“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Karl Marx
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to readers who do not form their views according to “political camps” or party logic, but who instead give priority to truth and to the search for truth.
- Some Preliminary Remarks on Defeat and the Distortion of Perspective
The present essay seeks to draw attention to a number of political and theoretical missteps of the Western Left whose theoretical and practical consequences remain with us to this day and continue to leave a deep imprint on our ways of thinking. I shall refrain here from attempting a precise definition of the concept of the “Western Left”, but I have primarily in mind the various currents and groupings of the “New Left” that emerged out of 1968. In this sense, and to a certain extent, we ourselves were also part of this phenomenon, even if, from another perspective, I would regard us as characteristically East European.
The missteps discussed below reinforced one another and, as we shall see, ultimately led to a political impasse. In my view, recognizing this fact is a precondition for finding a way out. This is all the more important because the newer generations of the East European anti-capitalist Left have often followed—and many still follow—the “guidance” and “models” provided by the Western Left, sometimes in an almost uncritical and imitative manner.
The present reflections also draw upon the author’s personal experiences accumulated over nearly four decades, although the genre of “notes” is obviously unsuited to a systematic treatment of such experiences.[1] During these decades the world has changed considerably, though not as much as many imagine. The astonishing pace of technological development has largely left untouched the centuries-old contradictions of capitalism and the capitalist world-system, as well as the hierarchical relations of dependence that continue to characterize the interactions among individuals, social groups, and classes.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought about a major geopolitical reordering of the world-system. The former bipolar order first gave way to an unipolar world dominated by the United States. Subsequently, however, the territorial and economic redivision inherent in the imperial structure of the world-system, together with the strengthening of Russia, state-socialist China, and India, pointed towards the emergence of a multipolar order. The wars we continue to witness today constitute an almost natural component of this process of redivision. In light of the historical experience of the twentieth century, the nature of these inter-imperialist conflicts can scarcely be separated from the struggle over markets—above all energy markets—the control of trade routes, and the corresponding rearrangement of the spheres of influence of regional and great powers.
For the readers of Eszmélet it hardly needs to be emphasized that the emergence and historical development of the Western, dominant, hegemonic centre of the world-system reaches back several centuries. One characteristic of this well-known historical dynamic is that, although the evolution of the world-system is increasingly moving towards multipolarity, the objectively existing hegemony of the West continues to leave its mark on everything from economic structures to everyday ways of life.
In this sense, the “Western Left” itself came to occupy a position of intellectual and political hegemony in the aftermath of the “world revolution” of 1968, insofar as it could regard itself as the heir to the critical potential accumulated there. The events of 1968 endowed it with considerable moral prestige, whereas the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia demoralized and, in the eyes of many, delegitimized the traditional socialist and communist Left. At the same time, however, the rich body of criticism directed at Soviet development was not matched by corresponding theoretical achievements or practical movement experiences capable of advancing the revolutionary transformation of the West.
The collapse of the Soviet Union subsequently provided a new objective impulse for the reconsideration of critical theory and political strategy, both in the West and, to some extent, in Eastern Europe. Yet this much-anticipated renewal ultimately proved, in many respects, to be more apparent than real.
We became aware of the limitations of this critical potential during the first post-transition conferences of Eszmélet, when even the leading figures of the Western anti-capitalist Left were unable to offer genuinely transformative ideas. It was already becoming clear at that time that the defeat of the socialist Left in Eastern Europe would have global consequences. One of the principal lessons was the recognition that the Great Experiment originating in the Russian Revolution ultimately collapsed because socialism itself remained unrealized.
Yet discussions of a “new socialism” were soon confined to conference halls, as the practical and movement-based foundations that might have sustained such a project gradually disappeared. Our journal published numerous articles and studies documenting this process, the global transformation of the anti-capitalist Left, and the destruction of a significant part of its political and organizational capacities. For a long time, we ourselves failed fully to grasp the magnitude of the defeat.
Naturally, when speaking of politics, we are not referring to the present or past state of Marxist theory and scholarship, whose most penetrating critiques of capitalism continue to provide indispensable guidance for understanding the overall trajectory of world development.
The matter may best be understood in the terms employed by Göran Therborn in his 2007 New Left Review essay “After Dialectics”:
“While capitalist inequalities intensified in most countries, while the global gap between rich and poor continued to widen, and while the brutality of the rulers of the dominant capitalist states repeatedly revealed itself, the dialectic of capitalism reignited. Yet this new advance of capital was not accompanied by even the slightest strengthening of the working class or of anti-capitalist movements, nor did it open a path from the existing system towards a different mode of production—at least no such tendencies were visible to the naked eye. On the contrary, the working class weakened, while embryonic systemic alternatives either disintegrated or became completely marginalized. During the final two decades of the twentieth century, the political defeats and social collapse of the Left proved devastating in every respect.”[2]
Today, nearly twenty years later, the situation is not better but worse. To use Therborn’s formulation once again, not a single global initiative or campaign—from the World Social Forum to the various green movements—has produced tangible results. Despite the emergence of a global condition marked by levels of inequality unprecedented in history, the Left has failed to formulate a mature and convincing response.[3]
Reflecting on the reasons for this failure, one must ask: where did they—and where did we—go wrong? At what points, and for what reasons, did these political and intellectual missteps occur?
