The revolutionary development of global Marxism

By Paul Le Blanc

Published date 24 March, 2026

First published at Tempest.

Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics
By Simin Fadaee
Manchester University Press, 2024

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
By Kevin B. Anderson
Verso, 2025

For those wanting to understand our world and help change it for the better, the theoretical system and political orientation developed by Karl Marx and his co-thinkers have been essential. But many critics still denounce Marxism’s supposed limitations as stuck in the bygone industrial capitalism of the 19th century and irredeemably Eurocentric.

The two volumes under review help readers not only to understand flaws in such criticisms, but especially to facilitate an advance in understanding and practical action.

Simin Fadaee’s contribution, Global Marxism, is a valuable starting point. Her achievement is to identify and briefly describe nine relatively diverse and incredibly important political activists, theorists and leaders who arose within and powerfully impacted upon the history of the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America). For each, Fadaee also offers a straightforward précis of their ideas, connecting them to Marxist ideology.

Fadaee’s selection is limited, but those she draws together in this concise volume have unquestionably been important in the history of their countries and of the world: Jawaharlal Nehru (India); Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam); Mao Zedong (China); Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana); Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands); Frantz Fanon (African Diaspora; France; Martinique, Algeria); Ernesto Che Guevara (Argentina, Cuba); Ali Shariati (Iran); and Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente – more widely known as Subcommandante Marcos (Mexico). There are surveys of what they said and did, with reference also to some of the important secondary studies on each of the nine, enabling readers to continue with further explorations.

Fadaee is intent on showing “how Marxism is a living tradition that has been the cornerstone of revolutionary practice and theory for leaders and revolutionaries of the global South for the collective struggles they led or inspired.” She insists that “for an honest and accurate evaluation of Marxist theory and practice, we need to know what Marxism means in different contexts and how it has been adapted in local and national struggles.” The contributions of these nine figures, she adds, represent a “creative engagement [that] not only localized and indigenized Marxism, but also globalized it” (Fadaee, pp. 216, 217).

A significant limitation, however, is that Fadaee’s account of the theory and practice of the nine is uncritical — the ideas are summarized rather than analyzed. As one progresses through the various summaries, it is apparent that the views of some of the nine are inconsistent with each other. Rather than providing an integrated analytical discussion, the volume presents us with nine silos of theory and practice. But it might be that more would be learned if the different conceptions were brought into contact and confrontation with each other.

In a critical study Mao Zedong Thought, for example, Mao’s countryman Wang Fanxi comments that “Mao had only a smattering of Marxist knowledge, a few general principles and organizational or executive methods, made in the Stalinist factory of ideas and given a Lenin varnish,” concluding that “Mao’s thinking occupies a tiny space on the spectrum of revolutionary thinking, or, by comparison with Marx, no place at all” (Fanxi, p. 267). It may be that Wang’s point is overstated or entirely wrong — but such a critique is simply beyond the scope of what Fadaee offers us.

If one wants to comprehend the reality of the Marxism that is integral to the Global South, one should be aware of — and ultimately engage with the contributions of — not only Fadaee’s nine, but at least some of the other Marxists from the same time and place. One could compile a list of thirty additional individuals about whom one could say — as Fadaee says about the nine — that these revolutionaries “faced very different challenges and Marxism offered a methodology that enabled them to link the local and national to the global in a way that engendered different forms of political engagement.” They found in Marxism, as she puts it, “a powerful framework that helped understand and change the world” – helping as well to create “a dynamic and diverse Marxism that is rooted in the lessons of various sites of historical and cultural struggles” (Fadaee, pp. 219, 223, 226).

Here is a list of such people worth engaging with: Anouar Abdel-Malek (Egypt; France); Neville Alexander (South Africa); Samir Amin (Egypt; France); Walden Bello (Philippines); Chen Duxiu (China); Chen Pilan (China); Ding Ling (China); W.E.B. Du Bois (African Diaspora; U.S.); Carlos Fonseca (Nicaragua); Kumar Ghoshal (India); Chris Hani (South Africa); C.L.R. James (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.; Britain); Claudia Jones (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.; Britain); Leila Khaled (Palestine); D.D. Kosambi (India); Liu Shaoqi (China); Lu Xun (China); Nelson Mandela (South Africa); José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru); Farabundo Marti (El Salvador); Claude McKay (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.); Julio Antonio Mella (Cuba); George Padmore (African Diaspora; West Indies; Britain); Walter Rodney (African Diaspora; West Indies); M.N. Roy (India); Tan Malaka (Indonesia); Dora Maria Tellez (Nicaragua); Peng Shuzhi (China); Ta Thu Thau (Vietnam); Wang Fanxi (China); Zheng Chaolin (China). In fact, this list could be expanded 10 times and still not be complete.

Yet to a significant degree, this criticism is unfair and foolish. If Fadaee did for all these what she has done for the nine, the result would be many thick volumes that would be quite unreadable for most human beings. Instead, she has produced a readable and informative volume which advances the project of developing a genuinely global Marxism. The nine are employed to highlight the relevance of Marxism to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the fact that revolutionaries from these continents have had an impact upon Marxism itself. The fact is that Fadaee’s book is useful as a starting point.

We continue to be faced, nonetheless, with the dilemma of determining precisely what is the globalized Marxism that can advance human liberation? One is reminded of a snippet of dialogue between two characters in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (p. 244) — Robert Jordan, an American intellectual and munitions expert in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, is talking with a highly-placed Soviet journalist and operative named Karlov (based on Mikhail Koltsov, whom Hemingway befriended in Spain):

Karlov: … How much dialectics have you read?

