"The Uprising," fresco by Diego Rivera (1931). Photo: Monthly Review/file photo.
By Chris Gilbert – Mar 10, 2026
Any theory should be adjusted when it conflicts with or diverges from salient features of reality, and Marxism is no exception. Among the best-known problems of this kind for the Marxist tradition is how the theory (at least in its initial formulation) seemed to indicate that socialist revolutions should happen mostly in the core countries of the capitalist system, but over the past century and a half they have happened almost exclusively in the periphery. In the first location—call it the Global North—one finds a sizable industrial proletariat and highly developed productive forces. These are the key material conditions that the theory holds to be conducive to socialist revolution. However, the class struggle has tended to be less fierce there, and workers’ horizons generally have not included abolishing the existing capitalist order and moving toward socialism. In fact, the theory and practice of social democracy has most often been the limit of worker consciousness in the Northern context. By contrast, in the periphery of the system, or the Global South, where there did not appear to exist the conditions for socialism—neither a sizable industrial proletariat nor highly developed productive forces—socialist ideas have often been embraced by the masses. Moreover, the class struggle has repeatedly exploded into dramatic revolutions and rebellions that, even if their first goal is the overthrowing of imperial-colonial domination, also take on a socialist character and, in most cases have communism as a strategic goal. These include the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela, to name only the best-known ones. Even the Russian Revolution of October 1917 took place far from the world’s capitalist centers at that time and was coeval with a process of national liberation.
This fact has generated a paradoxical situation that should lead us to re-examine our theoretical apparatus for missing mediations that would explain both the nature and the possibility of the socialist-oriented projects that have emerged so often in the context of the Global South’s national liberation struggles and also represent the main really existing socialist projects of our time. It is one thing that peoples of the Global South have continually rebelled against the imperialist and colonial order, which systematically denies them both sovereignty and dignity. Yet it is another matter—one that also needs accounting for—that they have frequently taken steps toward socialism, that is, collective, all-round emancipation from capitalist exploitation. Undeniably, the timeframe for building socialism in such contexts is usually an extended one, and there have been hard-earned learning processes about the importance of maintaining a broad popular front, avoiding both right and left errors, making compromises and creative alliances, and dedicating time and effort to national defense and technological development as bulwarks against imperialism’s hybrid wars. Even so, one after another, countries ranging from Russia (peripheral at the time of the revolution) to Vietnam and Venezuela today have all seen impressive and also durable efforts at socialist construction that have accompanied the national liberation process.1 How do we explain this? How do we account for these socialist projects embraced and developed by the masses of working people in the Global South that go beyond the immediate problem of imperial-colonial domination and actually initiate the march toward a future of all-round emancipation, despite the apparent lack of social and material conditions?
This article attempts to extend Marxist theory in a way that allows it to explain the existence and viability of these struggles for socialism in Global South processes of national liberation from imperialism. The project of extending Marxism to account for the shifting realities and processes that accompany capitalism’s worldwide expansion has a long and glorious history, including the works of V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, José Carlos Mariátegui, Kwame Nkrumah, and many others. That project has drawn from the most diverse sources—Lenin drew from J. A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, and Mariátegui from Georges Sorel. Here, in a similar spirit, we draw on theses developed by Michael A. Lebowitz regarding Marxism that give greater agency to workers and point to an underrecognized realm of workers’ self-activity. The reason for doing so is that these theses can help explain why working peoples of the Global South take strategic steps (and often very solid ones) toward socialism in contexts where the material conditions appear to be inadequate for that project: that is, where the productive forces are little developed, and the existence of a classical proletariat is in doubt.
In books and articles, Lebowitz argued that there was a whole side of Marxism that was part of Karl Marx’s original vision that had been neglected in Marxism’s later development. The reconstruction of that other side, which Lebowitz denominated the “workers’ side,” was a lifelong project for him.2 He carried out this reconstruction with the idea that it had universal validity for workers and workers’ movements everywhere. In what follows, however, I will show how Lebowitz’s theses about the “workers’ side” are relevant to the global present but have to be shorn of their abstract universality and remapped specifically onto Global South struggles. This reframing of his work is a worthwhile endeavor, since it can explain why his powerful interpretation of Marx—which might only inspire bland cooperativist projects in the Global North—actually takes on a different meaning in the Global South. There, his theses connect and coincide with mass-based movements toward socialism in processes of national liberation from imperialist domination.
