The Poverty of Socialist Thought
Bisharat Abbasi
One of the most revealing paradoxes of socialist discourse in colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial societies is the extraordinary disjunction between the radicalism of its vocabulary and the poverty of its historical experience. Socialism is spoken of with fluency, emotional intensity, and often with an air of moral self-certainty; yet its most elementary historical foundations—its conditions of emergence, its inescapable entanglement with national liberation, its dependence on the conquest and exercise of state power, and its necessarily uneven, conflict-ridden process of construction—remain either weakly understood or consciously disavowed. This gap cannot be explained simply by intellectual laziness or insufficient reading, as is often suggested by liberal critics or even by some self-styled Marxists. Rather, it is a structural outcome of societies that have never traversed the decisive historical experiences through which socialism became intelligible, not as an ethical horizon or discursive posture, but as a concrete political project rooted in struggle. Where there has been no genuine national liberation, no revolutionary rupture in the state form, no sustained confrontation with imperial power, and no attempt—however partial or contradictory—to reorganise production under socialist conditions, socialism inevitably appears as abstraction. It is encountered not as history lived and fought over, but as theory consumed and repeated.
Marxism, understood seriously, is not a doctrine of ideals but a science of historical motion. Its central claim is that social systems do not arise from intentions, moral commitments, or philosophical blueprints, but from material conditions, class struggles, and historically specific contradictions. Socialism, in this sense, is not a timeless aspiration hovering above history, but a determinate phase of development emerging from the internal contradictions of capitalism itself. Yet in much of the colonial and neo-colonial world, capitalism did not develop as a relatively autonomous system through the organic unfolding of bourgeois social relations. It arrived through conquest, plunder, and external domination; it was imposed violently by imperialism and structured from the outset to serve metropolitan accumulation rather than domestic development. Pre-capitalist relations were not superseded but selectively preserved and articulated to imperial needs, producing hybrid formations marked by extreme unevenness. The outcome was neither a completed bourgeois society nor an independent capitalist economy, but a dependent social formation in which the local ruling classes functioned largely as intermediaries—administrators of extraction rather than organisers of development. In such conditions, the historical experiences through which socialism became thinkable as a practical alternative in other contexts—mass proletarianization, bourgeois state formation, revolutionary rupture—were truncated or displaced. Socialism thus entered these societies not as the immanent negation of lived capitalism, but as an imported theoretical object, detached from a corresponding historical process.
This absence of formative historical experience has profound intellectual and political consequences. Where there has been no decisive revolutionary break, no seizure and restructuring of the state apparatus, and no prolonged exercise of power by a revolutionary class under conditions of scarcity and external pressure, socialism is easily imagined as something that exists above history rather than within it. The state appears only as an abstract machine of oppression rather than as a contradictory terrain shaped by class struggle; political power is treated as a moral contamination rather than a material necessity; and contradiction itself is experienced as failure rather than recognised as the normal condition of historical development. Socialism, stripped of its real history, is thus transformed into a vision of harmony, immediacy, and ethical transparency—precisely the inverse of how it has ever existed in practice. What is lost is the understanding that socialism is not the abolition of struggle, but its reorganisation on a higher historical plane.
It is in this context that the centrality of national liberation to the real history of socialism must be insisted upon, precisely because it is so often marginalized, trivialized, or dismissed in contemporary socialist discourse in the Global South. National liberation is not a matter of flags, anthems, or juridical sovereignty. It is a profound historical process in which the inherited colonial state is shattered or radically transformed, the coercive apparatus is seized and reoriented, the economy is reorganized under new priorities, and society is mobilised against both external domination and internal collaborators. It is through this process that the masses acquire not only political agency but historical experience—an experience of power, sacrifice, discipline, and collective struggle. Where independence takes the form of a negotiated transfer of authority from imperial administrators to a local comprador elite, this transformative process does not occur. The fundamental structures of domination remain intact, the economy continues to serve external accumulation, and political life is reduced to the circulation of elites within parameters set elsewhere. Under such conditions, socialism cannot appear as a historical necessity emerging from struggle; it can only appear as a moral protest against an otherwise unaltered reality.
It is precisely at this juncture that the peculiar appeal of Trotskyism and various currents of Western Marxism within neo-colonial societies must be located. These traditions did not emerge from successful processes of revolutionary construction but from moments of defeat, marginalization, and political impotence within the imperial core. As a result, they tend to conceptualise socialism in forms that systematically evade the burdens of power: revolution without consolidation, democracy without state authority, critique without responsibility, and purity without victory. For intellectuals in dependent societies—who have never faced the concrete tasks of building a state, defending sovereignty under imperial pressure, or organising production in conditions of siege—such frameworks are deeply seductive. They allow one to inhabit a posture of radicalism without confronting the historically unavoidable questions of coercion, discipline, compromise, and endurance. In this sense, these currents function less as theories of revolution than as ideologies of non-power.
The socialist tradition forged through actual revolutionary victories presents a radically different conception. For Lenin, socialism was inconceivable outside the seizure of state power and its disciplined exercise under conditions of economic backwardness and relentless imperialist hostility. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not an ethical ideal but a historical necessity imposed by the balance of class forces and the realities of civil war, sabotage, and intervention. Likewise, for Mao Zedong, socialism could not be abstracted from the concrete tasks of national liberation, agrarian transformation, and prolonged revolutionary struggle in a predominantly peasant society encircled by imperialism. In both cases, socialism was never imagined as a finished form or moral endpoint. It was understood as a protracted, contradictory process marked by improvisation, error, coercion, retreat, and renewal—a process whose success depended not on purity of intention but on the ability to learn from struggle and transform material conditions.
The experience of neo-colonial societies stands in stark contrast to this historical tradition. Here, the absence of revolutionary rupture has produced a peculiar intellectual condition: socialism without history. Political discourse oscillates endlessly between moral outrage and theoretical formalism, while the decisive question—how power is seized, organised, and defended—is either ignored or condemned in advance as inherently authoritarian. Socialism becomes something to be affirmed rather than something to be built, an identity rather than a strategy, a language rather than a programme of action. It is discussed incessantly precisely because it is never seriously pursued as a historical project. The avoidance of power thus masquerades as radicalism, while impotence is recoded as virtue.
Yet the material reality remains stubborn and unforgiving. Socialism does not arise from correct definitions, ethical commitments, or even theoretical sophistication alone. It arises from historical struggle—from the violent, uneven, and often tragic process through which oppressed classes and nations confront and attempt to overturn existing relations of domination. Where that struggle has been absent, deferred, or aborted, socialist thought will necessarily assume abstract, utopian, and moralized forms. The task before us, therefore, is not to refine ever more elegant definitions of socialism, but to restore the primacy of history to socialist analysis—above all, the unresolved and unfinished question of national liberation. Until this is confronted squarely, socialism in much of the Global South will remain what it too often already is: a discourse of aspiration without agency, critique without power, and theory without history.
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