Jordon: I have read the Handbook of Marxism that Emil Burns edited. That is all.

Karlov: If you read it all that is quite a little. …

The Handbook of Marxism (1935) — with over 1000 pages that included substantial selections from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin — published by Random House and also by International Publishers in the United States, and by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in Britain, essentially constitutes what represented Marxism for most 20th century adherents from the 1930s onward.

Yet such Stalin-inflected Marxism was only one variant of that ideology. Isaac Deutscher’s 1949 classic, Stalin (p. 118) comments that the Marxist outlook “science, philosophy, sociology, politics, and tactics were closely knit into a single system of ideas,” and yet, as Deutscher noted, “the interest of practitioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited.” He elaborates: “They accepted certain basic formulas of Marxist philosophy, handed down to them by the popularizers of the doctrine, as a matter of intellectual and political convenience. These formulas seemed to offer wonderful clues to the most complex problems — and nothing can be as reassuring to the half-educated as the possession of such clues.” He adds that while many adherents “enjoyed Marxism as a mental labor-saving device, easy to handle and fabulously effective,” they had little sense of immense research behind this “labor-saving gadget” with which they engaged in a “narrowly utilitarian fashion.” Deutscher explains that Lenin was different: “Unlike many of his followers, Lenin was the critical student in the laboratory of thought.” While “he always turned his findings to some political use,” and his findings “never shook him in his Marxist convictions,” his research and analysis was pursued “with an open and disinterested mind.”

Lenin’s approach is suggested by three pieces of commentary (shared in my Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, pp. 72, 149, 163):

1. Discussing Hegel’s approach to the dialectics of reality and of research, Lenin emphasized “living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical growing into a whole out of each shade) — here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with ‘metaphysical’ materialism.”
2. Discussing the limitations of many Social Democratic adherents of Marxism, he complained of “their slavish imitation of the past” with an understanding of Marxism that was “impossibly pedantic” and failing to understand Marx’s “revolutionary dialectics” which understood that “in times of revolution the utmost flexibility is demanded.” Instead they “walk around and about … like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.” Inclined to see how things developed in Western Europe as a universal model for all places and all times, they failed to comprehend an essential point: “While the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but on the contrary presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development.”
3. Discussing the limitations of many Communist adherents of Marxism, Lenin was especially exasperated by pseudo-revolutionary pretentiousness, insisting that “we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then to see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life.”

The approach suggested by these comments is the focus of the new book by Kevin Anderson — the final installment of an invaluable trilogy: Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study (1995), Marx at the Margins (2010), and now The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads.

Anderson — along with his mentor Raya Dunayevskya, plus Marx scholars Lawrence Krader, Teodor Shanin, and Michael Löwy — has been in the forefront of Marx scholars stressing the importance of the research and writing of “the late Marx” (from 1869 to 1882). These writings are often minimized by earlier scholars and activists — definitely Joseph Stalin, but sometimes even including Marx’s theoretical co-thinker Frederick Engels. Anderson acknowledges that at “a very general level, Engels and Marx are mostly in accord.” But there are also significant nuances of difference, which flowed from Marx’s greater engagement with Hegelian dialectics and from his unceasing and intensive new researches into historical and socio-cultural realities: of indigenous peoples of North America and elsewhere; of ancient Rome; of Russia (for which he taught himself Russian); of Ireland; of India; of differences in socio-economic and cultural developments between Western European and other parts of the world.

Among Marx scholars there has long been a debate over who represents the “real” or “best” Karl Marx — the philosophical and militantly humanistic “young Marx” or the “mature Marx” of later years, grounded in rigorous economic and sociological studies. And now we have a “late Marx” who seems to overturn much of what Marx produced from the late 1840s to the late 1860s. Anderson embraces all three — young, mature, and late — insisting on an underlying continuity but also perceiving changes, growth, and development in Marx’s thought. This was beautifully expressed decades earlier by pioneering Marx scholar Teodor Shanin, who insisted “there was neither ‘epistemological rupture’ in Marx’s thought nor decline or retreat, but constant transformation, uneven as such processes are. His last decade was a conceptual leap, cut short by his death” (Shanin, p. 33). Anderson’s Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads further documents and celebrates the changes and development that culminated in an approach richer, more dialectical, more vibrant (and far more adequate for our own time) than can be found in Emile Burns’ Handbook of Marxism.

In The Communist Manifesto and other writings from the late 1840s to 1859, Anderson suggests, there definitely is a Eurocentric dimension in the perspective that Marx and Engels lay out — indicating that “undeveloped” countries can see their future by looking at the industrially developed capitalist countries, and that human society across the face of the planet invariably evolves, as was the case in Western Europe, from “primitive” tribal communism to slave civilizations, then to feudalism, followed by capitalism, which is destined to give way to socialist revolution. This unilinear conceptualization of the “mature Marx” is superseded by a multilinear approach of the “late Marx,” who perceives different pathways of development in the world, alongside Western Europe’s historical evolution described (and overgeneralized) in The Communist Manifesto.

Anderson documents that even Engels did not fully comprehend all that Marx was developing before his final year. Lenin was able to grasp much (but not all) that eluded what Anderson refers to as “post-Marx Marxists,” and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution captured much but hardly all of its complexity. One is reminded of Rosa Luxemburg’s 1903 comment that Marx’s “detailed and comprehensive analysis … and … method of historical research with its immeasurable field of application … offered much more than was directly essential for the practical conduct of the class war.” She added that “as our movement progresses and demands the solution of new practical problems … we dip once more into the treasury of Marx’s thought,” going on to lament that the inclination to “go on working in old ruts of thought” was causing “the theoretical utilization of the Marxist system [to] proceed very slowly” (Luxemburg, p. 111).