- 1968, 1989: The Dissipation of the Western Left’s Aura
The fundamental contradiction underlying the analyses of significant sections of the Western anti-systemic Left revealed itself in its full magnitude during the period of system change.[4] The assumption that the Soviet Union stood in the way of all “revolutionary transformation” proved to be mistaken and ultimately served as a form of self-exoneration for the Western anti-systemic Left as a whole. From the “postmodern Left” to the various Trotskyist currents, many saw their predictions, optimistic forecasts, and “revolutionary prophecies” concerning the post-1989 transformations thoroughly discredited. Since the system change, Eastern Europe—albeit to varying degrees and in different ways across its sub-regions—has exhibited a general pattern of political, socio-economic, and cultural decline. As we had anticipated, it has remained a peripheral region of the European Union. This is all the more thought-provoking because, in the 2020s, Europe as a whole descended into a crisis marked by war, to which the Left failed to provide even a minimally coherent and effective response; not even an influential peace movement emerged.
I believe that we must give an honest and far more thorough account of all the essential features of this dead end than these brief reflections can provide, for such an undertaking may well be the most important precondition for a political rebirth. Without it, it is impossible to discover new paths towards a possible socialist future, to the intellectual points of departure for which Eszmélet itself has contributed within the limits of its capacities.
The self-critical reassessment of the experiences of 1989—much like the historical reckoning with 1968—also ran aground within the Western intellectual Left.⁵ The process began with the abandonment of “obsolete communism” (obsolet communism, in the formulation of Cohn-Bendit), which ultimately ended in the abandonment of communism itself. Cohn-Bendit, after all, eventually entered the French Parliament as a liberal. Meanwhile, the rupture with the Soviet Union left a major vacuum in world politics. Put bluntly, for many people—including many in Eastern Europe—the Western Left itself became the principal point of orientation once the Soviet Union had disappeared, a development scarcely altered by the post-1989 survival of the “Chinese model.”
Naturally, the question arose: from where, and towards what?
For the generation of 1968, the decisive element was freedom—or rather a particular myth of freedom—without any serious examination of its economic foundations or driving forces. It is well known that “world-changing” grassroots movements emerged from the United States to France, Spain, and Latin America; similarly, projects of “socialist orientation” took shape in parts of Africa, and later the Polish Solidarity movement appeared. Regardless of theoretical considerations, the emergence of small communities, cooperatives, forms of workers’ ownership, and communes constituted an important development, as did the rise of the feminist movement. The demands of sexual minorities and various racial, ethnic, and human-rights movements came increasingly to the fore, alongside environmental causes, anti-war campaigns, and numerous peace initiatives.
Yet with the advance of neoliberalism during the 1970s these causes fragmented into separate entities. Gradually they either merged into a new (neo)liberal mainstream or became institutionalized as distinct issue areas, the consequences of which continue to confront us today in the identity-political revival of the so-called progressives. Despite the many genuinely progressive aspirations involved, the entire question of democracy and freedom was ultimately reduced to a largely legal and political matter, detached from its economic dimension.
From the standpoint of a socialist perspective, what was crucial was the theoretical, practical, organizational, and movement-based elaboration of the concrete problems of economic and social emancipation.
There were attempts—largely theoretical ones—in Eastern Europe. One example was the issue raised by Lukács in his 1968 Demokratisierung, but it generated little serious response in the West. Instead, debates revolved around whether Lukács should be regarded as a Western or an Eastern Marxist. Despite the intellectual interventions of Rudolf Bahro and Miklós Haraszti, the New Left largely missed the opportunity for a theoretical and practical reconstruction of socialism. It exhausted itself in its critical functions and in its rejection of Soviet-type society, even though Isaac Deutscher and many others had drawn attention to the viable elements within the traditions of pre-Stalin Marxism. Yet the theoretical implications of these historical debates either evaporated or were never fully formulated.[5]
Even at the time, it was striking that the French Communist Party did not join the student movements of 1968. Many on the Left interpreted this simply as a betrayal, while failing to recognize their own one-sidedness, which in this respect mirrored that of the Communist Party itself. What was missing was an economic conception of post-capitalist, socialist development. They possessed virtually no concrete social alternative to neoliberalism.
Although theoretical points of departure could be found in Ágnes Heller, in the Yugoslav Praxis group, or later in Ernst Mandel’s works, sectarian thinking and immersion in partial issues proved stronger than any attempt to embrace grassroots movements or cooperatives as real transformative forces. The anti-imperialist struggle itself gradually became detached from socialist transformation as a practical-economic project.
It was therefore hardly surprising that, by the period of system change, the working class and its political organizations no longer possessed alternative socialist economic theories or movement-based points of support in the central regions of the world-system.[6]
Even many New Left critiques of the system dissolved into the prevailing liberal framework. A significant part of the Eastern European reform intelligentsia within communist parties came to see itself as the left wing of (neo)liberalism, inspired by Western social democracy. The Western New Left, while criticising neoliberalism, lacked a coherent strategic orientation and turned towards Eastern European and Soviet oppositions with largely unfounded expectations.
In reflecting on reforms within countries of actually existing socialism, their horizon scarcely extended beyond Alec Nove’s conception of market socialism. The problematic role of the market within the structure of state socialism remained largely misunderstood. The dominant opposition currents in Eastern Europe were still shaped by the mythology of “catching up with the West,” “following,” or “overtaking” Western development.
At Eszmélet, during the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, we took the position that catching up with the West was, for objective historical reasons, essentially impossible.[7] In other words, the fundamental social, political, and economic preconditions for such a process were absent and could not realistically be created in the foreseeable future.
