Bisharat Abbasi

Introduction

The relationship between philosophy, politics, and geopolitical orientation constitutes a foundational battlefield for any revolutionary theory that aspires not merely to interpret the world but to change it. The proposition that philosophical profundity and political-geopolitical correctness exist in separate, non-communicating spheres presents a profound challenge—and indeed, a potential pitfall—for the Marxist-Leninist tradition, particularly as it is lived, theorised, and fought for in the crucible of the Global South. To posit, as has been suggested, that one can be a “very mediocre and shallow thinker” yet hold a correct anti-imperialist position, while a “deeply profound thinker” can champion Eurocentric and pro- imperialist politics, is to initiate a problematic divorce between theory and practice, between the depth of comprehension and the direction of transformative action. This essay, from the perspective of the historically oppressed and revolutionary Global South, argues against such a schism. It contends that while the stated disjunction descriptively exists within bourgeois intellectual history (the case of Heidegger standing as a stark monument to this betrayal), to accept it as an organic or necessary condition is to disarm ourselves theoretically at the very moment imperialist hegemony demands our utmost intellectual and practical rigour. For us, philosophy is neither a fetishised object of detached contemplation nor a neutral toolkit of abstract concepts. It is, as Marx, Lenin and Mao embodied, the theoretical front of the class war, a weapon that must be forged, selected, and wielded with a ruthless dialectical critique that unmasks all class content, Eurocentric biases, and civilisational blind spots. Our task is to reclaim, deepen, and weaponise philosophy from our standpoint, engaging both the Western canon and our own millennia-old traditions not with passive reverence but with the active, critical, and synthesising spirit of Aufhebung, subsuming them into our revolutionary project of achieving socialist modernity and total decolonisation.

I. The Indissoluble Unity of Philosophical Depth and Revolutionary Position: Against the Fetish of Disjunction

To grant the premise that profound philosophy and correct politics can be radically separated is to concede a critical territory to bourgeois idealism. It implicitly accepts that the realm of “deep thought” operates in an ethereal space above the material fray of class struggle, imperialism, and colonial subjugation. This is precisely the illusion that historical materialism seeks to shatter. The examples of Heidegger or various Frankfurt School thinkers are not proof of an organic separation; rather, they are glaring evidence of the class character and geopolitical situatedness of all philosophy, no matter its apparent depth. Their profundity, often real in dissecting certain aspects of bourgeois alienation or technological modernity, remains imprisoned within the horizons of the imperialist metropole, failing to make the dialectical leap to the standpoint of the colonised, the proletarianised, and the globally exploited. Their “depth” is thus a partial depth, a depth that meticulously explores the cave but refuses to acknowledge the sun outside, or worse, rationalises the chains that bind the cave’s occupants. Conversely, a “shallow” thinker with a correct anti-imperialist position likely grasps, intuitively or through lived experience, a fundamental truth of our epoch that the “profound” philosopher mystifies: the fundamental antagonism of imperialism. However, to leave this intuition at the level of shallowness is a profound strategic weakness. Without deep, systematic, philosophical grounding, correct political positions risk becoming dogmatic, inflexible, and vulnerable to co-optation or theoretical corrosion. They lack the explanatory power to navigate complex, shifting realities and to wage an effective war of position in the ideological sphere.

Marx, Lenin, and Mao never engaged with philosophy in this fetishised, disconnected manner. Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, his lifelong engagement with Hegel, and his critiques of Proudhon, Feuerbach, and the Young Hegelians were not the hobbies of a polymath. They were surgical operations to extract the rational kernel from the mystical shell, to weaponise dialectics for the analysis of capital. Lenin’s immersion in Hegel while exiled in Switzerland during the catastrophe of the First World War, resulting in the Philosophical Notebooks, was not an academic retreat. It was a desperate and rigorous effort to deepen his—and the movement’s—understanding of dialectics to comprehend the unprecedented collapse of the Second International and the revolutionary opportunity it presented. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” he insisted, and this theory had to be philosophically robust. Mao’s On Practice and On Contradiction are not abstract philosophical treatises; they are philosophical deep-dives born from the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, aimed at rectifying dogmatic (“mechanical materialist”) and subjectivist (“idealist”) errors within the Party itself. Their attitude was one of dialectical critical engagement: studying bourgeois philosophy voraciously but filtering it through the ruthless sieve of class analysis and revolutionary praxis. To study without this filter is to risk theoretical contamination; to refuse to study deeply for fear of contamination is to guarantee theoretical poverty and political vulnerability. The unity of depth and correctness is not a given; it is a fighting unity achieved through relentless critique and synthesis.

