Library:A Marxist Taxonomy of the States of the Global South

A Marxist Taxonomy of the States of the Global South
Author	Taimur Rahman
First published	2026 Red Star
Type	Speech
Source	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heHXGdhmiDA
Audiobook	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heHXGdhmiDA

Foreword by ProleWiki

This is a transcript of the video "A Marxist Taxonomy of the States of the Global South" posted to YouTube on the channel Red Star on September 23, 2026. This transcript still needs to be cross-checked for accuracy.

Transcript

You see, what I want to try and do today is talk about a taxonomy of the state from a Marxist point of view.

When we study Marxism, the first thing we learn is that the state is the executive committee of a class—that can be the ruling class, it can be a feudal class, it can be the capitalist class, it can be the working class, it can be the class of slave owners as was the case in the Greco-Roman period.

And we are also dimly aware of the fact that when Marx wrote his very famous book, The Civil War in France, he spoke about a phenomenon that we refer to as Bonapartism, where the contending classes fought with each other in such a way that the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose name was Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, came to power and then basically took over the government, et cetera, and tried to place himself above classes in a certain sense.

So, these are the three things that we are dimly aware of. We are only dimly aware of these three things because Marx, although his intention was to continue writing Das Kapital, and to also write in a detailed manner about the state, never ended up actually writing in a lot of detail about the state.

We have the Critique of the Gotha Program. We have the amended communist manifesto after the Paris Commune of 1871. And we have The Civil War in France, from which we most of the time draw his ideas about the state. But then, of course, we have the writings of Lenin—The State and Revolution. Who is, in the main, polemicizing and responding to Kautsky and hence really not trying to develop a general theory of the state as such, but to defend the most important tenet of Marxism—which is that the state is but the executive committee of a class.

Hence, we Marxists, generally speaking, have not undertaken what I would refer to as a more detailed taxonomy of the different kinds of bourgeois states that may or may not exist. There are many different kinds of capitalist states that we know to exist. For instance, just to give you an example, we know that we have a settler-colonial state by the name of Israel, which has done enormous—you know, which has done genocide in the context of Palestine, and in Gaza in particular—and we know that there was the British Raj et cetera across South Asia in India, Pakistan, and so on. We know about these things. But we have to develop some sort of taxonomy.

What does this all mean?

So that's why I wanted to speak a little bit about the state in a generic sense, but from a Marxist perspective, and examining the different forms of the state. I believe that it is very important for us to understand that although the state is always, and will always be, nothing but the executive committee of a particular class—but what class? What is that class doing? Is it in the late stage of capitalism? Is it in the early revolutionary stage of capitalism? Is it a capitalist class, or a mixture of a capitalist and a feudal class? Is it an indigenous capitalist class, or a capitalist class created from the outside for colonial purposes? These are the kinds of questions that I want to tease out.

In political science literature, we often use this term, which is also in the title of my presentation: the term is "authoritarianism".

Now, I often have a bit of a problem with this term because it's an empty term in a certain sense—it's a politically empty term. What do I mean when I say it's an empty term? You can fill it up with any content you like. You can say Stalin was authoritarian. You can say modern China is authoritarian. You can say Hitler was authoritarian. You can say Mussolini was authoritarian. You can say Modi is being authoritarian. You can say the Pakistani government is being authoritarian. You can say the Bangladeshi government currently is being authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera.

In other words, you can put so many different kinds of states in the label of "authoritarian" that merely calling a state authoritarian actually doesn't really tell you very much about the politics of that state. It just tells you that they're suppressing somebody. But the question is: who are they suppressing, and why are they suppressing them? What is the politics of that suppression? Who are they, and who are their enemies? What is the nature of that contradiction, and why are they suppressing them?

So, for instance, the dictatorship of the proletariat—which is the socialist state—is also repressive against its class enemies, and it must be. The experience of socialism in the twentieth century has shown to us that wherever the dictatorship of the proletariat has been weakened, wherever the state has not been aware, has not been astute, has not been alert about the threats to socialism, those threats to socialism, with the help of international imperialism, have managed to reverse decades of struggle and millions of sacrifices and caused enormous harm to those states. The weakening of the dictatorship of the proletariat can result only in the restoration of capitalism and nothing else. That is a lesson from the Soviet Union.

