is the beginning of the end”), to drown in one’s own disbelief and moral outrage, and then either collapsing into despair or charging into anti-fascist activity without preparation, clarity, or discipline—without even an analysis of the forces arrayed before them.

The second is to dismiss the burgeoning fascist phenomenon entirely: to deem it inherently farcical and doomed to failure, to proclaim that it is too ridiculous to ever seize state power, to consider it of no real consequence, beneath the dignity of serious thought, unworthy of analysis, hardly even real.

These attitudes are not actually distinct but mutually reinforcing. The panic of the first type arises from a shallow understanding of imperialism, from an inability to situate the phenomenon within the wider crises of capital; the complacency of the second type is, in turn, a flight from that panic: an attempt to quell anxiety and dread by denying the object that provokes it, to replace material analysis with therapeutic dismissal. One overestimates fascism’s historical inevitability, while the other underestimates its historical possibility. Both reflect an unwillingness to confront the determinate conditions that render fascist mobilisation possible in the first place.

The disciplined anti-imperialist finds herself situated between these two poles. From one direction come breezy assurances that the fascist upsurge is not worth her time; from the other come frantic reprimands that she is insufficiently vigilant against the impending fascist apocalypse. One camp chides her for not trembling, the other for not laughing. Her task, however, is to embody neither serenity nor despair, but to grasp the fascist phenomenon in its concrete motion, to perceive the class logic that animates its ongoing development, and to prepare for the storm as it gathers, not as others fantasise it to be.

A third error is anti-fascism itself. As a strategic orientation and a political paradigm, anti-fascism operates as a self-contained horizon of struggle, channelling energy against a specific configuration of bourgeois class rule rather than against capitalism and imperialism in their totality. It mobilises opposition to the fascist form while leaving the imperialist institutions, hierarchies, and relations that give rise to it unquestioned and virtually untouched. Within this paradigm, fascism is crowned the supreme antagonist, the cardinal and even quasi-ontological evil. Yet the liberal configuration of capitalism and empire—responsible for the ravages of colonialism, the near-extermination of entire continents, the calculated famines and genocidal sanctions that even now continue to murder millions (see Rodriguez et al., 2025), and the enduring global partition of humanity into exploiter and exploited nations—proceeds with its quiet, far-reaching slaughter largely unchallenged. Fascism is presented as the singular menace to humanity, while the massive systemic violence of imperialism recedes into abstraction, continuing unabated in the shadows.

Anti-fascism’s central deficiency is therefore its fetishisation of the fascist form by wrenching it from its material soil. Fascism’s horrors are made so spectacular, so singular, that they come to absorb a wildly disproportionate share of political attention, even though liberal-imperialist practice has committed crimes on a comparable, if not far greater, scale. By severing fascism from its roots in imperialism, anti-fascism converts a structural problem into a moral spectacle. It offers a politics of outrage and symbol rather than strategy, a posture that obscures class relations, narrows analysis, and weakens the very forces that must confront the conditions from which fascism continually regenerates.

A fourth error is to mistake communism for eschatology, indulging in the belief that fascism is somehow desirable because it supposedly hastens capitalism’s demise. This accelerationist reading rests on a vulgarised understanding of Marxism that treats capitalism as a self-destructing machine, inevitably hurtling along a linear path towards collapse. Yet neither Marx, Engels, nor Lenin ever asserted such an inevitability. What they emphasised was that capitalism generates the conditions for its own supersession. It produces crises, contradictions, and antagonisms that make socialist transformation possible, but these conditions do not mechanically guarantee its downfall. They must be recognised, analysed, and exploited by revolutionary forces. The reality which most left commentators avoid saying out loud is that capitalism is an extraordinarily resilient and adaptable system. It absorbs crises, reforms just enough, metabolises its own opposition, and survives by shifting the costs onto the same people every time. Far from acting as a harbinger of collapse, fascism emerges precisely within capitalism’s durable structures, exploiting its crises without threatening its survival.

Accelerationism thus misreads the structural logic of fascism and capitalism alike. It mistakes fascism for a revolutionary catalyst rather than a defensive instrument deployed to preserve capitalist power. Equally erroneous is its conflation of capitalist crisis for revolutionary rupture—crisis alone decides nothing. Capitalism has always generated breakdowns, convulsions, and periods of systemic paralysis; these are not signs of imminent supersession but ordinary expressions of its contradictions. The decisive factor in whether crisis yields revolution or counter-revolution is the presence of a vanguard party capable of organising the working class, taking command of the political and economic instruments of power, and consolidating proletarian state authority. In this way, accelerationism is not merely theoretically flawed: it is politically hazardous because it encourages spectatorship and fatalistic optimism at the very moment when disciplined analysis, organisation, and preparation are most urgently required.

6. The Psychology of Capitalist Crisis

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It is precisely here—at the site of the liberal subject’s deepest illusion—that capitalism’s gravest crises strike him, negating him at the junction of knowledge and imagination where his confidence in the world has ossified. After a lifetime of being taught that the grand storms and upheavals belonged to earlier centuries and that his own era would be managed through expertise, markets, and polite institutions, the liberal subject is suddenly faced with a calamity of historical proportion. He is all at once confronted by forces he was never trained to comprehend, forces that act upon him without even appearing to him as such.

What once appeared as distant turbulence—something occurring in faraway nations, narrated by foreign correspondents through television screens—now bears down upon him directly. His insulation disintegrates as the chaos and noise of the world is no longer mediated by journalists reporting from elsewhere; it intrudes upon the fabric of his daily existence. The everyday movements of the market—prices rising and falling to express scarcity, demand, expectation—no longer make sense to him. They fail not in one direction but in rationality itself. Some prices plunge for lack of buyers; others spike as corporations choke supply or scramble for liquidity. Firms that yesterday stood as pillars of the economy are brought to ruin seemingly overnight, meeting their end with no more ceremony than a collapsed lung. Workers are expelled in widening waves. Entire sectors spasm. The machinery of everyday life grinds against itself, and the market that was once worshipped as a beacon of progress now flickers like a dying lantern. A civilisation convinced of its own perpetual motion finds itself on the brink of paralysis. But what confronts the liberal subject is not an ending; it is a crisis without an exit, a suspended present in which the old order continues to exist but does not continue to work. Having been brought to what he imagined would be the end of the world, he is instead seized by a terror unlike any other: he has been returned to history. The future that he was always taught would be an orderly extension of the present now appears as a landscape torn open by antagonism, a roaring labyrinth of contending forces, each straining to remake the social order he assumed permanent.

But when a crisis of sufficient magnitude emerges, it rarely enters with the drama of a single blow. It germinates beneath the surface like rot beneath a polished floorboard—hidden, patient, and then “suddenly” everywhere only once the decay has hollowed out the structure. The liberal subject feels the weight shifting long before he can name what is moving. Profits shrink, markets drown in surplus, speculation cannibalises the real economy, investment flees from production into ever more feverish financial games. Contradictions compound and feed off each other until the totality begins to collapse under its own weight and the calamity arrives with the cold indifference of a natural disaster.

And when the material falters, so too does the ideological. The ruling illusions begin to unravel. The promise that markets are self-correcting turns to ash as the invisible hand clenches into a fist that strikes indiscriminately. The institutions that once mediated social antagonisms—parliament, regulatory bodies, the professional-managerial layer that staffed the liberal centre—all begin to crack, their authority draining with each hollow reassurance. Parliament attempts to mask panic in procedural ritual. Media magnates scramble to reconstruct consumer confidence. Expert forecasts invert weekly, their certainties evaporating into theatrics. The crisis exposes not simply an economic breakdown but the naked fragility of the ideological architecture that had sustained bourgeois class rule.

From above comes the tremor of a capitalist class suddenly aware that its position is not eternal but must be actively re-secured. From below rises the anxious pulse of millions whose routines, certainties, and futures have all ruptured at once, revealing the contingency of everything that once appeared immutable. Between these two forces history contracts and accelerates, and humanity confronts capitalism as a system rather than endures it as fate. The side that emerges triumphant from this historical moment will determine the form of human life for generations.

7. The Consummation of Capital: From a Liberal to a Fascist

“Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.” So purports a popular socialist saying. But there is, in fact, a genuine moral aversion that liberals feel towards fascism. It is not the feigned indignation of a hypocrite pretending to oppose what he secretly admires, nor the cynical theatre of bourgeois self-preservation. It is a real repulsion. But it is one whose truth lies in its misrecognition. The liberal abhors fascism not because it stands opposed to his values, but because it exposes them. Fascism horrifies precisely by stripping bare the foundations upon which liberal civilisation rests: the world market built upon the destitution and toil of billions, enormous wealth built on relentless plunder and ecological collapse, “freedom” and “security” maintained by endless wars, genocides, and starvations.

Fascism did not invent any of these horrors, but it admits them. Where liberalism cloaks domination in the language of freedom, fascism proclaims it openly. While liberal humanism spiritualises inequality into the abstractions of “merit” or “civilisation,” fascism dispenses with the mask and declares the right of the strong. The liberal thus experiences in fascism a kind of moral embarrassment, a recognition too shameful to be acknowledged. His disgust is not that of the well-meaning humanist confronting inhumanity, but of the indoctrinated ideologue confronted with the truth of his own social order.

Fascism perpetrates coups, starvation blockades, mass incarceration, and imperialist wars with open and intimate brutality. Liberalism commits these only from an adequate psychological distance, sanctified through euphemisms: “sanctions,” “interventions,” “security,” “democracy.” The liberal’s horror, then, is not moral but narcissistic. Fascism abolishes the ideology which reconciles the violence of capitalism with the moral self-concept of the capitalist: the liberal ideology which makes domination appear as freedom, exploitation as exchange, and imperial plunder as civilisation or development. What liberalism sanitises, fascism valorises—and in fascism the liberal world sees itself absent the mediation of its own ideology, without euphemism, without even the veil of legality.

Yet the horror that the liberal feels is genuine. It is the sincerity of an alienated consciousness suddenly made aware of itself; an ideology caught in the act of self-recognition. It is not the case that the liberal suddenly becomes aware of the barbarity of capitalism—rather, he always repressed it, psychically displacing its brutalities onto misguided actors or the unfortunate contingencies of history. But when fascism emerges and obliterates the moral pretences of capital, the displacement becomes impossible and the mechanisms that once allowed him to believe in his own innocence collapse. He can no longer not know what sustains his civilisation.

What is it that allows this psychic displacement to occur, and under what conditions is it negated?

Under capitalism, the work that people do and the things that they produce are typically owned and directed by others: supervisors, bosses, shareholders, corporations, or governments. The liberal inhabits a world in which all the things he depends upon—work, income, infrastructure, institutions, even moral certainties—belong to someone else or derive from somewhere else. As a result, the liberal subject experiences the world as something external to himself, a vast machinery in which he is a small, irrelevant component. His existence under capital leaves him with the distinct sense of simply being an observer of his own life rather than a participant in it. He does not live his life so much as receive it, its circumstances and contingencies having little regard for his input.

As such, he perceives no ownership of, nor responsibility for, the social structures he helps sustain, even though it is his labour that keeps them functioning. Violence, inequality, and exploitation appear as simply unfortunate facts of life, outside of his control, inevitable and morally neutral. He might condemn war, poverty, or destruction, but only as the tragic misfortunes of a world that is virtually impervious to human agency, a world that he assumes is as indifferent to everyone else as it is to him; no one, including himself, can meaningfully change the world. No person or thing is responsible for it. It simply is. This moral and psychosocial detachment from a world that humans themselves create is a social relation produced by capitalism, known as alienation. It is the psychic foundation of liberal civilisation, the mechanism that allows people to inhabit a profoundly anti-human global order as if it were the only rational configuration of life.

Under ordinary conditions, liberal ideology uses alienation to insulate people from the immediacy of capitalism’s violence by translating domination into the language of laws, rights, and philosophical abstractions—human nature, reason, civilisation, and so forth. This allows capitalism to proceed under a veil of consent, and the psychic distance it offers enables the violence of capitalism to appear inevitable and impersonal, a brute fact of life rather than a creation of human hands. The liberal experiences himself as detached and morally blameless, a powerless conscript in the vast capitalist system. Alienation functions here as a buffer, preventing the awareness of complicity from impeding the reproduction of capital. Liberal institutions thus fulfil a mediating role: they legitimise the capitalist order by converting its methods and outcomes into sanitised, moralised, or procedural forms. In doing so, they keep humanity detached and politically passive, allowing capitalist domination to persist without provoking mass revolt or destabilising the liberal subject’s fragile self-conception.

The price of this mediated consent is not peace, however, but a quiet accumulation of psychic debris: unmet expectations, blocked futures, and resentments that lack a social object. What liberal mediation suppresses politically, it reproduces affectively, preparing a subject whose disappointments can be mobilised once crisis strips away procedural restraint. Liberal ideology cultivates this inner life of perpetual disappointment because it trains its subjects to anticipate a life of autonomy and fulfilment, even as capitalist relations render this structurally impossible. The result is an inner world patterned by disenchantment: aspirations always betrayed by circumstances, ambitions deferred indefinitely, resentments without clear objects, a growing awareness that one’s promised trajectory of upward mobility has been stolen. Chronic disillusionment forms the emotional substrate upon which fascism builds its appeal, such that when the most serious crises occur, the liberal subject is already predisposed to seek order, blame, and vengeance.

But because he is conditioned to interpret the world through the actions of individuals rather than systemic forces, the liberal subject searches for culprits amongst social actors—bureaucrats, immigrants, women, radicals, the young, the poor, the “irresponsible.” Prejudices such as racism, sexism, or xenophobia become convenient vectors for this misdirected anger, providing intelligible targets for grievances that are in truth structural. This subterranean moral agitation does not contradict his liberalism but is its affective substrate. As the old liberal abstractions falter, fear becomes his organising principle: fear of collapse, fear of decline, fear of the social “others” who seem to embody the chaos he dreads.

In this moment, the mechanisms that once stabilised alienation begin to reverse. Instead of paralysing, alienation becomes energising, propelling the liberal towards anything that appears to resolve his torment of powerlessness and uncertainty, towards anything that promises mastery over a world that once mastered him.

The ruling class, recognising both the utility and the danger of these predispositions, channels them strategically into political forms that uphold capitalist property relations. Their ideological apparatuses rouse the liberal through fear—of social breakdown, invading enemies, moral decay, and internal saboteurs. The liberal, who once experienced himself as a mere spectator of history, now feels chosen, indispensable, responsible for the survival of civilisation. National emergency becomes the alibi by which the ruling class incites him to abandon the scruples that once defined his moral universe, and the liberal subject is thus mobilised to come to the defence of capitalism. His alienation, which once permitted a morally reconciled detachment, is now brought into full alignment with the raw imperatives of capital: violence and terror applied openly with ever-shallower moral pretence, exploitation intensified and unvarnished, private property defended with unmitigated force. Where previously the liberal subject’s alienation was only partial and mediated, it becomes fully realised when he perceives himself not as reconciled with domination but as a direct agent of it.

Alienation ceases to be a condition experienced passively and becomes a mission undertaken actively. Domination is no longer distanced through law or euphemism but becomes the very content of political identity itself. The fascist is not simply a liberal stripped of illusions, but the liberal subject propelled through the negation of those illusions, animated by resentments that liberal civilisation could generate but could not contain. He is the living resolution of a contradiction: the alienated human who, in losing the mediations that once numbed him to the violence of capital, embraces that violence as his own vocation.

In that dialectical unfolding—when capital negates the liberal form that once mediated its contradictions, when legality and rights become fetters upon accumulation, and when alienation is compelled to turn inward and devour its own moral illusions—the liberal subject becomes fully abstracted from his own humanity. Estranged even from the moral universe that once reconciled him to his estrangement, his very alienation attains self-consciousness, precipitating his metamorphosis into the fascist—into the concrete, living expression of alienated humanity’s self-negation: the alienation of alienation.

The Fission of the Global Ideological Spectrum and 21st-Century Re-Globalisation

The System Cannot Change From Within — The Fission of the Global Ideological Spectrum and 21st-Century Re-Globalisation

The Fission of the Global Ideological Spectrum and 21st-Century Re-Globalisation

Article 2 of 9

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

By Eric Li

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-2-global-ideological-spectrum-re-globalisation/

Publication Date: December 12, 2025

Eric Li (李世默) is a venture capitalist and political scientist based in Shanghai. He is the founder and chairman of Guancha, one of China’s largest media platforms. He is a trustee of Fudan University’s China Institute and chairman of its advisory council, a trustee of Asia Society Hong Kong, and a member of the board of the SciTech Business School at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He is a frequent contributor to international media platforms.

Since the twentieth century, modern political ideologies across the world have been mapped onto a left-right binary spectrum. This is a highly simplified abstraction, but it has effectively encapsulated the structure of political orientations and struggles both within and between almost every country and region for more than a century. An undergraduate in political science could place the political ideologies and values of all parties and regimes on this spectrum, thereby determining identity, establishing political alignments, and devising strategies for struggle. However, over the past two decades, as post–Cold War globalisation has declined from its peak, this ideological spectrum has fractured. The once-clear structure has become blurred, and political forces – both between nations and within them – have detached from the traditional left-right framework.

This article, after briefly outlining the structure of the traditional left-right ideological spectrum, seeks to analyse and interpret the processes and driving forces behind this fragmentation, as well as the emerging post-fission ideological ecology. It aims to observe and explore an emerging new ideological spectrum and propose some ideas regarding the 21st-century world order that China is helping to reshape.

From October Revolution to World Anti-Fascist War: The Grand Narrative of Left and Right

The October Revolution inaugurated the grand narrative of the 20th-century ideological spectrum. The ‘Left’ embodied the communist ideal, socialist institutions, and the internationalist worldview championed by the Soviet Union. Although it had been underpinned by more than half a century of Marxist thought, this ‘Left’ arose abruptly as a political force and product of the great October Revolution. The ‘Right’, as a counterforce, evolved over thirty years, beginning with the confrontation of capitalism and feudalism against the Soviet Union and ultimately culminating in fascism, which, with state capitalism as its economic foundation, came to occupy the far-right end of the spectrum.

Within this global grand narrative, the United States and certain Western European countries occupied an intermediate position: they opposed the communism of the left while also resisting the fascism of the right. Their domestic politics unfolded within a small ‘left-right’ narrative – namely, the struggle between the leftist camp influenced by the Soviet Union and representing labour interests, and the rightist camp upholding capitalism and representing the interests of capital. In this smaller narrative, post-war US politics shifted leftward; domestic policy eventually settled on Roosevelt’s New Deal which protected labour, while the US allied with the Soviet Union to wage a decisive war against fascism.¹

During the same period, China’s politics were positioned in an intermediate zone, but with a right-leaning tendency. Following the failure of Kuomintang-Communist alliance, the Kuomintang emerged as a political force firmly defending the interests of the dominant feudal and capitalist classes. Domestically, the Kuomintang government employed fascist methods to suppress the Communist Party of China (CPC). However, because it had to confront Japanese aggression and rely on US support, it was unable to pursue a fascist path internationally.

At that time, the vast majority of colonised and imperialised nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia generally leaned to the left. Their leftist stance was primarily reflected in their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist positions, as well as in their struggle for national independence, with Marxism-Leninism serving as a critical ideological weapon against colonialism and imperialism.² From that era onwards, the notion of sovereignty transcended the left-right divide. Political forces in anti-colonial countries and regions engaged in left-wing struggles united against imperialism by fighting for sovereignty on a global scale. In the West, in opposition to predominantly leftist internationalism, far-right nationalism (including fascism) and right-wing sovereigntist factions emerged. In the United States, the political forces that opposed participation in the Great War and the World Anti-Fascist War and resisted joining the League of Nations belonged to the latter category.³

Overall, the left-right struggles of this era centred on the social upheavals set in motion by the Industrial Revolution and its disruptive impact across multiple dimensions. Within industrialised countries, the dominance of capital led to severe inequality, leaving large segments of the population without secure livelihoods. Internationally, the early industrialised Western powers engaged in unprecedented global plunder through force. Simply put, the right sought to protect the vested interests of capital and the state, while the left fought for the rights of workers and for the independence and liberation of peoples who had been plundered and colonised.⁴

China’s left-right politics at that time mirrored this global pattern, characterised by the fusion of the communist revolution with the struggle for national independence – a combination that became a foundational element of modern China’s state-building and has profoundly influenced its future trajectory.

