Reading, Reification, Movement: On Western Marxism

I write this brief note with humility, drawing from my experience of encountering and critically engaging with Western Marxism as a simple response to the current polemics surrounding Western Marxism.

My intellectual trajectory began with bourgeois thought in international relations theory and studies—through mainstream bourgeois theorists such as Hans Morgenthau, Samuel Huntington, Joseph Nye, and others, who strongly influenced me and led me to focus exclusively on security studies, geostrategy, geopolitics, and international and regional organizations through a bourgeois lens. Through mainstream bourgeois theory and theorists, we went on to establish the Strategic Studies Club.

When I began reading post-colonial and postmodern thought, this led us to create the Timoriana Association. Essential critique confronted questions of identity, culture, morality, and discourse. During this period, I began left-wing activism, but never became a Marxist. Fanon and Gramsci, combined with Friedrich Nietzsche through Derrida and Foucault, exerted strong influence. The focus became criticism of power within discursive and ideological contexts. Gramsci’s and Fanon’s influence was significant, but our interpretations went astray, leaning more toward cultural critique and social interpretation rather than studying theory for movements, organization, and parties.

After the COVID-19 crisis period, radicalization accelerated, and there was a shift from post-colonial leftism to Marxism. During this phase, I was deeply involved with Critical Theory, left postmodernism, and Western Marxism. Western Marxist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Ernesto Laclau, Trotskyist Daniel Bensaïd, and more contemporary figures like Kevin Anderson, Alberto Toscano, Michael Löwy, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou had strong influence. I was able to write in book projects involving Western Marxists such as Slavoj Žižek and others.

Two Western Marxists, Badiou and Žižek, served as guides and major reference points. Through Badiou, I was led to deeper engagement with Plato, Spinoza, and Rousseau; through Žižek, I was drawn more deeply into Hegel, Freud, and Lacan.

Above all, Alain Badiou’s thought strongly influenced me in reformulating what we call the “New Left”: studying the history of national liberation; studying the subject as organization, party, strategy, masses, class, nation, etc. Much of my writing relates to history, movements, and strategy, including social movement practices reflecting Badiou’s Maoism. These ideas strongly influenced how they connect to social movements, the new left in student movements, unions, urban intellectuals, and the petty bourgeoisie.

While involved in the book project Manifesto of Global Struggles, edited by my comrade Nicol from Chile and Slavoj Žižek as philosopher and central figure in Western Marxism, the book also became controversial—especially because it brought together intellectuals from different Marxist traditions and positions, often contradictory: Western Marxism versus Eastern Marxism, North versus South. This further reinforced my commitment to Marxism—Third World Marxism—its thought and practical experience.

Their comfortable moral critique and misreading of real socialist states, rooted in metaphysical idealism, lead to impotence in revolutionary praxis, an anti-materialist dialectic, and detachment from real practice. Western Marxism tends to reject and denounce “actually existing socialist” like China, Vietnam, Cuba etc, that and calling these “state capitalism,” “authoritarianism,” or “revisionism”, and and end up aligning with capitalist or imperialist narratives. Today, actually existing socialist states are under “imperialist siege” through blockades, invasions, and destabilization, among other forms of aggression. Despite this, they continue to struggle to raise national and global consciousness through national and international production across all sectors, including science, technology, and others.

 I quit this.

These decisions and changes not only helped but provided guidance and methods for self-criticism, for carrying out reification movements, correcting methods of thinking and practice. Our movement, including the Komite Esperansa and others, also carries out reification: self-criticism to correct our thinking, working methods, and strategies.

From now on, the readings I prioritize serve to distance myself from and critically break with Western Marxism.

My personal reading focuses especially on organizational, practical, and strategic questions. Clearly Lenin, Mao, Luxemburg, and other Third World Marxist thinkers and leaders. This deepened dialogue and study of Timor-Leste’s “Historical Marxism,” born from the liberation struggle since 1974, developed by FRETILIN, from Nicolau Lobato’s thought to today. On organizational questions, Lenin–Mao are central, alongside José Carlos Mariátegui, Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Florestan Fernandes, and Marta Harnecker.