So, what I'm trying to say is that there are forms of repression that are valid and justified. Yes, if I were, for instance, heading the United States of America, would I repress organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan? Absolutely, I would. Would I repress organizations that wish to create a form of apartheid for women—a gender apartheid for women, as we see, for example, in the context of Afghanistan, where women are no longer permitted to study, to go to school, or to get educated beyond class three, they cannot go to school. Would I be tolerant of such people? Thomas Paine, the great revolutionary, once said that to be tolerant of those spreading intolerance is actually a formula for disaster. You can either take the road of reason or you can take the road of ignorance and superstition. And if you are taking the road of reason, then you have a duty to suppress those repressive, regressive, and counterrevolutionary elements. And this was done in every revolution that I can think of. It was done even in the American Revolution of 1776, when George Washington and others suppressed the British royalist party.

It was done in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–11, where for a long time Mexico itself, before the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, or any socialist country, was in fact a one-party state.

It was done also in the famous French Revolution of 1789 under the directorate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and without that it would have been impossible to have saved the French Revolution from the invasion by the First Coalition.

And it was done in the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, and every revolution that one can think of. No revolution can survive if it is liberal with those who wish to see it drowned in blood. It must repress the elements that wish to restore the old order if it hopes to survive. These forms of repression, even the bourgeoisie, in many instances, accepts.

It was, after all, not the proletariat that repressed the royalist party of Britain in the American Revolution. It was, in fact, the bourgeoisie—the planter bourgeoisie of the United States of America. It was not the proletariat that repressed the opposition in the Mexican Revolution. Of course not. It was—well, it was very much the sansculottes, those who did not wear breeches, who played a very big role in the French Revolution, but ultimately the leadership of the French Revolution did not belong to the proletariat but to bourgeois middle-class elements. And yet those repressions were an essential part for the establishment of capitalist civilization, without which society would not have progressed, without which capitalism would not have been able to survive. What was accepted in the case of capitalism—the repression of regressive elements—is now no longer accepted in the case of socialism, because the actual question is about capitalism as a regressive system in history today.

So, for that reason, I feel that authoritarianism tends to be a somewhat empty term into which you can put anything. It is somewhat like the other term that has become very popular in political science: "totalitarianism"—meaning that the state has total control over society. Well, if you want to look at totalitarianism, you can look at the United States of America today, which has even hauled before the state members of the Harvard University faculty and the deans and vice chancellors of these big universities for having supported or even allowed anyone to talk about Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. Is that not totalitarianism?

You can see how every alternative point of view—not only on Palestine but also on Ukraine—has been completely crushed in these societies. There's no space for it. Of course, you can have your little seminars, et cetera, as long as they are not effective. But as soon as the movement becomes effective, it begins to reach mainstream media through social media. It begins to reach millions of people. You see that even rock stars who are performing in sold-out arenas can be cancelled. I'm sure you heard of how Ed Sheeran's whole band has now walked out on him, precisely because a billionaire, Mr. Kraft, called up Ed Sheeran and told him that you cannot say "Free Palestine" in your concerts. We will cancel all your concerts. So he had to cancel the person, Macklemore, who had said "Free Palestine"—and that resulted in everybody else leaving the band. Is that not totalitarianism, I ask you? Where the suppression of freedom of speech is in favor of the United States, of the capitalist class, they're always in favor of it. Where the suppression of freedom of speech is something that hurts the capitalist class, there they suddenly jump up in defense of freedom of speech. It all depends on their interest. There is no such thing as freedom of speech in the abstract or freedom of speech that is outside of what we consider to be the class conflict.

Now, that sounds very controversial because it goes against the grain of liberal theory, which says everybody should be allowed to speak and say whatever the hell they want to. But look at the reality of the world as we see it today. Everybody's allowed to speak, but some people have a megaphone placed in front of them. Some people have Fox News placed in front of them. Six corporations control ninety percent of the media. People who get access to that media, to those platforms—their speech is amplified to such an extent that the speech counter to that is completely crushed out.

So this form of freedom of speech is actually a form of freedom of speech that is controlled by capitalism, controlled in fact even more directly by capital itself.

And in that form, it is not free at all, but rather it is capital speaking through the mouth, through its mouthpieces, through various institutions and through its mainstream media.

Hence, it is freedom for capital to speak, and everybody else can speak as long as they are marginal to the entire discourse. That is the reality of what we see with respect to freedom of speech in the so-called liberal West.

So instead of talking about authoritarianism in the abstract, I want to talk about the state as the executive committee of the ruling class and try to understand the typology—as I said in the beginning—of all the different kinds of state that have come to exist. The bourgeois states, not the older ones, because that will take me too far.