This recognition—namely, that what was emerging here was the restoration of capitalism and that its second edition would likewise take the form of a peripheral capitalism dominated by nomenklatura and oligarchic interests—was one of the starting points that led to the establishment of the Baloldali Alternatíva Egyesülés (Left Alternative Association) in Hungary in 1988–89. It was conceived as an alternative both to Stalinist-derived “bureaucratic socialism” and to the restoration of capitalism. We also had our own Hungarian philosophical traditions to draw upon: Lukács, Mészáros, Tőkei, András György Szabó, and certain representatives of the younger generation.
Yet already during the 1980s, proposals for extending East European socialist reforms in the direction of a multi-sector mixed economy had become increasingly dominant, even though such conceptions had deep roots going back to the Lenin period itself. In this context, the non-market character of socialist cooperatives and, more generally, of communal forms of production and consumption grounded in social self-management was largely neglected.[8]
In the West, these tendencies culminated in a misunderstanding of perestroika. The fact that major currents of the Western Left—from Habermas to Mandel and beyond—misinterpreted the nature of perestroika and of East European system change has had consequences that continue to this day. They overlooked the actual character and roots of capitalist restoration, including its anti-democratic and authoritarian features.[9] Yet the intellectual attempt to envisage a kind of third alternative, rejecting both “bureaucratic socialism” and capitalism—along with capitalist democracy—could take a variety of forms.
This perspective still surfaced at the international conferences we organized in the early 1990s, although our Western friends showed little sympathy for such proposals. Even then, they continued to denounce the “Stalinist bureaucracy” as the principal enemy and warned of the dangers of a “Stalinist restoration,” despite the fact that the anti-communist and pro-capitalist nature of system change had already become unmistakably clear.
Without revisiting the reasons for this here, it should be noted that this misjudgment also reinforced a broader loss of perspective in other respects.
When this misjudgment became evident and the first attempts at self-critical reassessment began to appear, the Soviet Union had already collapsed irrevocably. Within the ranks of the anti-systemic Left, the centre of gravity gradually shifted—something that is especially clear in retrospect—towards increasingly sterile political struggles. Action whose primary purpose was merely to justify one’s own existence became ever more important, as did an unconditional attachment to old convictions and beliefs, together with a neo-sectarian estrangement from reality. The objective foundations of this development, I would reiterate, lay in the failure of the socialist experiments.
The rapid decline and loss of direction of the World Social Forum movement, which rose to prominence during the 1990s, likewise demonstrated that no successful new movements had emerged capable of initiating anti-capitalist development. The struggles of movements and groups critical of global capitalism ultimately dissolved into the confrontation between “globalists” and “anti-globalists”—that is, into the competitive conflict between global big capital and locally based “national capitals” competing with it. Depending on national circumstances, pro-capitalist “left-wing” parties oriented themselves either towards globalist liberalism (as in Hungary) or towards conservative nationalism (as in Russia).
In other words, political empiricism, organizational weakness, and spontaneity eventually came to dominate even the anti-capitalist camp. What prevailed was the “semblance of existence” and the rule of historical inertia, to which the epigraph of this essay alludes. One achievement, however, was preserved in the realm of theoretical and political reflection: the reconstruction, search for, and intellectual revival of self-managed socialism as an abstract avenue of escape. This effort extended from Eszmélet in Hungary to Alternativi in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe, above all among Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Transylvanian intellectual circles, as well as elsewhere. This was not something we learned from the West.
- The “Fall” of 1979: The “Civilizational” Misjudgment — Islamism Instead of Socialism?
In a certain sense, the conditions described above—the uncontrolled proliferation of empiricism and arbitrary theoretical constructions—were themselves expressions of the disappointment that the great expectations of 1968 had failed to materialize. Yet Paris soon became the scene of a new redemption: that of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, which attracted numerous adherents not only in Iran itself but throughout the Western world as well.
The dramatic history of attitudes toward the so-called Islamic Revolution of 1979 reflected a variety of problems. Ultimately, it formed part of the broader process through which the death knell also sounded for socialist-oriented movements in the Third World.
Already during the 1970s, a popular position within sections of the Western Left—particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world and especially, though not exclusively, among Trotskyist circles—was the critique of “Soviet-type” development and “Soviet civilization,” rejecting them as forms of “state capitalism” in much the same way as American capitalist civilization and Western imperialism.[10]
Eventually, a considerable part of the Western left-wing intelligentsia, influenced above all by the postmodern intellectual climate, turned globally toward a different, non-socialist “third way,” whose foremost ideologue was the renowned French postmodern philosopher and former Marxist Michel Foucault.
Beginning already in the 1970s, Foucault advanced what proved to be a fundamental misjudgment. Opposed both to bureaucratic socialism and to postmodern capitalism, he perceived in the Iranian Islamist Revolution a new possibility of liberation. The myth of “Islamic revolutionary redemption,” centered upon Ayatollah Khomeini, led to a strategic dead end through the embrace of the Iranian upheaval of 1979, under the spell of a kind of premodern romanticism. Foucault misunderstood, to a remarkable degree, the nature of the Khomeini dictatorship, in which he believed he could discern elements of freedom and a new civilizational challenge.
