By Carlos Martinez
January 19, 2026

The following essay is the closing chapter of the book “China Changes Everything.”

I’ve been involved in the Marxist movement in the West in some way or another since I was a teenager but thankfully have never got particularly close to Western Marxism.

The political tradition I grew up in emphasized the importance of supporting the socialist states and always prioritized the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and racism. To support China, to support the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], to support Cuba, to support the national liberation struggles of the Irish, Palestinian, Zimbabwean, Vietnamese and other peoples was very much part of that tradition.

So despite being a Marxist in the West, I haven’t had all that much exposure to the Western Marxist academics described by Domenico Losurdo and haven’t had to go through that extremely difficult “unlearning” process that many others have. I’ve read a lot of Lenin; I’ve read very little Adorno, Zizek and Perry Anderson.

Nevertheless, Losurdo’s book “Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn” was really clarifying for me and helped me understand the ideological roots of some of the objectively reactionary positions that you come up against all the time. Because although Western Marxism exists mainly in an academic ivory tower, it seeps into the wider movement for revolutionary change, where it seems to find quite fertile soil.

Marxism moves East and South

Marxism is, obviously, Western by birth. The first line of “The Communist Manifesto” is after all: “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.” The nascent communist movement was geographically limited to Europe and North America and focused almost exclusively on the industrial working class.

But from the beginning, it’s been on a journey to the East and South, including in Marx’s own lifetime.

First, the phenomenon of imperialism, which was studied systematically by Lenin but which Marx and Engels started to take note of in the 1860s and 1870s, expanded capital’s geographical sphere of operation. Capitalism was becoming a global system and with that came the creation of a proletariat — a class of propertyless workers — from Mexico City to St. Petersburg to Shanghai.

Second, Marx and Engels, as their own thinking developed, came to understand the inextricable link between the struggle of the working class in the capitalist countries and that of the oppressed nations against their colonial oppressors.

For Marx and Engels, this intellectual journey started with the Irish question. Of course, Ireland is not in the South or the East! But it was England’s first colony and had suffered for hundreds of years under a system of brutal colonial oppression.

Marx had originally considered that socialist revolution in Britain would bring national liberation to Ireland. In 1869, however, 21 years after the publication of “The Communist Manifesto,” he wrote that “deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.”

He went on: “A nation that oppresses another forges its own chains,” and he called on his followers to “put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland.” He pointed out that “the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of the English working class’s own social emancipation.”

So over 150 years ago, the founders of scientific socialism were already pointing to the indispensability of the struggle against colonial and national oppression.

Importantly, that understanding also extended to the struggle against national oppression within the capitalist heartlands. Hence that memorable sentence in Volume 1 of “Capital”: “Labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as labour in the black skin is branded.”

The development of imperialism gained pace towards the end of the 19th century.

Lenin noted that concentration of capital had reached a point where monopolies were increasingly driven abroad in pursuit of profit. As a result, more and more of the world was brought into the capitalist system, but not on equal terms. Rather, this was “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries.”

Lenin further noted: “Imperialism is leading to annexation, to increased national oppression and, consequently, also to increasing resistance.”

The strategic implication of this is that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries must unite with the broad masses of the oppressed around the world against their common enemy: the imperialist ruling classes. Hence at the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, the slogan “Workers of the world unite” was updated to “Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite.”

To return to Marx’s point that this is “no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment:” while imperialism is strong, the ruling class is powerful, and the possibilities for socialist advance are extremely limited. National independence and sovereignty for the oppressed nations means the ruling class becomes weaker, and the relative position of the working class becomes stronger.

That’s why Lenin said in 1921 that “the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc. account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. … It is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so … there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.”

So we can say that by a hundred years ago, Marxism had developed a clear global applicability. It had transformed from being a liberatory framework for the industrial proletariat in Western Europe and North America to being a liberatory framework for the working and oppressed peoples around the world. And with Marxism’s global applicability came its global application: the success of socialist and national liberation revolutions in Russia, Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and elsewhere. All these practical experiences have contributed to the broadening and deepening of Marxism.

Western Marxism resists

The Western Marxism described by Losurdo essentially rejects this whole process of globalization of class struggle.

Firstly, it near-comprehensively rejects the experiences of actually existing socialism. The Western Marxist trend has consistently distanced itself from the process of building socialism in reality: in the Soviet Union, in China, in Korea and elsewhere.

Wherever these academics and groups do support a socialist process, that support is highly conditional. For example, there was reasonably broad support for the first “pink tide” in Latin America at the beginning of this century, in large part because it was a form of socialism being built within the limits of bourgeois democracy.

However, once the U.S. stepped up its destabilization and propaganda campaign, and once countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua were forced to use the repressive machinery of the state in defense of their revolutionary processes, Western Marxism became disillusioned and withdrew support.

Some Western Marxist thinkers were for a time inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, with its extreme emphasis on class struggle. But when the Communist Party deemphasized domestic class struggle and found a place for capital within its development process, Western Marxism wrote China off as having restored capitalism. In fact, with Western Marxists we always find what Losurdo called “the dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism;” if a socialist project doesn’t look like what they imagine socialist projects should look like, it’s rejected.