The Cold War: Socialism or Capitalism?

After World Anti-Fascist War, the world swiftly entered a Cold War marked by confrontation between the two major camps led by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. The ideological spectrum between left and right became particularly clear in this period. During the half-century-long Cold War, the Warsaw Pact bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the NATO-based Western bloc, led by the United States, shaped a distinct global left-right landscape. Many developing countries in the Third World chose sides, while some remained neutral. For instance, the Philippines and Argentina aligned with the right, whereas most African nations leaned towards the left. In this global landscape, the left was represented by socialism and internationalism led by the Soviet Union, while the right was represented by capitalism and ‘sovereigntism’ led by the United States.⁵

Within these two blocs, political dynamics oscillated along a smaller left-right spectrum. In the West, the ‘left’ encompassed welfare-state politics within a capitalist framework, featuring high taxation, robust welfare systems, and labour protections, while the right represented a politics of protecting capitalist interests through low taxation and limited government. In the Soviet bloc, the left meant strict adherence to socialism and a planned economy, while the right was represented by advocates for introducing elements of a market economy within the socialist framework.

During the Cold War, China’s international stance straddled the ideological spectrum, encompassing both left and right. From the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the Cultural Revolution, China was clearly left-leaning, embracing a planned economy, internationalism, and opposition to revisionism. After the 1970s, however, China grew increasingly estranged from the Soviet Union, established diplomatic relations with the United States, and began to adopt the market economy framework led by the West. This was viewed as a rightward shift in many analytical frameworks. Some scholars have even classified Deng Xiaoping’s economic policies as a form of neoliberalism.⁶

The Post-Cold War Era and Globalisation

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the global left-right landscape underwent profound changes. The grand left-right divide at the international level essentially disappeared, and the Western-dominated right of the Cold War era established an ideological unipolar hegemony on a global scale. The entire ideological framework of liberalism and neoliberalism transcended the traditional left-right divide, evolving into so-called ‘universal values’ and the ‘end of history’ thesis. Many scholars refer to this period as the ‘unipolar moment’.⁷ This ideological framework repackaged the philosophical concepts of Europe’s Enlightenment into a contemporary ideological complex of political, economic, and geopolitical ideologies which were aggressively promoted worldwide. This complex includes several core elements: the individual is the fundamental atomic unit of human society, endowed with inalienable rights; multi-party elections and the separation of powers with checks and balances are the only legitimate political systems; an independent judiciary, detached from politics, is the only legitimate legal framework; and the capitalist market economy is regarded as the sole effective economic system for the world. Within this framework, rights such as freedom of speech and the press, as well as racial, gender, and sexual orientation identities – and even the choice of gender identity – are viewed as tools and expressions of the ongoing expansion of individual sovereignty. The essence of liberal ideology lies in its claim to universality: liberals believe their values transcend all cultures, religions, nations, and even history, and that these values must ultimately be accepted by all of humanity and embedded in every country’s political system, economic structures, and social institutions.

The universalisation of an ideology rooted in fundamentalist liberalism, combined with neoliberal economic policies, became the overarching narrative dominating the world during this unipolar moment. The ideological spectrum effectively detached from the traditional left-right divide and the political orientation of parties and states came to depend on the degree of their alignment with this liberal grand narrative. Internationally, the United States stood at the most extreme end of liberalism, while the opposite extreme consisted of states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran that rejected liberalism entirely. There were also cases like Russia, which swung from a full embrace of liberalism during the Boris Yeltsin era to resistance during the Vladimir Putin era. On the domestic front, political parties across countries selected elements from the ‘menu’ of liberalism and neoliberalism according to their interests and positions. For example, the Democratic Party in the United States leaned culturally towards identity politics and championed the continuous expansion of rights related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, thereby advancing individual rights. For this reason, they were labelled as left-wing liberals; however, this ‘left’ had fundamentally diverged from the definition of ‘left’ in the 20th-century ideological spectrum. Economically, the Democratic Party moved ever closer to the Republican Party’s neoliberal agenda, while both parties increasingly tilted towards the interests of capital. This orientation was termed right-wing conservatism, but it too had departed from the ‘right’ of the 20th-century ideological spectrum. In international politics, both the Democratic Party’s liberal interventionists and the Republican Party’s neoconservatives advocated the use of political, economic, and even military means to universalise liberalism.

In this era, China once again occupied an intermediate position. Economically, it embraced and advanced a market economy; politically, culturally, and geopolitically, it rejected liberalism and resisted neoliberalism in the economic domain. As a result, China’s market economy is defined as a socialist market economy, its political system as a people’s democracy led by the CPC, its rule of law as integrated with politics, and its culture as one that prioritises national sovereignty and collective interests over individualism. In the post-Cold War era, China rejected adherence to liberalism and neoliberalism while absorbing aspects of Western market economics, thereby becoming deeply integrated into globalisation and emerging as one of its most significant driving forces. In international affairs, China upheld the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and firmly resisted the universalisation of Western liberalism.⁸

The Ideological Fission Caused by the Transition to a Multipolar World

From the 2008 financial crisis that erupted in the United States and reverberated worldwide to Donald Trump’s first term as president, globalisation in the West experienced a profound transformation, leading to an ideological fracture on a global scale. The wave of globalisation, which began in the early 1990s after the Cold War, peaked with China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and started to recede with Trump’s election in 2016. While this wave of globalisation was primarily led by the United States, which formulated the rules, it manifested through global trade and financial integration. Globalisation’s underlying driving force carried a distinctly ideological dimension. At its core were the liberal political outlook and its economic offshoot, neoliberalism.⁹ China fundamentally rejected this ideological core; yet, it fully integrated into globalisation at the economic-structural level and, by adhering to the framework of globalisation, became an important participant and leader in the process.

Globalisation generated immense economic value: China vaulted to become the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, while the overall wealth of the United States and the broader West also grew substantially. However, most countries and regions in the developing world saw limited benefits. More critically, the gains from globalisation were distributed in an extremely unequal manner within the US and across the West. Elite interest groups captured the lion’s share of newly created wealth, while the middle and lower classes bore the heavy economic and social costs of deindustrialisation. At the same time, the cultural disruptions stemming from globalisation and liberal ideology inflicted severe damage on the social fabric of Western societies, undermining the political stability and social consensus established in the West after the World Anti-Fascist War.¹⁰

Meanwhile, US and NATO-led military alliances forcefully intervened in the political and economic affairs of numerous countries and regions. These interventions ranged from economic measures via Western-controlled international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund) to orchestrating colour revolutions and even wars. Such large-scale coercive interventions were driven both by strategic interests and ideological imperatives, culminating in what British historian Paul Kennedy has termed ‘imperial overstretch’.¹¹ This overstretch imposed enormous structural costs on the US and the West as a whole, deepening their internal social and political fractures.

Against this backdrop, the relatively stable left-right ideological spectrum of the 20th century underwent significant fission.

United States

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the grand left-right spectrum essentially disappeared within the United States and the broader West. The former right became the entirety of the political spectrum, within which a smaller left-right ideological divide encompassed all political debates. On this narrower spectrum, differences in economic and foreign policy diminished considerably. Economically, the left, represented by the Democratic Party, had, since the era of President Bill Clinton, largely abandoned labour interests and tilted towards neoliberalism – advocating for small government, reduced welfare, protection of capital, and free trade. At the socio-economic level, both parties sided with capitalist interests and promoted the deindustrialisation of the United States. Regarding immigration policy, both parties generally supported immigrant rights and adopted relatively lenient stances on illegal immigration, differing only in degree. In foreign affairs, the Democratic Party largely abandoned the dovish path previously associated with the left by advancing liberal interventionist policies, including the use of military force. Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were representative politicians of this so-called ‘Third Way’ or ‘Middle Way’, with the former launching military interventions in Yugoslavia and the latter strongly supporting the Iraq War.¹²

The right was represented by the Republican Party which originated neoliberal economic policies. They supported small government, low taxes, limited welfare, the protection of capital, and free trade even more strongly than the Democrats. In foreign affairs, their policy orientation is guided by neoconservatism, which is essentially in the same vein as the Democratic Party’s liberal interventionist policies.¹³ Under this shared political direction, during the twenty-four years of the presidencies of Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, colour revolutions and military conflicts persisted without pause, and defence spending rose steadily.

Within this smaller left-right spectrum, the differences between the left-leaning Democrats and the right-leaning Republicans were concentrated more in cultural values, racial politics, and environmental or climate policies. The two sides clashed sharply on values: Democrats insisted on the legalisation of abortion, while Republicans sought to restrict it; Democrats aimed to regulate private gun ownership, while Republicans viewed gun rights as constitutionally guaranteed. Democrats advocated for so-called multiculturalism, advancing identity politics for ethnic and sexual minorities. In policy, they implemented what is known as proactive affirmative action, continually demanding preferential treatment for ethnic minorities and sexual minority groups in school admissions and the job market. Over years of evolution, these political propositions have developed into what is known as ‘wokeism’. Most Republicans oppose these identity-based political agendas and advocate for the preservation of a more classical form of individualism. It is worth noting that the identity politics championed by Democrats is not collectivism but rather a manifestation of amplified individualism – aimed at helping individuals within certain identity groups overcome traditional social values seen as barriers to personal development. The ideological lineage of wokeism stems from an extreme form of modern liberalism.¹⁴ On environmental and climate issues, Democrats typically advocate for stricter regulation of businesses and more stringent environmental laws, while Republicans tend to favour free markets and fewer business restrictions.

This small left-right framework was completely shattered in 2016. At one end of the new spectrum is the entirely new ideology represented by the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement, and at the other is the liberal ideology that spanned the centre-left and centre-right throughout the post-Cold War era. Many media outlets categorise the Trump-led MAGA movement as right-wing or even far-right. Although some of MAGA’s political stances – such as opposing the legalisation of abortion – align with the right in the old small left-right spectrum, this classification is misplaced. Many of MAGA’s core political positions, such as trade protectionism and reindustrialisation, are in fact closer to the left in the Cold War left-right spectrum.

The ideological turbulence caused by MAGA was starkly revealed in the political alignments during the 2024 presidential election. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris received and welcomed the endorsement of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman, actively campaigned for Harris. Cheney has long been a right-wing politician deeply despised by the Democratic Party. Many establishment figures entrenched in the Republican Party, including George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, have strongly opposed Trump and the MAGA movement since 2016. Contemporary Western academia, political elites, and mainstream media often label MAGA and its European counterparts as ‘populism’. However, the definition of populism here remains vague. This is essentially a negative label applied by the Western establishment to brand a movement that is fundamentally challenging the foundations of liberal ideology as mere ignorance and anti-intellectualism.

The true significance of MAGA extends far beyond what is termed populism; it is dismantling the old small left-right framework and may be creating a new grand political spectrum in the US – and potentially across the entire Western world. In political discourse and theoretical terminology, revolutionary forces are often placed on the left, while conservative forces are placed on the right. Since MAGA is clearly an anti-establishment movement, with its opposing force being the relatively conservative establishment that seeks to preserve the liberal order, it could tentatively be positioned on the left of this emerging political spectrum. Meanwhile, the liberal establishment within both the Republican and Democratic parties could be positioned on the right.

The MAGA faction has now entered the White House, gained majorities in both chambers of Congress, and has a majority of Supreme Court justices who lean toward its political stance. Their domestic policy orientation runs counter to the bipartisan consensus that has taken shape over decades across the small left-right spectrum. In terms of cultural values, the MAGA faction has overturned the mainstream politics of recent decades, swiftly and assertively dismantling numerous woke policies across government and society and attempting to culturally reinstate traditional Christian values. It is also enforcing more stringent anti-immigration measures. In social and economic governance, the MAGA faction embraces a pronounced form of libertarianism, with Elon Musk being a representative figure. It is crucial to note that libertarianism and liberalism are fundamentally different – and in many respects even oppositional. Libertarian freedom is a freedom devoid of liberal values; it is amoral.¹⁵ In foreign policy, the MAGA faction has rapidly and comprehensively discarded the liberal establishment’s entire policy framework. Perhaps the most significant short-term shift is the move from staunchly supporting Ukraine against Russia to largely accepting Russia’s narrative of the conflict, bypassing Europe and Ukraine to pursue negotiations for a ceasefire and moving toward rapprochement with Russia. MAGA’s foreign policy vision appears to combine isolationism with expansionism. While this may seem contradictory, it need not be. The MAGA faction’s political trajectory is likely to resemble Theodore Roosevelt-style hardline expansionism, but this time focused on the Western Hemisphere, primarily driven by realist interests with little ideological content. There is a substantial likelihood of reduced US military presence in the Western Pacific and even Europe. Moreover, MAGA’s libertarian tendencies are sharply reducing the ideological component of US foreign policy; interventions in other countries’ internal affairs on the grounds of ‘universal values’ are likely to diminish significantly. Within the first hundred days of his administration, Trump dismantled several major institutions that had driven ideological propaganda for ‘colour revolutions’ abroad for decades.¹⁶

The most significant developments lie in the ideological domain. The formation of the MAGA movement is rooted in deep social, economic, and historical conditions. During the post-Cold War era, liberal political forces gained dominance within both the Republican and Democratic parties, seizing control of the power mechanisms of the US political system and societal discourse. Their promotion of capitalist globalisation, extreme individualist woke politics, and the global propagation of universal values eroded the internal cohesion of US society, resulting in an internal division unprecedented in nearly a century. Looking back over the ideological trends within the US over the past two decades, the real fault line does not lie between traditional Democratic and Republican politics but between the forces defending the post-Cold War liberal order and the collective backlash of groups disadvantaged by that order. The latter now appears to have taken control of the Republican Party, while the Democratic Party remains firmly in the grip of the liberal establishment. Liberals within the Republican Party are now either silent or openly aligning with the Democrats.

The same applies at the international level. Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference¹⁷ and the late-February confrontation between Trump, Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House clarified that the US position on the global ideological spectrum has undergone a qualitative rupture, placing it in direct opposition to forces that support the liberal ideological order. The illiberal political forces that had been marginalised in Europe during the post-Cold War era – such as President Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – have suddenly found a powerful new standard-bearer. The US is now abandoning the bipartisan consensus of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism that defined the post-Cold War small left-right spectrum, repositioning itself as a proponent of illiberal realism. This shift is exemplified by the tariff-based trade wars launched by the Trump administration. In the past, establishment-driven economic offensives against China were ideologically framed. For example, the Biden administration placed great emphasis on uniting liberal countries that share US values to jointly contain China’s economic rise. In contrast, Trump’s tariff wars target all countries, including liberal Western allies, with a pragmatism where interests override ideology. On the ideological spectrum of US foreign policy, the new divide can be described as follows: on the left, the illiberal realist ‘revolutionary’ faction, and on the right, the liberal conservative establishment faction.

The MAGA movement’s impact on China is undoubtedly profound. Given the central role of US-China relations in shaping the 21st-century global order, its implications for the world are enormous. At present, US policy toward China is undergoing a rapid shift – from the Biden administration’s comprehensive strategy of ideological, political, economic, and military alignment aimed at containment to a more unilateral economic confrontation driven by US interests. Whether this shift will persist remains to be seen. China’s current approach appears to be measured counteraction while closely observing the evolving situation.

Europe

A similar ideological fission that occurred in the US is unfolding in Europe, albeit with varying intensity and for both overlapping and distinct reasons. Intellectually, many European nations have been reflecting on liberalism for years. Europe’s welfare state model has served as a partial counterbalance to the inequality and fragmentation caused by US-style capitalism. However, in many social and cultural domains, the EU’s transnational politics and the large influx of immigrants – especially from Muslim-majority countries – are also reshaping the original political fault lines within European nations.¹⁸ Some countries have moved ahead of the US MAGA movement in seizing power and reshaping their socio-ideological structures, with Hungary and Poland being prominent examples and Italy potentially following suit. In major European nations, anti-liberal and illiberal political forces are steadily gaining ground. France’s National Rally, Germany’s AfD, and the political forces that emerged from Brexit in the United Kingdom command significant popular support and have the potential to seize national leadership. Similar trends are visible in several medium-sized states such as the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, Slovakia’s Direction – Social Democracy, Austria’s Freedom Party of Austria, as well as Romania, where Călin Georgescu (who was barred from running for the May 2025 elections) and George Simion (who won the first round of the election) have garnered notable influence. It is worth noting that the path to power for Europe’s anti-liberal and illiberal forces differs from that in the US, where the MAGA movement rose to power by taking over the Republican Party. In contrast, in Europe, these forces are often building new parties from the bottom up – a factor that may result in greater resistance faced by illiberal and anti-liberal forces in Europe.

Due to Europe’s diversity and number of countries, there has not yet emerged a political movement or organisation comparable to MAGA that spans the entire continent. For the time being, we may borrow Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s term ‘illiberalism’ to describe this political force that may be in the process of subverting Europe’s liberal ideology and institutional framework.¹⁹ Despite operating within very different domestic political environments, these parties share highly similar stances on many political and policy issues. They are united in calling for stricter immigration policies; for them, immigration is not merely an economic issue but, more importantly, a matter of culture and identity. The perceived dilution and erosion of European culture and society caused by large-scale Muslim immigration has been a critical source of illiberal thought in Europe for decades. At the same time, these parties reject wokeism, which largely originates in the US, insisting that Europe must uphold its Christian cultural foundations. This sense of crisis stemming from the perceived erosion of Western culture has led to an interesting phenomenon: some liberal political forces in European countries have, at least formally, diverged from the US brand of identity-based liberalism when it comes to so-called multiculturalism. Some even advocate for enforcing societal secularism through legal measures, such as France’s legislation banning Muslim women from wearing face veils in public.

Meanwhile, the determination of European illiberals to preserve cultural authenticity has made most illiberal parties and organisations across various countries oppose the expansion of the EU’s political power and the liberal ideology behind it, advocating instead for the preservation of national sovereignty, cultural integrity, and social structures. In foreign affairs outside the EU, the most significant common ground among Europe’s illiberal forces is their pro-Russian stance. With the exception of Italy and Poland, nearly all illiberal parties advocate rapprochement with Russia and, to varying degrees, oppose continued support for Ukraine.

Trump’s re-election in 2024 has provided a strong boost to illiberal thought and politics in Europe. Whether these forces will be able to capitalise on this momentum to expand their influence and capture more governments in the coming years – or whether they will instead be constrained by the negative impact of the Trump administration’s interest-driven ‘America First’ policies – remains to be seen.

For China, Europe’s illiberal ideology and politics have a longer history than in the US, offering valuable points of reference. A clear pattern is that several major illiberal parties and states are particularly friendly towards China. Hungary stands out as the most pro-China government in Europe, and Serbia shares a similar orientation. Germany’s AfD has also maintained a consistently positive stance toward China over the years. Of course, there are illiberal parties that are more hawkish on China, such as those in Poland and Italy, but even these have not been more hardline than the liberal regimes – including the EU itself – toward China. Likewise, some traditional liberal governments have been relatively moderate, such as Spain, which maintains a strong relationship with China.