Chris Cutrone succinctly formulated the essence of the problem in the aftermath of the Iranian popular uprising of 2009, in the thirtieth year of the regime’s existence:
“Of all the organized tendencies of the Iranian Revolution, perhaps the MEK (the People’s Mojahedin Organization, founded in 1965 by left-wing students seeking to combine certain revolutionary elements of Marxism with Islam — T.K.) most fully embodied Michel Foucault’s vision of the Revolution’s more radical, ‘non-Western’ character (see Afary and Anderson, 2005). Yet just as Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic Revolution should stand as a disturbing warning concerning the inherent limitations and right-wing implications of the Foucauldian critique of modernity, so too should the historical experience of the MEK’s sharia-inspired Islamism serve as a warning against similar late New Left valorizations of ‘culture.’”
As is well known, Khomeini proved fatal to the Iranian Left. Yet even the mass murder of thousands of Iranian communists failed to enlighten the Left as a whole.[11]
Within certain currents of the anti-capitalist Left, attitudes both toward Western civilization and modernity, on the one hand, and toward the Soviet Union, on the other, underwent significant changes, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. The debate no longer revolved around different variants of Marxism or the “pluralization of Marxism”; for many, the possibility of a civilizational turn also emerged under the spell of the Islamic Revolution.
Mutatis mutandis, this same lack of clarity reappeared—despite September 11, 2001—in the war policies of President Obama (and in the occasional support these policies received from sections of the Left). Ultimately, these developments contributed in North Africa and the Middle East to a breakthrough from secular regimes toward the violent establishment and support of Islamist religious dictatorships.
When the Arab Spring turned into winter, imperial military intervention unleashed a new wave of migration of millions of Muslims toward the West.[12] One consequence for the Left was that, once again, for political and tactical reasons, clarification of its attitude toward political Islam was postponed. In the context of opposition to Islamophobia, such postponement often appeared to provide an adequate justification.
Temporarily—and perhaps only temporarily—for tactical reasons, sections of the radical anti-capitalist Left, acting under the sign of a certain populism and regrettably learning from the everyday practices of bourgeois politics, committed themselves to supporting Islamic religious movements. Yet there exists no successful historical example demonstrating that Islam and Marxism, acting in a complementary fashion, have produced positive results in opposition to the capitalist system.
Or could the secular character of the socialist movement perhaps be abandoned for populist considerations, as represented, for example, in the Sanders–Mamdani relationship? Such questions might not even need to be raised—without beating around the bush—were it not for one shameful fact.
In January and February 2026, the first nationwide anti-Islamist popular uprising of global significance against a reactionary clerical dictatorship in Iran was met with silence on the part of the global Left. Moreover, the almost indiscriminate and brutal killing of tens of thousands of protesters has been accepted—or, for geopolitical reasons, simply ignored.
It is as though the matter were being left to Trump and Netanyahu, whose confrontation with Iran would then, quasi, serve to confirm the Left in its understanding of the bloody nature of imperialism, while at the same time the removal of the reactionary clerical dictatorship remains far from certain.
Part of the methodological background to this obvious error lies in the fact that the new neo-imperialist relations and hierarchies within the world system, as well as the internal social contradictions of these states, are still described using the old concepts of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle. The function of such a historical anachronism is none other than to justify a quasi-bipolar, geopolitically inspired struggle without any serious economic or class analysis.
To be sure, certain grave features of the colonial era continue to accompany us in accordance with the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in historical development. Yet oppression constitutes a multidirectional and complex class category, whose abstract use merely empties the category itself of content. In a certain sense, Black people, people of color, homosexuals, women, Palestinians, persons with disabilities, and others may all be regarded as oppressed; but upon what conception of class is such a vulgar Marxist understanding actually based?
Similarly vulgar (and unscientific) is the abstraction of a generalized “civilizational struggle” against the West, whose practical function is to provide a populist foundation for political campaigns. What remains overlooked is that capitalism has by now developed to such an extent even in most African countries that modern, or ostensibly modern, capitalist classes have established themselves almost everywhere. Despite all national peculiarities and all claims to sovereignty, these classes have become integrated into universal capitalist civilization, the world market, and global multinational corporations: the dividing lines between local capitalist exploitation and global exploitation have become so entangled that they are almost impossible to disentangle.
Relatively independent states and autonomous ruling classes have emerged, which, in conditions of mutual dependence, are simultaneously in competition with one another; and in this competition they employ every kind of ideology that may prove useful in manipulating the population. It is therefore no accident that the former “socialist orientation”, the African Marxist tradition (e.g. Frantz Fanon), have largely become part of the historical past. Across North Africa and Asia, the secular regimes driven to destruction by the West have everywhere been replaced by religious and Islamist systems accompanied by corresponding “medieval” ideologies.[13] Today, most of the former states and movements of the “socialist orientation” have rallied under the banner of Islam or other religions, accompanied by a complete rejection of every form of social progress.
Accordingly, no clear picture has emerged of the “eastern half” of the gradually evolving multipolar world order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union (e.g. BRICS). Although these actors constitute an economic and accumulative counterweight to the unrestricted hegemony of the Western centre, they do not offer any positive social alternative for humanity. This reality forms the background to the predominance of the aforementioned “rule of empiricism” even within the anti-capitalist Left, which manifests itself in the cobbling together of false political alliances and populist political campaigns.
