On False “Anti-Imperialism,” Campism, and the Abandonment of Class Analysis
By Nikos Mottas
The recurrent attempt to divide Marxism into “Western,” “Eastern,” “Third-World,” or other geographically marked variants reflects a deeper theoretical retreat from Marxism as a scientific worldview and a revolutionary method. Such distinctions implicitly transform Marxism from a universal theory of capitalist society and class struggle into a set of culturally conditioned perspectives, shaped primarily by geography rather than by objective social relations. From a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, this approach is fundamentally mistaken. Marxism is one, not because it ignores historical and national specificity, but because it rests on objective laws of social development that operate globally wherever capitalism exists.
This point was already clear to Engels, who repeatedly stressed that socialism is not a moral doctrine or a national tradition but the scientific outcome of material analysis. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels insisted that Marxism arose not from abstract ideals but from “the material conditions of life,” and that its conclusions follow necessarily from the development of capitalist production. A science grounded in material conditions cannot be regionally plural in its foundations. Either the laws of motion of capitalism exist, or they do not. If they exist, then Marxism, as their scientific expression, must be theoretically unified.
Marx and Engels did not present Marxism as a “European interpretation” of society. They formulated a materialist conception of history grounded in modes of production, class relations, and exploitation. These are not regional phenomena. Capitalism, once established as a world system, imposes its laws universally, albeit in uneven and contradictory forms. Marx’s stated aim in Capital was to uncover “the economic law of motion of modern society.” A law of motion is not culturally relative; it applies wherever the social relations it describes prevail. To speak of multiple Marxisms is therefore to imply multiple capitalisms governed by fundamentally different logics, an implication that collapses under any serious analysis of the world market.
Plekhanov reinforced this point in his polemics against populism and voluntarism. He argued that Marxism loses all scientific meaning when historical development is treated as the product of national character, moral will, or cultural specificity. For Plekhanov, the universality of Marxism lay precisely in its explanation of how objective conditions shape consciousness and politics. Differences in historical paths did not negate the general laws of development; they confirmed them through concrete variation. The attempt to derive distinct Marxisms from distinct regions thus represents a regression to pre-Marxist historical thinking.
The unity of Marxism becomes even clearer in the epoch of imperialism. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism was not the birth of a “Russian” or “Eastern” Marxism, but the continuation of Marxism under new historical conditions. Imperialism, as Lenin demonstrated, is not a policy choice or a regional phenomenon but a structural stage of capitalism itself, characterized by monopoly, finance capital, and the global division of labor. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin emphasized that imperialism binds all countries—oppressor and oppressed alike—into a single world system. The implication is decisive: once capitalism becomes imperialist, the terrain of class struggle becomes global, and Marxism can only exist as a unified theory addressing that global system.
Lenin’s insistence that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” must be understood in this context. Theory, for Lenin, was not a set of adaptable narratives but a scientific guide to action. When Marxism is fragmented into regional or cultural variants, it loses precisely this guiding function. What remains is not development but eclecticism, where theory bends to immediate political pressures instead of clarifying them.
The notion of “Western Marxism” often presents itself as a corrective to alleged economism or rigidity. Yet what it typically corrects is not dogmatism but revolutionary content. By shifting Marxism toward philosophy, culture, or epistemology while bracketing the question of state power, it reproduces the very separation between theory and practice that Marx criticized in earlier materialism. Lenin’s State and Revolution is unambiguous here: the state is an instrument of class domination, and any Marxism that does not place the destruction of the bourgeois state at the center of its analysis ceases to be revolutionary, regardless of its intellectual sophistication.
Althusser’s intervention is often misused to justify theoretical pluralism, but read carefully, it supports the opposite conclusion. Althusser insisted on the scientific character of Marxism and its epistemological rupture with ideology. He rejected historicism and humanism precisely because they dissolved Marxism into cultural or philosophical interpretation. While Althusser emphasized structural complexity and relative autonomy, he never argued for multiple Marxisms grounded in geography. On the contrary, his concept of a “theoretical practice” presupposed a coherent scientific framework whose validity does not vary by region, even though its objects of analysis do.