Russia and Other Western Illiberal Forces

In the ongoing fission and evolution of the global ideological spectrum, Russia is unquestionably a central player. If we were to place countries on the emerging grand left-right spectrum, Russia would undoubtedly fall on the far-left end among the anti-liberal revolutionary forces. In the global transformation of the ideological spectrum, Russia stands out as the worthiest subject of study and analysis. In the post-Cold War era, Russia has experienced one of the most complete cycles of national transformation. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s ideology tilted wholly toward Western liberalism: its political system, economic structure, and socio-cultural values were comprehensively modelled on those of the West. Economically, Russia’s neoliberalism has gone even further than that of the US. However, during Yeltsin’s decade in power, the Russian state suffered a dramatic decline, slipping from a global superpower to something close to a failed state. Even so, when Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he initially continued along the path of Westernisation, even expressing Russia’s willingness to join NATO.²⁰

Yet, Russia stands in sharp contrast to the other former Soviet states. While some smaller Eastern European countries fully embraced liberalism and were subsequently economically, culturally, and structurally absorbed into the Western order, Russia’s size and historical trajectory made such swift integration unfeasible. What cannot be integrated must be guarded against. In the more than two decades following the Cold War, the West abandoned the posture and promises made to not expand NATO after the end of the Cold War.²¹ Instead, NATO expanded eastward to include most former Warsaw Pact countries and many former Soviet republics, thereby pressing up against Russia’s borders.

At the same time, Russia’s own situation underwent significant changes. Putin led Russia to a broad economic and social recovery through the centralisation of power and by effectively leveraging the rise in energy prices brought about by global economic growth. Russia’s international status correspondingly improved. During this process of collapse and recovery, Russia’s elites and various social strata began to reflect on the comprehensive Westernisation that followed the Cold War.²² Politically, Russia could not immediately break through the liberal constitution established after the end of the Cold War. However, Putin’s administration used various legal mechanisms to bypass the liberal intent of the constitution and achieve the illiberal political outcomes that Russia required. The most striking example is Putin’s continued hold on power through the strategic swapping of presidential and prime ministerial roles with Medvedev. Socially, Putin consolidated the once highly fragmented liberal civil society which had been in opposition to the government and reshaped it into a relatively unified social structure. The media has also gradually shifted from its previous liberal orientation to an ecosystem largely aligned with the state’s overall interests. The economic dimension is relatively complex. In the decade following the Cold War, privatisation led to Russia’s economy becoming controlled by Western capital and oligarchs, effectively transforming it into an extreme neoliberal economy. After coming to power, Putin eliminated oligarchs with political ambitions, consolidated those willing to develop under the authority of the state, and rebuilt several state-owned enterprises, primarily in the energy sector.²³ Russia’s economy recovered relatively rapidly during Putin’s first two terms.

In terms of cultural values, the Putin era witnessed the re-establishment of Russia’s core traditional culture. Russian Orthodox Christianity has come to shape a comprehensive sense of identity across all aspects of the country’s political and social structures. From the collapse of Soviet ideology, through a phase of wholesale liberal transformation, to a return to its thousand-year-old religious and cultural traditions – and building sustainable social cohesion on this foundation – Russia has achieved a remarkable transformation. In terms of cultural values, Russia has become an ideologically emblematic state for non-liberal and anti-liberal forces across the world. Many of Russia’s ‘anti-woke’ policies strongly resonate with non-liberals in the West.²⁴ Non-liberal political movements in various European countries generally regard Russia as an ideological ally, a sentiment shared by numerous anti-liberal institutions and anti-woke figures in the US as well.²⁵

From NATO’s plan for continued eastward expansion in 2008 to the Crimea conflict in 2014, the tensions between Russia and the US-led Western military alliance reached a boiling point during the Ukraine conflict in 2022, culminating in a complete rupture. Building on its political, economic, and cultural foundations, this break with the West has made Russia the world’s foremost non-liberal or anti-liberal power, occupying a distinct and pivotal position on the emerging new grand left-right ideological spectrum and continuing to shape its evolution worldwide.

Ideologically, Hungary is now the country most closely aligned with Russia. Under Viktor Orbán’s leadership, Hungary has undergone a comprehensive political, cultural, and social transformation, laying claim to a model of governance and an ideological identity characterised as illiberal democracy.²⁶ With the continued rise of the MAGA movement, non-liberal forces in Western societies are likely to emerge in greater numbers, and some may gain political power. This will further promote and solidify the formation of the new grand left-right ideological spectrum at a practical level.

The trajectory of Russia’s ideological evolution and development has profound implications for China, and vice versa. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its wholesale liberalisation deeply influenced China’s political and intellectual circles. China’s engagement with globalisation after the 1990s – while maintaining Communist Party leadership and the ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics – was, to a large extent, shaped by lessons drawn from the Soviet and Russian experiences. Over the past decade, China and Russia have stood united in resisting the unipolar dominance of Western liberal ideology despite their own differences in ideology and political systems. The close partnership forged between China and Russia in the post-Cold War era, together with China’s remarkable developmental success, has provided Russia with a powerful example for its own reflection on liberalisation.²⁷

The Global South

The Global South encompasses the vast majority of countries and regions outside the Western nations and Japan. It includes the poorest African states, the wealthiest West Asian oil powers, military powers such as Russia, and, of course, the two major developing countries, China and India. The Global South is highly diverse, with vast differences in culture, religion, history, ethnicity, economic foundations, and social structures. Ideologically, many countries in the Global South were once caught within the 20th-century left-right political spectrum for various reasons. Some were former Western colonies, heavily influenced by Western political systems. Others took sides during the Cold War, adopting either the Soviet Union’s leftist ideology or the capitalist systems and values of the US and the West. Most importantly, after the Cold War, most developing countries embraced the ‘end of history’ thesis, transplanting Western liberal political systems wholesale into their own countries – many even copying constitutions verbatim.²⁸ This led to the artificial replication of the Western ‘small left-right’ spectrum in many Global South nations.

As this post-Cold War ‘small left-right’ spectrum rapidly collapses, the trajectory of the Global South deserves close attention. Most Global South countries will gradually disengage from liberal ideology and shift toward the non-liberal and anti-liberal side of the new grand left-right spectrum. There are two main reasons for this. First, most Global South countries inherently lack the ideological ‘genes’ of liberalism; their liberal values and systems were transplanted rather than homegrown. Many of these countries’ cultures and values are fundamentally anti-liberal. The Islamic world is a striking example: countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite their close economic and security ties with the United States, have successfully resisted liberal politics and values at the ideological level. Most Islamic countries – such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey – are likely moving in a non-liberal or even anti-liberal direction. The second reason is that the post-Cold War embrace of liberal ideology and institutions yielded disappointing results and unsatisfactory economic development. In stark contrast, China, which rejected liberalism, has emerged as the winner of globalisation – a fact whose significance has become increasingly clear.²⁹

The ideological relationship between China and the Global South has evolved through three eras. After the founding of the People’s Republic, China actively participated in and helped lead Third World political thought. Beginning with the Bandung Conference, China was a core member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Although its stance differed from that of the Soviet Union within the Cold War framework, China’s orientation was clearly leftist and socialist. In the post-Cold War era, China became ideologically estranged from the former leftist Third World countries while economically integrating into the Western-led globalised economy. Politically, however, China rejected the liberal ideology that the West sought to universalise, while the vast majority of developing countries adopted liberalism and implemented political systems based on it. Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, China’s relationship with the Global South has entered a third stage. Through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Three Global Initiatives, and the vision of a Community with a Shared Future for Humanity, China and the broader Global South are shaping an entirely new era of political thought – one that will be inherently non-liberal and transcend the 20th-century left-right spectrum.

The New Grand Ideological Spectrum: Liberalism versus Illiberalism

Across global media, academia, political circles, and even corporate and financial sectors, a new grand left-right ideological spectrum appears to be emerging. The right consists of the universalist liberal unipolar camp, while the left is composed of non-liberal and anti-liberal multipolar forces. On the ideological front, right-wing representatives continue to uphold the liberal unipolar structure of the post-Cold War era and persist in promoting the universalisation of liberal ideology and political systems worldwide. The most influential political forces within this camp are the still-powerful US establishment, followed by the other Five Eyes countries, US allies in the Pacific, and mainstream political forces within the European Union. The left, by contrast, consists of a broad camp of diverse illiberal and anti-liberal governments and political forces. While the internal differences within the right lie mainly in degrees, the left exhibits a much greater diversity. What unites the right is a shared interest in maintaining liberalism’s ideological dominance in the world, albeit to varying extents. What unites the left, on the other hand, is a shared interest in rejecting liberal unipolar hegemony – though their visions for the future differ.

The differences within the right can be broadly categorised into two camps: the universalist hardliners and the advocates for multipolar coexistence. The former Biden administration and the EU’s mainstream political forces are aligned with the universalist hardliners, as evidenced by their stance toward China. In recent years, the US, the Five Eyes alliance, NATO, Australia, the EU establishment, and certain EU member states have increasingly positioned China as a strategic competitor or adversary. In their policy documents, beyond highlighting conflicts of interest with China, they consistently cite ideology as one of the primary criteria for designating China as an adversary.³⁰ When calling on allies to unite in containing China – whether for trade-related or military interests – they routinely invoke shared values as a key rallying cry. The multipolar coexistence advocates are the moderates within the right. While they believe in liberal values and support policies and laws based on liberal ideology domestically, they take a more moderate approach toward universalising liberalism. They oppose the aggressive imposition of liberal ideology on other nations through economic or military means and instead favour peaceful coexistence with non-liberal countries and societies. Spain’s Sánchez government, France’s left-wing party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, New Zealand within the Five Eyes group, and US Asia-Pacific allies such as South Korea and Japan can, to varying degrees, be classified as advocates of multipolar coexistence. Argentina’s right-wing Milei administration is ideologically aligned with extreme liberalism – particularly in its embrace of radical neoliberal economic policies. While initially highly antagonistic toward China, it has adopted a relatively more moderate stance after taking office and can likely be classified as part of the multipolar coexistence camp.

The left wing of the new grand left-right spectrum is also fragmented and can tentatively be categorised into three main groups: anti-liberal political forces emerging within the West, major powers that have undergone their own transformations, and explorers seeking new paths of progress. The first group consists of the US MAGA movement and various non-liberal and anti-liberal governments and parties in Europe. The second group comprises China and Russia. The third group includes the majority of developing countries in the Global South. The differences among these three groups lie in the distinct driving forces behind their non-liberal or anti-liberal orientations.

The first group includes the continually emerging anti-liberal political forces within the US and various European countries. Their ideological struggle targets their own liberal establishment elites, and they believe that the liberal global order established by these elites has betrayed the interests of their own people and sold out national sovereignty for the benefit of their own class. Economically, they generally oppose neoliberalism, arguing that extreme market fundamentalism has hollowed out domestic industries, concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, and eroded social structures. At the same time, they feel that the liberal values of the elite have evolved into extreme wokeism and immigration policies that promote openness to foreign cultures, leading to the erosion of traditional national cultures.

In the second group, China and Russia have had fundamentally different experiences under the liberal order. China achieved rapid development within the framework of Western-led globalisation while preserving its political system. Russia, by contrast, adopted Western political systems but suffered severe, near-fatal blows to its economy and security. China is seeking to build on its success and continue developing but it faces dual obstructions from the US and the West. Liberal political forces view China as an ideological and strategic adversary while anti-liberal political forces see China as a rival primarily due to economic interests. Trump’s trade war was primarily driven by the latter. Russia, having learnt from its experience, has ideologically parted ways with liberalism, becoming the epicentre of global anti-liberal ideology and a primary target of the Western establishment. This conflict is irreconcilable and leaves no room for compromise. However, the Western anti-liberal forces in the first group do not have fundamental ideological disputes with Russia; in many areas, they even share commonalities. While their interests are not fully aligned with Russia’s, they are not entirely opposed either. This tacit ideological understanding and the space for compromise on interests are clearly reflected in the current positions of the US and Russia on the conflict in Ukraine. However, whether their relationship will move toward compromise or further conflict remains to be seen.³¹

The third group, composed of developing countries in the Global South, is both large and highly diverse. Most of these countries saw disappointing developmental outcomes following the adoption of liberal political systems after the Cold War. Many nations in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America span the traditional left-right political spectrum, yet their development has been constrained by the liberal political framework. As a result, they are all exploring new ideas and alternative models. Examples include Argentina’s government, which emerged from the traditional right; South Africa’s government, rooted in the traditional left; and Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and India, each with unique cultural and religious traditions. All are experimenting with non-liberal governance approaches within the frameworks of their post-Cold War liberal political systems. Additionally, some countries that have outright rejected liberal ideology and political systems – such as major Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as traditionally leftist countries like Venezuela – are also actively exploring and experimenting with ideologies and institutions suited to their survival and development in the post-grand left-right spectrum era.

Despite their vast internal diversity, the countries within this group share a common feature: a refusal to accept a universal ideology, political system, or unipolar global order imposed upon them or transplanted from outside. This rejection of universality and unipolarity defines a new illiberal bloc within the Global South – one that can be positioned on the left of the new ideological spectrum.

Multipolarism and 21st Century Re-Globalisation

The world is undergoing a profound transformation marked by fragmentation on all fronts. Observing the present and predicting the future is as difficult as viewing the Big Dipper from due south. I propose a hypothesis: the global ideological spectrum is in transition. The left and right wings of the new spectrum are divided by their differing visions for the future of the world order. The left seeks a multipolar world order (multipolarism) while the right aims to preserve a unipolar world order (unipolarism). The ideological core of unipolarism is liberalism, which encompasses the full set of liberal values along with their claims to universality and singularity. The left, by contrast, is extremely diverse, encompassing all ideologies and values beyond liberalism, as well as certain political forces that hold liberal values but reject their universalisation. The left includes both anti-liberal and non-liberal elements; the latter merely oppose the universal and monolithic nature of liberalism. The ideologies of the left are highly varied, rooted in different religious, cultural, and political traditions. Their interests also differ greatly and sometimes even clash. Nevertheless, their greatest common denominator is opposition to liberal unipolarity. We can attempt to locate all nations, political parties, or other forms of political power on this new left-right spectrum.

Within this framework, the tension between multipolarism and unipolarism will constitute the primary contradiction in the first half of the 21st century. Historically and in practice, China is destined to be a major force in favour of multipolarism. At the practical level, the past few decades of globalisation have been built on an ideological foundation of liberalism. However, today’s unipolar model of globalisation has become unsustainable. Interestingly, it is the Trump-led MAGA administration in the United States that is now working hardest to dismantle the unipolar world order, believing that unipolarity does not serve the interests of the populace it represents. While MAGA regards China as a rival, the world it envisions is also multipolar, much like China’s vision. MAGA promotes a multipolar world through de-globalisation, which, however, conflicts with China’s objectives.

China and the overwhelming majority of countries in the Global South must continue to develop, which requires further enhancing connectivity. Meanwhile, humanity faces existential global challenges – including climate change, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence, and others – which require cooperation among nations. Under the current wave of de-globalisation promoted by the US and the West, China and the Global South must champion a re-globalisation grounded in a multipolar ideological narrative, seeking both sustained development and solutions to humanity’s existential crises. Historically, China has been both the originator and advocate of a multipolar world order. In March 1990, Deng Xiaoping became the first political leader in the world to formally introduce the concept of ‘multipolarity’.³² At a time when the global order was transitioning from bipolarity to unipolarity, Deng’s vision of a multipolar world was remarkably farsighted. Since then, the pursuit of multipolarity has become a cornerstone of China’s international political theory and strategy.³³ In 1997, a new global order based on multipolarity was formally introduced to the world stage through a joint Sino-Russian statement.³⁴

Fast forward thirty years and China has proposed major global initiatives that concretise and strategise the vision for a multipolar world across three key dimensions: development, security, and civilisation.³⁵ These initiatives articulate China’s vision of an inclusive and pluralistic multipolarism, which stands in stark contrast and opposition to the liberal unipolar world. They represent the only viable path for humanity to sustain development and overcome existential crises. China is also the most capable nation today of actively leading the construction of a multipolar order. Its experience of successfully engaging in globalisation while maintaining its own political system and path offers valuable lessons for many nations in the Global South. In modern times, China combined communist ideology with the struggle for national liberation to achieve the founding of the modern state. In contemporary times, it has further integrated Marxism and the market economy with traditional Chinese culture.³⁶ This represents a key embodiment and example of the pluralistic foundations needed for re-globalisation. To achieve the vision of a multipolar world order, China’s strategic interest lies in uniting all forces that can be united ideologically. Contradictions are inevitable among multipolar states and political forces, and they will undergo phases of tension, conflict, and compromise. However, the principal contradiction in today’s world is between multipolarism and unipolarism. Only the victory of multipolarism can achieve a 21st-century re-globalisation – aligned with the long-term interests of both China and the world – and pave the way for building a community with a shared future for humanity.

Can the United Nations be used as a practical tool to advance the African revolution?

The System Cannot Change From Within — Can the United Nations be used as a practical tool to advance the African revolution?

Can the United Nations be used as a practical tool to advance the African revolution?

Article 3 of 9

Coalition for the Elimination of Imperialism in Africa

Originally published at https://abasimperialism.substack.com/p/can-the-united-nations-be-used-as

Publication Date: July 28, 2026

“The UN has never been capable of validly settling a single one of the problems raised before the conscience of man by colonialism…”

- Frantz Fanon (Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?)

Reflecting on the fate of the Congo during the early years of independence, the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon insisted it was a grave mistake for African countries to have sent troops under the cover of the United Nations. The events of the Congo crisis, culminating in the overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, clearly demonstrated that rather than serving as a decisive shield against war and intervention, the United Nations would prove utterly incapable of preventing imperialist destabilization in the heart of Africa and beyond. Rather than securing sovereignty, the UN functioned decisively to neutralize it.

More than six decades later, the hard limits of the UN’s ability to enforce its Charter principles or achieve its stated aims remain starkly visible: the daily escalating US blockade on Cuba, the Zionist devastation against Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, the atrocities in the war on Sudan and the failures of so-called “peacekeeping” missions throughout the Global south. As US-led western imperialism runs rampant around the globe, the United Nations functions less as a forum for justice than as an assembly for empire where rhetorical declarations by oppressed nations occur alongside the decisive material power of the imperialist west.

A Pan-Africanist analysis of the United Nations requires that the institution be assessed through a dialectical materialist lens, through the positive and negative aspects of its historical development and current reality. The question is not simply whether the UN is “good” or “bad” in the abstract, but rather: under what conditions has it served as a terrain of struggle for the oppressed and to what extent should African peoples place trust in the United Nations today.

The Suez Crisis: A False Dawn

The UN’s first intervention in Africa occurred in 1956 in Egypt during the Suez Crisis when Britain and France, along with Israel, sought to seize control of the Suez Canal. The United States, now established as the foremost imperial power, opposed their invasion, projecting an anti-colonial rhetoric while acting to limit the old colonial powers only insofar as it advanced US hegemony.

The UN formed the first-ever peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force, to oversee the withdrawal of foreign troops, successfully managing the withdrawal by early 1957. While this seemed like a success for the principles of state sovereignty against unilateral colonial interventions, the United States had used the occasion to diminish the old colonial powers and maintain its own ascendancy — a strategy more geared to the principle of neocolonialism, the continuation of imperialism without the need for a direct colonial presence. The US thereby sought to present itself as a champion of anti-colonialism while protecting its own imperialist interests in the oil-rich Arab region.

The Congo Crisis: The UN’s Original Sin

If the Suez intervention offered a false promise, the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1961 revealed the UN’s true character. The Democratic Republic of Congo, mineral-rich and strategically vital, particularly its uranium deposits (which the United States was keen to control), achieved independence under the Pan-Africanist leadership of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Almost immediately, the country faced a secessionist movement in the mineral-rich Katanga province, backed by its former colonial power Belgium with support from the United States.

Lumumba, believing the UN was a neutral institution and seeking to maintain a non-aligned stance, called for UN assistance in ending the Belgian secessionist movement. However, as stated by Belgian writer Ludo De Witte in his 2001 book The Assassination of Lumumba, these UN forces worked to overthrow Lumumba rather than protect the integrity of the Congo’s first democratically elected government.

The UN did not insist that the Belgians withdraw from the country or take real action against their active presence. Instead, the UN took over the radio station and the airport, stopped Lumumba from calling on friendly African nations for support, and blocked aid from the Soviet Union. Lumumba himself confirmed in a letter to his wife hours before his death that the Belgians were working with high officials at the United Nations to subvert his defense of the country.