We know that arguably one of the first bourgeois states to establish itself was the one in Britain. The revolution that began in 1642 took on a radical turn in 1648, and by 1649 the king, Charles, was executed by the revolutionaries. This caused a major, major problem, crisis, et cetera. And very soon, however, Lord Cromwell took power through his military to basically support the revolution. After the defeat of the revolution, the monarchy came back into power, and then in 1688, finally, there was the Glorious Revolution—what's called the Glorious Revolution, although it wasn't very glorious, to be honest—where the House of Commons and the king came to an agreement called constitutional monarchy: that the king will remain, but the House of Commons and Parliament, together with the House of Lords obviously, will be the authority-making body; it will be the government. And in this sense, then, we see the first form of bourgeois rule. Marx says that here the bourgeoisie does not have exclusive power over the state. It has to share power with the crown. It has to share power with the lords, the feudal lords. And the shape of that sharing of power was the House of Lords, which was a house of essentially the propertied feudal class.

The second massive uprising against feudalism—and the only one—sorry—the first one to have given exclusive power to the bourgeoisie—was the great French Revolution. This, of course, happened in 1789. It was preceded by a hundred-year philosophical revolution begun by people like Descartes, writing in 1637 and continuing all the way through to the great Denis Diderot, d'Alembert, Helvétius, as well as Holbach, and Voltaire, and so many others. This laid the philosophical foundation for the French Revolution.

Again, we imagine that the revolution was immediately successful, everything after 1789 was fantastic, the bourgeoisie won. In fact, this is not the case at all.

After the revolution in 1792, when the radical party took power—first there was a constitutional monarchy, then the radical party took power—and they decided to execute the king, Louis XVI. Immediately, as a consequence of that execution, all the monarchies of Europe decided that France was an anathema. It had to be wiped out. They formed what is called the First Coalition, and they made a huge coalition and they invaded France.

In fact, the king and the royal family were executed precisely because the revolutionaries understood that the king and the queen had betrayed themselves to the Austrians. The queen was, anyway, Austrian by birth, and they were afraid of an invasion. The invasion came, and revolutionary France had to fight against all the European powers.

In a certain sense, this is exactly what happened with the Bolshevik Revolution during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921–22. It's almost exactly the same.

Russia was part of it, this coalition. Prussia was part of it, Austria was part of it, Britain was part of it. They all invaded and caused great mayhem. And it was in this context that the French Revolution turned militant. It had to, and it eliminated even many people who were themselves revolutionaries but were the moderate wing of the revolution, called the Girondists. So the Jacobins and the Girondists fought each other.

Eventually, once the worst conditions were over, the Jacobins lost power, and they were themselves guillotined, including Robespierre, who was shot in the jaw. His jaw was hanging. It had been put together with a scarf, and right before he was executed, they removed the scarf. His jaw fell off. They put him in the guillotine and they killed him, and Saint-Just and others, et cetera. This Thermidorian Reaction led to the rise of Napoleon in 1799.`

Napoleon took power and he converted the revolutionary war machine that had been created to save the French Revolution into an imperial war machine. He crowned himself emperor and began the First Empire in 1804. Then later, in 1815, when he was defeated—first he was sent into exile in Elba, and then later he came back, he fought again, and then he was finally defeated in 1815 at Waterloo. After Napoleon, what happened? Do you think France continued as a republic? Do you think France continued as a constitutional monarchy?

No. There was the period of the Bourbon Restoration. The king came back. The whole monarchy came back. Yes. Although the monarchy came back, not all the gains of the revolution were lost. In fact, the land reform could not be reversed. The land taken from the church could not be reversed. The land taken from the feudal lords could now not—they knew, understood—could not be reversed. The struggle between the revolution and the church, which had weakened the church enormously, that could not be reversed anymore. The king understood that. But the king was now in power. The Bourbon dynasty was back in power in 1815. In 1830, again, the French poor, and especially in Paris, fought against the Bourbon dynasty. There was another revolution in 1830, and they decided that they would create a constitutional monarchy. So they created a constitution. But very soon, the revolutionaries who had created the constitutional monarchy realized that the king is not going to be faithful to the constitution. And so they tried another revolution in 1832.

This was the great revolution about which Victor Hugo wrote his famous work Les Misérables.

But the 1832 revolution failed. Then there was a third revolution in 1848. This revolution was not just in France but it swept across all of Europe. And in 1848, then, the Bourbon dynasty was removed and a Second Republic was created. Another republic—the Second Republic was created—but it only lasted four years. The republic itself elected Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as its president, but he was the nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte.

But Louis-Napoléon launched a coup against the parliament and became dictator in 1852 and crowned himself emperor, Napoleon III. It was this incident about which Marx wrote the famous work The Civil War in France, and he used Hegel. He quoted Hegel's saying that in history everything occurs twice. And Marx added to that—okay, Hegel forgot to add—first time as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce. What did he mean? He meant that Napoleon Bonaparte was a tragedy. Why is he a tragedy? He's a tragedy because a great revolution in which the poor fought with incredible bravery was turned into an imperial war machine. That is the tragedy of the French Revolution.