II. Philosophy as the Theoretical Front in the War of Ideas: The Marxist-Leninist Dialectical Method

For the Marxist-Leninist tradition, philosophy is explicitly understood as “class war in theory.” This is not a metaphorical flourish but a materialist axiom. The battlefield of ideas is not a salon for polite disagreement; it is a terrain where hegemony is secured or challenged, where the legitimacy of the existing order is fortified or undermined. Every philosophical system, every grand narrative, every epistemological framework carries, often in coded form, the fingerprints of specific class interests and geopolitical projects. The task of the revolutionary intellectual is therefore twofold: to engage with these ideas to understand the enemy’s terrain and to plunder its useful arms, and simultaneously to unmask them, to perform a dialectical critique that exposes their social function. The wholesale, abstract rejection of “Actually Existing Socialism” by various Western Marxist and Trotskyist tendencies is a prime example of an idea that must be unmasked. Presented as a defence of “pure” socialism or humanist ideals, this critique often functions, objectively, as an ideological accessory to imperialist encirclement and destabilisation. Its “profound” criticisms of bureaucracy or degeneracy, detached from the concrete, besieged, and scarred material reality of building socialism in the semi-periphery and periphery—under constant threat of invasion, sabotage, and blockade—reveal a Eurocentric bias that privileges a certain ideal model over the bloody, difficult, and non-linear process of historical transformation in the Global South.

This unmasking is not a simple act of negation. It is a dialectical Aufhebung: to overcome and preserve, to negate the reactionary class content while elevating and incorporating any rational insights into a higher, more concrete synthesis. When Marx critiqued Hegel, he did not discard the dialectic; he rescued it from its idealist mystification and reposited it on a materialist foundation. When Lenin critiqued empirio-criticism, he was defending the possibility of objective revolutionary knowledge against subjective idealism. When Mao critiqued dogmatic Marxism within the CCP, he was fighting for the living, adaptable soul of the doctrine against its dead, formalistic shell. This is the ruthless dialectical critique we must employ. It means engaging with a Heidegger not to marvel at his analysis of Dasein and “forgetfulness of Being” in a vacuum, but to ask: How does this profound inquiry into Being relate to his active support for the Nazi project, a project of racial imperialism and colonial expansion? What in his philosophical structure, for all its depth, made it compatible with such barbarism? The unmasking reveals the reactionary political ontology at its core. Our engagement is never for philosophical appreciation alone; it is for strategic intelligence in the total war of liberation.

III. Philosophy as Its Own Time Apprehended in Thoughts: The Historical Specificity of Global South Thought

Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is “its own time apprehended in thoughts” provides the crucial historical-materialist key to decolonising philosophical engagement. Philosophy is not the pursuit of timeless, placeless, abstract universals—a notion that is itself a Eurocentric universalisation of a particular historical experience. Rather, it is the most concentrated, conceptual expression of the specific historical, cultural, and social contradictions of an era. From the standpoint of the Global South, this means first recognising that the grand narrative of “Western Philosophy” from the Greeks to postmodernity is the philosophical apprehension of the time of Europe: its internal class dynamics, its Renaissance, its Enlightenment bourgeois revolutions, its imperial conquest, its capitalist modernity, and its subsequent crises. Its claims to universality are the ideological corollary of its global imperial domination. To study it as universal is to unconsciously adopt the perspective of the conqueror. Therefore, our engagement must begin with this act of situating: reading Hegel not as the culmination of human thought, but as the philosophical apprehension of the modernising, bourgeois, and still-rising European nation-state. His dialectic of master and slave, for instance, takes on a radically different, more literal resonance when read from the vantage point of the colonised slave.

For us, then, philosophy must be the apprehension of our own time in thought. Our time is the time of deferred modernity, of combined and uneven development, of the enduring scars of colonial borders, of extractivist economies, of national liberation struggles, of the painful construction of sovereignty, and of the quest for an alternative, socialist modernity that does not replicate the ecological and social depredations of the capitalist core. A Marxist-Leninist of the Global South does not become a mere commentator on Marx, Lenin, or Mao. The task is to become the Marx, Lenin, or Mao of our own historically specific conditions. This means applying their method—the living, dialectical, materialist method—to the concrete analysis of our concrete realities: the neocolonial structures in Africa, the legacy of dependencia in Latin America, the civilisational-state rejuvenation projects in Asia, and the complex interplay of class, nation, religion, and ethnicity in our societies. Our universality emerges not from aping Western categories, but from the concrete analysis of our particularities, contributing to the internationalist understanding of the global class struggle. In this spirit, internationalism is not uniformity, but “socialist unity in historically specific diversity.”

