Image credit: “The Worker of the Future Overthrowing the Chaos of Capitalism” (1935) fresco by Viscount Jack Hastings at the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School in London. Photo by Ben Sutherland via Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons License 2.0.
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Prashad’s latest books are On Cuba (with Noam Chomsky, The New Press, 2024) and The International Monetary Fund Suffocates the World (with Grieve Chelwa, Inkani Books, 2025).
The author is grateful for the immense inputs by Atilio Boron, Atul Chandra, Carlos Ron, Evgeny Morozov, Grieve Chelwa, John Bellamy Foster, Li Bo, Manolo De Los Santos, Michael Brie, Miguel Stedile, Mika Erskog, Shiran Illanperuma, Srujana Bodapati, Stephanie Weatherbee Brito, and Sudhanva Deshpande.
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Aijaz Ahmad (1941–2022), who first referred to the phrase the “intimate embrace” of liberalism and the far right.
The refashioned liberals and social democrats are back. They have positioned themselves as the saviors of the world; they act as Reason to the unreasonableness of neo-fascism. This is possible because their forebearers have collapsed in the puddle of neoliberalism and technocracy, and because their adversaries now present themselves as the howling wolves of the extreme right. The refashioned liberals and social democrats are like zombies, the reanimated corpse of a dead liberalism.1
These refashioned liberals and social democrats have a point. Their immediate predecessors had taken their liberal tradition and exhausted it in the fires of austerity and debt. From the British Labour Party to the Indian Congress Party, the old liberals and social democrats in the West and the anticolonial freedom fronts in the Global South bowed down when the Soviet Union collapsed and began to conform to four realities of their own making:
- That capitalism is eternal.
- That the neoliberal policy framework (capitalism let loose) is inevitable, even if it creates extreme inequality and does not advance social goals.
- That the most that can be done by us is to improve society by ameliorating certain specific social hierarchies (such as those around race, gender, and sexuality).
- Finally, following the poorly conceived warnings of Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944), that pursuing anything more than mere amelioration is folly because it is either bound to fail or inevitably reproduce the “autocracy” and “bureaucracy”‘ of the Soviet Union.2
As the old liberals tied themselves openly to the austerity-debt agenda of neoliberal policy, they refashioned themselves as technocrats and began to style themselves as the sole arbiters of what in popular opinion was acceptable to their technocratic vision. This acceptance by liberals of the gripping pain of austerity and the rejection of its critique allowed the extreme right to cloak itself as the people’s representatives and strike a populist tone through the ugly rhetoric of anti-immigration and “anti-woke,” but marrying it with their incoherent criticisms of the economic system. The extreme right emerged largely on the coattails of liberal surrender to neoliberalism. But the extreme right has not broken with the general outlines of neoliberal policy. It replicates it alongside a harsh social agenda. Despite all the talk of economic nationalism, the extreme right does not have an original economic agenda.
The refashioned liberals and social democrats ignore the surrender of the old liberals to austerity and debt and refuse to do an accounting of the ways in which liberal technocracy laid the foundation stone for the extreme right. To position the return of liberalism as if it could save civilization from the extreme right is misleading, since this refashioned liberalism and social democracy has no different formulation about the way forward than their predecessors. Nothing from the refashioned liberals or the social democrats provides confidence that they are prepared to break the austerity-debt-finance conservatism agenda of neoliberalism. What we have is a left-sounding rhetoric and agitational sensibilities against the system, but incoherence when it comes to how to move beyond the atrocities of capitalism. Specifically, there is nothing in the form of an economic policy that addresses the gross inequality that characterized the neoliberal period. Dig deep into the political agendas and programs of the new social democrats and, amid a festival of identity politics jargon (not even taking seriously the demands for dignity in contexts of social oppression), you will be hard-pressed to find an economic agenda that restores rights or builds power for the masses. At best you will find conservative redistributive policies that attempt to rebuild a middle class that social democracy considers its real base—eschewing any ambition to represent and organize beyond it and into the working class and the peasantry who comprise the vast majority of the world’s people.