What most defines my position, in opposition to Western Marxism, international Trotskyism, and other tendencies, is adherence to the political economy tradition of Third World Marxism—Marxism that confronts today’s principal and central contradiction: monopoly capitalism, anti-monopoly and anti-imperialism.

My position is strongly influenced by Marxists like Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Karl Polanyi, and Michael Parenti. Their influence is particularly important for understanding monopoly capital, global polarization, and why many countries of the Global South remain poor, underdeveloped, dependent, and culturally dominated. This perspective also involves firm study and solidarity with existing socialist states such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela. At the center of these traditions stands Samir Amin. This is complemented by rigorous reading of classical dependency theorists, from Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ruy Mauro Marini to Mariátegui and André Gunder Frank.

I returned to Marx’s mature phase, which focused on colonial, peripheral, and late development issues, including unfinished work on the “world market.” I returned to Lenin’s monopoly capitalism, Luxemburg’s primitive accumulation and unequal exchange, and Trotsky’s combined development. Post–World War II Marxists such as Paul Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, Harry Magdoff, Ernest Mandel’s long waves, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory also deeply shaped my thinking. Che Guevara’s economic thought, rooted in Cuba’s socialist construction, remains underdeveloped globally but essential.

Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik on Northern exploitation of the South; Sam King on labor migration and imperialism; Torkil Lauesen on Nordic imperialism and the myth of Scandinavian socialism; Japanese Marxists like Kōzō Uno, with particular preference for Makoto Itoh; critiques of financial capitalism by Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai—all exerted major influence.

Feminist Marxist critiques from Maria Mies and Silvia Federici, ecological Marxism from John Bellamy Foster, and digital capitalism analysis from Michael Kwet, Nick Couldry, Cédric Durand, and my mentor Anita Gurumurthy are also central. Vijay Prashad, István Mészáros, Álvaro García Linera, and Atilio Borón help clarify contemporary anti-imperialism in Latin America, integrating social and cultural questions into class struggle. Liberation theology figures such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Pope Francis, and Enrique Dussel also form a foundation.

Alongside intellectual Marxists, thinkers, and activists above, we must also humbly learn from the concrete experiences, practical wisdom, and hard-earned knowledge of past and present Marxist leaders— from Lenin, Stalin, and Alexandra Kollontai; Mao Zedong; Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il; Che Guevara and Fidel Castro; Ho Chi Minh; Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping; Hugo Chávez; Nicolau Lobato; and others. History teaches us that there are multiple paths to power and to socialism, and that such knowledge is not produced in seminars, but forged through struggle, organization, errors, self-criticism, and practice.

Marxism is not a dogma or doctrine. It is a science of society and nature, a guide to action. Ideological struggle must proceed to correct erroneous ideas—within parties, movements, and between movements. Most importantly, we must cultivate a culture of self-criticism—what Mao called “rectification”—correcting work methods, thinking, readings, and adopted theories to achieve “concrete analysis of concrete situations,” leading to Fidel Castro’s “correct interpretation of reality” before Marx’s question of “how to change the world.”

Be the most materialist and realist version of yourself. One must recognize errors and correctly interpret the reality before changing it – We must engage with concrete material conditions rather than demand a pure, ‘perfect’ socialist state or movement, as if no compromises or contradictions were possible.

Over ten years, since 2013, I evolved from bourgeois thought to radical petty-bourgeois post-colonial critique, to left activism with Western Marxism, and now to Third World Marxism. This journey of learning and implementation is unfinished and has not yet reached its objectives. These positions are not final or absolute—they will continue in a nonlinear, complex and dynamic process of leap and retreat.

The option is in your hands—what kind of Marxist do you choose to become?