And the second was a farce. Why was that a farce? Because this pretender, this populist, this performative nephew who thinks he is great—he is like Napoleon, you know, he's like Napoleon Bonaparte, thinks that he's going to be the great conqueror, et cetera. But actually, he is a fake, a phony, and, you know, he doesn't have it. So in that sense, it's a farce. It's a joke. He is insulting both the Napoleons, in fact. And that proved to be true. Louis-Napoléon wanted to create a gigantic empire, but the empire didn't succeed. In 1870, in the Franco-Prussian War, Otto von Bismarck of Prussia won that war, created modern Germany, defeated France, and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was caught in that war and, of course, died. And as a consequence, then, France had the Third Republic.

In other words, what we don't teach often is that the revolution started in 1789, but they did not achieve its goals till 1870. Can you imagine? Did you know this? It took one hundred years—before France was able to establish continuous revolutions and counterrevolutions—one hundred years before France was able to establish a stable republic, a government without a monarch. And that lasted till 1940 when the Nazis came and basically took over France.

When we look at the history of the USSR in seventy years, the incredible things they've achieved is absolutely phenomenal. What we are seeing in this period of the USSR's history is itself a kind of Bourbon Restoration, a period of capitalist restoration. And you will see in the former USSR, again, movements that just like they arose in Paris and in France in 1830, in 1832, in 1848, you will see similar movements for the reestablishment of socialism. Yes, it may take a century before socialism becomes firmly established.

Now, Marx made an examination and analysis of Louis-Bonaparte's government. He said, first and foremost, that if I examine what he says, his discourse was that I am above classes. I don't represent any class. I don't represent the capitalist, and I don't represent the proletariat, or the peasantry, or this class or that class. That's what he said: I am above classes.

Marx, of course, says nobody can be above classes. Nobody is above classes. It doesn't happen in politics. You can live as a hermit somewhere, and then you'll be above and beyond classes. But if you're in society and you're in politics, it's all about politics. It's all about classes. So that is a claim. It's not the reality. The reality was that, of course, he was very much part of—he wanted to stabilize what we consider to be bourgeois rule. He wanted to stabilize property standing above classes and representing the nation as a whole.

You know, if you look at medieval history and you look at medieval states, they are very blase and open about the fact that the state represents a certain class. They don't hide it. They don't say we represent everybody. Nonsense. They say this is our country. It belongs to me. It was given to me by God. I'm God's representative on earth. That's the theory of the divine right of kings. They have a divine right. So they're not saying this is yours and mine equally or something. The serfs cannot also come and vote. No, serfs are like slaves. They cannot work without permission. They cannot leave without the permission of the lord. The lord is their lord. The same word "lord" is used for "king," and the same word "lord" is also used for "God." And so they treated their king like a god.

So this is the time in history that Marx observes that you have a new kind of politician: a politician who is a farce, a joker as far as Marx is concerned, a phony, but who says no, no, no, no, no. I am not with the poor, but I am also not with the rich. I am neither with the rich nor the poor. Who are you with, then? I am with all of France. I represent the nation. Everybody. Sorry. So you all understood. I don't know if you need translation. Maybe I should speak in Hindi. That in the world today, most politicians make the claim that I am neither with the rich nor the poor, but I represent the nation as a whole. Interesting. Pretty much everybody says it, except for Donald Trump and Milei in Argentina and a couple of other people who say very explicitly we are with the rich—to hell with all of you, you know. I mean, Marco Rubio even says yes, we want to be imperialists, and we want to colonize the rest of the Third World. The West was great, et cetera. So that's not saying we want to represent everybody, we are the world, let's all get together and sing a nice happy song, which is what the liberals were saying, like Clinton, you know, et cetera, the Clintons, et cetera. Although they were doing something different, but they claimed to represent everybody.

So this political [form], this new politics that Marx was already observing, we see first and foremost that it has become the standard politics of the liberal class as such. And I'll explain to you why this happened in just a second. Why did this happen in the context of France? If we read Marx, he says it was to mitigate the class struggle. The classes had been fighting like crazy. They had been fighting in 1830. Well, they started fighting in 1789. Then they had fought in 1830. Then they had fought in 1832. Then they fought in 1848. France was continuously in revolution. You could say about France in that one-hundred-year period, it is a very revolutionary sort of country at that time in history.