A set of slogans—for instance, technofeudalism (Yanis Varoufakis), democratic setbacks (Red Futuro), progressive capitalism (Joseph Stiglitz), rights with responsibilities (Third Way)—breed this disjointedness and offer a nostalgic sense that there was once a democratic system rooted in a perfectly competitive capitalism.3 Such a golden age did not ever exist: capitalist competition is driven toward monopolization, and to the use of state power (often with violence) to exert the will of this or that company, and to reduce the share of wealth that is distributed to society as a whole through wages and taxes, while members of the capitalist class accumulate income and wealth to themselves and amass more capital to continue their dominion.
Further, hearkening back to a “gentler” capitalism of the postwar period ignores that this model depended on the severe exploitation of labor and predatory resource extraction of the Third World—built on the backs of coups d’état and military interventions intended to suffocate the sovereignty of the postcolonial states. While workers in the Global North may have briefly enjoyed marginal stability and relative prosperity during the “Golden Age of Capitalism” (1945–1973), for workers around the globe this was not an age of prosperity. This golden age was built on the neocolonial economic structure of theft that maintained itself through imperialist coups (from Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1973) against any country in the Third World that tried to establish its sovereignty and through the refusal to allow the Third World states to implement the New International Economic Order (1974) formulations voted in by the United Nations General Assembly.4 The neocolonial system financed the golden age, and, through the operations of the International Monetary Fund and the large multinational corporations, it remains the defining system today.5 Capital continues to flow as “tribute” from the Global South to the bank accounts of bond holders in the Global North, most of whom take this liquidity and plough it into a vast financial casino rather than making large-scale industrial investments (although this does not mean that large investments are not being made in actual infrastructure by the billionaire class in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and weapons production).6
A more coherent proposal from the perspective and experience of the Global South would be to rebuild the nationalist economic agendas that were dismantled by U.S. interventionism. This, however, is sorely lacking from the vision advanced by refashioned liberals and social democrats, who have built an analysis derived from wistful nostalgia for European welfare states and the New Deal in the United States. A “return to golden age capitalism” or building a “capitalism with a human face” is an illusion that the world’s people cannot afford.7
A remarkable survey published in 2024 by the Alliance of Democracies called the Democracy Perception Index found that the majority of people questioned about the threats to democracy listed three as the main problems: concentration of income and wealth, corruption, and corporate control over political life.8 Interestingly, 79 percent of the Chinese population say that their country is democratic, much higher than in any Western country. This survey, done by a pro-Western liberal think tank, shows that the Chinese population believes that their government does more for them because it puts the needs of the vast majority ahead of the needs of the capitalists around the world. At a time when there is global interest in socialism, and with the possibilities of finding some lessons from the Chinese experience of breaking the dependency barrier, the return to “progressive capitalism” and social democratic milquetoast ideas seems misplaced. Exhausted ideas of liberal democracy and free market capitalism do not need to be reanimated by a new zombie liberalism.
Karl Marx and the History of Liberalism
The liberal tradition that was born and nourished in the Anglo-American world of ideas was formulated in the context of a struggle against the tyranny of monarchy. Anglo-American writers, such as John Locke (1632–1704), imagined a world without a monarch as sovereign but with propertied interests, referred to as “the people,” as sovereign. Locke argued that the commercial order (capitalism) emerges by the autonomous action of private persons (possessive individualists) without any explicit contract made among them. The task of the state—regardless of its character, with either a king or no king—is to guarantee the basis of private property.