Fanon’s lesson was brutal and clear: trusting the UN was a fatal error – not because of bad faith alone, but because the UN’s composition and funding reflected western imperial interests. What was needed was not a UN intervention but a Pan-Africanist military force that could have defended the Congolese revolution. Lumumba made a tragic mistake in relying on the UN’s supposed respect for national sovereignty and peace rather than ensuring the survival of his struggle through alliances with African and other anti-imperialist countries.

The Bandung Era: Glorious but Constrained

Despite this devastating early failure, the period from 1955 to 1975 represented what Samir Amin, the Egyptian Marxist economist, called the UN’s “glorious period.” The Bandung Conference of 1955, bringing together twenty-nine Asian and African nations, marked the Global South’s active participation in international relations. It established ten principles including mutual respect for sovereignty, non-intervention, and equality of races — serving as a blueprint for international relations after the era of direct colonialism.

By 1960, seventeen African countries had become nominally independent, and there was a further push to use the UN to advance decolonization. The Soviet Union presented a draft declaration calling for the final and complete abolition of colonialism. The UN Charter was thereby amended with the adoption of Resolution 1514 on December 14, 1960 — the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It declared that the continuation of colonialism was incompatible with the UN Charter and that all peoples have the right to self-determination and independence.

The Bandung-era UN also produced important legal victories. Resolution 1803 of 1962 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources gave states the legal right to nationalize foreign-owned mines, oil fields, and plantations. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD), was created in 1964 as a forum for Global South demands on trade and development. The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States was adopted in 1974. These were real achievements within the limits of the UN at that time; they provided newly independent states with diplomatic weapons to invoke against former colonizers. However, the Congo crisis had already demonstrated the fundamental limit of these achievements: the UN could pass resolutions, but it could not enforce them. Legal victories without material power — military capacity and financial independence — were vulnerable to imperial destabilization.

The Pattern of Failure

The early failure in the Congo established a pattern of UN interventions that failed to restore order or protect civilians. The UN neither prevented nor stopped the Western orchestrated 1994 Rwandan genocide, withdrawing its peacekeeping force instead of reinforcing it when violence escalated. It has failed to protect civilians in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Somalia, and Sudan resulting in the death of tens of millions of Africans.

The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, has displaced over twelve million people. The UN’s humanitarian appeal for Sudan in 2025 reached only fourteen percent of its funding target. Developmental progress has been minimal, with UN agencies functioning as bandages that obscure rather than heal the wounds of imperial extraction — a far cry from the developmental framework envisioned by Bandung and the G77.

Samir Amin’s analysis is essential for understanding the UN’s current crisis. He argues that the UN did not simply fail or decay. It was murdered — that is, deliberately stripped of its already limited countervailing power by US unipolar action. Following the overthrow of the Soviet Union, the United States, with its European and Japanese allies, decided to implement its project of global dominance and installed NATO military power and the G7 countries as the UN’s authority. What we have now is an “Empire of Chaos”: permanent war, global apartheid, and the systematic negation of sovereignty, all dressed up in the liberal logic of “human rights” and “democracy”.

The Example of the Sahel

In the Sahel, popular uprisings overthrew neo-colonial governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. These new governments — forming the Alliance of Sahel States, or AES — have taken decisive action to assert genuine sovereignty: expelling French troops, taking back control of their natural resources and withdrawing from Western institutions.

Significantly, Mali has joined the Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, a coalition of states that includes China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and others which explicitly rejects the western “rules-based order” and insists on the primacy of the UN Charter’s principles of sovereignty, non-interference, and peaceful settlement of disputes. The AES, learning from the lessons of the tragedy in the Congo demonstrates a path forward for those seeking genuine liberation: do not trust the UN to secure your revolution; build your own capability first, then use the UN as a platform for diplomacy and legitimation.

The Primary Task: Building Material Counter-Power

The decisive lesson of the Congo crisis, affirmed by every subsequent failure, is that the UN cannot be relied upon to defend sovereignty or liberation struggles. Legal victories at the UN are real and valuable — they provide legitimacy, build solidarity, and create norms that can be invoked in struggle — but they are insufficient without material power to enforce them.

The primary task for the global south today is therefore to build cooperative independent military capacities, economic infrastructures and diplomatic institutions. The UN can then be tactically used as a megaphone, a witness, and a site for exposing imperial hypocrisy — but never as a savior.

The Way Forward

The United Nations was created by imperialist nations in order to administer the world. However, colonized people have historically managed to utilize this Western forum as another terrain to advance their struggle for liberation. This was clearly demonstrated in the 1960s when African nations utilized this platform to rally global support for their anti-colonial struggles.

Whether the UN will ever become a body capable of settling “the problems raised before the conscience of man by colonialism” depends on it being delinked from western economic infrastructure and refastened to a new anti-imperialist multipolar infrastructure — a process that will not happen through UN reform debates but through the growth of material counter-power outside the UN. The growing multipolar world order — the rising financial, economic, and political power of the anti-imperialist world — creates the necessary conditions for any international body to function fairly.

Amin is clear that the UN cannot be reformed from within while the global balance of forces remains unchanged. The necessary preconditions for any potential transformation include the removal of US military bases covering the planet, the dismantling of Western financial dominance including dollar hegemony and SWIFT control, the building of regional monetary systems such as an African common currency, the creation of alternative institutions like the New Development Bank and BRICS Pay, and a genuinely multipolar world order where no single power or bloc can dominate.

The history of the UN in Africa and across the Global South demonstrates conclusively that the institution cannot be trusted to defend sovereignty or deliver justice. Therefore, the primary task for anti-imperialist and Pan-Africanist forces today is to build the independent military, economic, and diplomatic power that can, over time, shift the global balance of forces and create the conditions for a genuinely just international order.

Challenging Liberalism: Unpacking the Limits of Partyism

The System Cannot Change From Within — Challenging Liberalism: Unpacking the Limits of Partyism

Challenging Liberalism: Unpacking the Limits of Partyism

Article 4 of 9

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Haig Kisherian

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2026/05/14/partyism-and-the-limits-of-liberalism/

Publication Date: May 14, 2026

 “Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”

 “Democracies need opposition parties to keep the ruling party in check!” 

These are all thought terminating cliches. They form the bedrock of liberalism, a theory of power created by 18th century bourgeois merchants challenging the divine right of kings in European coffee houses. Liberalism had a historical role to play in ending feudalism, but it is now an outdated theory of power.

The experience and practice of Marxism-Leninism in real life revolutionary movements and state building have answers to these cliches: 

“Power Corrupts.” Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals. A person placed in a position of power will act in a way that reflects the class character they have developed over the course of their life. Bourgeoise governments are set up to place people with a bourgeoise character into positions of power. Proletarian governments largely draw their ‘bureaucracy’ from the proletariat. An otherwise kind and just person doesn’t instantly turn into ‘Stalin’ upon reaching a position of power. Zimbardo’s prison experiment was refuted a long time ago. 

“Democracies need opposition parties to keep the ruling party in check!” This has the opposite effect. Multi-party elections act as an illusory pressure valve for revolutionary anger. The ‘opposition power’ once in control simply continues serving the dominant class. All states under our current material conditions are functionally single-party states. To quote Julius Nyerere: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

Why am I talking about Liberalism? I am discussing liberalism because its various assumptions and limits have been accidentally reproduced by the Marxist ideology known as Partyism. Partyism is the dominant ideology of Communist Unity, an Australian ‘Pre-Party’ which has recently undergone a name change. Most comrades reading this will know them as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO). (For any comrades reading this from the United States, the ‘Marxist Unity Group’ within the DSA also share this ideology, as does their associated publication Cosmonaut.)

I have recently defected from Communist Unity because I came to the realisation that Partyism is just a Marxist repackaging of Liberalism. In my time with Communist Unity I’ve come to the conclusion that Partyism misdiagnoses the cause of sectarianism, reproduces liberal assumptions about power, creates a party culture dominated by circular debates, and in turn has produced a dysfunctional Trotskyist sect. For us to organise a proletarian revolution, we need to directly challenge liberalism and its various limits. Partyism instead reproduces liberalism, and cannot mount the challenge to capitalism that we so desperately need. 

Partyism is a framework developed by comrades Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair of the contemporary Communist Party of Great Britain. It argues for an ecumenical communist party, one that allows Trotskyists, Maoists, Hoaxists, Bordigists and everyone else to join under one democratic centralist banner. It calls for giving members the right to continue debate after a decision has been made, to be able to dual card with other groups, and to openly form internal factions with their own publications, while still calling for programmatic unity. 

More importantly, Partyism argues that you cannot go ‘straight to’ the class. You must first unite the sects. The working class is naturally suspicious of division and won’t listen to 57 varieties of Marxist-Leninist organisations all saying largely the same thing. Engaging in class struggle is expensive and – as Partyism argues – we cannot do what we want to do as a series of splintered sects. We must unite, share resources, then act as one after a series of debates. 

If the majority votes to do some sort of weird strategy you don’t like, well too bad! That’s      what the majority voted, so now we go all in. You can disagree, sure, but none of our strategies will work when divided!

This argument worked on me. So I joined and have made a sincere attempt to engage with Communist Unity. I contributed to debates, including being one of a tiny group of Marxist-Leninist voices at the 4th general conference. I served as the chair for the Melbourne education cell, running meetings and writing the agendas. I am an experienced educator, and I really wanted to run the short course. However Communist Unity’s dysfunction meant I did not get to sit in on the short course until relatively recently. I tried to express my disagreements the ‘right way’. Instead of ‘splitting’ I wrote the preliminary manifesto for the ‘Catalyst Tendency’ (A current focused on organisational reform and a mutual aid strategy). One of our big complaints was about the organisational dysfunction within Communist Unity.  

Despite our best efforts, my tendency was not able to engender any organisational reforms. I eventually, very recently, got to sit in on the short course only to see that it is a mess and requires an overhaul. However, I realised that much like my tendency’s criticisms of Communist Unity’s dysfunction, that my attempts at reforming the short course would likely also be ignored. 

All of this led me to realise that the organisation’s dysfunction is not a coincidence, but reflects the various ways that Partyism as a framework reproduces the limits of liberalism as an ideology. Once I understood this I realised that even if Communist Unity was able to succeed at uniting the sects, that such an endeavour would likely be a catastrophic failure in practice. 

There are three main issues with Partyism as a theory. The first is a misdiagnosis of what causes the sect form to emerge in the first place. The second is the false assumption of communist failure and a Trotskyist fixation on ‘bureaucracy’. The third is that within the communist movement there exist irreconcilable differences which in practice generate degenerative debates. I have seen the way that all of these flaws in Partyist ideology have expressed themselves as a form of fundamental dysfunction within Communist Unity, which is why I ultimately decided to leave.

In Defence of the Sect Form

Macnair argues that the sect form’s material cause is a reaction to a particular set of material circumstances. He points to the ‘Iron law of oligarchy’ in his article titled “Bringing about a Marxist Party”, where he argues that capitalism as it currently exists encourages the proliferation of ‘brands’ with an authoritarian leadership that can maintain brand unity. He believes that organising a group in a particular way – allowing for freedom to form factions, for example – can counter-act this trend. 

Having been in Communist Unity, I can confirm that this does not work in practice. But more to the point that’s not why sects emerge.

Sects largely emerge during times of failure. Conversely, sects primarily decline once it becomes clear that one organisation in particular has momentum. It’s serious and organised, it’s making gains, building numbers, making progress. This builds morale and leads to a network effect where more people are motivated to recruit, to join, and existing cadre are motivated to give the organisation their all. The moment a group stalls, stagnates or hits a wall, then people lose morale. They start looking for the exits. When that happens they will come up with a theoretical reason for why they disagreed with the party’s primary direction, before leaving to form a new group. 

Consider the following thought experiment: think of a large Marxist or socialist organisation in your country that you have strong disagreements with. If you are in the imperial core, odds are that they are stagnating. They’ve hit a wall some time ago and have not budged or grown from that point. Whoever they are, I would like to make the argument that if they had not stagnated then you would likely have already joined them by now. If they had made steady, material progress for the time that you have known them then you would likely be a member right now. 

If you still don’t believe me, let me ask you a question: How big would this organisation have to get before you bit the bullet and joined? 2000 people? What about 10,000? Not enough? What about 100,000? A million?

I promise you there’s a number, and at that point you’ll very reluctantly join. Even if you disagree with their specific approach to socialist politics, you will be forced to concede that – in this particular thought experiment – that their message is clearly resonating with a mass of people and that therefore this is where the proletariat are leaning. If that doesn’t move you, then seeing this organisation initiating strikes and actions absolutely will. Hell, you’ll probably talk yourself into adopting their ideology! 

This is what I mean. Sects emerge during times of failure because people can tell that the dominant organisation they are a member of isn’t going anywhere, so they split. This is a rational and sane decision because it’s infinitely easier to try and pursue a novel strategy with a smaller and more dedicated organisation than with a large, decaying organisation that has a majority utterly resistant to change. Eventually when class conditions give rise to social upheaval, one of the many sects in the petri dish of a nation’s Marxist left will emerge to become the new dominant organisation. 

“OK” say my former Communist Unity comrades. “I hear you, but we will prove you wrong. Communist Unity will grow and eat the other sects and you will join us again!”

You’re right, I would join you again! But I don’t think that’s going to happen. This is because Partyism as an ideology is built around a set of assumptions that are fundamentally Trotskyist in nature. This necessarily limits the appeal of an organisation like this to other Trotskyists. To understand this we need to understand Partyism as a response to a particular view of historical communism as a failed 20th century movement brought down by the ever dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. 

How I learned to stop hating and love the Bureaucracy 

A key assumption of Partyism is that Communism is a failed 20th century ideology. That its main issue has been the dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. That this is a ‘big problem’ that requires serious solutions. The right for people to form internal factions is considered one big way this ‘issue’ can be resolved. But is this true? Is communism a failed ideology that ‘grapples’ with bureaucracy? Does the Communist Party just need an internal liberal multi-party democracy?

Communism is a massively successful international movement that has defeated fascism, lifted literal millions out of poverty, destroyed reactionary practices and bigotries, and sent the first woman into space. It still continues to exist as the dominant governing system in China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos. 

So why do the theorists of Partyism speak of Communism like some morose, failed experiment of the early 20th century? The fundamental assumption is that this is a failed movement, that everything that has been tried before has fallen apart, and that fundamentals need to be questioned. 

The obvious answer here is that Macnair and Conrad are Trotskyists. I’ve been told within Communist Unity that this is not the case, that Macnair is highly critical of Trotskyism (particularly the Trotskyist notion of a transitional program). But having read his works I can’t help but see a Trotskyist on paper. 

The works of both these writers are filled with fear and trepidation of the ever dreaded ‘bureaucracy’, lamenting the loss of directly elected and recallable soviets, despair that communist states professionalised their armies rather than keeping worker militias. “Power corrupts, and absolute bureaucracy corrupts absolutely, so only directly recallable delegates can work!” goes the argument. The USSR collapsed due to betrayal from their dreaded bureaucracy, and China will follow soon after! (assuming it hasn’t already fallen due to Dengism)

This is an unfalsifiable claim with alternative explanations. I would argue that the USSR collapsed because it tried to fix its economic issues through political liberalisation when the moment clearly called for a tactical retreat to some new version of the NEP. I and many others would dispute the idea that China is not pursuing socialism. But either way I’m talking to a brick wall here because the ‘traitorous bureaucracy’ is an unfalsifiable claim. Any communist country with a functional government simply hasn’t failed yet, and any that do fail must have failed because of their bureaucracy. There’s no way to ‘disprove’ the theory, and so debating it becomes a waste of time. 

What I’ve found drives a lot of this hand-wringing about the ever-dreaded ‘bureaucracy’ of ‘deformed workers states’ is a thoroughly bourgeoise-liberal understanding of how states work. To these people, it would seem that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Hence the obsession with antiquated calls for a worker’s militia – a tactic that very clearly does not work under our current conditions when put into practice. The United States has very high gun ownership and yet they’re still ruled by zionist pedophiles, so I’m not sure why anyone thinks a worker’s militia would provide anything other than an easy way for far-right elements to get easy access to weapons. Meanwhile ‘authoritarian’ China has universal healthcare, affordable housing, a high speed rail system and high levels of trust in their government. There’s clearly a limit to this democratic-procedural understanding of politics. 

I have a much more Marxist understanding. States are fragile, easily overthrown, and paranoid about their survival. Because of this, they will appease the classes with the power to overthrow them. In post-revolutionary communist states the bourgeoisie have had their wealth expropriated, their lands nationalised, and their control over the media restricted. In the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, it is primarily the proletariat that has the power to overthrow the state. AES states have a very strong incentive to set up democratic structures responsive to the proletariat, and are highly motivated to root out corruption in order to secure state legitimacy. Labour strikes are common in AES countries, they always have been, and in many instances these strikes are met with compromise. 

This is not to say that AES countries are perfect. Internal and external class dynamics mean that pressure from the bourgeoise for a capitalist restoration never fully goes away. This requires international comrades to show critical support, to analyse the situation that these parties are in and to make constructive criticisms where necessary. However by shifting focus to the supposedly ‘deformed’ nature of these worker states you distract from this material class analysis, and instead focus on finding liberal-procedural solutions to the ‘bureaucracy’. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in Macnair’s article ”Control the Bureaucrats”, where he correctly identifies the failure of world revolution and imperialist pressure as the reason why the USSR abandoned its Soviet model of democracy. However, Macnair can’t accept a state that defeated capitalism in one country, and developed material gains for the national proletariat as a ‘success’, so instead he defaults to ultra-liberal calls for ‘election and recallability of officials’ along with ways for proletarians to ‘develop power over its full-timers under conditions of bourgeoise rule’. He can’t accept the USSR as a success, and world revolution had clearly failed in 1917 (a state policy of ‘permanent revolution’ was not going to change that), so all he can do is to call for Communist parties that are paranoid about bureaucracy. 

I have seen with my own two eyes the way this fixation on bureaucracy has rendered Communist Unity internally dysfunctional. I won’t be using this article to repeat the debates about the need for a basic division of labour that I found myself repeatedly having in my time with the organisation. What I will say is that the intransigence of comrades on this point made me realise that some disagreements cannot be resolved through rational debate, as they are driven by irreconcilable values and priorities. In this particular case, Partyism is a liberal ideology whereas I am a Marxist, so the debate could not be resolved. Yet the Marxist movement is riddled with similar disagreements, which will in practice lead any Partyist organisation into an endless spiral of degenerative debates. 

Some Sects Cannot Get Along

One of the things that tore me away from liberalism was the realisation that democratic discourse is only as good as the frame of the debate. 

Here is what I mean by this: if you’re in an election where one party is running on a platform of neoliberal capitalism and the other party is running a climate change denier, who is very clearly a corrupt pedophile – then that’s the debate. The debate isn’t ‘how do we address climate change?’ or ‘how do we ensure that everyone has a roof over their head?’ but instead becomes ‘How many homeless people should we shoot?’ and eventually ‘is this guy a pedophile?’.

Is that ‘more democratic’ than, say, carefully vetting candidates to ensure no insane corrupt pedophiles run? Sure maybe. Is that a more effective form of democracy? Absolutely not. 

Herein lies Communist Unity’s issue. Because Partyism is driven by bourgeoise-liberal concerns about procedural democracy, freedom of speech, and the expansion of democracy, it is doomed to repeat the flaws of liberalism. Liberalism doesn’t have an answer for climate denial, misinformation, or large organised and cashed up minorities that believe something really stupid. Because of this it is doomed to repeat liberalism’s pitfalls. 

The Marxist movement is diverse. There are Marxists who support Zionism, who are TERFs, or who are oddly fixated on defining proletarians as only including factory workers. Not all of these perspectives can be resolved through debate and often the debate itself ends up being an unproductive waste of time. The time spent debating whether or not office workers count as proletarian could have been better spent debating a thousand or so more productive and interesting questions. 