One is struck, in much of what Marx was doing in his final years, by the profoundly revolutionary qualities of his thought, consistent with his youthful admonition of 1843 — “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.” And as Sidney Hook more than once noted, the aging reformist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein (certainly in a position to know) long ago put his finger on this quality with the comment that “Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak in him!” (Quoted in Hook, p. 43).

From explorations in the history of ancient Rome to developments in India (both ancient and modern) and Ireland, to commentary on current realities in the vast expanses of Russia and the United States, Marx invariably focuses on class dynamics and revolutionary possibilities. Often these possibilities involve a convergence of multiple developments and struggles and — according to Anderson (p. 237) — with a “theoretical originality … which not only breaks new ground but still speaks to us today on issues often considered under the term ‘intersectionality,’” that is, the dynamic interplay with class of other forms of experience and struggle grounded in race and ethnicity, gender, and other forms of identity.

Along with attention Marx gives to class struggle infused with intersectionality, we find a revolutionary internationalism which explodes Eurocentric paradigms – an increasingly interactive globalism related to the interplay of the so-called periphery and core of global capitalism. Where he once envisioned the highly industrialized regions of Western Europe leading the way to socialist revolution, the late Marx, as Anderson puts it, “now sees revolutionary change in Western Europe emanating from the periphery — in the cases of Ireland and Russia — and moving to the core” (p. 233).

What also comes through in Anderson’s study is Marx’s increasing attention to revolutionary possibilities in Russia and the United States.

Regarding Russia, this is convincingly argued and well documented in Teodor Shanin’s 1983 classic Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, republished by Verso in 2018. But of course the point is also beautifully and succinctly made in the preface Marx and Engels wrote for the 1882 Russian translation of The Communist Manifesto.

Regarding the United States, the massive and explosive working-class upsurge of 1877, ignited by rebellious railroad workers, caused Marx to note (in a letter to Engels dated July 25, 1877): “This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labor party in the United States.” He also noted two additional “favorable circumstances.” One resulted from the terrible betrayal of the democratic promise represented by Reconstruction: “The policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers …” The second involved “the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favor of railway, mining, etc., companies,” which Marx believed “will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers.” This and much else can be found in Robin Blackburn’s study of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Era and rapid spread of capitalist industrialization in An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), also published by Verso.

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads is an important contribution for those wishing to comprehend both past and present, and especially to those who seek to help shape the future.

Works cited

Anderson, Kevin. The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism. London, UK: Verso, 2025

Anderson, Kevin. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study. Urbana, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995.

Anderson, Kevin. Marx at the Margins, Expanded Edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016.

Burns, Emil, ed., Handbook of Marxism. New York: International Publishers, 1935.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin, A Political Biography, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Fabaee, Simin. Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024.

Fanxi, Wang. Mao Zedong Thought. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner’s, 1940.

Hook, Sidney. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. New York: John Day Co., 1933.

Le Blanc, Paul. Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 2023.

Luxemburg, Rosa. “Stagnation and Progress in Marxism,” in Mary-Alice Waters, ed. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. New York, 1970.

Shanin, Teodor. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2018; first published by Monthly Review Press, 1983.

What Might Lenin Have Thought About the US-Israeli War on Iran (and the War in Ukraine)

by Stephen Gowans / March 17th, 2026

Facit indignatio versum
(Indignation makes my verses) – Juvenal

In his analyses of the causes of the first world war, Lenin stressed the importance of understanding the policies the belligerent states pursued before the war. Borrowing from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Bolshevik leader argued that war is politics by other (namely, violent) means. Clausewitz put it this way: “War is policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen.” Lenin echoed Clausewitz: All “war is but a continuation by violent means of the politics which the belligerent states and their ruling classes had been conducting for many years, sometimes for decades, before the outbreak of war.”

So, what policies were the belligerents pursuing by the pen, before they took up the sword? The answer, in Lenin’s view, explained what caused the war. If “you have not studied the policies of [the] belligerent groups over a period of decades … then you don’t understand what this war is all about,” he wrote.

All the belligerents, argued Lenin, were pursuing the same policy: they were reaching across the world for opportunities to dominate its economic surpluses wherever they could be found.  They had been able to do this, for a time, without each greatly impeding the other. However, they had arrived at the point where this was no longer possible. The sum total of opportunities had been completely claimed, and acquiring new ones, could only mean encroaching upon the opportunities that other states, or more specifically, other ruling classes, claimed for their own. The cause of the war, then, was “the whole policy of the entire system of European states in their economic and political interrelations.” The war, said Lenin “steadily and inevitably grew out of this system.”

The word ‘system’ is important. Lenin saw powerful states as actors hopelessly entangled in a system of inter-state relations which pit one against the other for economic advantage. This was a system in which individual states, acting on behalf of, and as the instruments of, individual ruling classes, competed for opportunities to exploit labor and acquire raw materials in order to appropriate as much of the world’s economic surpluses as they possibly could. As a class, said Engels, the bourgeoisie has a common interest and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against bourgeois of other nations outside the country. What do ruling classes do? Exploit the labor of subordinate classes. So, when the common interest of one ruling class is directed against the common interest of another, it is directed against encroaching on territory over which the other exploits labor.  The community of interest against the ruling classes of other states took both non-violent (by the pen) and violent (by the sword) forms. “These policies,” argued Lenin, “show … continuous economic rivalry between the world’s … greatest giants, capitalist economies.”