This liberal tradition did not acknowledge its own limitations, such as its racist belief that the only people who could be sovereign were whites and that it was permissible for whites to exterminate the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and to enslave Africans, and its belief that private property was not in contradiction to human freedom. Locke, the ideologue of the Enclosure Movement in England that expropriated the peasantry, wrote, in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), about why the Indigenous peoples of the Americas must lose their land, drawing his justification from the Bible (Genesis, 1.28): “For I ask, whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life, as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated?” Locke, who was the Secretary of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and Secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, made an argument that served his own interests by removing the Indigenous from the lands that he owned and at the same time allowed him the freedom to write about rights that he did not allow for Indigenous people. Not only did Locke justify the expropriation of Indigenous lands, he also was a principal figure in the development of slavery in North America, as an investor in the slave trade through his shares in the Royal African Company and as the principal author of the slave-based Carolina Constitution.9
The republican liberal traditions of the French-speaking peoples that culminated in the French Revolution in 1789 crashed down on the beaches of Haiti with the attempt at preventing the Haitian people from realizing their own republican and liberal ambitions.10 Finally, the German tradition—central to the formulation of liberal principles of law and education, through the work of people such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)—could not overcome the contradictions of the detritus of the Holy Roman Empire, of Napoleon’s confederations, and the rise of Prussia. Hegel thought that Napoleon—”this soul of the world”—would destroy the old German freiherren, and on whose lands would flourish the age of liberty.11 But Napoleon both in victory and defeat failed the Enlightenment liberals, and the Junkers returned with the Hohenzollern dynasty to rule for another century. Reacting to the repressive Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, liberals participated in the continent-wide 1848 uprising, the failure of which to dislodge absolutism led to the liberals’ total disillusionment (many of them—such as Heinrich von Gagern—appealing to Prussia’s Fredrick William IV to wear a constitutional crown in 1849, while in France, Émile Ollivier became Napoleon III’s main liberal ally). Liberal republicanism rapidly faded into constitutional monarchism.
Drawing critically on the limitations of Hegel, the Young Hegelians, and the liberals, all of whom accepted some version of the monarchy, Karl Marx (1818–1883) developed his immanent critique of liberalism, rooting his critique in liberalism’s inability to go beyond the relations of private property that hemmed in its ambitions. What is central to Marx’s early writing on freedom is his acknowledgment that the advances made by the 1789 French Revolution and by liberalism were vital. Political emancipation, he wrote, is “a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.”12 It is not the ideal that Marx disavows but its carriers, the liberals, who end up being so attached to the defense of private property that they become a motley crew unable to clearly advance socialist goals. Marx’s 1852 characterization of the British Whigs (the liberals who opposed monarchy and church control) is apposite:
It is evident what a distastefully heterogenous mixture the character of the British Whigs must turn out to be: Feudalists, who are at the same time Malthusians, money-mongers with feudal prejudices, aristocrats without point of honour, bourgeois without industrial activity, finality-men with progressive phrases, progressists with fanatical Conservatism, traffickers in homeopathical fractions of reforms, fosterers of family—nepotism, Grand Masters of corruption, hypocrites of religion, Tartuffes of politics.13
Some quick annotation of this remarkably efficient quote that applies to today’s liberal parties and to their social democratic intellectuals: Thomas Malthus was a reverend who believed that population growth (rather than capitalist plunder) increased starvation. Finality-men considered the English Reform Bill of 1832 to be the final step in the development of liberalism and opposed the extension of the vote any further, especially to the mass of the population. Tartuffe was a play by Molière about religious hypocrites.
In his later writings on these same themes, Marx would retain the idea of the “big step forward” and of the need to continue to push the class struggle toward “the final form of human emancipation.” In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote that “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” A society with productive forces unable to generate sufficient surplus, and therefore with insufficient leisure and cultural institutions, would not be able by itself to constitute human emancipation. Liberal rights to property in a capitalist system, for instance, guarantees every person the “freedom to own property,” which had been restricted under precapitalist social formations, but it does not guarantee the “freedom from property,” in other words, the freedom from the tyranny imposed on the propertyless. It is only “in a higher phase of communist society” that has moved from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom—with abundance as its characteristic—that one can grasp the social basis for freedom. “Only then,” Marx wrote in 1875, “can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The issue of how to describe “needs” (though he described it as a “hierarchy” starting with the fulfillment of basic needs) is not relevant here.14 The important point is that Marx makes at least three decisive breaks with the earlier liberal tradition:
- That ideas of freedom and right cannot be disassociated from the material conditions of human life.