IV. The Double Engagement: Critiquing the West, Reclaiming the Indigenous

Adapting Marxism-Leninism to our civilisational contexts is a task of immense philosophical depth that requires a double, simultaneous engagement. On one front, we must continue and deepen the critical dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, from their classical foundations to their contemporary Eurasian or reactionary modernist offshoots (e.g., Dugin). This critique is not an exorcism but a strategic sorting. We must identify conceptual tools that can be dialectically retooled—for instance, certain aspects of dependency theory or world-systems analysis, themselves products of critical Global South and Western radical thought that broke with Eurocentrism. We must also confront directly the philosophies that provide intellectual fuel for neo-imperialism or reactionary particularism, from the Nietzschean will-to-power appropriated by fascisms to the postmodern scepticism that, in some iterations, undermines the very possibility of collective revolutionary projects and meta-narratives of liberation.

On the other, and this is the profoundly neglected front, we must embark on a deep, critical, and dialectical engagement with our own philosophical and cosmological traditions: African Ubuntu philosophy with its emphasis on communality and interconnectedness; the complex materialist and idealist strands of Indian philosophy from Lokayata to Advaita; the rich Chinese traditions of Confucian statecraft, Daoist dialectics, and Legalist realism; the sophisticated cosmological systems of pre-Columbian Americas; and the philosophical dimensions of Islamic civilisation that grappled with reason, revelation, and justice. This engagement is not a nativist return or a romantic retrieval. It is a rigorous, materialist critique that identifies both the progressive, communitarian, and dialectical elements that resonate with socialist aims, and the feudal, hierarchical, or metaphysical aspects that must be transcended. As the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui argued, socialism in Latin America had to be a “heroic creation,” not a copy or a replica, forged from both the scientific socialism of Europe and the indigenous communal traditions of the Andes. This synthesis enriches the Marxist tradition, moving it beyond its specific European historical origins and allowing it to speak in the cultural and philosophical idioms of our peoples, grounding it in our historical memory and moral universe. It is a process of making Marxism truly universal by deepening its roots in all of humanity’s philosophical soil.

V. Marxism-Leninism as a Theoretical Weapon for Socialist Modernity

Ultimately, for the Global South, Marxism-Leninism is not an academic philosophy for interpretation. It is a theoretical weapon for total transformation. Its goal is concrete: the completion of the decolonisation project through national liberation and full political-economic sovereignty; the development of the productive forces to overcome poverty and dependency; the construction of a socialist society that ensures common prosperity, dignity, and cultural flowering; and the strengthening of internationalist solidarity against imperialism. In this total war, we must choose and forge our philosophical weapons wisely. We engage with various philosophical traditions not to become erudite scholars of Heidegger or expert exegetes of the Upanishads, but to enrich our own theoretical arsenal. We study Nietzschean perspectivism or Heideggerian phenomenology to better understand the ideological underpinnings of late bourgeois subjectivity and crisis, and to sharpen our own counter-arguments. We study our indigenous cosmovisions to find conceptual resources for ecological socialism and non-individualist social organisation.

This is the spirit of critical giants like Domenico Losurdo, who meticulously excavated the liberal tradition’s complicity with slavery and colonialism, and Enrique Dussel, who constructed a “Philosophy of Liberation” from the perspective of the excluded. They exemplify the engaged, partisan intellectual of the Global South who raids the philosophical armouries of the world, subjecting every weapon to the stress-test of dialectical materialist critique and the urgent needs of liberation. Our aim is to overcome our historically specific condition of subjugation. Therefore, our philosophical praxis is one of strategic synthesis: becoming the Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao of our own time and place, armed with the deepest possible understanding of both the global structures of oppression and the local reservoirs of resistance and wisdom, all subsumed into the relentless pursuit of a socialist future.

Conclusion

The premise that profound philosophy and correct anti-imperialist politics are easily separable is, from the trenchant viewpoint of the Global South, a dangerous concession to theoretical complacency. It risks fostering a generation of revolutionaries who are politically committed but theoretically disarmed, unable to comprehend the sophisticated ideological assaults of imperialism or to navigate the complex philosophical terrain of their own societies. We reject this false dichotomy. We insist on the fighting unity of theory and practice, of depth and direction. Our path is the demanding, dialectical path charted by the masters of our tradition: a ruthless critique of everything existing, which includes a ruthless critique of philosophy itself, whether Western or indigenous. We engage with all thought as historically situated, class-bound, and geopolitically marked. We unmask it to reveal its service to empire or to liberation, and we synthesise its insights into a higher, more potent revolutionary theory. For us, philosophy is the spearhead of the war of ideas. In our hands, Marxism-Leninism is that spearhead, constantly sharpened by critical engagement, continuously reforged in the fires of our diverse civilisational experiences, and eternally aimed at the heart of imperialism and the construction of a sovereign, socialist modernity. This is our comprehensive thesis, our method, and our unwavering commitment in the long struggle for total liberation.