In light of his analysis, Lenin believed that the question of which belligerent fired the first shot in the war—that is, which, in today’s terms, launched a war of aggression contra international law—was beside the point, for each was pursuing a policy that would inevitably lead to war.  As he put it: “This war is the continuation of a policy of … conquest, of capitalist robbery on the part of [the states] involved in the war. Obviously, the question of which [state] was the first to draw the knife is of small account to us.” Why? To reiterate: “Everybody was preparing for the war; the attack was made by the one who considered it most auspicious for himself at a given moment.” Another would have turned to the sword first, if, in the moment, violence was the means judged to be most suitable to the pursuit of policy.  For this reason, Lenin refused to blame Germany for starting the first world war, even though the Kaiser declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium.  “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”

Much of the discourse on the current war in Ukraine is concerned with the question of which state started it. If we take Lenin’s view, the question is of no consequence, since the origin of the war lies not in Valdimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops thundering across the border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, or the decisions of US and NATO leaders to renege on their promises to assuage Russian security concerns by forbearing from NATO expansion into the former Russian sphere of influence. It lies instead in the rivalry between the Atlantic Alliance and Moscow for the economic interests of their respective ruling classes.

When I say the economic interests of the ruling classes I don’t mean specific deals, or pipeline routes, or mining concessions, although they may be involved. I mean, something broader: the ability of a ruling class to exploit opportunities for capital accumulation over as wide a territory as possible—which means at home, and if the state is strong enough, abroad. The existence of multiple ruling classes obviously complicates matters. Since there are multiple states, hence multiple ruling classes, there are multiple ongoing efforts to exploit the same economic spaces. This isn’t to say that security concerns aren’t relevant. The first job of a ruling class is to survive. Security concerns very likely played a part in Moscow’s decision to try to conquer Ukraine. But why do exploiting ruling classes want to survive? To exploit.

The Imperialism of Peace

Lenin’s analysis produces the interesting and important concept of the imperialism of peace. If war, in Lenin’s view is simply one means of pursuing a policy for economic space and opportunity, then soft-power, diplomacy, and other non-violent forms of inter-state intercourse, are but alternative methods of pursuing the same policy.  In the words of the German-Polish Marxist, and cofounder of the German Communist Party, the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, policy is pursued as either war or armed peace. Peace treaties may stay a violent hand for a time, but they do not eradicate the rivalry that gives rise to war. On this matter, Lenin and Luxemburg were ad idem with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that a “treaty of peace makes an end to the war of the moment, but not to the conditions of war which at any time may afford a new pretext for opening hostilities” (emphasis added). This is a radical view. To end war, the conditions of war must be eradicated. Peace treaties simply paper over the problem and fail to address the root of war.

In the view of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Kant, inter-state rivalry is ubiquitous and interminable; competition among states is always present, even when violence is absent from their intercourse. If we define war as the effort of one ruling class to impose its will on another, then states are always at war, even if they are not using violence to get their way. Kant again: “A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state, which is rather to be described as a state of war: that is to say, although there is not perhaps always actual open hostility, there is a constant threat that an outbreak may occur” and “the separate existence of a number of neighboring and independent states…is in itself already a state of war.”

Incessant struggle, even in times of formal peace, calls to mind the observations of numerous other thinkers. Lenin’s view was hardly novel.

Clinias of Crete, a character in Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, contended that “Even what most men call peace is but a name. The reality is that every state, by a law of nature, is engaged at all times in an undeclared war against every other state.”

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that: “In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independence, and in ceaseless competition [for power], are in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns, upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a position of war.”

British prime minister Pit the Elder in 1763 accurately predicted that the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War, would be nothing but an armed truce.

French marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently characterized the Treaty of Versailles as “not a peace [but] an armistice for 20 years.”

While every state may be at war with its neighbors, some states are more able, as a matter of their great size and strength, to wage it. Washington is at war with every state (that is every other ruling class) that does not submit to US hegemony. Almost always the war is carried out as the imperialism of peace. For decades, Washington has waged war on Iran by mainly economic means, punctuated, every now and then, by violence, but violence has been the exception. The rule has been daily non-violent coercion extending over decades. The US war on Iran aims to contain and weaken the state so that it is incapable of extending its own domain to territory the US state currently dominates; to demonstrate to other states that what happens to countries that fail to toe the US line is that they will be menaced, throttled, and undermined by the United States, its proxies, or both; and to make Tehran more compliant with US demands favorable to US ruling class interests.

Washington has long held Iran in a cruel economic vice that has immiserated Iranians. The predictable and intended outcome of this campaign has been civil unrest. The program has paid off handsomely for Washington, with the Iranian economy collapsing under the weight of US cruelty. Iranians took the street to demand their government provide relief from the pain, relief Tehran had not the power to provide. Even capitulating to US demands would not bring about the desired relief, since Washington refused to provide any immediate easing of its sanctions. On 20 January, the Wall Street Journal quoted US Treasury Scott Bessent: “U.S. financial pressure ‘has worked because in December, their economy collapsed. This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired.’” To be clear, the reason why civil unrest erupted in Iran was because the United States brought it about, not by accident, not unintentionally, but by malice aforethought.

