“Palestine,” Yahya Sinwar said, “will expose the world.” It has done precisely that. Gaza has stripped the mask from the global order. Israeli-induced starvation, the systematic annihilation of hospitals, the levelling of an entire society, and the open genocide of Palestinians have not merely revealed the barbarism of settler-colonial violence; they have exposed the moral bankruptcy of the international system itself. The courage with which Palestinians face death-not as tragedy but as an expected guest-stands in grotesque contrast to the cowardice of those who claim to rule the world in the name of freedom, democracy, human rights, and even socialism “of their characteristics.”
The attempted kidnapping of President Maduro has shredded the already tattered veil of Western civilisation. The world has regressed to the colonial era, where countries’ sovereign wealth is seized at gunpoint without even disguising imperial designs. Imperialism no longer feels compelled to justify itself. The gangsterism normalised in Gaza has now encircled the entire Global South. Venezuela’s defiance sharpens this contradiction. While one besieged state dares to name imperialism openly, others with far greater economic and geopolitical capacity retreat into caution, diplomacy, and balance-at best condemnation, at worst silence. Europe, the eternal subordinate of hegemony, now watches nervously as its own interests come under threat. Greenland, openly eyed by Donald Trump, may yet remind Europeans that an empire eventually consumes even its most loyal servants.
The so-called liberal democracies of the West have revealed themselves as Orwellian regimes of managed outrage and selective humanity. International law exists only to discipline the weak; the strong violate it with impunity. The United States does not merely enable genocide-it organises, funds, and arms it. Europe follows obediently, issuing empty calls for restraint while ensuring the machinery of death never pauses. More damning still is the posture of those who present themselves as alternatives to Western imperialism. Russia mutters, hedges, and manoeuvres. China-a state governed by a Communist Party that teaches Capital while overseeing wage exploitation, class stratification, and the super-exploitation of labour-retreats behind the fiction of neutrality. It’s socialism, endlessly qualified and endlessly deferred, that evaporates the moment international solidarity demands material risk.
What Gaza and Venezuela have revealed is not merely U.S.-Israeli brutality. They have exposed the hollowness of Western democracy, the paralysis of international institutions, and the ideological exhaustion of states that once spoke the language of socialist revolution. The world system now stands naked: barbarism at the core, complicity at the periphery, and silence where solidarity should be.
The world has regressed to the colonial era, where countries’ sovereign wealth is seized at gunpoint without even disguising imperial designs.
This exposure forces an unavoidable question. Beyond the West, what are we to make of China, which still claims the mantle of socialism? “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” has become less a theory than an enigma, its claims colliding relentlessly with lived reality. Russia, antagonist to socialism, now exists as a peripheral capitalist power armed with vast Soviet-era arsenals, illustrating Marcuse’s grim observation that under capitalism, invention becomes the mother of necessity, may it be restricted to the means of destruction only.
China, by contrast, is often praised as a command economy that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and emerged as the only serious economic rival to U.S. hegemony. Yet the revolutionary internationalism that once inspired Vietnam, Cuba, and Che Guevara has been relegated to history. Its defenders loudly proclaim Marxist credentials, but China’s internationalism is conspicuously absent. The new orthodoxy insists that it is not China’s responsibility to help the oppressed of the world build socialism.
This claim-that each nation can “build its own socialism” independently of international conditions-is not a continuation of Marxism but a regression into methodological nationalism. It detaches socialism from the world-historical character of capitalism and reduces it to a nationally bounded development project. In doing so, it contradicts the core insights of historical materialism.
Marx’s assertion that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself” has been repeatedly misused to justify national self-reliance. In reality, it was never a nationalist or statist proposition, but a class one rooted in the international unity of the proletariat-a unity produced by the global expansion of capital itself. Capitalism, for Marx, is from its inception a world system. Its laws of motion-accumulation, exploitation, concentration-operate globally. To imagine socialism as realisable within the bounded horizon of a single peripheral nation is to abstract it from the very system it seeks to negate. Lenin’s theory of imperialism provides the decisive bridge between Marx’s critique of capital and contemporary reality. Imperialism is not merely aggressive foreign policy but the monopoly stage of capitalism, marked by capital export, global market division, and the systematic subordination of vast regions. Rosa Luxemburg sharpened this analysis when she insisted that imperialism is “an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.” Palestine, Venezuela, Sudan, Nigeria, and much of the Global South embody this condition today.