- That the institution of private property creates a cycle of exploitation and accumulation that transforms the ideas of freedom and equality into their opposites, all without violating the terms of free and equal exchange.
- That the realization of the ideas of freedom and right require the transcendence of private property (the social relations of capitalism) and the creation of a new “world order.”
Marx ultimately demonstrated that liberalism could not realize its values. To take these values forward would require a rupture with capitalism and the formation of a socialist society. But liberals, believing in possessive individualism, did not want to make that break.
Liberalism, nonetheless, continues as a political and philosophical tradition, but now alongside a critique that had shown its limitations. The best of liberalism, arising from the nineteenth century, understood that capitalism generated inequalities, and that the highest form of liberal politics would be to ameliorate these inequalities through social welfare programs.
Across Europe, from Otto von Bismarck’s Staatssozialismus to John Maynard Keynes’s welfare state, and then in the United States through the antitrust actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, grew various strands that recognized the harshness of capitalism and sought to find ways to humanize its impact on the working class. The entire field of debate and dispute about social welfare remained in a close or distant conversation with Marxism, which haunted liberalism as the clearest critique of capitalism and its social impact. Even the traditions that rejected social welfare policies (such as anti-Communist thought, from the John Birch Society in the United States to the Mont Pelerin Society in Europe) had to engage with Marxism, if only as their foil.
From the 1970s onward, however, much more confident versions of anti-Marxism emerged that abandoned social welfare policies and rejected the centrality of the Marxist critique of capitalism. The collapse of the USSR, the debt crisis in the Third World, and the business unionism of Northern unions (a process largely engineered by Washington) led this seam of thought to congeal into variants of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, two distinctly named strands that shared the break from Marxism’s critique and from the cultural centrality of social welfare.
The arrival of these discourses was helped along by the emergence of post-Marxism, which in the name of liberalism participated in the attack on Marxism and returned theory to pre-Marxism (exemplary here is the 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which paved the road from post-Marxism backward to liberalism).15 The rejection of the core elements of Marxism leads directly to incoherence: this form of post-Marxism celebrates struggle for the sake of struggle and offers no strategy or orientation beyond movimentismo and mobilization (as opposed to building organizations and developing a programmatic strategy). Marxism showed that the masses historically cohere around an agenda of building their own strength, and, through organization, use that strength to convert mass struggles into class struggles that focus the power of the people against the capitalists and their state emissaries in order to build a socialist society. All that is sublated by post-Marxism into the unintelligibility of “multiple” and “intersecting” struggles. The message now is do whatever you want to change the world, and something will certainly happen—there is no need to put the question of productive forces or capitalism on the agenda, or indeed for a socialist strategy that includes political parties of a vanguard form. The structural role of capital and labor is obscured by this form of political miscellany.
Revolutions Are Made in the Poorer Nations
Socialism came to us as a possibility. We imagined that the vast wealth produced by social labor could be used by society to enrich each of us. We believed that we could harness new technologies and social wealth to organize production along humane lines, to treat people with dignity and kindness, and to steward the planet rationally. That was our possible history. It remains our possibility. For hundreds of years, sensitive human beings fought to build a world in the image of freedom. Workers and peasants, ordinary people with dirt under their fingernails, threw off the cloak of humiliation put on them by the owners of land and wealth to demand something better. They formed anticolonial movements and socialist movements—movements against the terrorism of hunger and indignity. These were movements: people in motion. They did not accept the present as infinite, their position as static. They were on the move, not only toward the landlord’s house or the factory gates, but toward the future.