So he understood he had to mitigate that class conflict. Both classes—the poor, the rich—were tired of fighting. They were exhausted because they had been fighting now for the last half century, more than that, seventy, eighty years. They had been continuously confronting each other. They were exhausted. Into that exhaustion came Louis-Bonaparte, who said you know, I'll fix everything, et cetera, et cetera. His power was really based on the military, which was derived mainly from the peasantry, not from urban workers, and that was the basis of his power. And then he enacted certain reforms, which said certain welfare reforms—here's something for the poor, here's something for the rich, here's something, a little bit, for everybody. Now notice that this becomes the dominant form of bourgeois politics in the twentieth century. So we can say that in a certain sense, Bonapartism—although not military Bonapartism, but elements certainly of Bonapartism—came to become the framework through which the bourgeoisie sought to mitigate the class conflict in the twentieth century.

How and what were the peculiar mechanics of how this happened? Lenin made a fantastic analysis where he says, very early on in his writing, where he says that look, capitalism can develop in many different ways. It takes many different paths, many, many different paths. Agrarian capitalism, you know, urban capitalism—it can take the development of commodity production in many different roots. In fact, Marx even writes this in Das Kapital. He says the manner and peculiar path through which capital takes hold of the means of production in every instance can be many, many, there can be many, many different ways through which capital takes hold of the means of production, and therefore it alienates the producer from the means of production.

But two paths that Lenin elaborated were one was the republican path, and the other was the Junker's path. The republican path was the path that was taken by the French Revolution—that we're going to get rid of the king, we're going to execute the king, and we're going to create a republic, a state without a king. And the Junker's path was the one taken by Otto von Bismarck in Germany. The German feudal lords were the Junkers. And they basically said we're going to retain the entire feudal state structure—everything, officials, the church, everything—we're going to retain [it]. They were Protestant naturally, but we are going to modernize the economy. It's going to be a top-down process. So that was the Junker's path.

And then Barrington Moore Jr. wrote a very important work in the sixties called The Social Roots of Dictatorship and Democracy, and his analysis said that the countries that took the republican path became what we call democracies: England and France and the United States of America. And the countries that took the Junker's path—Austro-Hungary, Germany, Prussia naturally, all the German states together, Italy—they became fascist and Nazi countries. So the emergence of Nazism, this horrific monstrosity that is responsible for the death and destruction of fifty million people, has its origin also in the preservation of the state structure of feudalism. This is just the extension of Lenin's analysis going forward, and I believe it's quite correct.

So now we see the different kinds of societies in the core capitalist countries, historically speaking. And we see also the connection between the development of capitalism, the peculiar development of classes, and the development of the state. What are these?

Firstly, rule exclusively by capitalists through a parliamentary mechanism. This, of course, is what we see in France. Now we see it in the United States, which took the republican path. And over time, the balance of power within the constitutional monarchy moved in favor of the House of Commons and against the House of Lords. So today we see it also in the context of Great Britain, where the monarchy is today reduced to being more or less symbolic. And we see it in many other—we see a constitutional monarchy in several, in fact, European countries.

We also see Bonapartism. We saw it, of course, in France with Louis Bonaparte, but we saw it also with respect to Otto von Bismarck. And in a certain sense, Bonapartism is a blueprint for fascism—Mussolini, Hitler, Nazism, and so on. So these are the three forms we see: pure parliamentary systems, we see constitutional monarchies, and we see Bonapartism and that kind of Junker's path that I spoke about.

But what about the Global South? What are the—what is the taxonomy of different kinds of states that we see in our context?

Well, given that most of you are here from South Asia, the first, most direct experience of a capitalist state that we have is of the British Raj in India. This also is a capitalist state. It doesn't mean that the state has to be run by you. Somebody else can be running your state for you. And it was run by the British. But it was an Indian state. It was paid for by—I'm—when I say Indians, I mean all of us: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, all of South Asia. All of South Asia was paying for it. South Asia was also fighting for it. The Gurkhas of Nepal were fighting for it. The Punjabi Jats were fighting for it, et cetera, et cetera. We were fighting for them. We were paying their taxes. We paid for our own colonization. Yes. This is the saddest, the saddest part of our own history. We paid, we fought, we bled to conquer ourselves. That is the reality of what we went through.

And so the state was also, in that sense, a state that was Indian. It was paid for with our blood. Although it was not made for Indians. It was made for colonial plunder, exploitation.

So we see that form: direct colonial rule. The second form we see is settler colonial rule. First and foremost, we see this around the Mediterranean, because the Mediterranean touches, of course, Europe, and the Mediterranean is a European ocean, and of course there's been a Mediterranean economy for centuries. And so the first settler colonies were mainly around the Mediterranean. Algeria is an example. Palestine, in fact, is a late example. Lebanon is another example, and there are many other examples that we can think of. Most of North Africa has many examples of settler colonialism. But we also see settler colonialism all the way to the tip of Africa: the Boers of South Africa, the Rhodesians of Zimbabwe. They came to dominate much of southern Africa through a horrific settler colonial policy that was justified through racism, through apartheid. Settler colonialism, arguably, is the most brutal form that we have seen of the colonial state.