Bessent’s acknowledgement that the collapse of the Iranian economy is the product of US “economic statecraft”, which is to say the imperialism of peace, is virtually absent from the analyses of the quality, but all the same, Chauvinist and pro-imperialist, US media. No matter how sound their analyses might otherwise be, they cannot help but propagate the fiction that the collapse of economies undermined by US “economic statecraft” is due to the “economic mismanagement” of the targeted “regime.”  Thus, the victim is blamed for the miseries the US ruling class visits upon the victim’s citizens. This is true of the US imperialism of peace in Venezuela and Cuba as much as Iran.

As shocking and deplorable as the current US-Israeli attack on Iran is, is it any more shocking and deplorable than the decades-long dropping of economic atom bombs on the people of Iran by the US state and its bootlicking vassals, Canada, the UK, Germany, and so on? Indeed, it may turn out that US “economic statecraft” has created more misery in Iran than will be created by all the US and Israeli bombs that will be dropped and all the missiles that will be fired in the current campaign of violence. This isn’t to lessen the gravity of the violence unleashed on the Iranians, but to point out that a program of deliberately wrecking an economy and immiserating a people in order to expand the domain over which US and allied billionaires can dominate the world’s economic surpluses is equally deplorable and is as richly deserving of condemnation and opposition as the use of violence to achieve the same end.

Mendacity

As to the claim that Washington and its toadies are engaged in an operation to deter an Iranian threat, we can dispense with this piece of nonsense immediately. The notion that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal and ICBMs to reach the United States is the kind of bald-faced, shameless, mendacity in which the US administration specializes. As the New York Times reported two days ago:

President Trump and his aides assert that Iran:

• Has restarted its nuclear program;
• Has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days; and
• Is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.

But:

• There is no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
• American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

What’s more, US intelligence is of the view that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran, a country dwarfed in population, GDP, and military assets by the United States alone, to say nothing of the United States and its allies, is no more of a threat to the United States than a Boy Scout troop armed with peashooters is a threat to a platoon of US Marines. All threats the chronically mendacious Washington cites are greatly inflated because Washington regards as a threat any state that 1) does not submit to US “leadership” and 2) has a means of self-defense. Iran will only be characterized as a non-threat when it has given up every means of defending itself. Indeed, US demands in its phony negotiations with Iran can be understood as an ultimatum to surrender all means of self-defense or face a withering attack.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nuclear-warheads to place atop them it still wouldn’t be a threat to the physical safety of any person in the United States. North Korea is a nuclear-armed state with, what might very well be the ability to deliver warheads to the continental US by ICBMs, but it is hardly a threat. The reason why is that Pyongyang can’t survive a war with the United States, and therefore would never start one. The same would be true of a nuclear-armed Iran. What a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to is Washington’s latitude to bully Tehran and impose its will on the state. That, in turn, is a threat to the US ruling class project of dominating as much of the world as possible. This, of course, is the aim of every exploiting ruling class, but few have the resources to pursue the goal. Most must be content with defending spheres of exploitation within their own territory, either by resisting the aggressions of larger states seeking to encroach on their own domestic sphere of exploitation, or coming to an arrangement that makes concessions to the larger state’s menacing demands. As for Iran, its failure to follow the path of North Korea is largely responsible for the peril in which it now finds itself. No country in Iran’s position that wishes to pursue an independent path free from the domination of the United States (or any other meddling great power) can afford to be without a nuclear deterrent.¹

Washington may sincerely believe Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and developing ICBMs because it makes sense for the Iranian state to do so in light of Washington’s own conduct.  It should be clear by this point that a view that is consistent with Lenin’s would deny that Washington will ever refrain from behaving in ways that encourage its victims to proliferate. The raison d’etre of the US ruling class is not to live in peace with other ruling classes, but to weaken them and turn them into vassals, and if that can’t be done, to crush them. Letting them be is not an option, any more than choosing not to try to score goals is an option for a hockey team.

International Law

Lenin’s view of war raises a question about whether international law has any practical significance. I would say that the answer is manifestly in the negative and I would hardly be alone in this view. Kant, for example, observed that “Codes [of international law] whether couched in philosophical or diplomatic terms, have not—nor can have—the slightest legal force, because states, as such, are under no common external authority.” Nothing has changed in two hundred years to contradict Kant’s thinking. Large powers and their proteges regularly violate international law without the slightest reservation and do so with impunity. They get away with it because there is no overarching, independent, authority equipped with the means to enforce compliance with international law. The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Given this sad reality, it is “an illusion,” remarked the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, “to preach international law in a world … of capitalist struggle where [the] superiority of weapons is the final arbiter.”

I point this out because much discourse about war, apart from ignoring the imperialism of peace, attaches itself to outraged diatribes against the failure of various states (usually the United States and Israel, the accustomed miscreants) to abide by international law. Carrying on a discussion as if international law and the rules-based order have any significance as guardrails on the conduct of powerful states, focusses attention in the wrong place. The Tartuffe of international law, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, admitted in his vaunted World Economic Forum address what anyone not stultified by the propaganda of the United States and its international lickspittles already knew: That “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false; that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient; that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying vigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” If Venezuela, Iran, or Cuba were to violate international law, they would be held accountable and punished by the UN Security Council, largely a plaything and instrument of the United States.² When the United States and its proxies (Israel especially) violate international law, as they regularly do, nothing happens, except that a chorus of progressive voices bleats fecklessly about US and Israeli crimes, on the assumption presumably that ‘speaking truth to power’ will make the malefactors mend their ways. As the nineteenth-century French novelist Balzac is reputed to have observed: “Laws are spider webs through which big flies pass and little ones get caught.” Despite all the bleating, the big flies continue to pass through the spider webs with scarcely a concern.