These movements produced the revolutions of 1911 (in China, Iran, and Mexico), the revolution of 1917 (against the Tsarist empire), the revolution of 1949 (China), the revolution of 1959 (Cuba), the revolution of 1975 (Vietnam) and many others.16 Each of these revolutions offered a promise: the world need not be organized in the image of the bourgeoisie when it could be developed around the needs of humanity. Why should the majority of the world’s people spend their lives working to build up the wealth of the few, when the purpose of life is so much richer and bolder than that? If the people from China to Cuba were able to overthrow the institutions of humiliation, then anyone could do so. That was the promise of revolutionary change.
The defeat of the German Revolution in 1919 put an end to the possibility that Europe would follow the example of the Bolsheviks and overthrow their martial capitalist regimes. Instead, the revolution prevailed in the Tsarist Empire—a technologically and industrially backward state that had colonized large parts of Asia and Europe. It was then followed by a revolution in Mongolia in 1921, around the same time that various parts of the former Tsarist Empire moved with the revolutionary wave into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
What the October Revolution of 1917 against the Tsar revealed was that ordinary people can set aside the pretense of imperial or democratic liberalism and govern themselves through a socialist-oriented state (the idea of imperial liberalism is illustrated by Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov in Leo Tolstoy’s 1899 novel Resurrection). But more than anything, the October Revolution—like the revolutions that would follow (Vietnam in 1945, China in 1949, and Cuba in 1959)—proved the axioms of V. I. Lenin (1870–1924) to be correct. These axioms (that liberalism would not be capable of revolutionary change, that colonialism had to be overcome, that revolution could take place where the productive forces had not fully developed) inspired generations of revolutionaries in the colonized world to become Leninists, and then Marxist-Leninists (which included people such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, E. M. S. Namboodiripad, and Fidel Castro).17 These general axioms of Marxist-Leninism, fundamentally built on the experience of socialist construction in the Third World, can be theorized into the following:
- Marxism, as it developed in the Second International (with its primary theorist being Karl Kautsky), believed that the revolutionary forces in the advanced capitalist and imperialist bloc, namely the industrial proletariat, would revolt and move history forward toward socialism. This theory did not come to life. Instead, the revolution failed in the capitalist and imperialist core. This was because of a labor aristocracy, or what Lenin defined as an “upper stratum” of the “workers turned bourgeois” in the capitalist core who allied themselves with the capitalist class. In particular, the “labour leaders,” he argued, benefited from the wages of imperialism and strongly imbibed the ideological culture of imperialist liberalism.18
- Instead, the revolutionary breakthroughs occurred in the semicolonies and the colonies, where the workers and peasants formed an alliance to overthrow the colonial rulers and the classes that had grown by their dependence on colonialism. The classes that ruled on behalf of the colonizers had neither the energy nor the program to lead their own society away from colonial domination, or to build a liberal agenda for self-reliance; they could not break with imperialism, only—perhaps—break with direct colonial rule.
- The culture in many semicolonies and colonies (particularly in Africa and Asia) had been thwarted by the refusal of the imperial powers to build modern institutions of education, health, and housing for the colonial subjects, and the culture of the colonies had not incubated a sufficient liberal patina around the institutions of the law and politics. For that reason, the worker- and peasant-controlled states did not include liberalism among their inheritance, but had to create their own ideological forms in the new society. Similar situations existed in Central America and in the Caribbean (including Colombia), where colonial forms of rule persisted despite formal independence and liberalism was fundamentally curtailed. In the Southern Cone, thinkers such as Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884) in Argentina and José Victorino Lastarria (1817–1888) in Chile wrote liberal tracts but had nothing to say about the Indigenous people or of the working class and peasantry in their societies (this was, essentially, Locke three hundred years later). Their liberal theories were in direct opposition to the views of Marxists from the next generation such as Peru’s Mariátegui (1894–1930) and Venezuela’s Salvador de la Plaza (1896–1970).19
- Imperialism had smothered the growth of modern economic systems, including the construction of modern industry and infrastructure. The colonies had been tasked with the production of raw materials, the export of their wealth, and the import of finished goods. This meant that the new revolutionary states took charge of disarticulated dependent economies with few scientific and technical skills.