Without getting into details, this was the overwhelming experience I had of ‘debates’ within the organisation. The discussions themselves were not focused on substantive ways we can gain, take and hold power. Instead they were circular discussions around bizarre views held by many of the organisation’s members, who in turn found my own views bizarre. We simply could not find a common ground so our conversations often went in circles before failing to resolve themselves. 

If the much anticipated Red Ant merger ever did happen I suspect the entire organisation would get bogged down in similarly circular debates driven by irreconcilable values and perspectives. Get ready for multiple waves of ‘Is China Communist?’ over and over again with absolutely no resolution. I would rather discuss more interesting questions, like ‘what can we learn from China?’

Why do these circular discussions take place? Marxists tend to be rational, so why is rationality in and of itself insufficient? The reason comes down to conflicting values. Working proletarians typically find themselves enmeshed in daily practices and communities that require them to develop values of solidarity, care and discipline in order to survive and thrive within their current class context. For the bourgeoise and petite-bourgeoise, values of autonomy and individualism take priority. 

Virtue ethics philosopher Alastair Macintyre builds on this Marxist framework in his works After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to argue that the disjointed nature of capitalist society creates subjects that are ‘pulled’ between conflicting values, and generates competing moral frames that are incommensurate with one another. If I care about solidarity and my landlord cares about generating profit, we have no common values-based grounds upon which to reach agreement. We want opposing things. 

While I believed in Macintyre’s argument, I nonetheless had hoped that commensurability was possible within Marxism, which is why I held out hope that a ‘Stalinist’ like myself could work together with Trotskyists. I failed to consider that many are drawn to Marxism for reasons alien to my own. I care deeply about the suffering of others; I desperately want to win and build a more caring world. I understand that this requires a revolution that – as Engels argues in “On Authority” – is necessarily ‘authoritarian’, especially in the imperial core. 

Yet I found that many of the comrades I found myself working alongside in Communist Unity were drawn to Marxism for different reasons. For them, capitalism is insufficiently liberal, and they have pinned their hopes for a more ‘liberal democracy’ on an idealised ‘Workers Republic’. For these Partyists what matters isn’t ensuring people are cared for and protected from fascism and imperialism. Instead what matters is that the workers republic has ‘elected judges’ or whatever other ultra-liberal fantasy they choose to entertain. We care about different things, and that makes it difficult to find common ground through reason. It is the reason I look at China and see success, where they see failure. Throw in Marxist ‘TERFS’, ‘Zionists’ and ‘Nazbols’ and suddenly the problem grows tenfold. 

This issue of commensurability produces a very specific contradiction within Communist Unity, one which has led to a major issue within their culture, namely the clash between maintaining ideological cohesion while trying to build a mass party. It is simply not possible to unite the entire radical left, Cliffites will never make bedfellows with Hoaxists and Dengists. A decision needs to be made. When pushed to make a decision, Communist Unity opts for Orthodox Trotskyism.

A Disorganised Trotskyist Sect

To summarise, Partyism misdiagnoses the cause of sectarianism, merges irreconcilable views, and is driven by a paranoid fear of bureaucracy. In practice this has produced a relatively small Orthodox Trotskyist organisation in Australia that is utterly dysfunctional. Any proposal that meetings be cut down and important work be delegated to an elected officer is simply shut down for fear of being ‘bureaucratic’. The ‘pre-party’ is gripped by circular debates. The party majority understands (consciously or otherwise) that adding Marxist-Leninists would likely add only more circular debates, and are effectively chasing comrades with those views away through their behaviour. 

Through denunciations of ‘Stalinists’ at their fourth conference through to me being mandated to explain why ‘Socialism in One Country is reactionary at best’ as part of my short course, it is clear that in practice Communist Unity want ‘Stalinists’ to be a tamed minority at the most. According to their theory, Partyism ‘smashes the sect form’ and creates a reformed communist left. In practice, Partyism reproduces liberalism with all of its flaws and limitations. 

Just to be clear, my problems with Communist Unity are numerous. This article is but the tip of the iceberg for the overwhelming issues that I had in my time with the organisation. However if Partyism held true then the correct line would have been to stay with the organisation, and to use reason to sway my other fellow rational humans to my position through logical argumentation. Failing that, I ought to have persuaded other rational Marxists to join Communist Unity so that I may gain a majority. 

But that’s not how humans operate. Humans are driven by the values and interests that emerge from the material class position they occupy within society. Many Marxist sects reflect irreconcilable views which would only lead to degenerative debate once they co-exist within the same shared space. This is exactly what I saw happen in my time with Communist Unity. This has persuaded me that clear lines are important both in a Communist Party, and in a post-revolutionary Communist State.  

There is no inherent reason why a worker’s democracy has to look exactly like a federation of worker councils, or a Partyist ‘Workers Republic’. Building workers’ power will necessarily involve directly challenging liberal illusions of freedom through ‘multi-party elections’, and will require a class independence that allows the advanced sections of the proletariat to fight oppression without asking for permission. 

Many workers are sick of capitalism, and they can tell that liberal democracy is merely a cover for bourgeois rule. However, decades of propaganda have convinced them that China, North Korea and Cuba are ‘authoritarian regimes’, and they are fearful that a proletarian revolution will lead to a more oppressive world. By calling AES states ‘deformed’ or ‘state capitalist’ we merely reinforce this imperialist propaganda.

The sect that emerges to win power in Australia will be the one that directly challenges liberalism and counters it with a Marxist vision of proletarian democracy. Partyism merely counters liberalism with more liberalism, and as such cannot provide that alternative vision. 

Mending the Antisocial

The System Cannot Change From Within — Mending the Antisocial

Mending the Antisocial

Article 5 of 9

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

Originally published at https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/mending-the-antisocial

Publication Date: July 12, 2026

Socialism as a Culture

Material conditions drive the forces of change. Education guides the intellectual work. But there is also psychosocial work to be done to evolve our cultures.

What use is being the most well-read Marxist, if culturally we are still navel-gazing liberals and conservatives, unable to connect the masses? Similarly, how do socialists expect to unify the masses under a new vision of community and land stewardship, without creating a new patriotism to support this?

If you find yourself agreeing with messages from the official White House social media account, that is not a green flag. It means their propaganda has worked. “You can either be a Communist, or you can be a Patriot” is not only historically inaccurate, but a false dichotomy meant to preserve supremacist patriotism centered around capital. The White House doesn’t want citizens to realize there is nothing patriotic about capitalism. Patriotism, the love of country, has always truly belonged to the communists. Stuffing Elon Musk’s pockets, or that of any other billionaire more concerned about mitigating human water consumption than data centers, is the most anti-social, anti-patriotic thing one can do. It doesn’t serve the land, or its people. It’s a distortion. What weight would the current distortion of patriotism hold, if citizens began to question what is truly patriotic about people facing rising insecurity and new homeless encampments sprouting.

Let’s be clear that patriotism is not the same as nationalism. Patriotism is the love of country and its shared values, while seeing it as a flawed place that needs commitment to fix. Nationalism is a culture of ethnosupremacy and superiority, and often demands blind loyalty to the state.

In Brazil, the left is taking patriotism back from the right under slogans of sovereignty. “Brasil com S”, or “Brazil with an S”, and the reclamation of the Brazilian flag from the Bolsonaristas is a way to convey a Brazil free from US imperialism. This strategy is effective because it vividly exposes the contradictions of the inverted false patriotism of the right who serve foreign private interests over public national ones.

Marxist political analyst and prominent dialectical materialist, Michael Parenti, argued in

Super Patriotism that there is nationalist supremacist patriotism, and a progressive patriotism. Mao said similarly. He also argued that patriotism doesn’t ever go away, therefore it can be fanned and co-opted by the wrong people at any time. History validates them. We’ve seen the manifestation of the nationalist patriotism in the West many times, the MAGA movement being the latest. What will Americans finally do about this patriotism that won’t go away?

Redefining patriotism is not as shallow as changing flags, symbols, or the names of things. A nation can do all that, and still be the same. Many former colonies, which became neo-colonies in Africa, describe the deception in the day they got their own flag, but were still colonized. Analyzing nationalism or decolonization on the basis of optics alone doesn’t paint a full picture. There are parties in the US that wave the American flag, then go on to lead ‘Death to America’ chants in Iran at Khamanei’s funeral, and then there are parties who avoid using it, but cower at supporting real resistance to US imperialism. Who are the American nationalists here, protecting US interests more? There are politicians all over the West that sew disunity, funnel people back into two-party politics, and then others firmly against this. Again who are the real nationalists here protecting status quo interest?

En masse, settlers don’t decolonize themselves. Colonized people decolonize themselves. Native Americans are devastatingly only 2% of the American population in the US now after a legacy of genocide and ethnic cleansing by the Europeans who settled there. Today, Native Americans should self-determine and hold meaningful leadership. Their reality doesn’t end there, as they exist in relation to everything else around them. Whatever else is done on that land; whatever pollution enters their rivers, impacts them too. The US is also a nation of migrants now, from all over the world. The melting pot identity of the US could benefit from a cohesive equalization of ethnicity materially matched by equal opportunity and development that benefits all citizens: no supremacy. Which would also mean prioritized resources to uplift impoverished native reserves and other poor neighbourhoods. This is a deeper form of reparation than any immaterial symbolic gesture, or abandonment.

The current system prioritizes class and racial supremacy. There is a way to do that, for real: communism. Patriotism can become a tool for uniting people under this new vision, for real.

Marxist-Leninists understand that factionalism and balkanization is

anti-proletarian internationalism. It is a bourgeois nationalist tactic that divides the working class, squanders revolutionary potential, and makes socialist economies inefficient. It is a historically hostile process that fuels ethnic wars, poverty, and destabilization. Balkanization would not bring clean drinking water to reserves, nor would it protect natives from nationalists. It would be to no ones benefit but the US ruling class to weaponize balkanization and ethnic tension to prevent the masses from unifying against their removal from power. Sadly in this day, because of how divided and antisocial Americans have become, both the left and right would blindly and foolishly eat this up.

On the topic of patriotism, the Western Left still devolves into idealist moralizing and empty virtue signaling because they are forgetting to center

people at the root of their performance. What is the point of being a socialist if it’s not improving the material conditions for people? This is similiar to how there is no urgency felt in mobilizing to stop a war and genocide based economy, compared to faraway purist ideals.

This distorted virtue signalling did not fall from the sky, it is a byproduct of liberalism. Western Leftists still concern themselves with how morally pure and correct they

appear, not how effective or even actually correct they are. This is antisocial to its core, centering the self and not collective impact or urgency. Culturally, liberalism is a self-centered worldview that placates personal liberties and the self as a driving political force above a collective. Most liberals and conservatives in the West are highly enmeshed in this. Nearly anyone can craft a perfectly moral and idealist speech; that does not warrant us clapping like seals for. We should be having sober and materialist conversations about how to resolve tangible issues within our reach like poverty and lack of clean water on reserves, or the disregard for indigenous autonomy when they reject pipelines on their soil.

Our antisocial tendencies are also fueled by the weaponized distortion of identity politics, propagated by both liberal and conservative culture wars. “Woke” and “Anti-woke” are mirrors to eachother. Both are willing to derail social movements by centering themselves over locking in on greater objectives. Both overfixate on identity and language. Both lack the greater social awareness and embodiment needed to prioritize fighting imperialism and capitalism. Both also tend to exist in an illusive world that is mostly young and online. The movements we are trying to build are meant to exist in real life, helping workers and families. Our culture must not tail either of these chronically online groups and their antisocial, narcissistic tendencies.

Western Marxists would do well to seek supplementary sociocultural knowledge outside of European Marxism. Trump fears communism and Islam for very similar reasons, valuing a life beyond our own navel-gazing and beyond death being some of them. There are lessons from the Islamic Resistance on mending our individualist, antisocial culture, and even many anti-capitalist principles baked into Islamic finance itself. The US tried to break the Islamic Republic of Iran, and undoubtedly made its population stronger and more unified. Iran now also controls the Strait of Hormuz and will be collecting fees indefinitely. The pro-resistance, communal and cultural influence of Shia Islam for generations has helped support Iran’s steadfastness, foresight, and mobilization. We should be note-taking, because our movements are lacking the critical collective embodiment still needed in our hangover of liberalism.

The most-well read Marxist in the West, still doesn’t have that dog in them. Liberal societies placation of the individual as the central driving political force has reached such extremes it has become antisocial and detrimental to not only ourselves, but the world around us. There seems to be no limit to how much we will tolerate while being able to compartmentalize, and lacking an undeniable collective duty beyond ourselves to mobilize. Nihilism is a byproduct of this that must also be rejected wherever it comes up. If only the Self is centered, it can be rationalized that nothing really matters beyond it, both when it comes, and when it goes.

Where we’re at culturally right now, people talk a big game for folks who wouldn’t be able to handle living in a more planned economy due to an inability and willingness to move more like a school of fish. A planned economy means restructuring for long term goals, which is what we would need to do for effectively tackling climate change for example, not just follow the whim of a market or reacting to selfish private pocket interests.

China just removed some, not all, but some arts and humanities degrees that weren’t leading to jobs and contributing to unemployment rates. Many liberals in the West gasped in horror and immediately saw this as terrible, when it is actually is a state’s job to resolve unemployment, not fuel it, nor selfishly allow universities to take people’s tuition money knowing damn well they’re gunna be screwed after. Degrees should match with jobs. It’s dysfunctional when it doesn’t. People go into lifelong debt for their studies, then don’t even wind up getting to live their art anyway. Those who are lucky can pursue another study and career.

”We just need to fund the arts more.” This has become an empty slogan that sounds sensible in theory. Butfunding the arts doesn’t solve the issue that someone also needs to want to receive the art for that to also be a functional societal arrangement. Not everyone is a good artist. We live in societies, not just a world of individuals. In the US there’s an epidemic of unemployed artists who don’t feel driven to pursue anything else, then lean onGoFundMe links. This is dysfunctional.

In a more planned economy, industries that serve luxury capitalism, rich-people playground-stuff, would also have to be reexamined. I was a stripper for 5 years in my 20’s, and almost every woman around me and their dog were also sex workers to afford life. I have no shade for these industries from a moral POV, and people in them deserve utmost safety. But I’ve also soberly reflected that a more planned economy would not lean on Israeli-owned OnlyFans and strip clubs for bored rich men who don’t know what to do with all their heaping cash.

So, for everyone that talks a big game about planned economies, some who even say zero tolerance for any markets (in my view China has proven markets can be socialized too, in this stage of transition) start having real, material conversations about what that really means and if you are actually ready.

Are we culturally socialists yet?

Buy me a coffee instead.

Electoralism Is The New Opportunism

The System Cannot Change From Within — Electoralism Is The New Opportunism

Electoralism Is The New Opportunism

Article 6 of 9

Proletarian Polemics

Originally published at https://monotheistmusings.substack.com/p/electoralism-is-the-new-opportunism

Publication Date: May 22, 2026

“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers, and not “millions” and “legions”, follow the lead of the Catholic clergy—and a similar minority of rural workers follow the landowners and kulaks (Grossbauern)—it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.” (V.I. Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, emphasis added)

The question of whether Marxists should participate in bourgeois elections has been a topic of significant debate, particularly in the last ten or so years. There has been a surprisingly wide spectrum of ideas presented within this debate, such as advocacy for voting for a Democrat, abstaining from electoral participation entirely, or running third-party candidates through an independent workers’ party.

This piece will use another essay as a reference, expanding upon its arguments and offering additional insight. As that essay has already put in the theoretical work for why the first strategy should be discarded outright, we will not revisit that position here. We will, instead, approach this discussion from an adjacent angle, and it is recommended to read through that essay before engaging with this one.

In the United States, there are quite a few Marxist-Leninist parties, and throughout the years, these parties have used participation in bourgeois elections as one of several strategies to advance their party’s program, ideally toward revolution. They base this participation in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Lenin’s most unambiguous advocacy is laid out in the opening quote of this essay, but it is worthwhile to share aspects of Marx’s view as well, which is that, even when there is “no prospect of achieving their election,” the working class must put forward candidates in bourgeois elections “to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention.” Workers, further, must not “be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory” (Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League).

As such, these parties justify their participation on a few additional grounds. First, that elections draw out a significant number of working-class people, and our participation is theoretically justified in Lenin’s own words as a means of meeting the masses where they are. Second, that these elections present us with an opportunity to agitate and propagandize the masses around the limits of reform and to expose the bourgeois character of the two-party system.

Third, ballot lines build name recognition and recruitment infrastructure for the party itself. Fourth, running candidates is necessary to maintain political independence from the Democratic Party. Fifth, electoral cycles concentrate mass political attention in ways that other arenas do not, rendering them strategic moments for us to intervene, regardless of vote totals.

Lenin himself was one of the strongest advocates for participation in bourgeois elections, as the Bolsheviks themselves participated in them, and he also criticized parties on the European left for their conclusion that bourgeois elections were “obsolete,” arguing that if there were masses of workers still engaged in these elections, then it became obligatory upon communist parties to use them as a means for agitation. Simply because these arenas are reactionary or saturated with bourgeois ideology does not mean that we should refuse to participate in them, and even the significant hurdles that would need to be overcome in order to participate do not mean we should not at least try.

If we graze the surface of the theoretical implications of Lenin’s critique of the European left, we would conclude, as these parties in the US have, that our participation is equally obligatory. This, however, represents a vulgar reading of theory that does little more than recite Lenin’s words and uncritically apply them to one’s own current reality. This reflects the kind of dogmatic application of Marxism-Leninism critiqued by Lenin, Mao, and other theorists.

For this purpose, before we can take this conversation any further, we must contextualize the historical climate in which Left-Wing Communism was written in order to fully understand Lenin’s critiques and to determine whether they remain applicable today.

In the wake of the success of the Russian Revolution, many of the European communist parties had taken to adopting Lenin’s strategies and applying them, uncritically, to their own circumstances. Lenin found this uncritical application to be rather childish, as it reflected a failure on their part to analyze their own material conditions to determine which, if any, of these strategies would be of use to them.

One such critique was directed at the German and Dutch communists, namely the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (the KAPD, which had split from the KPD in April 1920), who argued that bourgeois parliaments were “historically obsolete” and that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in elections altogether. The important context here is that the KAPD and its allies were operating in a country where the SPD had been a mass workers’ party for decades, with millions of German workers still voting for social-democratic and Catholic Center parties.

There was already a massive proletarian movement within these political arenas, meaning that the German and Dutch left were operating among a working class with a considerable degree of existing political consciousness. This was particularly true in Germany, which already had one failed attempt at revolution resulting in the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. So, importantly, these were not your average undifferentiated voters, these were voters who were already operating within an organized system of labor from trade unions to worker cooperatives, maintaining an entire ecosystem that prioritized labor as a political entity.

The KAPD’s decision to boycott participation in bourgeois parliament was short-sighted because it was primarily aesthetic in purpose; that is, it had little to do with an analysis of the masses, and instead rested on the perspective that because the elections were bourgeois in character, any revolutionary party should boycott them on principle alone.

This is what Lenin referred to as infantile.

He agreed that, in principle, bourgeois elections were obsolete insofar as they could not serve as a means to obtain socialism, but he disagreed that they were historically obsolete, particularly when the masses still participated in them in large numbers. Lenin argued that their illusions about parliament were structured around a false consciousness in which these worker parties would somehow lead to socialism.

The task of Marxists was to participate within these elections because the German left held significant influence over the workers, and that influence could be utilized to redirect their consciousness away from bourgeois elections and toward revolution as the only viable path to socialism.

The same was also somewhat true for Lenin and his party. It is important, however, to focus on the structural function of their participation in these elections, as it speaks significantly to their strategy. The six Bolshevik deputies who were elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912 had legal parliamentary immunity for any speeches given inside the chamber.

They could make revolutionary declarations from the rostrum that would have been criminally prosecutable if delivered anywhere else in Russia, and this, in turn, legally permitted their press networks to publish these speeches and distribute them to the masses.

These declarations included speeches written by Lenin from his exile, in which they openly denounced the tsar, called for his overthrow, and urged the public toward revolutionary socialism. The deputies also received worker delegations in the Duma building, used their parliamentary salaries and travel allowances to fund underground party work, and used their immunity to facilitate communication between legal and illegal party activity.