To echo Hilferding, it is an illusion to preach international law in a world of struggle among states where the superiority of weapons is the final arbiter. As Lenin, and before him, Marx, argued, though not precisely in these words, inter-state war ends when inter-state rivalry ends. And inter-state rivalry ends, when states end. What should not be forgotten is that the long-range project of socialism is not only the end of class, which is to say the end of exploitation of one group by another, but, as a consequence of this, the end of states.  We say, declared Lenin in a lecture on war and revolution, our aim “is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Notes

• 1
  On the other hand, nuclear weapons would not be a panacea for Iran. While they would very like dampen the war-lust of Washington and Tel Aviv for bombing Iran, they would do little to stop the US-led siege warfare that cripples the country and immiserates its people.
  
  Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical situation is different from that of North Korea, and concluding that what is strategically sound for North Korea is also strategically sound for Iran, may be an error.
  
  North Korea borders two significant powers, Russia and China. As states outside the US orbit, Russia and China are willing to trade with Pyongyang if it’s to their advantage. This makes the DPRK less vulnerable to US economic warfare than Iran, which is isolated geographically from China.
  
  Additionally, Iran is located in, what is for Washington, a strategically important region. West Asia produces a substantial fraction of the world’s petroleum resources, which Washington aims to control in order to exercise leverage over China, Japan, and Europe, which depend on energy imports from the region. In order to control the region, Washington needs regional states to be submissive to US preferences. Inasmuch as Iran refuses to act as a US client, it has been the target of US conventional and economic warfare.
  
  North Korea, in contrast, occupies territory that is less strategically significant for Washington, and therefore, Pyongyang can be more readily ignored. It matters little from the US coign of vantage that North Korea zealously asserts its independence. Doing so doesn’t affect US strategic interests. While it is true that China is considered the United States’ single most important strategic threat, and North Korea abuts China, Washington’s focus on the Indo-pacific region is mainly confined to maintaining control of the First Island Chain, the belt of islands running from Japan through Tawain to the Philippines and Malaysia.
  
  An independent North Korea, then, is less of an impediment to US geopolitical ambitions than an independent Iran, and the United States is therefore less likely to be moved to attack it, nuclear arms or otherwise. It’s not clear that the same calculations apply to Iran. Why take a gamble on attacking North Korea, if the outcome might be a nuclear counter-strike? On the other hand, Washington might be prepared to gamble on attacking a nuclear-armed Iran, in light of Iran’s greater strategic importance.
• 2
  While the Security Council by no means invariably produces resolutions reflecting US preferences, on matters that do not abridge the interests of other permanent members, the council tends to go along with US wishes. Witness, for example, UNSC Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025, which effectively ceded Donald Trump a personal autocracy over Gaza.  It is from this very same resolution that Trump’s Board of Peace was born.  There has been much talk about Trump using his Board, of which he is the chairman, as an alternative to the Security Council.  A case might be made that the Security Council is not the plaything and instrument of the United States, for if it is, why would Trump seek to establish the Board of Peace as a new Security Council? It’s true that a whole loaf is better than nine-tenths of one, but wanting a whole loaf doesn’t prove that you don’t already have nine-tenths of it. In any event, the Board of Peace is comprised, apart from its chairman, of leaders of states with insignificant power that have joined to curry favor with the US president. The Board’s power is in no way equal, much less greater, than that of the Security Council.  It may be able to compel its few members to go along with Trump’s whims, but the Security Council, in theory anyway, can compel the compliance of every UN member state.

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Styephen Gowans is the author of Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform (2019), Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom (2018), and Washington’s Long War on Syria. Read other articles by Stephen, or visit Stephen's website.

 

The Foundations of a Dangerous New MAGA Iteration

By Chris Green

March 15, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Tucker Carlson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

One of the curious phenomena of Israel’s genocidal slaughter in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023 is that  it has moved prominent right wing figures otherwise known for reactionary sadism to express horror at it. Anti-immigrant, white nationalist and conspiracist demagogues like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback have all condemned Israel as genocidal–as has the homophobic former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller, until recently a member of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. 

One would like to think that the sheer epochal horror of Israel’s barbarity has moved these brethren to speak out but it is likely that anti-semitism is a primary motivation for most of them, part of the broader rise of white nationalism within the Republican Party. A recent survey by the right wing Manhattan Institute reported that noticeable minorities of self-identified Republicans under age 50 admit openly expressing racist views (31%) or anti-semitism (25%). 

The trend is symbolized by the appointment of the explicitly white supremacist Kai Schwemmer as political director for the College Republicans. Schwemmer has been a close associate of Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. Fishback has a mutual admiration society with Fuentes, refusing to disavow him, and enjoys provoking outrage by using the term “goy slop,” a white supremacist term used to denote processed food and immoral, corrupting entertainment (TV shows, video games) foisted upon gentiles by Jewish businessmen. Owens indulges in explicit anti-semitism: for example in a typical half-witted rant on the Jimmy Dore podcast in 2024, she demanded that Jewish people answer for the crimes of the Bolshevik revolution–which, she explained, took place “around 1910”–as well as Stalin’s purges. Carlson and Greene have been less explicitly anti-semtic–apart from Greene’s public speculations about California wildfires and Rothschild space lasers–but Carlson has been plausibly accused of indulging in anti-semitic dog whistles with everything from his fulminations about George Soros during his Fox News days to his friendly interviews with Fishback and the Holocaust deniers Fuentes and Darryl Cooper on his current podcast platform.