Each of the revolutionary states that emerged—from the USSR to the People’s Republic of China to the Republic of Cuba—understood this situation and these limitations perfectly well. This is precisely what most of the refashioned liberals and social democrats with left slogans do not grasp: they want to distance themselves from the actual experience of building socialism that does not occur in the capitalist core but rather in the colonial periphery, and that works to build a socialist culture against enormous odds. It is easy to dismiss the one-party state rule or to sniff at “statism” or even “authoritarianism,” easy to adopt the language of Cold War liberalism, but much harder to offer a diagnosis of why the revolutionary developments occurred in the poorer nations and why these revolutionary developments had to go in a way that does not conform to the best gestures of liberal ideology. The socialist experiments in the poorer nations had to confront immediately a list of important tasks, including the following:
To defend the revolutionary process from internal and external attack. This meant to utilize the armed forces and to arm the people, but it also meant to prevent the organization of internal counterrevolutionary forces into a bloc of resistance, using liberal discourses of “freedom” to mask their desire to return to power and to impose the undemocratic regime of property on the vast masses. These were not theoretical debates: the USSR was attacked in 1918, Cuba was blockaded beginning in 1962, and China now faces a serious imperialist buildup off its shores. Liberal states tried to suffocate them from their birth.
To address the immediate problems of the people. Hunger, poverty, and other everyday humiliations faced by the masses had to be overcome as rapidly as possible. This meant using the limited means in society in a manner that was novel to the cultures of cruelty that existed previously. It meant that the revolutionary regime would have to make decisions from the standpoint of all of society that would require certain sections of the working class to work very hard in a short period to produce sufficient goods to fulfill the needs of all of society.
To build the productive forces of the society. Colonial conditions had meant that the poorer nations had neither the infrastructure (particularly electrification and transport systems) nor the industry to produce the goods and services needed to complete the aspirations of the people. This infrastructure and industry would need science, technology, and capital—all of which had been denied to these countries, and therefore would need to be hastily produced both by international solidarity and by the express development of higher education and using raw material exports to be converted into capital for industrialization.
To create the cultural world for the masses. Building educational and cultural institutions to erase illiteracy and to build the confidence of the workers and peasants to rule their own society is a long-term project, whose difficulties should not be underestimated. In all these revolutionary experiences, the most trying part of constructing a new project is to build the clarity, confidence, and dignity of the masses to become the agents of their own history and take charge of the state project, a multifaceted entity necessary for the highly complex digital economies of our times.
The most immediate task was always the first one, particularly after the Second World War, when the technological means of attack had become more sophisticated. Imperialist coups d’état and direct military invasions had become almost normal, and interventions of one kind or the other had been conducted with impunity.
It is interesting that in a country such as Chile, which experienced a vicious imperialist overthrow of the Popular Unity government in 1973, there is so little empathy within the ranks of the refashioned liberals and social democrats, not only in the Frente Amplio but also in sections of the Communist left, with the plight of, for example, Cuba, which not only gave full-throated solidarity to the Popular Unity government between 1970 and 1973, but helped the resistance against the military coup government, and has all along—especially now—faced an illegal and deleterious blockade led by the United States. It is so easy to adopt the language of Cold War liberalism, taken from epigones of the Cold War such as Hannah Arendt, but much harder to understand the complexities of building a revolution in the poorer nations.20
The Marxist revolutions from Russia to Cuba took place in the realm of necessity, not in the realm of freedom. It was difficult for each of these new states—that ruled over regions of great poverty—to marshal the capital necessary for a leap into socialism.