Further, the structural elements of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly, functionally different from the electoral systems of today. The Russian Duma was a legislative body created by the tsar in 1905, after mass revolutionary pressure forced him to concede limited representative government, with seats divided among four separate voting classes that weighted landowners far above workers. The Weimar Reichstag was the central legislature of Germany after the 1918 revolution overthrew the monarchy, and it allocated seats through proportional representation, meaning that roughly 60,000 votes was enough to acquire a seat for the party.

The Bolsheviks were a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was already a recognized party in the Duma system, and recognized parties needed only to put forward candidates directly within each voting class without needing to overcome additional barriers to appear before the electorate. In the Reichstag, any recognized party could submit a ranked list of candidates, and if that list received the votes necessary for a single seat, the first candidate on the list took office, meaning that a party with even minimal working-class support could send representatives to parliament!

The political climate in which Lenin released Left-Wing Communism was one of immense revolutionary potential. It was a climate that had just emerged from the First World War, a moment in which socialism, communism, Marxism, and “democratic socialism” were dominating the political sphere among the working class. So while the workers themselves still harbored “parliamentary illusions,” the broader political climate was ripe for revolution and necessitated the participation of communists in order to quickly dispel these illusions and harness the revolutionary potential of the (already organized) working class.

Now, we hope that it is becoming more apparent why this historical context is relevant and why it would seem that it doesn’t map clearly onto our present conditions in the United States. Before we elaborate on that point, we should also make clear that there are a number of contingencies that have been laid out for us to understand not only if our participation in bourgeois elections is justified, but what our primary objectives as Marxists should be in the first place.

Foundational to Lenin’s classic polemics is the insistence on a clear division between communists and the opportunistic, social-chauvinists who had co-opted the term “socialism,” and on the corresponding necessity that communists clearly identify themselves as such. Lenin had observed that socialism was already being captured by those who wished to steer revolutionary politics into that of reform, thereby betraying the working class. In a piece written on the 25th anniversary of Marx’s death, Lenin wrote about how Marxism had emerged as such a revolutionary ideology that it completely transformed the political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of the working class.

He observed that the “dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compels its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism” (V.I. Lenin, Marxism and Revisionism). Lenin argues that this is due to capitalism reproducing itself in the form of the petite bourgeois, that is, those who have yet to challenge the capitalist hegemonic mentality into which they have been indoctrinated.

Mao Zedong similarly wrote about the difficulties of overcoming liberalism, stating that liberals “approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practise it or to practise it in full… they talk Marxism but practise liberalism” (Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism), and that whether wittingly or unwittingly, they serve as enemies of Marxism and push the party toward reform.

This would be proven correct in August 1914, when the parties of the Second International (most notably the SPD in Germany) voted to approve war credits for their respective national bourgeoisies at the outbreak of the First World War, betraying the international working class in the crisis where their support was most needed.

Lenin identified this betrayal as the co-optation of the communist movement by opportunists, those who represent “a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement,” what Lenin would call the “labor aristocracy.” These opportunists would infiltrate the communist parties, achieving ranks high enough that “the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism)

Lenin wrote in his foundational work What Is to Be Done? that we should judge these people by their actions and by what they actually advocate for through their words. In doing this, we will very quickly realize who is interested in introducing “bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.” And in another of Lenin’s foundational works, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains in the preface how, due to the success of Marxism, the bourgeoisie had moved to turn Marx and Engels into “harmless icons” while also “robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

The reason we call all of this to the reader’s attention is that there are within these passages an implicit yet obvious conclusion, which is that those of us who identify as Marxist-Leninists must ensure that our revolutionary platforms are not compromised by opportunists or social-chauvinists who seek to flatten the revolutionary character of our message. This requires us drawing a clear line of demarcation between our message and that of the social chauvinists and opportunists. We must clearly identify as communists, and our agitprop must be overtly revolutionary in character.

This is also stated rather explicitly in the conditions for entrance into the Third Communist International, and although these are rather lengthy, we should like to provide several of them below, as they are of the utmost importance for the formulation of our argument:

“1. Day-by-day propaganda and agitation must be genuinely communist in character. All press organs belonging to the parties must be edited by reliable Communists who have given proof of their devotion to the cause of the proletarian revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat should not be discussed merely as a stock phrase to be learned by rote; it should be popularised in such a way that the practical facts systematically dealt with in our press day by day will drive home to every rank-and-file working man and working woman, every soldier and peasant, that it is indispensable to them.

2. Any organisation that wishes to join the Communist International must consistently and systematically dismiss reformists and “Centrists” from positions of any responsibility in the working-class movement (party organisations, editorial boards, trade unions, parliamentary groups, co-operative societies, municipal councils, etc.), replacing them by reliable Communists. The fact that in some cases rank-and-file workers may at first have to replace “experienced” leaders should be no deterrent.

3. In countries where a state of siege or emergency legislation makes it impossible for Communists to conduct their activities legally, it is absolutely essential that legal and illegal work should be combined. In almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution.

5. Regular and systematic agitation is indispensable in the countryside. The working class cannot consolidate its victory without support from at least a section of the farm labourers and poor peasants, and without neutralising, through its policy, part of the rest of the rural population… To forgo this work or entrust it to unreliable semi-reformist elements is tantamount to renouncing the proletarian revolution.

6. It is the duty of any party wishing to belong to the Third International to expose, not only avowed social-patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social-pacifism. It must systematically demonstrate to the workers that, without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, no international arbitration courts, no talk about a reduction of armaments, no “democratic” reorganisation of the League of Nations will save mankind from new imperialist wars.

11. It is the duty of parties wishing to join the Third International to re-examine the composition of their parliamentary groups, eliminate unreliable elements and effectively subordinate these groups to the Party Central Committees. They must demand that every Communist proletarian should subordinate all his activities to the interests of truly revolutionary propaganda and agitation.

18. In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.”

We must understand that this document represents one of the most authoritative texts in Lenin’s entire body of work, including What Is to Be Done?, with even Left-Wing Communism, written the same year, being subordinate to the terms laid out within this piece. The Twenty-One Conditions are the formal institutional codification of how Lenin’s tactical arguments in Left-Wing Communism were supposed to be applied.

Both of these works were written after the success of the October Revolution, after the collapse of the Second International in which the opportunists betrayed the communists, and after Lenin’s ample experience dealing with the social-chauvinists and opportunists who had repeatedly attempted to infiltrate and co-opt his revolutionary program in favor of revisionist bourgeois reformism.

These points represent a formula that was put forward in opposition to a period that sought to completely strip Marxism of its revolutionary character. When we place Left-Wing Communism within the context of these points, it becomes quite clear that any party seeking to participate in bourgeois elections must, at the very least, be overtly communist in name and in message. This includes drawing a clear line of demarcation between the social democrats and the communists, agitating openly toward the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even seeking to expose and purge social democrats from other organizations and replace them with communists.

It also highlights the importance of using elections as one of many tactics rather than a primary one, and emphasizes the importance of pairing legal work with illegal work. Arguably most importantly for our purposes, there is a direct callout from Lenin that acknowledges that America is heading toward civil war (which remains true today), and that in periods of emergency or where the bourgeoisie has made it nearly impossible to conduct our work, we should place no faith in legal mechanisms and should direct most of our efforts toward illegal forms of organization.

It could be argued that our present conditions allow us to conduct considerably more work legally than in Lenin’s time, but regardless, we must understand that electoral participation is incomplete if it is not paired with alternative primary strategies.

Without any of this, and without waging a continual battle against opportunists, without recognizing them as the threat they truly are, we end up in the situation Lenin describes when he writes that “such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other.”

In other words, a communist party that participates in elections while tolerating opportunist parliamentarians and softening its communist character almost justifies the left-communist rejection of parliamentarism altogether. Effectively, there is no point in our participation in bourgeois elections unless these contingencies are being met.

We might have noticed some other contingencies within the points listed above that seem somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of bourgeois elections, which we will revisit momentarily. First, we must understand what opportunism is and why it poses such a significant threat to Marxist-Leninist parties.

It might seem, upon first glance, that an opportunist is someone who knowingly co-opts socialist movements to steer them toward reform. But this is not the case, no, opportunists are often those who are sincerely dedicated to the party. As Lenin put it, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”

The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment. While no serious communist would argue against responding to the changing political tide, by Lenin’s own standards this responsiveness is opportunistic if it isn’t grounded in a consistent long-term strategy and vision.

The damage this produces is often irreversible, once the opportunists have unconsciously guided the party toward short-sighted small wins and reforms, Lenin tells us, it is likely impossible to correct course. Those who would be most likely to aid in the change of course have either left, been worn down, or been gradually shaped by the new revisionist norms.

Social-chauvinism is a form of opportunism, but it largely involves prioritizing one’s own bourgeoisie over the interests of the international working class, including support for war, or support for policies put forth by the Democratic Party that do not serve the long-term interests of the working class, or even a refusal to build solidarity internationally with other communist parties. This is the ultimate result of opportunism, that the proletarian movement gets actively mobilized in support of the bourgeoisie’s project, lending its organizational weight and ideological authority to the achievement of their goals.

The symptoms of opportunism appear in the form of tailism, which is characterized by continually tailing after the spontaneous consciousness of the working class without guiding them a step further. The working class will naturally and inevitably diagnose many problems within their society and react to them through spontaneous uprisings such as protests, strikes, and the like.

However, without guidance, these spontaneous uprisings often dwindle into nothing, with everyone returning to their lives as normal. This is because the working class has not yet achieved the political consciousness necessary to turn spontaneity into revolutionary change, and the bourgeoisie’s ideology remains intrinsic to their ability to approach and solve problems.

If we only seek to echo their ideas rather than systematize them into a strategy that elevates their consciousness, we are “meeting them where they’re at,” but only to keep them there. Mao explains the process of this systematization where he says that we should “take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own” (Mao Zedong, Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership).

The masses are not without understanding, and we should have faith in their ability to diagnose problems even if their solutions are disorganized or not yet of an elevated consciousness. Therefore, we should absolutely listen to them. But we should not tail after them and presume that whatever has their attention is where they are at consciously.

Lenin is highly critical of this tailist strategy as well, explaining that remaining subservient to spontaneity “seems to inspire a fear of taking even one step away from what is ‘accessible’ to the masses, a fear of rising too high above mere subservience to the immediate and direct requirements of the masses” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?). We should note that Lenin is not making a moralistic claim that tailism is bad because it isn’t “radical enough.”

He is making a structural claim that any deference to spontaneous mass consciousness, due to the character of bourgeois ideological dominance, automatically strengthens bourgeois influence within the proletarian movement. For example, continually using slogans that replace “capitalism” with “billionaires” will reaffirm what the masses already understand, that billionaires are a detriment to working people, rather than pointing to why billionaires exist in the first place and how to wage struggle against them.

Additionally, if a Marxist party allows the masses ebbing consciousness to guide their strategy, they will have to continually pivot and wind up sacrificing longer term strategies for shorter term ones (and in doing so, you also sacrifice the trust of the community by failing to prove your commitment to them long term).

On the other end of the spectrum of symptoms of opportunism, we have commandism, where we ourselves are far ahead of the masses and begin issuing orders, demanding actions, expecting compliance, without doing the patient work of earning the trust of the masses through dialogue, commitment, and meeting their material needs. This characteristic is typical of parties who are ideologically clear but have totally lost their connection to the actual consciousness of the masses they are supposed to be leading.

The danger comes when a party becomes isolated from the class it claims to represent, issuing communiqués nobody is listening to, planning actions nobody will join, becoming a self-enclosed sect rather than the leading detachment of a proletarian class-war. For this, Mao’s solution is to put down the theory and go to the masses as students to learn from them.

All of these things, commandism, tailism, opportunism, and social-chauvinism, ultimately steer the party (and the masses) toward liberalism. We can understand how the short-sighted perspective of voting for the “lesser of two evils” has progressively shifted the entire American political consciousness further to the right. When we continually make short-sighted compromises that do not serve a longer-term strategy, we will ultimately make the same mistake of shifting our own political consciousness further right toward liberalism.

Within this, we have “progressive” liberals and “Social-Democrats” who co-opt revolutionary language entirely to distort what socialism actually is. That is why Communist parties tailing after the working class rather than taking them a step further wind up making our platforms indistinguishable from those of a counter-revolutionary social democrat.

Commandism similarly operates by making top-down commands that are detached from the political consciousness and material needs of the masses, often instructing cadre to adopt strategies that are out of sync with the needs of a community, and this in turn creates confusion and distrust.

We might be inclined to give individual opportunists the benefit of the doubt, and while we certainly should not call someone’s intentions into question without basis, their actions can irreparably harm the proletariat even if unintentionally. Marxism-Leninism is a science, a means of diagnosing the problems in our society and identifying exactly what would need to happen to address them.

We understand that capitalism (and a system built around capitalism) cannot be reformed, must be captured by the proletariat, and that revolutionary consciousness must be actively constructed by a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries to dismantle it. This is what distinguishes Marxism-Leninism from every other kind of leftism.

When we flatten the message into one that is more “palatable” to the masses, we are ultimately betraying the solution to our diagnosis and transforming it into something else entirely. Lenin wrote that there is “no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?), and that theory itself comes from the praxis of previous revolutionaries who took the time to write down the problems they encountered along the way with the solutions to address them.

By studying revolutionary theory and revolutionary history from the perspectives of revolutionaries, we can learn from how they identified and addressed problems. Today Western Marxists experience a proliferation of opportunism that is the result of a nearly century-long project to obfuscate socialism, dilute it, and literally kill revolutionaries and the potential they carried.

The trend toward anti-intellectualism is significant in driving the idea that we, as revolutionaries, do not need theory. We absolutely need theory if we claim to be revolutionaries, and it is our job to turn theory into praxis and bring it to the masses in a way that treats the masses as capable of understanding it. And we have to have confidence in the masses, rather than paternalize them or treat ourselves as heroes who are there to save them.

Bringing all of this back to our overarching discussion of American Marxist parties’ participation in bourgeois elections, we can pretty clearly see that the historical context in which Lenin advocated for participation in bourgeois elections is entirely different from the political climate today.

The actual structures of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly and entirely different from our pseudo-representative “democracy,” and the amount of time, money, and resources that are required just to get past all of the red tape for a chance at participating in elections is drastically different from the relative lack of barriers that the Germans and Russians had to overcome in their time.

American Marxist-Leninist parties must acquire hundreds of thousands of signatures, tens of millions of dollars in funding, and dedicate tens of thousands of hours campaigning within the four-year election cycle just to be able to throw their hat in the ring. The American political system is designed entirely to keep legitimate socialist candidates off of the ballot, and the internal red tape is structured to prevent us from using the system against itself (if we were miraculously able to win an election).

Decades of red-scare propaganda and additional measures to restrict ballot access and voter access (redlining, gerrymandering, etc) add further barriers that need to be overcome that our revolutionary predecessors never encountered. Further, when we look across the actual platforms of the candidates running in these elections, what we notice is that their campaign platforms are indistinguishable from those of any other “progressive” candidate.

Let us take a look at the campaigns of two candidates from the 2026 Gubernatorial Election in California. The two explicitly socialist candidates are Ramsey Robinson, running through the Peace and Freedom Party, and Butch Ware, running through the Green Party. Ramsey Robinson is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is a Marxist-Leninist party that believes the “only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society.” (PSL website)

Butch Ware is an independent running through the Green Party but describes himself as a “movement builder, an activist, educator, and organizer.” Ware is obviously further left than many demsocs but he is certainly not a Marxist-Leninist. Robinson, being a PSL member, upholds the values of his party as laid out in their party program.

When we look at each candidate’s platform on their campaign websites, we notice an astounding similarity between the two. Robinson’s campaign slogan is “A California for the people, not the billionaires,” while Ware’s slogan is “We’re fighting for a California that serves you, not the corporations.”

Already, we notice their slogans are effectively the exact same. When we dive into the actual platform each candidate is running on, they are nearly identical. Both Robinson and Ware are advocating to end California’s housing crisis, single-payer CalCare, free education, protection of immigrant rights, and divestment from “israel,” among other similar points.

Each platform is structured around reforming capitalism and disciplining it through taxation, minimum wage increases, outlawing corporate bribes, and similar measures. Every single thing within these campaign points operates within the capitalist system, rather than putting forward any real solution to challenge or dismantle it.

Ware, at least, acknowledges this by explaining that his campaign’s reforms are a form of “direct action” aimed at meeting the needs of working-class people, though we disagree with this perspective entirely. Robinson’s platform, however, doesn’t even explain the pandering toward systems of reform, with the closest thing to agitation being an option to “get involved,” which states that it’s “going to take more than one election to fight the billionaire agenda. Join us in building a socialist movement: together we can make a California for all of us.”

What is concerning here is that one of these candidates is a Marxist-Leninist who should be advocating for the complete abolition of the bourgeois state instead of lightly disciplining the capitalists within it. Yet, in order to even ascertain that this candidate is a communist would require significat digging, and his platform certainly is not revolutionary or even explicitly socialist in anything other than name.

After sitting through dozens of interviews and social media reels, it can be concluded that while Ware’s politics are somewhat inconsistent depending on who he’s talking to, it cannot be denied that his language is more overtly socialist (even when his platform is not) than that of the Marxist-Leninist candidate.

Now, when we compare both of these candidates’ platforms to that of Bernie Sanders (a liberal zionist from the DSA) in 2020, his campaign similarly advocated for universal single-payer healthcare, free education, immigrant reform, and other similar issues, with the most notably absent being divestment from “israel.” Ware and Robinson’s platforms are very subtly but noticeably further left than Sanders, but the undeniable overlap in similarity is extremely alarming, and not recognizable by the general public. The platform of the Marxist-Leninist is indistinguishable from those of two other non-ML candidates.

We should recall that Lenin, rightfully, stated that we should analyze someone based on what they advocate for and what they actually do, not on what they say in interviews and on social media. Sanders exposed himself as a zionist shill of the bourgeoisie repeatedly by voting in favor of arming the apartheid state, voting for pro-war measures, and similar betrayals. While Robinson and Ware have not yet achieved an electoral position that we can measure against, we should understand that their platforms neither challenge the capitalist system nor advocate for dismantling it entirely.

It can certainly be argued that calling for the overthrow of the government as a slogan for governor would indeed likely alienate many working-class people who are not quite ready for such “extreme” revolutionary language, and could also pose legal consequences. However, there are a great many ways to elevate the consciousness of the masses within these confines without pandering to outright reformism!

There is a congressional candidate in Texas who called for converting ICE detention centers into prisons for zionists, which is hilarious and outlandish in a way that quickly revealed the reactionary nature of AOC and other politicians, and is suprisingly a more effective way of exposing the cracks in the capitalist duopoly.

Now, the defense from most Marxist-Leninist parties is that they don’t run in elections to win, but to forward their platform, recruit candidates, etc. Our criticisms would not change regardless of if they sought to win or lose these elections, and arguably their participation makes significantly less sense if the objective isn’t to win.

To campaign on a platform without intending to act on it is to lie to the general public, who (according to the duopoly) is already “wasting” their vote by putting confidence in a communist candidate, and it is a betrayal to that confidence by running on platforms that give no indication of this strategy. The masses need to trust us, and this doesn’t build trust.

These parties are also wasting significant amounts of resources on these campaigns just to lose them. And the individuals they do manage to recruit into their party will likely not understand the difference between scientific socialism and Bernie Sanders’ distortion of “socialism,” which isn’t to say that they cannot learn, but recruiting them on false pretenses is not the way to attract the dedicated, professional revolutionaries of Lenin’s vanguard party.

And just as a side note, Lenin did not lose elections. In fact, the Bolsheviks won six seats in the Fourth Duma in 1912, and as we’ve discussed, despite living under the tsar, openly called for his violent overthrow.