It is obvious that anti-zionism and anti-semitism is a useful stance for these figures. It gives them transgressive cachet, at least to their credulous followers, especially as more establishment MAGA figures like Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick have tried to expel the likes of Carlson and Owens from the conservative movement. Meanwhile, in Florida, Trump and the national Republican organization have thrown their weight behind Fishback’s gubernatorial primary opponent, congressman Byran Donalds, who is well ahead of Fishback in the polls and in fundraising. The popularity of the “anti-establishment” pose of people like Carlson and Fishback will likely grow as mainstream MAGA headed by President Trump fails to stem economic decay in the United States and involves the country in a destructive war with Iran. 

While people like Carlson and Fishback have been attacked by prominent MAGA figures, they have also received friendly attention from other influential right wing figures. Although Trump vehemently denounced Carlson for the latter’s opposition to his aggression against Iran, as late as January Carlson was a guest of honor at the White House for a conference of oil executives convened to discuss the future of Venezuelan oil (while also speaking during the same time period at a real estate conference in Saudi Arabia alongside Hillary Clinton). Fishback was given a lengthy friendly interview on the enormously popular pro-MAGA Valuetainment podcast in January by the vehemently pro-Israel host Patrick Bet David. Long after he politically flip-flopped from being pro-Israel and writing for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press to accusing Israel of genocide, Fishback posted on X a recent picture of himself in friendly conversation with Weiss, the arch-Zionist and current overseer of the destruction of CBS News whom he praised as “incredible.” 

The truth is that the likes of Carlson and Fishback are not meaningful opponents of Israeli settler colonialism and genocide, even if they are sincere in what they’ve said about the horrors Israel has unleashed on Gaza. They are not meaningful threats to the agendas of any section of the American ruling class; they serve the interests of the latter by scapegoating marginalized communities (like undocumented immigrants) for the troubles of ordinary Americans and encouraging wild conspiracy theories. 

Carlson and Fishback are a breed of Republican in prime position to exploit the ever growing precarity and brutality of life in the United States. In his new book Hated by all the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, New Yorker staff writer Jason Zengerle suggests that Carlson has designs on soon displacing Trump as the leader of MAGA. It would seem that Carlson with his enormously popular podcast network–and the dynamic and iconoclastic aura he projects to right wing audiences with his frequent criticisms of Trump and MAGA from the far right–is indeed in a position to replace Trump. Fishback meanwhile will likely handily lose the Republican gubernatorial primary but is only 31 years old and has enormous room to expand his influence. He has gained a large audience of young men attracted by his appeals to white nationalism and sexism. In spite of his personal, legal and financial troubles, Fishback  may only just be getting started. 

In the continuous void left by the absence of viable left wing politics (reformist or revolutionary), the fascistic right will only continue to grow in this Trumpian age.

DESANTISLAND

This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes

Florida public schools will force students to take a Heritage Foundation-backed class on the “evils of communism.”

By Eleanor J. Bader , 

Truthout

March 10, 2026

Florida Department of Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas speaks during a news conference in Orlando, Florida, on July 15, 2025.Rich Pope / Orlando Sentinel / Tribune News Service via Getty Images

First, there was democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Then, in 2018, socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Rashida Tlaib won seats in the House of Representatives. Seven years later, in the fall of 2025, voters chose socialists Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson to lead New York City and Seattle, upping socialist representation in government to 250 people in 40 states.

These victories reflect the growing influence of socialist ideas and organizations across the U.S., driven in large part by youth. Unsurprisingly, the right wing has taken notice of this growing public appeal and has made it clear that it intends to stop the ascent of socialism — and communism — in their tracks. Their launching pad? Public education in Florida.

Beginning in the fall of 2026, all Florida middle and high school students will be required to take a yearly social studies class on the history of communism. The curriculum has already received the stamp of approval from the conservative Heritage Foundation (the group behind Project 2025), a right-wing nonprofit organization called the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and a NAS spinoff called the Civics Alliance, and it follows on the heels of the state’s 2022 imposition of Victims of Communism Day, which is now held every November 7 to mark the start of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The annual commemoration requires schools to provide a minimum of 45 minutes of instruction on “the horrors of communism” and the “destructiveness of Marxism-Leninism.” Programming is also expected to inculcate “an appreciation for the founding principles of the American republic.” What these principles are is not specified.

The new curriculum builds on this one-day event and also expands the Sunshine State’s commitment to “The Phoenix Declaration: An American Vision for Education,” which was developed by the Heritage Foundation and released in February 2025. According to Florida’s Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas, the state’s official approval of the Declaration — which was announced at a press conference — reflects the state’s “affiliation with the Heritage Foundation” and restricts topics the state has long viewed as pedagogically problematic, including instruction that covers sexual orientation, gender identity, racial inequality, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instead, the Declaration pledges curricula that foster “a love of country” and purportedly teach children to “seek the good, true and beautiful.” To date, Florida is the sole state to have signed on to the Declaration. Kamoutsas and state education officials are arguing that the new History of Communism Standards will uphold the Declaration’s principles and bolster student support for capitalism and free enterprise.

Their rationale is explicit:

Young Americans [sic] avowed fondness for socialism and communism is the corollary of never having been taught about the poverty, cruelty, and mass murder that are characteristic accompaniments of communism in practice. It is difficult to believe that Zohran Mamdani (for example) would have received such enthusiastic support if New York students had been taught about the lamentable catalog of atrocities committed in the name of communism by Lenin and Stalin, by Mao and Pol Pot, by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Moreover, a state DOE press release sings the History of Communism Standards’ praises, saying: “Florida is leading the nation by equipping students with a truthful, in-depth understanding of how communist ideologies suppress individual freedoms, abuse power, and inflict widespread suffering.”