One of them—Vietnam—had been bombed by the United States, including with chemical weapons, until its soil was irreparably contaminated and its infrastructure was destroyed.21 To expect a country like Vietnam to easily transition to socialism is naïve. Each of these countries had to squeeze themselves to collect resources and they made a great many errors against democracy. But these errors are born of the struggles to build socialism; they are not endemic to it. Socialism cannot be condemned because of the errors in any of these countries. Each of these countries is an experiment in a postcapitalist future. We have much to learn from each of them.
Programs of humanity followed these revolutions—projects to enhance the lives of people through universal education and universal health care, projects to make work cooperative and enriching rather than debilitating. Each of these revolutions experimented in different ways with the palate of human emotions: refusing to allow that state institutions and social life be governed by a narrow interpretation of human instinct (greed, for example, which is the emotion around which capitalism is developed). Could “care” and “solidarity” be part of the emotional landscape? Could “greed” and “hate” be ameliorated?
The Need for Clarity and Class Struggle
The current conjuncture requires a movement between two political concepts: sovereignty and dignity. These are intertwined concepts of our era, with different movements and state projects operating with relative degrees of commitment to each of them.
National sovereignty is a state-level concept referring to state projects that push against the intervention of foreign interests and seek to develop a political and economic set of policies that defend the rights and needs of their own people. For a country that has emerged from colonialism, sovereignty is a mechanism to measure how much the country has been able to exit the pressures of colonial rule and imperialist intervention.
To seek sovereignty is by itself a negative assertion, meaning that it is against imperialist intervention; the category of sovereignty itself does not describe the nature of the class relations within the country, allowing for countries to have nonsocialist paths but nonetheless sovereign paths from imperialism (Iran, for instance, is not a socialist state, but it nonetheless seeks sovereignty from the clutches of imperialism). All socialist state projects decidedly seek national sovereignty, but all sovereign seeking projects are not socialist.
Dignity is a people-level concept that refers to the idea that each person and then the social communities to which they belong as social individuals seek dignity in all aspects of their life, from a dignified everyday life (emancipation from poverty and hunger) to a dignified cultural life (celebration of their own cultural heritage as part of human culture).
The concept of dignity is widely shared across human history, from the traditions of Buddhism (everyone has Buddha nature in them) to Stoicism (dignitas or worthiness shared by all rational beings); the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) opens with the recognition of the “inherent dignity” of all “members of the human family.” But dignity is not an a priori fact of humanity (as humanism or liberalism argues); it must be produced as we exit the wretchedness of deprivation (poverty, illiteracy) and form dignified lives (as socialism argues). There is, in other words, a material force that must shape our dignity. A politics to produce dignity is a socialist politics, although others might adopt this or that element of the socialist program. There is no evidence in the world that the capitalist system can emancipate all people from a life of indignity: capitalism inherently generates forms of inequality and indignity. Therefore, all undertakings that seek dignity for all are socialist projects.
One of the most complicated aspects of our present state of the world is that while there is chaos in the North Atlantic world, there seems to be a growing sense of stability in parts of southeast and east Asia. The old imperial powers continue to insist on a world of austerity, debt, and war—ugly ideas that bring grief to billions of people, from those Palestinians who face the Israeli genocide to those who starve to death in their homes because their precarious work does not earn them enough to survive.
Meanwhile, particularly from China, the message is clear: we must work toward peace and development in order to create a shared future for humanity.22 This is a call that increasingly seems more attractive to people around the world. This is where the refashioned liberals and social democrats appear to be so cut off from reality: being accustomed to the Cold War-era liberal language of authoritarianism, they are unwilling to properly acknowledge the great gains made against all odds in places such as China and Vietnam to lift their populations out of poverty, to build new, quality productive forces, and to offer technology transfer and economic and technical collaboration for the industrialization of large parts of the Global South that had suffered from the yoke of the neocolonial structure of globalization. China and other Asian countries have not solved the problems of the world; they do not offer an “off the shelf” model for development. But they offer a stance toward the world—peace and development—that is far more attractive than that offered by the old North Atlantic states in the name of liberalism—austerity, debt, and war.