Capitalism generates not only class antagonisms within nations but structural antagonisms between nations. As Domenico Losurdo argued, imperialism produces “proletarian nations”-formally sovereign yet materially dominated-occupying a position analogous to the proletariat within capitalist society. Within this structure, the idea that peripheral countries can autonomously construct socialism becomes theoretically untenable. Samir Amin demonstrated that peripheral capitalism is defined by structural dependency: distorted accumulation, technological subordination, and chronic surplus transfer to the imperial core. These are not contingent failures but constitutive features of the system itself.
Frantz Fanon’s critique of the postcolonial bourgeoisie remains devastatingly relevant. This class functions as an intermediary stratum whose historical role is to manage imperial domination locally. It lacks both the capacity and the will to transform inherited colonial relations. Such a class cannot lead to socialist construction. At best, it administers dependent capitalism; at worst, it collaborates actively with imperialism against popular forces. Lenin anticipated this dynamic in semi-colonial societies, where the bourgeoisie proves incapable of completing even democratic tasks.
Peripheral societies may resist imperialism, wage national liberation struggles, and even seize state power- despite evolving methods of imperial domination through sanctions, kidnapping and decapitating leaders and coloured revolutions, a CIA-Mossad’s combined aggression -but without external support, they cannot consolidate socialism. To confuse resistance with socialist construction is to substitute moral will for material analysis.
History offers a decisive refutation of nationalist illusions. The Soviet Union left indelible fingerprints on liberation struggles across the oppressed world. While it avoided a permanent hot war with imperialism, it understood socialism as a world process. Lenin warned explicitly that without international extension, the revolution would face a constant existential threat. Anti-colonial victories across Asia, Africa, and Latin America were inseparable from Soviet material support: Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa; Vietnam, Laos, Cuba; even Afghanistan under Najibullah until the USSR’s collapse. Cuba’s intervention in southern Africa-backed by Soviet logistics-was decisive in breaking apartheid’s military dominance. The Cold War functioned not merely as a geopolitical standoff but as a global class struggle that materially constrained imperialist violence.
Industrialisation throughout the Global South likewise bore the imprint of socialist cooperation. Heavy industry in India, steel mills in Pakistan, and agricultural and industrial development in Vietnam, Cuba, and Eastern Europe were not national miracles but collective achievements. China itself built its industrial foundations with Soviet aid in the 1950s, making later narratives of self-sufficiency historically incoherent. Under Deng Xiaoping, China underwent what Gramsci would call a passive revolution: a transition from Maoist socialism to state-managed capitalism. Wealth creation produced a new bourgeoisie and its organic intellectuals. The compromise was clear-retain party control while allowing capitalist class relations to consolidate. This arrangement binds the Party to nationalism as a legitimating ideology.
Chinese suffering under imperialism is rightly remembered but instrumentalised to secure consent. Work, productivity, and growth have become new gods. As Marx warned, labour is not liberation; freedom lies in liberation from labour. In China, the formula is reversed.
Submission to work and patriotism displace socialism from the imagination of the young. Lenin founded the Comintern because he understood the duties of a socialist state toward the oppressed of the world. Mao understood this as well. Contemporary China has chosen retreat.
Marx was right because he grasped capitalism-and therefore socialism-as a world-historical process. Lenin, Fanon, Amin, and Losurdo reaffirmed this insight across different conjunctures. The emancipation of the working class-and of proletarian nations-cannot be achieved in isolation. Internationalism is not a moral sentiment but a material necessity. To deny this is not revolutionary realism; it is ideological accommodation to imperialism, dressed in the language of self-reliance. Neutrality is abdication. In an era of naked U.S. barbarism, Gramsci’s war of position will inevitably turn into a war of manoeuvre.
If China has reduced the Belt and Road Initiative to capital realisation rather than solidarity, it risks standing alone-opposed by imperial centres and undermined by reactionary elites in the Global South. Rosa Luxemburg’s reminder that capital is “an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, from which no nation can hold aloof at will,” remains decisive. Capital’s logic is inescapable. To confront it alone, stripped of internationalism and abandoned by solidarity, would be the least enviable outcome of all.
The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. His Latest Work, “God’s Republic Making & Unmaking of Israel & Pakistan”, is available in Pakistan & on Amazon.com. He can be reached at [email protected]/saulatnagi’s Substack.