The Western Left—including all those who regard themselves as left-wing, the so-called “progressives”, as well as European and American academic intellectuals—has further aggravated this misunderstanding by stepping into the same river in October 2023 as their French and British predecessors did in 1979. They defended the geopolitically motivated war launched against Israel by terrorist organizations supported and financed by Iran and Qatar (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc.) as a “national liberation struggle”, and even presented it as a global anti-imperialist war, although it was clear beyond doubt that the entire “resistance” was merely an instrument in a new phase of a regional power conflict.[14]
- “Palestinism” as the Contemporary Infantile Disorder of the Radical Left
An anti-capitalist Left whose “centre of struggle” is not the internationalist emancipation of labour, which loses itself in the sea of “inter-imperialist” contradictions, and which drifts in the wake now of liberalisms, now of nationalisms (conservatisms), is incapable even of mitigating its present regrettable political insignificance. It strays into sterile political alliances that imprison it and limit the struggle for, and the search for, the global perspectives of socialism. Fundamental questions—such as the global transformation of property relations, the establishment of communal forms of economic organization, and their place within a multi-sector mixed economy in the various regions of the world system, particularly in those areas abandoned by capital and rendered “free” in the form of mass unemployment under conditions of global crisis—have been almost entirely ignored. Instead, the Left has become an instrument of “high politics”, a development that manifested itself paradigmatically in the course of the Middle Eastern conflict.
“Palestinism”, as an instrument and arena of global mobilization, has reached a dead end. It is therefore worth dwelling on this problem somewhat longer, although there is evidently neither the possibility nor perhaps even the necessity of undertaking a systematic historical reconstruction here. The mass appearance of self-styled “experts”, who arrange historical facts purely for propagandistic purposes, has produced its own “street fighters”, who in most cases have little idea what the war in question is actually about. By inflaming nationalism, religious passions, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, these “experts” are preparing, or indeed consciously pursuing, the final burial of anti-capitalism. “They do not know what they are doing, yet they do it.”
What is Palestinism?
Already during the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Lenin concluded, in his examination of the national and colonial question, that movements opposing modern capitalism frequently turned toward “medieval” forms of development. The history of the Russian Revolution itself, the Civil War, and the formation of the Soviet Union richly illustrates this dilemma. He emphasized the exclusion of all forms of political alliance with such movements.[15]
The adherence of a considerable part of the radical Left to the banner of “Palestinism” is justified by the claim that, in the present era, it represents “the resistance” to the System itself.[16]
In reality, the Arab-Israeli conflict has never been merely a religious confrontation. The so-called Jewish-Arab antagonism appeared, at most, on the surface as an ethno-religious problem. This aspect was deliberately emphasized by those who, in the regional great-power struggles of the Middle East, sought to advance their own interests and roles while concealing the essential issues—from British Mandate policy to the present day.[17]
The actual organizational source of the myth of Palestinism is connected with the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Emerging during the 1960s and possessing a quasi-Moscow centre, the movement regarded itself as the bearer of a socialist orientation in the Middle East. Ideologically, it situated the creation of a Palestinian state within an anti-imperialist and pro-socialist framework, although it never succeeded in realizing that statehood, even after its own emancipation from socialism. Nor has it done so today.
The socialist cadres of this movement largely consisted of young people who had become acquainted with the foundations of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union or in other socialist countries—a system-legitimating ideology that withered away in parallel with the disintegration and destruction of the Soviet Union and disappeared together with socialist orientation itself. Socialist orientation, as an anti-colonial force of mobilization, evaporated. The “Palestinian cause” was transformed into a purely ideological, political, and military instrument of Middle Eastern power rivalries. Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others consequently “Islamized” anti-Israeli resistance through global financial support.
It is therefore evident that the financiers, supporters, and arms suppliers of Hamas are themselves engaged in mutual competition, since the present war itself constitutes part and manifestation of a long-standing geopolitical struggle for power.[18] Every form of “historical argumentation”—from blood libels to Islamophobic arguments—serves exclusively to obscure the real power sources and stakes of the Palestinian-Jewish conflict.
The latest war, launched by Hamas on 7 October 2023 with Iranian and Qatari financial, military, ideological, media, political, and diplomatic support, was conducted in accordance with the shared objective formulated with Iran: the destruction of the State of Israel together with its population. What anti-capitalists did not consider even for a moment—for they mobilized on Hamas’s side the very next day, identifying the organization with the Palestinian people—was what elements of social emancipation, if any, could possibly be discerned in the mass killings perpetrated by members of the terrorist organization.
It became unequivocally clear that no liberation in any meaningful sense was at stake here. Hamas constitutes a global capitalist project, a capitalist enterprise for which the myth of “Palestinism” serves merely as an instrument. The sacrifice of the population is undertaken not in favour of the creation of a second, or rather another, Arab state, but in the name of a borderless, “Jew-free” Islamic caliphate. This exploitation of the misery and victimhood of the Palestinian Arab population has nevertheless appeared in numerous radical Left publications and demonstrations as a war of liberation against American-Israeli imperialism.
Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, immense sums of money have poured into Hamas’s coffers: over the past fifteen years, incoming funds have been estimated in the hundreds of billions. Among these were, for example, some 40 billion dollars from the European Union, various agencies of the United Nations, above all UNRWA, which operated under Hamas’s direct “supervision”, while funds also flowed from the United States and from the “civil organizations” (NGOs) of numerous other countries and regions, or through such organizations, without any concrete accountability.
Substantial sums from Qatar reached Gaza with the knowledge and consent of successive Israeli governments, above all that of Netanyahu, who has remained in power for fifteen years. In their arrogant and irresponsible manner, they apparently believed that such financial support would at least reduce the scale of unrest.