Communist parties in the United States have been participating in elections at the local and federal level for over a century. When we analyze the statistics on what portion of the working-class vote we are able to win and how often we win, the results are genuinely depressing. Eugene Debs’ 1912 Socialist Party run remains the most successful at roughly 900,000 votes (about 6% of all votes), and CPUSA candidate William Z. Foster managed only 102,991 votes (0.26%) in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, when conditions for socialist win should have been perfect.

While the PSL’s 2024 presidential campaign did secure the most votes for a socialist candidate in nearly a century (roughly 167,000 votes, or 0.11% of the total), as we have explained, assuming that this correlates to a genuine interest in revolutionary socialism is short-sighted and opportunistic. The material conditions of the 2024 election had significantly more to do with that number of voters than any actual interest in socialism or communism itself.

The most damning aspect of our participation, however, is what the article we mentioned at the beginning of this piece pointed out. Those who participate in elections at the local and federal level are typically those who belong to the labor aristocracy.

According to this article, while the average voter turnout from the 2020 presidential elections was about 63%, “turnout among households with a family income of 75 thousand to 99 thousand dollars per year, 100 thousand to 149 thousand dollars per year, and 150+ thousand dollars per year turned out at rates that were well above the average (72%, 77%, and 80% respectively) and in much greater numbers than lower income brackets.” The article continues, explaining that these “upper income brackets should correlate roughly with the Labor Aristocracy, the Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie proper.” Their conclusion, which we wholeheartedly agree with, is outlined below:

“Firstly, the kinds of people who are likely to turn out for elections in the US are unlikely to support Communism barring a massive decrease in the living standards of most of these people. As stated earlier in this essay, most likely voters in the US come from the American Labor Aristocracy, Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie. These groups do not have any natural inclinations to support Communism. They have either carved out a precarious yet comfortable place for themselves within the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Labor Aristocracy, benefit directly from the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Bourgeoisie or Capitalist Class, or fall somewhere between these two poles, as in the case of the Petty-Bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the most exploited, and therefore more inclined to support Communism, segments of American society turn out not only in lower percentages than the more Bourgeois classes, but also in lower overall numbers. This is especially telling since the more exploited classes represent a far larger segment of American society… When taken with the fact that the social classes of Capitalist society tend to be segregated into separate communities, making concrete efforts at targeted community outreach, going to the Proletariat and trying to meet its needs while also educating and organizing it, is a far more concrete strategy than running a political campaign and hoping that you catch the attention of some portion of the Proletariat. In this regard, the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers should be taken as a model for any political group organizing towards Proletarian Revolution in the US.” (emphasis added)

Again, we might encounter pushback from someone who would insist that the Black Panther Party also participated in electoral politics. And indeed, they participated in bourgeois elections, specifically Bobby Seale’s 1973 mayoral campaign and Elaine Brown’s 1975 city council campaign.

However, before running campaigns, the Black Panthers spent almost a decade engaging in mass organizing initiatives through their survival programs and self-defense programs, and had garnered the attention of mainstream media, which granted them national name recognition in addition to the respect and trust they had cultivated within their own communities.

Their participation also came after the FBI spent years systematically crushing their movement and momentum, reducing their ability to engage in self-defense programs and their survival programs, and had already assassinated much of their leadership. Electoralism for the Black Panthers was one of their last legal forms of party work that they could engage in. In addition, these elections were used as organizing platforms for their survival programs (sickle cell testing happened during Seale’s campaign), and were subordinated to the rest of the mass work that constituted the actual base of the party’s politics.

While the Black Panthers contain many lessons for us to draw from, their evolution as a party took time to form and was not always explicitly Marxist-Leninist. One thing they correctly identified, which we should take time to discuss, is the group of people in the United States with the most revolutionary potential, the lumpenproletariat. First, let us break down some statistics expanding upon the figures above.

The author correctly pointed out the correlation between those who actually turn up to vote and having a higher income, but let us put this figure into more context. Out of the roughly 183 million U.S. workers, about 42.3 million (23.1%) made at least $100,000 in 2024, which means roughly 140 million individual workers, about 77%, earned less than $100,000 per year (both figures from the 2024 U.S. Census). Over 90% of employed workers earn their living through wage labor (BLS, 2025).

There are almost 800,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night according to the HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. There are roughly 23 million non-citizen adults living in the United States, with 14 million of those being undocumented immigrants (Pew Research Center, July 2023), and 4 million formerly incarcerated people with felonies (The Sentencing Project, “Locked Out 2024”), representing 27 million people who are legally barred from voting in the United States.

When we look at the voting statistics from 2024, we can see that voters earning under $100,000 make up only 42% of voter turnout, with that number decreasing to 16% for voters earning under $50,000 (PRRI, “Breaking Down the Differences Between Voters and Non-Voters in the 2024 Election,” May 2025). Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 did not vote in 2024, and half of all adults earning under $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote.

These numbers are quite staggering, and their complexity gets even worse when we factor in other demographics such as age, ethnicity, and location. It should be incredibly obvious that the Marxist-Leninist parties, who claim to represent the interests of the Proletariat (those who have nothing to sell but their labor power), are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours to platform watered-down socialism to predominantly white voters aged 45 and over who earn $100,000 or more annually, the labor aristocracy, historically the least likely to give a communist the time of day let alone join in their “movement.” The Proletariat and lumpenproletariat, roughly 65% and 8% of the U.S. population respectively, are indeed the least likely to turn up to the polls whether it comes to local or federal elections.

Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explained that “it is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”

He also explained that these factions of people, who have already been pushed to the outskirts of society, systematically excluded from participating in the system and often abused by it, already understand how broken the system is and are willing to challenge it. “So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men.” Further, it is of the utmost importance that revolutionaries get to the lumpenproletariat first, because the bourgeoisie “will also find in the lumpenproletariat a considerable space for manoeuvring.”

In conclusion, it is evident that after over a century of participation in bourgeois elections, they have not produced any meaningful results, by any possible metric, at urging the working class toward political consciousness. In fact, by taking more than a superficial glance into the justifications these parties make for their participation in bourgeois elections, we find that they have neither a theoretical nor a material leg to stand on to justify their continual use.

By every possible metric, our participation is a failure, an astounding misappropriation of passionate revolutionaries’ time, money, and energy that is drilled into a completely feckless endeavor. When we look into the amount of money that these campaigns require, it becomes more than just a silly oversight of party leadership to continue this failed strategy, and becomes a deliberate, opportunistic strategy to thwart any revolutionary change.

More concerning, revolutionary language, to this day, is flattened into that of reformism and revisionism, despite Lenin’s diagnosis over 100 years ago. While many (though not all) Marxist-Leninist parties take the “correct” geopolitical stances, and have astute material analysis in their publications, when we look at their actual organizational efforts and what they advocate for, it becomes evident that these are not serious revolutionary parties.

This should not discourage any revolutionaries within these parties, or those who have considered joining them, but these revolutionary Marxists should take up reading theory as a preventative measure against allowing their hearts and minds to be corrupted by opportunism, and understand that it is their duty to fight opportunism!

What we can also take from this long-winded critique that there is a clear path forward. But we simply do not have the time to continue to recycle failed strategies and to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the comrades or leaders who have engaged in these strategies. It is time to stop organizing the labor aristocracy, the liberals who show up to No Kings protests, the engineers who work from home, and the suburban neo-liberals who love to “two things can be true at once” us into war.

While these groups are always welcome to prove themselves as comrades to the struggle and to join in our efforts toward revolution, it is evident that our primary focus should be foremost on the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, those who are disengaged from elections and left behind by society.

Given the bloody century of feckless endeavors by American Marxists, a good place to start is by going to these communities and learning from them, and gradually working to earn their trust by meeting their needs (using the Panther’s as a template, forging it’l solidarity along the way) and being consistently devout to the proletarian struggle. It is our job to have faith in these comrades’ ability to intrinsically understand their own exploitation, and to present them with a means to become the tools of their own liberation.

Further, we MUST distance ourselves from the progressive liberals, the social democrats, the pseudo “socialists,” and all other social-chauvinists and opportunists who have co-opted the term socialism to obfuscate and confuse the true nature of it. This clear line of demarcation is necessary to ensure that our solution to the diagnosis of capitalism (and the proletariat’s clear understanding of such) stands in stark contrast to the feckless measures that will reproduce systems of suffering.

There is only one solution.

“During the 1914–18 imperialist war between two groups of equally predatory countries, social-chauvinism was the principal and fundamental type of opportunism, i.e., support of ‘defence of country’, which in such a war was really equivalent to defence of the predatory interests of one’s ‘own’ bourgeoisie. After the war, defence of the robber League of Nations, defence of direct or indirect alliances with the bourgeoisie of one’s own country against the revolutionary proletariat and the ‘Soviet’ movement, and defence of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarianism against ‘Soviet power’ became the principal manifestations of those intolerable and treacherous compromises, whose sum total constituted an opportunism fatal to the revolutionary proletariat and its cause. […] Naïve and quite inexperienced people imagine that the permissibility of compromise in general is sufficient to obliterate any distinction between opportunism, against which we are waging, and must wage, an unremitting struggle, and revolutionary Marxism, or communism.” (V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, emphasis added)

“The bourgeoisie (and especially the big bourgeoisie) not only exerts an influence on the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, but does its utmost to influence the proletariat and the Communist Party in a strenuous effort to destroy their ideological, political and organizational independence, turn them into an appendage of the bourgeoisie and its political party, and ensure that it will reap the fruits of the revolution for itself or its political party alone... To neglect all this is Right opportunism. The characteristic feature of Chen Tu-hsiu’s Right opportunism was that it led the proletariat to accommodate itself to the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie and its political party.” (Mao Zedong, Introducing the Communist)

“Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.” (Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism)

“The only choice is, either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?)

“The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away.’” (V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution)

Identity Politics as Divide and Conquer

The System Cannot Change From Within — Identity Politics as Divide and Conquer

Identity Politics as Divide and Conquer

Article 7 of 9

Social Rights Ireland

Originally published at https://blog.socialrightsireland.com/t/identity-politics-as-divide-and-conquer/198

Publication Date: July 25, 2026

Have you ever suspected that the endless proliferation of identities, each with its own flag, its own month, its own hierarchy of oppression, serves not to unite us, but to divide us?

And when flags and months are exhausted, the logic of fragmentation does not stop. It descends into absurdity. I recently encountered a single parent who informed me that she was not a “single parent” like me. She was a “SPBC”. I had to Google it. You might too.

The material reality of raising a child on one income, of fighting for childcare and maintenance, is hard, trust me. But the distinction being drawn here is not about material reality. It is about class status dressed in identity language. The Single Mother By Choice (SPBC)—often middle-class, with resources, support networks, and the luxury of planning, is distinguishing herself from the Single Mother By Circumstance. (I feel a new acronym coming on!). The one who was abandoned. The one who fled abuse. The one who cannot afford childcare, let alone the luxury of a label (or a flag).

Class contempt wrapped in therapeutic language is becoming the new norm. More and more in the West, we are seeing the petty bourgeoisie marking its distance and distinction from the working class. If every lived experience must be siloed into its own micronation, then the working class is not merely divided…it is being atomised into dust. And in that dust, capital finds its paradise.

Something has gone very wrong with what was once known as the left. Identity politics in its contemporary, authoritarian form is not a progressive force. It is a reactionary one. It is a tool of the bourgeoisie, deployed to divide the working class along artificial lines, to replace material analysis with moral posturing, and to substitute the difficult work of class solidarity with the easy comfort of virtue signalling.

The recent silencing of the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland by Féile an Phobail is a case in point. We do not know if WRNNI are working-class voices. We do not know if they are genuine grassroots organisers. That is not the point. The point is that Féile, a festival with historic roots in republican and working-class struggle, capitulated to an online mob, shut down debate and then refused to engage with the community it claims to serve.

Whether the dispute is about biological women or trans women is irrelevant to the principle at stake. Identity politics is eating itself. The content of the disagreement matters less than the fact that disagreement itself has been rendered unspeakable. Féile’s justification claimed it was “unaware” the event would “promote campaigns against rights for the Transgender community.” The reality is that they bowed to organised online pressure and initially stonewalled all attempts at dialogue until the threat of legal action became an issue.

But let us step back for a moment. Consider the trans debate itself. Where is this debate most intense? In the imperial core. In Britain, in America, in Western Europe. It is a preoccupation of the privileged. Go to Gaza, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, to rural India, and ask them about pronouns. Ask them about safe spaces, HRT, changing rooms, and sporting competitions. Ask them about the hierarchy of oppressions. They will look at you with confusion, perhaps even with pity. They are fighting for food. For water. For shelter. For survival against bombs, drones, and the slow violence of austerity imposed by the IMF. They are fighting for life itself! They do not have the luxury of naval gazing because the boot of imperialism is on their necks every single day.

What does this reveal? It reveals that identity politics is a creature of the imperial core. It is the politics of those who have the material security to obsess over language. It is the politics of the petty bourgeoisie who have substituted revolutionary struggle for therapeutic self-examination. It is a form of narcissism dressed as radicalism.

The working class of the Global South does not have the time for this. They are too busy fighting for their lives against the very system that Western progressives refuse to name. And yet, these same progressives claim solidarity with them while at the same time demanding that we all adopt their language, their labels, their ever-shifting goalposts.

Free speech, disagreement and healthy debate are the lifeblood of any genuine working-class movement. However, they are being systematically eroded by an authoritarian identity politics that allows no dissent, and recognises no unity except the unity of the orthodox. The only way forward is to reject this division and to return to the materialist foundation of class struggle. There is no war but class war. And there can be no unity but the unity of the working class!

The economic base is what determines the superstructure. The mode of production shapes the forms of consciousness. Our struggle for survival is the primary struggle from which all others derive. Identity politics, however, turns this all on its head. It places the superstructure above the base. It treats consciousness as primary and material conditions as secondary. It asks “Who am I?” before it asks “What do I own?”

This inversion is no accident. It serves the interests of capital by fragmenting the working class, by channelling revolutionary energy into reformist channels, and by replacing the goal of systemic transformation with the goal of symbolic inclusion. Instead, we invite you the reader, the worker, the comrade to think about these questions:

Who benefits when the working class is divided into competing identity groups?

Who benefits when the discussion of women’s sex-based rights becomes unspeakable?

Who benefits when the left spends more time arguing about pronouns than about wages, rents, and the cost of living?

Who benefits when the demand for “safe spaces” becomes a demand to silence anyone who disagrees?

Who benefits when Western progressives obsess over language while the people of Global South struggle for food and water.

The answer to all these questions is the same: the bourgeoisie. The capitalist class. The owners of the means of production. Those who profit from our division, our silence, and our submission. The Epstein cabal laughing at us fighting each other online and on BBC radio programmes.

The liberal bargain is indeed simple but very, very, effective. The bourgeoisie will give you flags til the cows come home. They will give you dates in the calendar, even months. They will give you logos on their products. And grants for your PR team. They will give you everything—except power.

Corporations fly the rainbow flag while funding a killing regime not just in Palestine, but across the Global South. Banks celebrate International Women’s Day while investing in Zionist bonds that fund the slaughter of innocent girls and women in West Asia. Tech companies champion diversity while destroying unions, to expand a Zionist surveillance empire.

And we see it in the progressive movement itself. The demand that we recognise every identity except the one that actually matters—the identity of the worker. The demand that we centre the preoccupations of the imperial core while making secondary the material struggles of the Global South.

This is the authoritarian face of identity politics which demands that certain views not only be disagreed with, but be rendered unspeakable. The reductive nature of “one group good, other group bad” thinking is killing us. And those who engage in such lazy, false dichotomy thinking shoot only themselves in the foot.

Where has free speech gone? Where has disagreement gone? Where has healthy debate gone? They have been sacrificed on the altar of identity. They have been traded for the promise of safety. Safety that never comes, alas, because the demand for safety is infinite, and the goalposts are always shifting.

The only way out of this impasse is to return to the materialist foundation, to reject the hierarchy of oppression and refuse the liberal bargain. We need to rebuild the unity of the working class.

And no, this does not mean ignoring the real oppressions faced by LGBTQ+ workers, by women, by people of colour, by the disabled. It means understanding that these oppressions cannot be overcome without overcoming the class system that produces and reproduces them. It means understanding that the trans debate, whatever one’s position, is a Western preoccupation that distracts from the material struggle of the global working class.

The old revolutionary in the Communist Manifesto put it this way:

“The only rights that cannot be lost are those secured by the abolition of the class system itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat. The seizure of the means of production. The end of wage slavery.”

This is the path forward. Not the multiplication of flags. Not the naval gazing of the imperial core, but the international solidarity of the exploited.

We end where we began: with questions.

Will we allow identity politics to divide us further?

Will we accept the liberal bargain—recognition in exchange for silence?

Will we abandon free speech, disagreement, and debate to the authoritarian mob who throw the “hate speech” label at those who don’t talk their way?

Will we allow ourselves to be divided until every individual has their own flag… until we are too busy defending our subjective labels to notice the boot on all our necks?

Or will we reclaim our movement, the movement of the working class, the movement that has won every genuine gain in human history, and rebuild it on the materialist foundation of class struggle?

The choice is ours. The future is ours.

Social Rights Ireland

For the working class. For free speech. For international solidarity against imperialism.

Follow us for more materialist analysis, working-class organising, and the defence of free speech against the authoritarian identity politics that seeks to silence us.

Mamdani and The Liberal Repackaging of Power

The System Cannot Change From Within — Mamdani and The Liberal Repackaging of Power

Mamdani and The Liberal Repackaging of Power

Article 8 of 9

Vox Ummah

By Marwa Yousuf K.

Originally published at https://voxummah.com/2025/11/mamdani-and-the-liberal-repackaging-of-power/

Publication Date: November 9, 2025

Marwa Yousuf K.

In the shadow of genocide, while Gaza burns and its skies bear witness to one of the most one-sided assaults in modern history, a Muslim man ran for mayor in the heart of empire and won. People celebrated, calling it a win for progress, diversity, and even justice, as if a scheduled political election had reversed history. As if liberation had arrived not in the form of dismantling state power but by crowning someone who could speak against it politely from within its walls.

Zohran Mamdani’s ascent was a familiar ritual – liberalism’s favourite act: taking the language of resistance, draining it of substance, and performing it just long enough to pacify those who still remember how to rage.

His campaign was slick, built on Bollywood soundtracks, trendy edits, and the images of the brown boy made good. Immigrant nostalgia was folded neatly into electoral language. It was carefully curated identity politics, designed not to unsettle power, but to charm it. It spoke to the hunger for representation among South Asian and Muslim communities, yet offered no real confrontation with the systems responsible for their marginalisation. The Spectacle worked.  

Zohran ran on a platform that included free buses, rent freezes, and childcare for all. Policies that sounded left but lived centrist in application. He framed himself as anti-capitalist, yet never touched the scaffolding of imperialism on which capitalism depends. He spoke of housing and healthcare, but not occupation or settler colonialism, in ways that unsettled the state. He wanted to be revolutionary, but only on terms that wouldn’t revoke his invitation to the table. He wanted visibility, not exile, approval, not sanction. And to achieve that, he played by the rules that have always governed the ascent of people of colour in the West: disown the resistance, pacify the people, and become the story the empire can tolerate.

When asked about “globalise the intifada,” Mamdani avoided both rejection and affirmation. Instead, he hedged, saying it wasn’t his place to police language. But neutrality in the face of resistance is not neutrality – it is alignment with the status quo. Soon after, he tweeted that peace could only come from ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid. The type of language that leans towards liberation but stops short of naming its agents. He wants a dismantling that doesn’t disturb. Apartheid is gone, but Israel remains. Liberation is abstracted from those who fight for it. Solidarity that never costs him anything. 

And then there was October 7. When Palestinian fighters stormed out of Gaza, breaking the illusion of Israeli invincibility, the world recoiled. Zohran Mamdani issued a statement, calling the attacks “horrific.” No mention of the sixteen-year blockade or the occupation. No historical context. Just horror – convenient, detached, and familiar. His words echoed familiar liberal zionist talking points. The people of Gaza – dispossessed, besieged, brutalised – vanished from his story, erased from the narrative in real time by the very politician claiming to stand for justice.