This is combined with, and closely related to, a downplaying of the role of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles; a rejection of the notion that the primary contradiction in today’s world is that between imperialism and the oppressed nations; a rejection of the ideas of national liberation Marxism, in a historical context where the vast majority of socialist experiments thus far have had a major national liberation component. In Cuba, China, Korea, Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, Mozambique and Nicaragua, the struggle for socialism has been very closely connected to the struggle against imperialism and the struggle for sovereignty.

Why is Western Marxism like this?

Western Marxism has many different trends and contradictions, but its essence is these two rejections: of actually existing socialism and of national liberation. Both are a function of Eurocentrism and dogmatism.

But it’s also important to bear in mind that there is a clear material basis for a Western left that minimizes the national question. In their introduction to Losurdo’s book, Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce De Leon mention how the academic mainstream encourages a dogmatic, Eurocentric and essentially inert Marxism, creating a situation whereby success in academia more or less relies on taking positions that don’t fundamentally threaten the interests of imperialism.

This is a microcosm of a trend Lenin recognized over a century ago, whereby the “high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries” opens up “the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat,” creating a privileged layer of the working class that benefits from imperialism and therefore has a material interest in its success. Therefore, I argue that the distortions of Western Marxism really represent the extension of this trend of opportunism and social chauvinism into the realms of academia.

Where do we go from here?

Now, it’s important to recognize that the Western Marxist trend has produced some extremely valuable insights, and in many cases has expanded Marxism into a range of academic fields, from gender studies to cultural studies and a good deal more. Being based in the advanced capitalist countries, it generally addresses itself to the problems faced by people in those countries, and on that basis has played a valuable role in moving human understanding forward. But there are some things we must absolutely insist upon if our movement is going to make any real progress.

First is the primacy of anti-imperialist struggle, of solidarity with peoples fighting our ruling classes, and of playing our part in a global united front against imperialism. Since today [July 5, 2025] is the 50th anniversary of Cabo Verde’s independence, it seems apt to cite Amilcar Cabral: “If imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all the advanced countries and smother the national liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting.”

Second is the leadership of socialist countries. It should be obvious that it’s the socialist world that is the vanguard of the project of developing Marxism; that it’s the states, movements and parties engaged in the process of building socialism that are doing the most to build humanity’s collective understanding of how to carry out the task that history has placed before for us: completing the transition to world socialism.

As Mao Zedong famously put it in his essay “On Practice”:  “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.”

Additionally, it is absolutely crucial to understand, support and learn from China — the largest and most advanced socialist country, that is at the core of an emerging multipolarity. Indeed, as China develops, we should increasingly be showcasing China as an example of what can be achieved under socialism.

China simply cannot be understood through a lens of Western Marxism — a lens of purism and dogmatism. In the course of over a century of fierce and constant struggle, the Chinese leadership have developed a socialist path that is suited to the traditions of the Chinese people and adapts to the ever-changing material reality they face.

Outside an academic ivory tower, the questions of whether people have food on the table, whether they have access to health care, whether they have a roof over their heads and whether their children get a good education are more important issues than whether China has billionaires or whether there are branches of Starbucks and KFC in Shanghai. Deng Xiaoping’s insistence that “development is the only hard truth” and that “poverty is not socialism” may have been dismissed as revisionist or capitulationist by well-fed intellectuals, but it reflected the actual needs of the Chinese people.

Domenico Losurdo of course understood all this.

On the question of inequality in China, Losurdo pointed out that China’s rise constitutes a most extraordinary contribution to the fight against global-scale inequality — the inequality between developed and developing countries. He also pointed to the existence of an “absolute inequality that exists between life and death” which Chinese socialism has addressed with extraordinary success, “eliminating once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.”

That’s what a Marxist, dialectical analysis of inequality in China looks like.

On the question of China’s role in the world, China’s support for sovereignty and development in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific is more important than whether people think China should do more aid and less trade, or China should pursue a more militant foreign policy. Suffice to say that the slogan “Neither Washington Nor Beijing” is not often heard in Palestine, in Iran, in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Eritrea, in Zimbabwe.

And again, Losurdo understood this very well, describing China as “the country that more than any other is challenging the international division of labour imposed by colonialism and imperialism and furthering the end of the Columbian epoch — a fact of enormous, progressive historical significance.” Any Marxist who refuses to understand this enormous, progressive historical significance is, frankly, not actually a Marxist.

So we have a plan of action: reject dogmatism and purism, reject Eurocentrism and chauvinism, and get back to playing our part in a global united front composed of the socialist countries, the oppressed nations and the working classes and progressive forces in the imperialist countries. That’s what will get us on the path to a socialist future.

Carlos Martinez is an author, researcher and political activist from London, England. He is author of “The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century” (Praxis Press, 2023), “The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse” (LeftWord, 2019) and co-editor with Keith Bennett of “People’s China at 75 – The Flag Stays Red” (Praxis Press, 2024). Martinez is a co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China platform and a coordinating committee member of the International Manifesto Group.

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