Hamas is therefore an instrument, a global capitalist project endowed from the outset by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and others with military, political, and propaganda-media functions. Perhaps even more surprising is that the “progressive” adherents of Palestinism wanted to know nothing of all this: the last population on earth maintained in refugee status, the approximately one and a half million inhabitants of Gaza, counted merely as sacrificial material. For nearly two decades Hamas has apparently remained at the centre of power despite repeated military defeats, retaining characteristics deeply rooted in the past, reflected not only in its ideology but also in its methods of killing.[19]
Within the framework of the myth of Palestinism—among Trotskyist organizations, radical Left parties, university activist structures, and others—Hamas and its oil-funded supporters, above all Iran, are adorned with all manner of anti-imperialist decorations and surrounded by the aura of national liberation and anti-colonial resistance, aided by substantial and organized international media campaigns. The formulations of earlier times referring to “progressive movements” or countries of “socialist orientation” have given way to the ideology of “resisting Islamist movements”, to the revival and perpetuation of global antisemitism, and to a system of jihadist terror operations financed partly by Western money, employing paid terrorists and compensating the families of “martyrs”—that is, terrorists. In short, the project of Holocaust 2.0 appears here tacitly as a business enterprise.
Within the myth of Palestinism, this voluntarily embraced exile, this “victimhood” and “martyrdom”, is placed at the centre of thought and action in the spirit of a cult of death (the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and others), with the aim of sweeping away every obstacle from the path of Islam, above all the Jews. In this interpretation, the Jews also came to embody Western intrusion. Thus a global struggle was seemingly launched in the spirit of jihad (“globalizing the intifada”, “from the river to the sea”). By now, Palestinism has penetrated Western political culture and become part of political discourse, legitimizing itself through appeals to human rights and a manipulative anti-colonialist demagogy.[20]
The mythical narrative of the war against Israel, which placed the “salvation” of the Palestinian population at its centre in opposition to Israeli retaliatory strikes, appeared plausible, since Israel is militarily many times stronger. Yet it had no conception of how terrorist organizations whose own documents reveal that they had placed military bases, weapons depots, and other infrastructure beneath hospitals, schools, residential buildings, and public institutions could be dismantled by non-traditional means.[21]
Together with the Hamas activists, they knew in advance that the attack of 7 October would have horrific consequences in Gaza, for this was precisely what they intended. This potential—and subsequently actual—destruction constituted the propaganda material through which the “progressive pogrom” and the Iranian-Hamas genocidal project were globalized.
The anti-Israeli and antisemitic media campaign that disseminates Hamas’s rapidly globalized narrative obscures the true nature of the terrorist organizations. Media structures largely under Qatari influence, university “sponsorships”, and a broad spectrum of media actors—from the radically antisemitic Tucker Carlson to media institutions generally regarded as liberal, such as the BBC or CNN—form the basis of this media enterprise.
Accordingly, it remains obscured that nobody is once again genuinely concerned with the fate of the Palestinian population. The “solidarity” in whose name the solidarity movement was created decades ago has thus far exhausted itself in a handful of symbolic acts, such as the “narcissistic” boat actions associated with Greta Thunberg. Meanwhile, under Hamas’s rule and as a consequence of Israeli military operations, Gaza itself has become a field of ruins. Although the IDF evacuated civilians from combat zones, hundreds of thousands continue to survive in tent cities. Hamas, despite all human-rights propaganda, also employs child terrorists, not to mention the Iranian clerical dictatorship, which has been known to conscript children as young as twelve.[22] A considerable proportion of child victims must therefore be sought among the victims of the terrorists themselves.
This very notion of “anti-colonial resistance” has itself become central to global political struggles across countless forums of the bourgeois world. In the power struggles of the United States and Western European countries, it serves as an instrument for securing the votes of former Muslim immigrant communities. In Spain, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, France, and elsewhere, political parties of various persuasions exploit the Gaza conflict in their efforts to win electoral support. In many cases, Palestinism is employed to forge a form of political alliance between governing parties and political Islam against their domestic opposition. This was likewise the dynamic at work in New York, symbolized by the rise of Mamdani. But what place does the anti-capitalist Left have in this populist chaos, given that it possesses its own internationalist intellectual tradition and theoretical heritage, one in which any open flirtation with antisemitism has always been inconceivable?
At the same time, the entire issue has for many years formed part of the struggle within the United Nations to secure the support of approximately fifty so-called Muslim states (more accurately, states with Muslim majorities), none of which can plausibly be said to have advanced the cause of social progress or social equality over recent decades.
Almost nowhere has it been recognized that the entire issue has been futilely intertwined with the question of migration. Ultimately, the anti-capitalist Left can derive no political benefit for itself or its potential social base from any element of Islamist politics, nor does such an approach contribute in any way to improving migrants’ living conditions or facilitating their integration into the societies in which they live. The political forces rallying under the banner of Palestinism—including significant sections of the anti-capitalist Left—hardly utter the word “capitalism” at all. Instead, they become subordinate to political agendas not their own.
Another such political enterprise that exploits Palestinism is represented by small-nationalist movements and states. Palestinism has become a useful instrument for smaller European national movements and state-building projects seeking to advance their own causes in the international media, at home, or within the United Nations. The Irish, the Basques, the Catalans, and others may in due course expect similar expressions of international solidarity with their own declarations of national independence under the banner of “solidarity with Gaza.”