Only weeks later, when outrage turned bipartisan, when silence became too loud to bear, did he pivot. He began by saying “apartheid”. He began referencing occupation, gesturing left again. But the shift felt calculated, not born from conviction. 

This is where his politics unravel – not just at the edges but at the core. His language mimics revolution, yet his position safeguards the empire. What good is a Muslim face in office if that face will not call out the mechanisms killing Muslims abroad? What worth is a brown name if it can’t say “Zionism is the problem,” out loud, in the city that funds, shelters, and justifies it?

Here’s the truth no one wants to say while the confetti still falls. The rise of a Muslim settler of colour to mayor in a settler-colonial state isn’t a win for the oppressed. It´s a triumph for the liberal machine that knows exactly how to package power in acceptable skin. 

Mamdani didn’t defy the system. He is what the system builds when it feels threatened: A controlled burn, a release valve. A politician who can channel anger without threatening order. Someone who gestures toward liberation while kneeling to the structures that make liberation necessary.

He isn’t the first. Obama was the prototype – a man who once walked alongside Edward Said, who spoke of hope, who quoted Baldwin, then went on to bomb weddings, expand surveillance, and uphold every border that caged the people he once claimed to come from. Mamdani’s arc follows that line. It is the blueprint, and that blueprint is increasingly effective. 

The new order no longer relies on silence but on aesthetic resistance – people of colour who quote Malcolm but shudder at the idea of armed resistance. Muslims who call for a ceasefire while condemning the very resistance that forces negotiations onto the table. Brown faces on blue banners, faith emptied of fire and identity retooled as insulation. What we’re all calling representation is actually absorption.

Mamdani’s campaign leaned heavily on the identity: Muslim, South Asian, immigrant. Each carries the weight of history, displacement, and diaspora. In his hands, they became aesthetics, not politics. It’s not the presence of culture that was the problem; it’s the absence of confrontation. This was identity without struggle, Muslimness without militancy, tradition without tawḥīd. 

The timing made it worse. While his campaign gained traction, Gaza was being eviscerated. While voters in New York debated his policies, children were pulled from the rubble. As he spoke about rent control and childcare, fighters in South Lebanon were labelled terrorists by the same state whose approval he sought. And yet, not a word in defence of those fighters. No word for the resistance. Not a word in honour of the martyrs.

He didn’t need to. He was already being positioned as the good Muslim, the one who speaks softly while the ummah cries out. The one who rises through respectability while others fall in resistance.

And this matters more because he is Shīʿī – or claims to be. There is a deep tradition within Shīʿī thought, one that does not bow, one that remembers Karbala, one that stands with the oppressed even if you are slaughtered for it. A tradition that still breathes through the bodies of resistance fighters across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. 

But Zohran Mamdani, the Shīʿī mayoral candidate, did not invoke or embody that tradition. He became, instead, its antithesis – a Shīʿī face used to neutralise Shīʿī resistance. A brown man is elevated precisely because he would not do what other brown men are being killed for doing. 

What does it mean when the West props up a Shīʿī politician at the exact moment it is bombing Shīʿī fighters? What does it mean when the only Muslims allowed into power are those who do not disrupt it? What does it mean when the language of “representation” is deployed to undermine the global resistance to empire?

This is why we must be careful. Because when we start confusing presence with power, and identity with impact, we lose the plot. Mamdani’s win matters, yes – but not in the way people think. It does not show a system evolving. It shows a system adapting. One that has learned to speak the language of the left, to quote the prophets of justice, to nod at resistance while sterilising it. 

And people fall for it because it feels good. It feels like progress. But if you listen closely, if you strip away the applause and see who still holds the guns, the drones, the aid money, and the power to erase, you will understand. This is not a new story. It is the same one – with new actors, a new poster, a new hashtag.

This is not the victory people imagine. It is not a blow to imperialism. It is its latest disguise – one that looks like you, sounds like you, speaks your language, sings your music, yet serves your enemy. Real resistance is never elected in the belly of the empire. It is smeared, silenced, bombed, starved and dehumanised. 

Resistance does not become mayor. It does not govern or seek power; it dismantles, it seeks justice, it speaks of liberation, not just ceasefires. 

Zohran Mamdani is the mirror empire holds up to show how much it has learned, how far it can move without changing at all. And if we celebrate that, then the loss is already ours – not because he won, but because we mistook his victory for our own.

Marwa Yousuf K. is a writer exploring how politics and faith shape life in Occupied Kashmir and beyond, with contributions to local publications and community platforms.

On "No Kings" and Liberalism: Analysis

The System Cannot Change From Within — On "No Kings" and Liberalism: Analysis

On "No Kings" and Liberalism: Analysis

Article 9 of 9

Voice of the Proletariat

By Park Jee-hoon

Originally published at https://voiceoftheproletariat.substack.com/p/no-kings-and-liberalism

Publication Date: March 29, 2026

Why is it said that we must combat liberalism?

In the West, the regions in which a Liberal or Democratic party is deceptively considered “leftist,” is it not beneficial to support any group that claims to work against the so-called “right-wing” groups? Of course not!

Liberals know only to vocally complain—to voice their “intense anger” by raising signs at state-sanctioned parades marketed as protests, then pat themselves on the back for feeling as if they have done something.

Yet they wholly refuse to make any contributions to any material revolution, let alone a socialist one. At the end of the day, they wish for the status quo to remain unchanged.

This is why we say that liberals and conservatives are the same.¹ Both uphold imperialism and allow for the continuation of capitalist exploitation, so long as the one waging these wars fits their “diverse” criteria. So long as it is a Black woman committing genocide in Palestine and not a white man, they will turn a blind eye!

They do not care for internationalism, nor the struggle of those exploited workers in the Global South. To them, only they themselves matter.

Many have voiced concerns regarding the recent “No Kings” protests across Imperialist America. BettBeat Media writes of the newest wave:

Do you know what was happening while Bruce Springsteen played his new single in Minnesota? Do you know what was happening while a woman in Los Angeles wore a blow-up flamingo and told a reporter that the protest was an “opportunity to make a statement and respond with silliness to the silliness the administration is doing?”

Silliness.

One hundred and seventy-five schoolgirls in Minab were dying. Thousands of Iranians were dying. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian innocents were dying. That is what was happening.

Silliness.

It is the perfect word — not for what happened to the victims, but for what the West chose to do instead. Dancing, waving flags, squeezing into costumes — this is what passes for protest when the protest is designed never to threaten the thing it claims to oppose.

“No Kings” does not care about the Trump administration. These so-called “protests” are merely meant for optics—news networks have described them as perhaps “the largest day of demonstrations in the nation’s history.” This is why liberals oppose ICE: an imperialist form of oppression turned inward. They attend for the adrenaline and the mere feeling that they have “done something,” regardless of its effect (or lack thereof).

Does this matter at all when no material change is caused? Will Imperialist America immediately stop interfering in other countries’ affairs because some white liberals showed up to the streets in Halloween outfits?

Frankly, the liberals do not even truly care for their own immigrants or People of Colour—only that these deportations inconvenience them. They want peace, but only for themselves. They could not care less for the genocides in Palestine or in the Congo. These are “far away” issues that they “can do nothing about” and can ignore whenever they desire. Are the Palestinians and Iranians being actively bombed able to simply “tune out” the horrors of Imperialist America’s wars as the Americans are?

The lack of attention on foreign policy is also seen rather clearly in the “No Kings” movement’s own views as well. Robert Inlakesh of The Palestine Chronicle writes:

On the No Kings official website, there was notably no mention of Donald Trump’s pro-war policies, including his continuation of the Gaza genocide, attack on Iran that was opposed by the overwhelming majority of the American public, and his continued friendship with Israel.

While some commentators defended No Kings for their relative silence on such issues, arguing that it is a protest movement focused primarily on domestic issues, such as ICE raids, creeping authoritarianism, and funding cuts to federal programs, the No Kings website itself does make mention of foreign protest movements.

For example, the website urged demonstrators to wear Yellow. “Throughout history, people who have come together in protest against authoritarian regimes have utilized a color that is easy to see among a sea of thousands,” it states.

It then goes on to cite the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, where demonstrators used yellow umbrellas and yellow ribbons used to represent resistance to Russia in Ukraine, as its two specific examples to align the movement with. Both of these examples are in line with the US foreign policy interests shared between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the Hong Kong protests, in both 2014 and 2019, the US government was accused of directly interfering and helping to direct the demonstrations, especially through its CIA-linked soft-power projects like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

He continues:

When reading more into Levin’s views, it is clear that the line he adopts is very similar to that of Indivisible, in that it unequivocally condemns the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack, labeling Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a response, while also assuming the position that Israel has gone too far and committed war crimes. While this view often tries to equivocate between the violence of Palestinians under occupation and Israel, it is still in line with the more progressive strain of thinking associated with Democratic Party members.

[At] one of the protest locations itself, some of the pro-Democratic Party voices began making scenes over anti-war activists attending with Palestinian flags. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK was even approached by a woman who attempted to force attendants of the No Kings demonstration holding Palestinian flags to leave, stating, “You are in the wrong place”.

Chairman Mao Tse-tung referred to liberalism as a “manifestation of opportunism,” one that “conflicts fundamentally with Marxism.” This performative opportunism is seen most notably in the inconsistent, fluctuating support for Palestine within liberal circles. The settlers in Imperialist America feel as if they have the moral authority to condemn Hamas or the Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, despite both contributing much more concretely to the Palestinian cause than these liberals themselves.

It is also seen in the rhetoric of “social democrats” and “democratic socialists” who “condemn both sides” of imperialist conflicts, using so-called “nuance” to validate their empty words. Their actions are inherently insufficient and reactionary. Worse are the voters who praise their words uncritically, offering blind support regardless of contradictions. This is why we reject liberalism.

It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.

All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.

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Citations

Citations

From Liberalism to Fascism: An Analysis of the Social Basis of Fascism

Notes

Engels, “Introduction,” The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 10.

Engels, “Introduction,” 11.

Yuri Andropov, “Karl Marx’s teaching and some of the problems in the building of socialism in the USSR,” in Karl Marx and our time (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), 14.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The classical tradition (Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1996 [1927]), 30.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999 [1925-6]), 528.

On Italian capital and fascist alignment, see Adrian Lyttelton, The seizure of power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004).

The Fission of the Global Ideological Spectrum and 21st-Century Re-Globalisation

Notes

¹ Richard Polenberg, The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

² Sanjay Seth, ‘Lenin’s Formulation of Marxism: The Colonial Question as a National Question’, History of Political Thought 13, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 99–128.

³ Jennifer Mittelstadt, a historian at Rutgers University in the United States, conducted the research project titled ‘Sovereignty and Subversion: The Global Agenda of the Grassroots Right’, which offers an in-depth study of Western right-wing sovereignty movements. Her op-ed in The New York Times presents a systematic overview of the American right-wing sovereignty movement. See: ‘Why Does Trump Threaten America’s Allies? Hint: It Starts in 1919’, The New York Times, 2 February 2025.

⁴ Jake Altman, Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Moment from Romance to Revisionism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

⁵ This notion of sovereigntism differs from the ‘sovereignty faction’ discussed earlier. It refers to a doctrine of national sovereignty promoted by the United States after the World Anti-Fascist War, in opposition to Soviet internationalism. A representative strategist of this thinking was Hans Morgenthau. See: Hans Morgenthau, ‘The Problem of Sovereignty Reconsidered’, Columbia Law Review 48, no. 3 (April 1948): 341–365.

⁶ David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁷ Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post–Cold War Order (Cornell University Press, 2016).

⁸ Editor’s note: The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence were first outlined in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement, known in Hindi as Panchsheel. These principles include: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.

⁹ In September 1993, Anthony Lake, then Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, delivered a speech titled ‘From Containment to Enlargement’, which marked a strategic shift in US foreign policy from the Cold War–era doctrine of containment to a more proactive strategy of enlargement. This new approach emphasised support for liberal democracy and market economies and aimed to shape a world order aligned with US values and interests through economic power and multilateral cooperation. See: ‘Remarks of Anthony Lake: Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs: From Containment to Enlargement’, Johns Hopkins University, 26 September 1993.

¹⁰ The following works analyse the internal disruptions that globalisation has caused within Western societies: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014); Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Forum Books, 2013); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (HarperCollins, 2016).

¹¹ British historian Paul Kennedy proposed the theory of ‘imperial overstretch’, arguing that hegemonic states in history often declined due to an imbalance between external commitments and internal resources. He warned that the United States might follow a similar trajectory. This perspective sparked intense debate among strategists and politicians in the United States during the final years of the Cold War. See: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Vintage, 1988).

¹² Flavio Romano, Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the Third Way (Routledge, 2005); Hubert Zimmermann, The End of the Age of Military Intervention: Liberal Interventionism and Global Order Since the End of the Cold War (Routledge, 2023).

¹³ Justin Vaïsse, ‘Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy’, Brookings Institution, 3 August 2010.

¹⁴ Eric Kaufmann, ‘Left-Modernist Extremism’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, vol. 2, ed. Jens Rydgren (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023), 295–311.

¹⁵ Samuel Freeman, ‘Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 2 (April 2001): 105–151.

¹⁶ Tyler Pager, ‘Trump Orders Gutting of 7 Agencies, Including Voice of America’s Parent’, The New York Times, 15 March 2025.

¹⁷ J. D. Vance, ‘Remarks by the Vice President at the Munich Security Conference’, Office of the Vice President of the United States, 14 February, 2025.

¹⁸ Since the 2008 global financial crisis, Europe has seen a surge of political and intellectual works reflecting on liberalism, expressing concern over multiculturalism, globalisation, and the erosion of national identity. For example, French right-wing commentator Éric Zemmour harshly criticised liberalism and immigration policy in La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (2021). Former German Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin argued in Deutschland schafft sich ab (2010) that large-scale Muslim immigration would undermine Germany’s culture, education, and social cohesion.

¹⁹ On 26 July 2014, at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp, Viktor Orbán introduced the concept of ‘illiberalism’, stating that Hungary was building an illiberal state. He cited countries such as Singapore and China as successful models that had achieved economic development without being liberal states.

²⁰ Following the 9/11 attacks, Vladimir Putin swiftly declared in a televised address his support for the US-led anti-terror coalition. He expressed Russia’s willingness to assist the Northern Alliance, permit US military access to Central Asia, and signalled interest in securing American concessions on trade and security in exchange for counterterrorism cooperation. These included lifting Cold War–era trade restrictions, debt restructuring, accession to the World Trade Organisation, and – most crucially – a postponement or cancellation of NATO’s eastward expansion. Putin even left open the possibility of Russia eventually joining NATO. See: Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution (Scribner, 2005), 83–84.

²¹ In 1990, then US Secretary of State Baker made an informal assurance to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand ‘one inch eastward’. In the decades that followed, however, NATO expanded steadily and initiated ‘intensive dialogues’ with Ukraine and Georgia, bringing military borders closer to Russia’s doorstep. To many Russian elites, this was a fundamental violation of the postwar European security consensus. The resulting strategic squeeze intensified Russia’s sense of insecurity. See: Timothy J. Colton, Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–125.

²² For example, Alexander Dugin, a leading figure of ‘neo-Eurasianism’, argued that Russian civilisation is distinct from both East and West and should be founded on the values of state, nation, and religion to resist Western cultural and political encroachment. Yevgeny Primakov promoted the idea of a ‘multipolar world’, emphasising that Russia should act as an independent great power in international affairs, rather than follow a US-led unipolar order. See: Alexander Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, vol. 1 (Arktos, 2012); Yevgeny Primakov, Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millennium (Yale University Press, 2008).

²³ David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Russia’s Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia [《从戈尔巴乔夫到普京的俄罗斯道路：苏联体制的终结和新俄罗斯》], trans. Li Xiuhui [李秀慧译], (China Renmin University Press [中国人民大学出版社], 2015).

²⁴ In his 2013 speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin explicitly criticised European countries for ‘rejecting their roots, including Christian values’ and emphasised that Russia must defend values that have developed over millennia. In the same year, Russia passed an anti-LGBTQ law, which banned ‘promoting non-traditional sexual relations’ to minors. In 2023, Russia implemented a full ban on legal gender change for transgender people and imposed restrictions on related medical interventions.

²⁵ For example, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of the MAGA camp publicly praised Russia as ‘a staunch defender of Christianity’. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn also repeatedly lauded Putin in public speeches for ‘defending God and family’. In 2024, prominent US media personality Tucker Carlson travelled to Moscow to interview Putin in person, further amplifying Russia’s symbolic role as an ‘anti-woke culture ally’. See: ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene Applauds Russia for “Protecting Christianity”’, Newsweek, 8 April 2024; ‘Mike Flynn Lauds President Putin’s Words on “Family & God as Strong Values West is Destroying”’, Sputnik, 23 February 2023; ‘Interview to Tucker Carlson – President of Russia’, Kremlin.ru, 8 February 2024.

²⁶ Zsuzsanna Szelényi, Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary (Hurst Publishers, 2022).

²⁷ Sergei Glazyev, then economic advisor to the Russian president, argued that China’s success – characterised by state-led development, long-term industrial policy, and a global strategy centred on the Belt and Road Initiative – offered a viable institutional model for Russia. In a speech at the Moscow Economic Forum, he emphasised that China’s experience in channelling credit to the real economy and curbing financial bubbles is worth emulating as Russia pursues its own modernisation. See: Sergei Glazyev, Leaping into the Future: China and Russia in the New World Tech-Economic Paradigm, (Royal Collins Publishing Company, 2023); ‘МЭФ-2023: № 2. «Китай. Опыт модернизации для России»’, Moscow Economic Forum, 2023.

²⁸ Eric Li, Party Life: Chinese Governance and the World Beyond Liberalism (Springer Nature, 2023), 18–21.

²⁹ Li, Party Life: Chinese Governance and the World Beyond Liberalism, 37–45.

³⁰ For example, the National Security Strategy of the United States (2022) stated that China is ‘the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective’. In 2019, the European Commission published EU–China: A Strategic Outlook, which for the first time labelled China a systemic rival and competitor attempting to promote alternative models of governance.

³¹ From an ideological perspective, the Trump administration aligned its narrative more closely with Russia and, in pursuit of strategic interests, was willing to sacrifice Ukraine in exchange for détente with Moscow. However, liberal establishment forces within the United States and the European Union strongly opposed this position.

³² Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 [《邓小平文选》第三卷] (People’s Publishing House [人民出版社], 1993), 353.

³³ Yu Sui, ‘We Must Uphold the Central Committee’s Theory of World Multipolarisation’ [‘必须维护党中央的世界多极化理论’], China Strategic Review [《中国战略观察》], no. 3–4 (2022).

³⁴ Joint Statement of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation on World Multipolarisation and the Establishment of a New International Order [《中华人民共和国和俄罗斯联邦关于世界多极化和建立国际新秩序的联合声明》], 23 April 1997.

³⁵ In the Global Development Initiative, China emphasises principles such as ‘development first’ and ‘technology for all’, aiming to restructure the global centre-periphery model and reduce developing countries’ dependence on a single financial and technological system. The Global Security Initiative advances concepts like ‘common security’, ‘indivisible security’, and ‘regional leadership’, with the goal of promoting multicentric and coordinated global governance. Meanwhile, the Global Civilisation Initiative advocates civilisational diversity and equality, criticises value exportation, cultural hegemony, and ideological demarcation; and seeks to break the liberal paradigm’s monopoly over global discourse. Together, the three initiatives constitute a trinitarian vision of global governance with Chinese characteristics, reflecting a vision of international order centred on decentralisation, multipolarity, and de-ideologisation.

³⁶ In his speech marking the centenary of the founding of the CPC, President Xi Jinping proposed a major theoretical proposition: to integrate the basic principles of Marxism with China’s concrete realities and with fine traditional Chinese culture – a formulation known as the Two Integrations.

Challenging Liberalism: Unpacking the Limits of Partyism

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