It is not as if refashioned liberals and social democrats are so eager to build mass movements and to abjure state power. They believe that state power can be won through the ballot box in liberal democracies and that this can be done by disassociating themselves fundamentally from the aim of socialism, from the history of socialism, and from the actual experience of socialist state projects. But that would be a hollow state power, because it would mean taking office without power, without building the movements and political organizations that come with a mass base that is gripped with clarity, confidence, and an appetite to realize full human dignity. The class struggle remains the central battlefront to build the dignified protagonists of the future.
The world wants to advance to socialism.
Notes
The essence of the critique of the far right of a special type and of neoliberalism is drawn from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The False Concept of Populism and the Challenges Facing the Left: A Conjunctural Analysis of Politics in the North Atlantic, Dossier no. 83, December 2024, and Tricontinental, Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type: The Thirty-Third Newsletter (2024), August 15, 2024, thetricontinental.org.- Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944). On the lingering legacies of Hayek and these ideas, see Quinn Slobadian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
- The most insightful critic of the entire tradition of “technofeudalism” is Evgeny Morozov, first in an early essay, “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” New Left Review, no. 133/134 (January–April 2022); and more recently in “What the Techno-Feudalism Prophets Get Wrong,” Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2025, mondediplo.com. The most compelling critique of the “third way” is by Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (London: Polity, 2001). Susan Watkins cleverly calls the dominion of the “third way” of Labour’s Blairism “weightless hegemony” in “A Weightless Hegemony: New Labour’s Role in the Neo-Liberal Order,” New Left Review, no. 25 (January–February 2004).
- The broader story is in my book: Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
- The full story is in Grieve Chelwa and Vijay Prashad, How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (Johannesburg: Inkani Books, 2025).
- Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond, and Fabian Ferrari, “Big AI: Cloud Infrastructure Dependence and the Industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence,” Big Data and Society 11, no. 1 (January–March 2024).
- Note: This essay focuses attention on attempts to resurrect liberalism and social democracy in the Global North. A future essay will deal more specifically with Global South liberalism and social democracy, which has its own range of views and particularities; in that essay, I will expand on the emergence of unique strands of social democratic politics that derive from old anticolonial political fronts, and specifically to analyze the revitalization of religious welfarism.
- Alliance of Democracies, Democracy Perception Index 2024 (Copenhagen: Lantana, 2024), allianceofdemocracies.org.
- Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Paul Cochran, “John Locke on Native Right, Colonial Possession, and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium,” The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 23, no. 3 (September 2018): 225–50; Peter Olsen, “John Locke’s Liberty Was for Whites Only,” New York Times, December 25, 1984.
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
- The term “soul of the world” comes from a letter that G. W. F. Hegel wrote to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer on October 13, 1806.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 3, 155.
- Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11, 331.
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 19; Karl Marx, Texts on Method (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195.
- Antonio Anzaldi Pablo, Sobre Laclau y Mouffe: Para una Critica de la Razon Progresista (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2023). The original book is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985). The term “radical democratic politics” is indicative of the liberal strain that is then elaborated by these authors, such as in Mouffe’s Le politique et ses enjeux: Pour une démocratie plurielle (Paris: La Découverte, 1994) and in Laclau’s edited volume, The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994)—both texts seeing political identity as “discursive” and “democracy” as being a central category of their political thought. Both eventually wrote books on populism, where they argued the case for movimentismo and manifestations over organization, such as Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005) and Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).
- Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2017).
- This entire tradition will be elaborated into a book, October, which I will present in a few years.
- V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000), 40.
- José Carlos Mariátegui, An Anthology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
- On Cold War liberalism, see Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024).
- The United States bombed Korea and Vietnam savagely in the name of liberalism. See Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
- For a general view of the intellectual debates in China, see the regular issues of Wenhua Zongheng produced by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, at thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng.