What lies behind this left-wing deviation? It is the absence, at the present historical stage, of any socially transformative movement capable of providing direction. There are no Zapatistas, no cooperative movements, no forms of social self-defence, no internationalist solidarity directed against capital. Instead, there is racism and political particularism, phenomena that have never before flourished so vigorously within the Left itself, while even anti-capitalist forces have resorted to various populist and racist experiments in the hope of gaining parliamentary representation here and there. The very concept of capitalism has been displaced by Israel, and, in accordance with an old tradition, the flames of antisemitism have once again been rekindled in many Western countries, in ways that correspond to the interests of the dominant political elites.[23]
One of the “secrets” behind the emergence and near-entrenchment of Palestinism within sections of the anti-capitalist Left is that no questions need be asked. One merely throws into the debate a series of assertions—validated, among others, by university intellectuals—in support of the “revolutionary cause”: anti-colonialism, famine, genocide, resistance. There are no facts to analyse. Even the name of Hamas need not be uttered and therefore need not be condemned. The result is the image of a sterile struggle conducted in the name of an “eternal truth”, authenticated by a narrative of suffering and victimhood—a myth that conceals reality itself: the ongoing reconfiguration of power, financial interests, and markets in the Middle East.
Is this truly the function of the progressive Left? Or are we instead witnessing the hacking, marginalization, and eventual destruction of the genuine anti-capitalist Left? I fear the answer is yes.
The anti-capitalist Left has become part of an unspoken “system of alliances” stretching from the Spanish Social Democratic Prime Minister, the Irish Prime Minister and President, the French liberal Emmanuel Macron, the British Labour Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn—the uncrowned king of the British Left—to the Iranian clerical dictatorship that supported and financed Hamas’s attack, to Erdoğan, Qatar, the American far-right Republicans, and Tucker Carlson. In this way, well-financed terrorism has, almost imperceptibly, been incorporated into the place once occupied by anti-capitalist ideology, alongside antisemitism, thereby betraying every tradition of the Left and of anti-racism that can be traced back to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Yet if we recognize the problem, if we understand the mechanisms and manipulative structures of the imperialist world order, then, in the sense outlined above, “rebirth” is not merely a utopian aspiration. Rather, we must reclaim and mobilize the legacy of socialism founded upon social self-government. As part of this endeavour, we must not forget that the genuine humanist tradition of anti-colonialism was originally grounded in the ideal of social emancipation.
Notes
[1] During the preparation of this text, I have drawn on some of my previous writings: Tamás Krausz, System Change and Property Relations: On Perestroika’s Historical Experiences, in Eszter Bartha, Tamás Krausz, Bálint Mezei (eds.), State Socialism in Eastern Europe: History, Theory, Anti-capitalist Alternatives, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023, pp. 155–182. The volume Antikapitalista baloldal (The Anti-Capitalist Left) (Eszmélet Foundation, Budapest, 2016.), which I edited, reflects positions that are not entirely homogeneous and are at times mutually polemical, but they indicate the boundaries within which Marxism, as a political “doctrine” and praxis, continues to exist up to the present day.
[2] Göran Therborn, “After Dialectics: Radical Social Theory in a Post-Communist World,” New Left Review, no. 43 (January–February 2007), https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii43/articles/goran-therborn-after-dialectics
[3] Cf. Göran Therborn, “The World and the Left,” New Left Review, no. 137 (September–October 2022), https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii137/articles/goran-therborn-the-world-and-the-left
[4] New Left Review itself constitutes living evidence of this phenomenon. I say this despite the fact that I am not aware of any systematic intellectual-historical study devoted to the journal’s different periods of development. Perhaps that, too, is not entirely accidental.
[5] On this question, see Krausz Tamás-Mesterházi Miklós: Mű és történelem. Viták Lukács György műveiről a húszas években, (Work and History: Debates on the Writings of György Lukács in the 1920s) (Budapest: Gondolat, 1985).
[6] For a discussion of the workers’ councils that emerged during the process of system change, and of their subsequent fate, see Nagy Éva Katalin: Munkástanácsok 1989-ben. A dolgozói tulajdon kérdése a rendszerváltás folyamatában, (Workers’ Councils in 1989: The Question of Workers’ Ownership in the Process of System Change) Eszmélet, vol. 23, no. 91 (Autumn 2011), pp. 111–129.
[7] Cf. Krausz Tamás: Viták a Szovjetunió és Kelet-Európa XX. századi történetében. (Debates on the Twentieth-Century History of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Ruszisztikai Könyvek, XXXIII), Budapest: Russica Pannonica, 2011.
[8] See Krausz Tamás-László Tütő: Lenin a szocializmusba való politikai átmenet időszakáról. (Lenin on the Period of Political Transition to Socialism) Társadalmi Szemle, nos. 7–8 (1984).
[9] Two personal episodes may be recalled here. One was our meeting with Ernest Mandel, probably in late 1989 or early 1990, when Ernest’s revolutionary predictions concerning the Soviet Union (“The socialist revolution is approaching!”) so exasperated András György Szabó that he stormed out of our apartment, slamming the door so hard that we could feel the windows shaking even from the room where we were sitting. Mandel later subjected these views to self-criticism. The other episode occurred at a conference in Moscow in the early 1990s, when Habermas, during a conversation in the elevator and later in the corridor, agreed with my criticism of his article “The Rectifying Revolution,” published in New Left Review, which had likewise proved excessively optimistic. See Jürgen Habermas, “What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left,” New Left Review, no. 183 (September–October 1990).