To hammer the idea, the curriculum outlines a range of topics to be covered: how communist espionage undermined U.S. national security and continues to pose a threat to the U.S. and its allies; how communists infiltrated the civil right movement; and how communist indoctrination works, among them. The curriculum presents Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee as “champions of anti-communism”; it denounces collectives; and it extolls the value of private property and the acquisition of individual wealth. Cuba comes in for a particular drubbing: it is described in the curriculum as a key “exporter of revolutionary internationalism,” which, of course, is depicted in negative terms.

“Teachers Already Feel Handcuffed”

Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, is critical of the anti-communist curriculum. Nonetheless, he told Truthout:

Florida’s code of ethics requires educators to teach the state standards. That’s the challenge. Teachers already feel handcuffed. If they want to use their own resources or add a supplemental reading or film, these materials must first be approved by the district. We know that public students need and deserve more than math and reading instruction. They need the honest teaching of history. A democratic society demands that students learn how to think, not what to think. Debate and discussion drive ingenuity and the development of problem solving skills. But that’s not what is being promoted.

Indeed, Spar reports that teachers are feeling increasingly anxious about what can and cannot be taught. “The state needs to let teachers teach,” he said. “It’s concerning that the right wing says that it wants to take politics out of education, but this requirement does the exact opposite.”

Spar is far from alone in his critique. Still, despite union and community opposition to the Standards, teachers and administrators expect the curriculum to be rolled out at the start of the 2026-2027 school year.

Opponents, however, hope that negative assessments of the curriculum will deter other states from latching onto the model.

Timothy Snyder, a scholar who has written extensively about authoritarian regimes, used his Substack to denounce the curriculum for its over-simplification of the U.S. as the “best country in the world … The U.S. is to be defined as free and democratic, regardless of what Americans or their legislators actually do,” he wrote. What’s more, he concludes that the curriculum derails meaningful examination of the country’s history and limits thought about the best ways to preserve and expand equity, fairness, and liberty.

Like Snyder, historian Ellen Schrecker is an expert on right-wing repression (and especially McCarthyism) and told Truthout that the many false claims in Florida’s new curriculum need to be addressed:


They are pulling up random facts about a communist attack on so-called American values. What students will be taught is a view of a communist threat that did not, and does not, exist. The presentation of an out-of-control left — socialist and communist — that has continually tried to undermine American security is false. We also have to look at what is missing from the curriculum. For one thing, its coverage of McCarthy does not mention that people lost their jobs, really suffered, because of his attacks.

Like Snyder, Schrecker sees the portrayal of the U.S. as a world beacon as problematic. “The curriculum presents the U.S. with its great, white, male, Christian leaders, as perfect in most ways, but cautions that the country can be threatened by external socialist or communist forces,” she explained. “There is no mention of people who have been oppressed in the U.S. or even given limited opportunities. There is also a vague ‘us versus them’ positioning, with a focus on individual over collective responses.”

John White, a professor of English and Adolescent Literacy at the University of North Florida, is also troubled by the fallacies put forward in the History of Communism Standards.

“The right wing says that teachers should not indoctrinate students, but they have put forward a curriculum that indoctrinates students with a particular viewpoint,” he said. “The curriculum conflates communism and socialism as if they are one ideology.” White also agreed with Schrecker: “The curriculum ignores the fact that Joseph McCarthy was the epitome of a blowhard who has been widely discredited. Worse, the term ‘communism’ seems to be a catch phrase for any ideas that the right does not like.”

White said many of his students want to become social studies teachers because they love history and politics. “They don’t want to look at the world as a binary between good and evil or put opposing racism, sexism, and homophobia in the evil category and blind patriotism in the good category,” he continued. “Students do not need to be spoon-fed. This curriculum is the antithesis of good teaching because it undermines critical thinking.”

But these objections do not bother Florida’s Department of Education (DOE) or the DeSantis administration. Indeed, they see the History of Communism Standards as a continuation of a required class called Americanism vs. Communism that was taught to the state’s middle and high school students between 1962 and 1983. The course mandate was instituted following the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and was explicit in its intent to teach Florida kids about “the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism and the false doctrines of communism.”

Linda Camarasana, a retired professor of English at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, took the class in 1976 while in high school in North Miami Beach. “We knew that the goal was to teach us about the evils of communism and stress that the U.S. was superior,” Camarasana told Truthout. “But at the time, the population of North Miami was very liberal and so were our teachers. We learned about the conditions that led to the Russian revolution and that caused people to rise up.” And despite knowing that the class was meant to present communism as horrible, she says that she got a balanced viewpoint that prompted independent study and research.

Both DeSantis and Kamoutsas are hell-bent on making sure that the current History of Communism Standards do not offer students or their teachers this kind of wiggle room to debate systems of governance. As Kamoutsas said in a 2025 press conference, stopping “the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States and throughout the world,” is a Florida educational priority. He has asserted that he and the state DOE are confident the curriculum will soon be adopted by other states.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Eleanor J. Bader
Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, New York-based freelance writer who focuses on domestic social issues and resistance movements. In addition to Truthout, she writes for The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, Lilith, The Indypendent, New Pages and other progressive blogs and print publications.

Yorku.cawww.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/4090pdf/manifest.pdf

Manifesto of the Communist Party - York University

These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Page 11. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.