The idea of a distinct “Third-World Marxism” follows a similar problematic logic. It often arises from the undeniable reality of colonialism and national oppression, yet it transforms these realities into theoretical foundations rather than objects of analysis. Lenin addressed this danger directly in his writings on the national and colonial question. He insisted that support for national liberation struggles must always be subordinate to proletarian class politics and internationalism. The decisive question is never geography, but class leadership and social content. When anti-imperialism is detached from the struggle against capitalism, Marxism is reduced to a radical vocabulary for bourgeois nationalism.
Here again, Stalin’s work on the national question is instructive. By defining the nation through economic life and historical development, rather than culture or ethnicity, Stalin reaffirmed the materialist basis of Marxism. National forms are historically produced; they are not theoretical starting points. To derive separate Marxisms from national or regional experience is therefore to invert Marxism, elevating historically conditioned forms into autonomous theories.
What emerges from Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, and even Althusser is a consistent line: Marxism is a science of social formations governed by objective laws. It demands concrete analysis, but concrete analysis presupposes general theory. Tactical diversity does not imply theoretical pluralism. On the contrary, only a unified theory allows for meaningful strategic variation.
Historically, the fragmentation of Marxism has coincided with periods of defeat or accommodation, when revolutionary politics give way to reformism, cultural critique, or nationalist substitution. In such moments, Marxism is redefined as one discourse among others, rather than as a science oriented toward the conquest of power. This pluralization mirrors bourgeois ideology, which presents all viewpoints as equally valid while preserving the material dominance of capital.
At this point, a particularly corrosive distortion must be confronted directly. Among certain self-proclaimed “communists,” the term “Western Marxism” is invoked in a purely derogatory sense, not to defend the unity of Marxism, but to legitimize a vague and ultimately reactionary “Third-Worldism.” Under this framework, any force that rhetorically opposes a given imperialist bloc is automatically treated as progressive, regardless of class character, relation to capital, or repression of the working class and communists. This is not Marxism but geopolitical campism dressed in radical language. Lenin warned explicitly against precisely this substitution when he insisted that the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation can itself become an oppressor, and that socialists must never abandon their duty of class struggle against their “own” bourgeoisie. Imperialism, for Lenin, was not a question of hostile foreign policy or civilizational alignment, but a system of capitalist relations, and conflicts between imperialism and non-proletarian ruling classes did not in themselves constitute progressive struggles. The trajectory of the Iranian Ayatollah regime after 1979 illustrates this with brutal clarity: despite its confrontation with U.S. imperialism, it moved rapidly to crush the communist movement, outlaw the Tudeh Party, execute or imprison thousands of communists and militants, destroy independent trade unions, and consolidate a capitalist order under clerical rule. To present such a regime as “progressive” on the basis of geopolitical antagonism alone is to abandon Marxist class analysis in favor of state-centered apologetics. To support openly anti-communist states, comprador bourgeoisies, or reactionary regimes in the name of “anti-imperialism” is therefore to abandon class analysis entirely and replace it with a crude friend–enemy logic borrowed from bourgeois geopolitics. This tendency does not overcome “Western deviations”; it reproduces them in inverted form: where reformism dissolves Marxism into liberal pluralism, this pseudo-Third-Worldism dissolves it into nationalist apologetics. Both negate the central Marxist principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. A politics that suspends criticism of exploitation, repression, and capitalist domination simply because these occur outside the “West” is not anti-imperialist in a Marxist sense; it is anti-proletarian. By severing anti-imperialism from anti-capitalism and proletarian leadership, such positions do not strengthen internationalism—they liquidate it, reducing Marxism to a rhetorical accessory for forces that would, under different conditions, turn their repression directly against communists themselves.
Marxism, however, was never meant to be a catalogue of perspectives. It is the theoretical expression of the historical movement of the working class. Its unity reflects the unity of capitalism as a world system and the unity of the proletariat as a class with common interests across national boundaries. As Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, the emancipation of the working class is an international task not because of moral solidarity, but because capital itself is international.