Then we have also seen what I would refer to as colonial Bonapartism. What do I mean by that? We have seen that European powers have, in fact, created states that are run by militaries, but they are directly tied to colonial interests. So we can see the Shah of Iran as a very important [example]—both the Shah in fact, Reza Shah, and Muhammad Reza Shah, his son, both of them were the Shah of Iran. Reza Shah was brought by the British, and then Muhammad Reza Shah was supported by the Americans against Mossadegh. And their power base was, of course, mainly in the military, paid for by Iranian oil itself, managed by the British and later by the Americans.

Fourth form of the state that we see in the Global South is what I call colonial monarchies. These monarchies, of course, existed here in our Global South, and they were solidified, consolidated by imperialism. The biggest example of this is the entire Gulf region, dominated by monarchies: Saudi monarchy, Kuwaiti monarchy, Jordanian monarchy—the whole of the Gulf is basically [made up of] all the Gulf states, mainly all monarchies. And they are not constitutional monarchies, [I might say]—my, sorry, that's very Indian to say, [minded]. They're not constitutional monarchies. They are basically absolute monarchies.

If the king says women will drive from tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, women will drive. If the king tomorrow decides a new king comes and he says women will not drive from tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, women will not drive. There's no constitution as such. But this entire system has been supported now for decades—decades, centuries, over a century—by the governments and by a civilization that claims to respect the right of everybody to vote, the right of everybody to express their opinion, the right of a constitutional government, and so on.

And this has had an incredibly destructive impact on the Muslim world as a whole. These monarchies—because these monarchies are the main reason why Muslims are, quote unquote, conservative. It was supported throughout by imperialism.

We also have what we can refer to, or what was once referred to by certain left parties, as national bourgeois parliamentary rule. Now we can quibble about who is and who isn't a national bourgeois, but as Marxist-Leninists we do accept that in a third-world country they will inevitably develop a capitalist class, and sections of that capitalist class—developed no doubt by imperialism—will want to create a project for the national development of that particular country. There was a big debate in India, for example, about whether the Congress Party represented the national bourgeoisie. And then, of course, there was a second debate: even if Congress Party did represent the national bourgeoisie, what does that imply with respect to the communist movement? Because Lenin's point of view on the national bourgeoisie is that even if there is a national bourgeoisie, you have to still fight to win the hegemony of the national liberation movement. You cannot tail the national bourgeoisie. But certainly we can accept that Sun Yat-sen was a national bourgeois—and this is, of course, not me saying it; it's Lenin saying it. We see another form, in fact, of a national bourgeois project. We also see, of course, Sukarno as a national bourgeois project. He was not a communist, and we see many other examples of this as well.

But in the Middle East we see another curious kind of national bourgeois project, which is a national bourgeois project led not by a private bourgeoisie but led by military officers. And this is the Pan-Arab movement of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and this is the Ba'athists of Iraq and Syria in particular. They very consciously—they used to call themselves socialists. All of them were they socialists? No, of course not. They were not socialists. In fact, Nasser banned the Communist Party of Egypt, banned the trade unions, and so on. The Ba'athists were also at one time allied. In Syria, they were allied with the communists, but in Iraq they killed the communists. They murdered them in thousands. They were very repressive because in Iraq the communists were actually very strong. Wherever they became strong, the Ba'ath killed them. So what was this? This was a military national bourgeois project. Was it national bourgeois? Yes, I believe so. I believe Hafez al-Assad and the Ba'athists of Syria wanted a national capitalist development. I believe that until Sadat came to power, that is what Gamal Nasser wanted. I believe that is what Libyan president—former president Mohammad Gaddafi—wanted. This is a big wave of national bourgeois projects that also claimed to be socialist, but they were not socialists. They were capitalist, but they nonetheless were a different kind of capitalist project from the kind of capitalist project that you see with respect to Saudi Arabia—that you see with respect to other Middle Eastern societies. They were capitalist projects that nonetheless collided with imperialism on certain key questions, like the Suez Canal crisis and others like that.

Then similarly, we see comprador parliamentary rule. You have parliament in all shapes and forms. It is active. It is there, but it is completely doing the bidding of the empire. I would say Modi is a great example, or India today is a great example of a system where you have parliamentary rule completely encased and absorbed into imperialism.

