Above: Soviet statue in Caracas, Venezuela.
One impact of the Global South’s intensifying struggles against U.S. imperialism will be to shove aside the sectarian, chauvinistic politics of formations like the Communist Party of Greece. What this will mean is taking anti-imperialist politics beyond the abstract, and making it something that’s practiced in a concrete way for all the world’s workers to see. This is the only way Marxism can be taken into the future: by breaking it out of the stagnant, self-defeating practices which have dominated many CPs since the fall of the USSR, and applying Marxism to the class struggle as it exists today.
For an example of the kinds of debates the communist movement will undergo as the Global South continues resisting Washington’s offensive, look at how the KKE has tried defending itself on the question of Venezuela. The communists who stand behind Venezuela’s revolutionary government have rightly pointed out how the KKE and its Venezuelan partners, by opposing the Bolivarian republic, have in effect aligned themselves with the imperialist regime change project. But the KKE assures us that this can’t be the case, because its camp has rhetorically opposed U.S. imperialism:
Are they unaware that the KKE has, for decades, condemned and opposed every US attack, sanction and coup attempt against Venezuela? Are they unaware of the long-standing struggles of the Communist Party of Venezuela, in all forms, against imperialist interventions in their homeland? Are they unaware of the recent Joint Statement signed by more than 30 Communist and Workers’ Parties which explicitly condemns “the current deployment of US military forces in the Caribbean, on the orders of the Trump administration, threatening Venezuela under the pretext of the fight against drug trafficking”, exposing US imperialist interventions in the region over time? Are they unaware of the statement issued by the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE, which, as early as 21/9/2025 expressed the KKE’s solidarity with the Venezuelan people, condemned imperialist aggression and the deployment of the US fleet in the Caribbean and denounced the threats against Venezuela? Have they not seen the numerous statements, articles and interviews published in Tribuna Popular, the newspaper of the CP of Venezuela, condemning and opposing any scenario of imperialist aggression against their country?
This is a debate about form vs. content. Those in the KKE’s camp say that if they talk about an abstract form of solidarity with the Global South, this alone means their solidarity is consistent and principled. But the practical reality of the Global South’s struggles shows this to be wrong. The proof is in how the KKE’s “support neither the U.S. nor Maduro” position has not only had zero material impact within the effort to stop imperialist war; but has actively done damage to the workers struggle in Venezuela. It was because the Trotskyist faction within Venezuela’s CP unilaterially implemented their sectarian stance against Chavismo, and undemocratically shut out the members of the party which opposed the sectarians, that the workers movement experienced a grievously harmful split; a split that massively reduced the party’s popularity, and forced its pro-Maduro members to rebuild it from almost nothing.
It’s this story that proves why KKE’s position fails to embody an authentic anti-imperialist content, and only represents “anti-imperialism” in a superficial sense. I have retold it, after telling it many other times, to illustrate what the next phase in Marxist politics will need to look like. Because the point is not simply to fight the KKE, but to build an alternative kind of communism that brings dialectical materialist thought into the 21st century. Our ideological battles against the KKE and other antagonistic forces are only a means to this end.
The politics of a serious 21st century communist movement are politics that get their guidance from the liberation struggles of the Global South’s people. This does not mean we take on the third worldist position, where only the Global South is viewed as relevant; despite the efforts by our right-wing enemies to smear us as third worldists, we stand with working-class people all throughout the globe. When I say we need to learn from the Global South’s struggles, I’m talking about adopting a mode of practice where we’ve incorporated Juche; where the next version of the global workers movement has implemented Juche’s universal principles of self-sufficiency within revolution, which we can only properly understand by looking at the Global South’s liberation efforts.
Kim Il Sung wrote about why these principles are universally applicable: “We consider that if the people maintain the Juche idea and engage in the movement to give rein to independence and creativity throughout the whole world, they will be able to make rapid progress. We proceed from this principle in assessing all matters as well as in carrying out socialist economic construction. Revolution cannot be accomplished either by mechanically copying the example of other countries or by clinging to any ready-made formula. The revolution and construction must be carried out in one’s own way to fit in with the reality of one’s country with faith in the strength of one’s own people.” When we see the Palestinian resistance build a force that’s successfully crippled the occupier’s economy, or see Ansarallah free Yemen through innovative guerrilla struggle, or see Africa’s popular revolutionary movements break several countries out of neo-colonialism, or see Venezuela solidify a government that’s tied in with the needs of the workers, we are seeing such independently creative thinking be applied.
These revolutionary projects haven’t been able to get this far all on their own; but the outside help they’ve received is due to international solidarity, a core part of working-class politics that doesn’t contradict Juche’s ideas about independence. Marxism can be brought into the future by Juche—and therefore by a project to learn from the Global South—because it’s Juche that can give us the creative mindset required for solving today’s problems within the struggle. This idea of independent creativity is very necessary to emphasize within today’s Marxist discourse, because our movement has become captured by forces that actively oppose creativity. That enforce a stale dogmatism, as the KKE does in almost every area of its practice.
There’s a reason why the position of the KKE on the DPRK, and on many other anti-imperialist forces of today, is mostly unclear: for this dogmatic, sectarian element that swooped in to take control of communism, it’s not a priority to seriously study the struggles that these forces have been waging. Within this environment, we see the proliferation of many wrongheaded ideas about these struggles, such as that Juche is not universal but merely “Marxism applied to Korea.” This falsehood comes from the same mindset that’s led today’s dogmatic opportunists to vilify and slander Venezuela’s revolutionary government, while only standing with a Trotskyist CP faction that’s deservedly lost its former power.
This backward practice comes from a place of not being curious about how today’s most advanced revolutionary struggles have reached where they are. When we truly investigate these unfolding popular revolutions, we gain the creative tools to expand the current revolutionary wave into our own countries.
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