There is therefore no “Western,” “Eastern,” or “Third-World” Marxism in the theoretical sense. There is Marxism applied to different historical and social conditions, confronting different configurations of exploitation and domination, but guided by the same scientific principles. To defend this unity is not dogmatism. It is the defense of Marxism against relativism, eclecticism, and political liquidation. Marxism is one because capitalism is one world system, class struggle is universal, and the liberation of labor is a single historical task.
Marx and Engels did not present Marxism as a “European interpretation” of society. They formulated a materialist conception of history grounded in modes of production, class relations, and exploitation. These are not regional phenomena. Capitalism, once established as a world system, imposes its laws universally, albeit in uneven and contradictory forms. Marx’s stated aim in Capital was to uncover “the economic law of motion of modern society.” A law of motion is not culturally relative; it applies wherever the social relations it describes prevail. To speak of multiple Marxisms is therefore to imply multiple capitalisms governed by fundamentally different logics, an implication that collapses under any serious analysis of the world market.
Plekhanov reinforced this point in his polemics against populism and voluntarism. He argued that Marxism loses all scientific meaning when historical development is treated as the product of national character, moral will, or cultural specificity. For Plekhanov, the universality of Marxism lay precisely in its explanation of how objective conditions shape consciousness and politics. Differences in historical paths did not negate the general laws of development; they confirmed them through concrete variation. The attempt to derive distinct Marxisms from distinct regions thus represents a regression to pre-Marxist historical thinking.
The unity of Marxism becomes even clearer in the epoch of imperialism. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism was not the birth of a “Russian” or “Eastern” Marxism, but the continuation of Marxism under new historical conditions. Imperialism, as Lenin demonstrated, is not a policy choice or a regional phenomenon but a structural stage of capitalism itself, characterized by monopoly, finance capital, and the global division of labor. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin emphasized that imperialism binds all countries—oppressor and oppressed alike—into a single world system. The implication is decisive: once capitalism becomes imperialist, the terrain of class struggle becomes global, and Marxism can only exist as a unified theory addressing that global system.
Lenin’s insistence that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” must be understood in this context. Theory, for Lenin, was not a set of adaptable narratives but a scientific guide to action. When Marxism is fragmented into regional or cultural variants, it loses precisely this guiding function. What remains is not development but eclecticism, where theory bends to immediate political pressures instead of clarifying them.
The notion of “Western Marxism” often presents itself as a corrective to alleged economism or rigidity. Yet what it typically corrects is not dogmatism but revolutionary content. By shifting Marxism toward philosophy, culture, or epistemology while bracketing the question of state power, it reproduces the very separation between theory and practice that Marx criticized in earlier materialism. Lenin’s State and Revolution is unambiguous here: the state is an instrument of class domination, and any Marxism that does not place the destruction of the bourgeois state at the center of its analysis ceases to be revolutionary, regardless of its intellectual sophistication.
Althusser’s intervention is often misused to justify theoretical pluralism, but read carefully, it supports the opposite conclusion. Althusser insisted on the scientific character of Marxism and its epistemological rupture with ideology. He rejected historicism and humanism precisely because they dissolved Marxism into cultural or philosophical interpretation. While Althusser emphasized structural complexity and relative autonomy, he never argued for multiple Marxisms grounded in geography. On the contrary, his concept of a “theoretical practice” presupposed a coherent scientific framework whose validity does not vary by region, even though its objects of analysis do.
The idea of a distinct “Third-World Marxism” follows a similar problematic logic. It often arises from the undeniable reality of colonialism and national oppression, yet it transforms these realities into theoretical foundations rather than objects of analysis. Lenin addressed this danger directly in his writings on the national and colonial question. He insisted that support for national liberation struggles must always be subordinate to proletarian class politics and internationalism. The decisive question is never geography, but class leadership and social content. When anti-imperialism is detached from the struggle against capitalism, Marxism is reduced to a radical vocabulary for bourgeois nationalism.