You know, the Pakistani left used to say to our own people back in the '70s and earlier—we used to say, "You know, Pakistan stood with—unfortunately with Britain, Israel, and France—on the Suez Canal crisis, and Pakistan supported the Arab League in Jordan against the PLO. We even sent soldiers there in 1970, what's called Black September." And we used to say to people back then, "Okay, we Pakistanis are doing this, not supporting Palestine, and India is supporting Palestine. In India, Arafat is a hero, and in Pakistan, he's persona non grata." And now, sadly, we can't even say that anymore, given how India has allied—sadly, you know—with Israel. A day before Israel decided that they're going to assassinate the entire political leadership. A day before the US and Israel decided that they're going to assassinate the entire political leadership of Iran—with whom they were negotiating—you know who was in Tel Aviv?

So we see a comprador project as well. Then we see, finally, what I would refer to as people's democracies in the instance of China, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, and Cambodia. Now these are very different societies from societies like India and Pakistan. If we put them all in the same group of societies and we say, "Oh, it's exactly like India. It's exactly like Pakistan"—well, Pakistan didn't see the elimination of absolute poverty as did China. Pakistan is not seeing what I have seen with my own eyes in Vietnam.

So although I would not say that these societies are what we could consider to be societies run by exclusive—where exclusive power belongs to the proletariat—these are not proletariat revolutions. Let's understand that they're not, because in 1949 there was very little proletariat in what we call China. What proletariat was there in Vietnam when they began organizing against the French? I went to Vietnam, and in the museum of Vietnam, they showed me the machines that they used to use in the period of French colonial rule to make rubber and textiles, and so on. And I wanted to—I didn't know whether to laugh or cry—because calling them machines is like an insult to machines.

They were not machines, my friends. They were tools that are used by peasants—tools that are used by craftsmen. That's all they were. It was brutalizing, backbreaking labor. This is not modern industry we're talking about. This was really utilizing the technology that was already present in Vietnam but organizing it on a mass scale. In that sense, I cannot say that there was any industrial revolution in Vietnam during French colonial rule. No, there was not. I cannot say that there is any real industrial revolution in China in that particular period, which they call the century of humiliation.

The only country in which I can say there was a little bit of industry was India, perhaps, where Marx talks about the creation of the railways. And even there he says it's just a forerunner to industry—it's not an industrial revolution; it's a forerunner to industry. There might be an industrial revolution if Indians take hold of this technology and then begin to use it for their own benefit. He even puts that condition in his famous writing. Look at all of Africa. I went to West Africa—Senegal, et cetera. West Africa—what industrial revolution can I speak of? Yeah, they were shipping people like cattle to work them to death in plantation colonies. In fact, there was—there could have been an industrial revolution. It was destroyed by the Atlantic slave trade, by the way in which Europeans basically uprooted millions of young people and destroyed the very social fabric of Africa. There was no industrial revolution there.

So what were the choices in front of the Global South? The choices in front of the Global South were that the vanguard of the proletariat—that is, the communists who understood the theory of the proletariat revolution—they had to join up with, they had to take the leadership of the peasant revolutions and anti-colonial revolts that had been occurring all throughout the period of colonial rule. They had to put themselves into the leadership. If you are in China, of the Taiping and the Boxer Rebellion. They had to put themselves into the leadership of revolts against landlords, as we saw in Telangana and India. That was the formula of national liberation: the communist vanguard with a small proletarian contingent puts itself as the vanguard of a mass peasant movement.

And that is why you can also see—it's not that I make the claim that the peasants are more revolutionary or radical, as is made by Hamza Alvi and many other Marxists who do not understand that the peasant does not fight for the elimination of property but rather for small property. In that sense, Lenin always regarded the peasant struggle as a revolutionary petty bourgeois struggle, but not a proletarian struggle. So yes, it is a revolutionary petty bourgeois struggle, but it's what we have. It was the best of what we had. We had to make do with it. And so the proletarian vanguard—a small number of workers and revolutionary intellectuals—placed themselves at the head of these peasant rebellions. And where the peasant rebellion accumulated, they were able to create vast armies of millions of peasants that were able to overwhelm imperialism. That's what happened in China. That's what happened in Korea, in the anti-Japanese army. That's what happened in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

And this is then a fundamentally different kind of revolution from what happened in India and Pakistan, where there was a comprador bourgeoisie—and there was a bourgeoisie that took power and continued bourgeois rule. Here the bourgeoisie was weak. Here the communist vanguard, with the support of workers and mainly peasants, was able to take power and was confronted with the very difficult task of now having to build a proletarian society without a proletariat—a mass-based proletariat, a big proletariat. It's not an easy task, and that's why I have great empathy for these societies. Although that does not mean that everything they do is correct and I agree with everything that they do, I have great empathy for Vietnam. I have great empathy for Korea. I have great empathy for Laos and Cambodia and for China, because of the historical path that they have taken, which is so fundamentally different from the path we have taken.