[10] See Államszocializmus. Értelmezések-Viták-Tanulságok. (State Socialism: Interpretations, Debates, Lessons) edited by Tamás Krausz and Péter Szigeti (Budapest: Eszmélet Foundation and L’Harmattan, 2007).
[11] Cf. Michael J. Thompson, review of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.
Dissent magazine article
[12] For perhaps the best Hungarian analysis of migration, see Attila Melegh, The Migration Turn and Eastern Europe: A Global Historical Sociological Analysis (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
[13] See also Adam Mayer’s study on this subject: Adam Mayer, “African Military Marxism: Deviation or Innovation?”, Review of African Political Economy, 29 October 2025.
https://roape.net/2025/10/29/african-military-marxism-deviation-or-innovation/
[14] See also my article: Krausz Tamás: A Hamász és Izrael háborújának értelmezései: antikapitalista vagy iszlamobaloldal? (Interpretations of the Hamas–Israel War: Anti-Capitalist or Islamo-Left?), Eszmélet, vol. 35, nos. 139–140 (Autumn–Winter 2023), pp. 5–11.
https://www.eszmelet.hu/en/tamas-krausz-hamas-israel-war-anti-capitalist-left-or-islamo-left/
[15] Many years ago, I examined several aspects of this problem in greater detail in a historical study: Krausz Tamás: Bolsevizmus és nemzeti kérdés. Adalékok a nemzeti kérdés bolsevik felfogásának történetéhez 1917-1922 (Bolshevism and the National Question: Contributions to the History of the Bolshevik Conception of the National Question, 1917–1922) Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1989.
[16] For example, Judith Butler, the American “neo-Marxist” feminist philosopher of language and one of the leading figures of Jewish Voice for Peace, described Hamas as part of the global Left, apparently in an effort to steer the myth in a left-wing direction, much to the satisfaction of the majority of Trotskyist organizations.
[17] Within the Soviet-American bipolar world order—which effectively consigned the British to the sidelines—the regional balance of power ultimately developed in such a way that the State of Israel, established at the initiative of the Soviet Union, became, not without compensation, an American proxy, while the Arab states, frequently changing sides, proved willing to represent Soviet interests in exchange for military and economic support. At the same time, Israel never completely turned its back on the Soviet Union, partly for linguistic and cultural reasons, since the original homeland of a significant part of its population had been Russia itself. Today, alongside Israel, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, with varying degrees of success, seek to bring Middle Eastern power politics under their control. Whether the State of Israel can survive in the midst of the “Arab sea” has always remained uncertain; consequently, every armed conflict has been, and continues to be, regarded by Israel as a war involving existential stakes.
[18] For a discussion of the global power-political background to the present conflict and the “meaning” of the attack of 7 October 2023, see my article: Krausz Tamás: A Hamász és Izrael háborújának értelmezései: antikapitalista vagy iszlamobaloldal? (Interpretations of the Hamas–Israel War: Anti-Capitalist or Islamo-Left?), Eszmélet, vol. 35, nos. 139–140 (Autumn–Winter 2023), pp. 5–11.
https://www.eszmelet.hu/en/tamas-krausz-hamas-israel-war-anti-capitalist-left-or-islamo-left/
[19] Much about its origins is revealed by the suicide-glorifying, “sacrificial” philosophy of Frantz Fanon’s personal friend Ali Shariati, who then transferred this horror to the Shiite suicide and murder myth. These concepts passed into religious, even sectarian identity politics in the Middle East, which Shariati combined with the Shiite religious martyr cult of suicide bombing. Later, Shariati was forced to flee Khomeini’s Iran, and Arafat learned suicide bombing as a “method” from them in the early eighties. For a scholarly analysis of the problem, see the work of the excellent Hungarian author: Adam Mayer: Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, Lexington, Lanham, 2025, 10-35.
[20] In late autumn 2025, supporters of Werder Bremen displayed a clearly visible banner during a match in Bremen, Germany, reading: “Globalizing the intifada means killing Jews.” Rarely have football ultras captured the essence of a matter so simply. Could those “resisters” genuinely committed to anti-capitalist and humanist values have failed to understand this message? Nobody believes that.
[21] See: In Their Own Words: Hamas Turns Hospitals into Military Assets with NGO Compliance, 29 September 2025. Available at: https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/
[22] Amir Tibon, a “progressive” journalist employed by the equally “progressive” Haaretz, who lived in Kibbutz Nahal Oz—where Hamas killed fourteen people and abducted five—stated that on 7 October Hamas “understood that it was signing the death warrants of thousands of Gazans. Hamas calculated that this was the price to be paid for murdering my teenage neighbour and kidnapping small children. They knew exactly that Gaza would face bloody and shocking destruction. And yet they did it.” Hamas has since confirmed this assessment. “Of course, we expected that such a serious act would provoke a large-scale response,” Khalil al-Hayya, one of the organization’s leaders, told The Times. The fact remains that Hamas has always regarded the bloodshed in Gaza and the incitement of hatred against Israel as among its most effective instruments for shaping public opinion. Images of dead Palestinian infants and dead Israeli infants alike—though for different reasons—serve the objectives of the terrorist organization.See Susie Linfield, “The Return of the Progressive Atrocity”, Quillette, 18 November 2023. https://quillette.com/2023/11/18/the-return-of-the-progressive-atrocity/
[23] Dagestan, Amsterdam, Michigan, Sydney, London and others – to mention only a few antisemitic incidents that caused international outrage.