Here again, Stalin’s work on the national question is instructive. By defining the nation through economic life and historical development, rather than culture or ethnicity, Stalin reaffirmed the materialist basis of Marxism. National forms are historically produced; they are not theoretical starting points. To derive separate Marxisms from national or regional experience is therefore to invert Marxism, elevating historically conditioned forms into autonomous theories.
What emerges from Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, and even Althusser is a consistent line: Marxism is a science of social formations governed by objective laws. It demands concrete analysis, but concrete analysis presupposes general theory. Tactical diversity does not imply theoretical pluralism. On the contrary, only a unified theory allows for meaningful strategic variation.
Historically, the fragmentation of Marxism has coincided with periods of defeat or accommodation, when revolutionary politics give way to reformism, cultural critique, or nationalist substitution. In such moments, Marxism is redefined as one discourse among others, rather than as a science oriented toward the conquest of power. This pluralization mirrors bourgeois ideology, which presents all viewpoints as equally valid while preserving the material dominance of capital.
At this point, a particularly corrosive distortion must be confronted directly. Among certain self-proclaimed “communists,” the term “Western Marxism” is invoked in a purely derogatory sense, not to defend the unity of Marxism, but to legitimize a vague and ultimately reactionary “Third-Worldism.” Under this framework, any force that rhetorically opposes a given imperialist bloc is automatically treated as progressive, regardless of class character, relation to capital, or repression of the working class and communists. This is not Marxism but geopolitical campism dressed in radical language. Lenin warned explicitly against precisely this substitution when he insisted that the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation can itself become an oppressor, and that socialists must never abandon their duty of class struggle against their “own” bourgeoisie. Imperialism, for Lenin, was not a question of hostile foreign policy or civilizational alignment, but a system of capitalist relations, and conflicts between imperialism and non-proletarian ruling classes did not in themselves constitute progressive struggles. The trajectory of the Iranian Ayatollah regime after 1979 illustrates this with brutal clarity: despite its confrontation with U.S. imperialism, it moved rapidly to crush the communist movement, outlaw the Tudeh Party, execute or imprison thousands of communists and militants, destroy independent trade unions, and consolidate a capitalist order under clerical rule. To present such a regime as “progressive” on the basis of geopolitical antagonism alone is to abandon Marxist class analysis in favor of state-centered apologetics. To support openly anti-communist states, comprador bourgeoisies, or reactionary regimes in the name of “anti-imperialism” is therefore to abandon class analysis entirely and replace it with a crude friend–enemy logic borrowed from bourgeois geopolitics. This tendency does not overcome “Western deviations”; it reproduces them in inverted form: where reformism dissolves Marxism into liberal pluralism, this pseudo-Third-Worldism dissolves it into nationalist apologetics. Both negate the central Marxist principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. A politics that suspends criticism of exploitation, repression, and capitalist domination simply because these occur outside the “West” is not anti-imperialist in a Marxist sense; it is anti-proletarian. By severing anti-imperialism from anti-capitalism and proletarian leadership, such positions do not strengthen internationalism—they liquidate it, reducing Marxism to a rhetorical accessory for forces that would, under different conditions, turn their repression directly against communists themselves.
Marxism, however, was never meant to be a catalogue of perspectives. It is the theoretical expression of the historical movement of the working class. Its unity reflects the unity of capitalism as a world system and the unity of the proletariat as a class with common interests across national boundaries. As Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, the emancipation of the working class is an international task not because of moral solidarity, but because capital itself is international.
There is therefore no “Western,” “Eastern,” or “Third-World” Marxism in the theoretical sense. There is Marxism applied to different historical and social conditions, confronting different configurations of exploitation and domination, but guided by the same scientific principles. To defend this unity is not dogmatism. It is the defense of Marxism against relativism, eclecticism, and political liquidation. Marxism is one because capitalism is one world system, class struggle is universal, and the liberation of labor is a single historical task.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