At the very least, what we can say about them is that the distinction between them and what we see in our context is much like the distinction between the paths taken by the revolutionary French Republicans and the path taken by the Junkers. We are the Junkers, sadly, of the Global South.

So whatever reversal they may suffer in these people's democracies, I am nonetheless confident that they will overcome them in time and march boldly forward to a new proletarian future. And the development that they have managed to accomplish in the last three-quarters of a century, through many different economic policies—some of which I do not necessarily agree with—nonetheless, the industrialization that they've managed to accomplish has now laid the economic foundation for a socialist and advanced socialist society. And that is something that is a silver lining in all of this and cause for us to celebrate.

But back to the overall question: So my main contention is that even amongst those states that are capitalist, there are many different kinds of states. There's a whole taxonomy of them—many different varieties of them. And each of these varieties is created by the kind of class struggles and class rule that exist in those societies.

Let me go over it very briefly. There are capitalist states, of course. There are Bonapartist states and constitutional monarchies in the Global North. There's direct colonial rule and settler colonial rule in the Global South, as well as colonial Bonapartism, military rule, et cetera. Colonial monarchies in the Gulf, national bourgeois parliamentary rule in certain periods of history and societies, comprador parliamentary rule with respect to Modi, Shabbah, Sharif, et cetera. Military national bourgeois rule—Ba'athists and Pan-Arab socialists—and finally, people's democracies that are distinct from the rest.

So one big lesson from all of this is that domestically, the progressive national liberation forces in each of our societies frankly had already become stronger by the 1960s than the regressive forces in our society. By the late 1960s, when you had the emergence of—well, by the '70s, when you even had the emergence of armed struggle in so many different parts of the world against the state, you had really a situation where within that particular country—whether we're talking about India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Ethiopia, or Egypt—within that particular country, the national liberation project was far stronger than the regressive reactionary forces. They would have easily won. Yeah, they were even stronger in Afghanistan, where there was no industry to speak of at the time of the Saur Revolution. Yet Afghanistan is one of the two countries in the Muslim world that had a Marxist government. The other being, of course, Yemen.

So they could have even won there, and they would have survived. Nobody expected in the early 1980s that the Mujahideen would have won that struggle and actually become the government. How did they win? They won because of support from imperialism routed through Pakistan and support from Saudi Arabia, the reactionary monarchies. Now imagine a world in which that didn't exist—a world where the Saudi monarchies were not funding the Mujahideen and the Americans were not funding the Mujahideen and the Pakistan army was not training them to fight. The communists had won. They were in power. Think about that.

If that is true for Afghanistan, is it any less true for countries like India, Pakistan, and Iran? Where Mosaddegh had, you know, won the argument? Frankly, everybody was with the National Front, and the Tudeh Party was part of that front. They had won the argument in Egypt. I was shocked to read in so many books that in the '60s and '70s, the entire Egyptian intelligence here was dominated by Marxists. When I read this, I was shocked, because now Egypt is so different after Sadat's counterrevolution—so different, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. But at that time, Marxism had swept over the Global South. This was the reality. And it would have been that way had it not been for what the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Israel, and the so-called advanced capitalist countries did in the Global South. They destroyed our opportunity for a French Revolution. They destroyed our opportunity for a Third Republic. They destroyed our opportunity to get rid of the vestiges of the past. They destroyed our opportunity to get rid of feudalism. They destroyed our opportunity to march forth into reason and science. They destroyed our opportunity to develop democratic societies. They destroyed our opportunities to develop societies where men and women were equal, where we would have done away with the lens of gender segregation and gender apartheid. They destroyed the opportunities which were present in front of us where we could have eliminated caste systems and discrimination on these bases. They destroyed the opportunities we had for the social progress of our civilizations as a whole.

In that sense, then, I say to you—to all of you, comrades—that capitalist civilization as a whole has completely, completely outlived its historical usefulness for mankind, for humanity as a whole. It is time for the Global South to take the step forward, organize Marxist-Leninist parties and movements, and not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Neither to tail the national bourgeoisie where it exists nor to be sectarian in any shape or form, but in fact to understand the peculiar and specific class contradictions and the peculiar kind of state that is created in your given context. Understand the contradictions created by that form of state and utilize those contradictions. Mao said, "Utilize those contradictions in your favor under the hegemony of the party and theory of the proletariat."

Long live socialism. Long live Marxism-Leninism.

Thank you.