Reconstructing the Other Half of Marx’s Vision
What are the relevant theses developed by Lebowitz, and how do they apply to Global South struggles? Lebowitz spent decades developing what he contended was the “workers’ side” of Marxism.3 He argued that Marx originally planned to develop two sides to his critique of capitalism: one side would approach the social totality from the perspective of capital, while the other would approach it from the perspective of the workers. The problem was that Marx only completed the first part of his critique. That was the part that viewed capitalism from the side of capital, and it is what is found in the three volumes of his major scientific work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. By contrast, Marx only managed to give spare and scattered indications of the critique of capitalism from the side of the workers. Lebowitz pointed out that Marx had originally planned a six-book series that would have included a book on Wage Labour as the third in the sequence, where Marx could have presented the “workers’ side” in a more complete form. 4 However, that text—like all the other projected books, except Capital—remained unwritten.5 As a consequence, Marx’s reception has been shaped largely by Capital, giving rise to what Lebowitz called “one-sided Marxism.” The latter is a line of thought that remains too confined by the parameters of a work that, for methodological reasons, adopted much of the perspective of classical political economy and its relatively reductive view of workers as mere instruments of production. This historical imbalance made it imperative, Lebowitz thought, to rebuild and recover the underdeveloped workers’ side of Marxism, which gives workers greater agency, treats them as multidimensional beings, and recognizes how they push back against capital in diverse ways.
Lebowitz believed that his recovery of the workers’ side of Marxism was equally applicable everywhere, sustaining an essentially “flat-world” perspective throughout his writings. However, the spatially differentiated expansion of capitalism worldwide—and the entry of capitalism into its imperialist stage—has led to a North-South polarization that is roughly isomorphic with the two sides of Marxism as he described them. On the one hand, workers of the Global North tend toward greater subjection to capital and tend to be more fully instrumentalized by it: this comes close to incarnating the expectations of the “one-sided Marxism” that adopts the perspective of capital. On the other hand, the working peoples of the Global South are typically less fully integrated into the logic of capital, while they confront the most bald and violent contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist system. This leads the working class of the Global South to pursue radical alternatives and express their agency more fully. Since these are the very dynamics described by the workers’ side of Marxism, Lebowitz’s reconstruction is most fully applicable to that peripheral context, both its history and its present.6
Remapping Lebowitz’s workers’ side of Marxism onto the Global South is akin to extracting the rational kernel from G. W. F. Hegel’s thought and situating it in material reality the way Marx did. Such a transposition validates the conception of the workers’ side but takes that conception out of the world of abstractions and into concrete reality. In doing so, however, it compels us to draw conclusions regarding revolutionary organization, projects, and priorities that are significantly different than those drawn by Lebowitz himself. Specifically, it requires correcting for his tendency to privilege worker self-organization at the expense of other constitutive elements of a revolution and also for his downplaying of the role of material development in favor of human development among socialist goals. The need for these adjustments has to do with Lebowitz’s disattention to how imperialism overdetermines global material reality in our time. Nevertheless, once his theoretical innovations are placed in sustained relation to the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed nations—the principal contradiction of our time—they can help explain how horizons of socialist construction open up within national liberation processes of the Global South. These are generally state-guided but mass-based efforts at socialist construction that are difficult to account for without appealing to Lebowitz’s ideas. In what follows, we will look at what his theses can tell us about the Global South’s revolutionary processes, focusing first on what Lebowitz’s interpretation of Marx reveals about the revolutionary subject in those contexts. Then we will turn to what it teaches us about the levels of development needed to initiate processes of socialist construction in a peripheral or dependent country.
The Revolutionary Subject for Socialism in the Global South
One of the main areas that Lebowitz’s reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism helps elucidate is the nature of the revolutionary subject, which is, arguably, the most important theoretical question of our time.7 Applied to Global South contexts, his theory shows why, despite the relative scarcity of a classical proletariat in many processes of national liberation from imperialism, such processes can still embrace the socialist project in a strategic way and even take concrete steps toward materializing socialism. The puzzle about the proletariat in Global South countries emerges in great measure—I argue, appealing to Lebowitz—because the approach that Marx developed in Capital to the proletariat is framed by the purposes of that work, which was to expose the inner logic and internal laws of capitalism.8 However, it accordingly treats workers in a one-sided and abstract fashion, putting aside important aspects of workers’ lives, agency, and aspirations. For example, in Capital, workers’ needs are presented as fixed in each historical moment, and the whole realm of social reproductive labor is set aside.9 This abstraction served the aims of Capital, but it would have taken the completion of Marx’s projected theoretical oeuvre to overcome the limitations of this one-sided approach.
Naturally, when it comes to identifying the revolutionary subject for socialism, it is especially important to reconstruct the side of wage labor in a richer and more multidimensional way, if we want to avoid treating the proletariat in the abstract terms that so often appear in texts of political economy: that is, as a subject that is almost uniquely determined by the wage relation and viewed as a mere instrument of production. This can only be done by paying attention to the other aspects of workers’ lives, such as their social reproductive labor, their “nonproductive” social relations, their connections to the natural environment, and the varied strategies that workers use to push back against capital in the pursuit of their own development.10 All this belongs to what Lebowitz termed the “workers’ side” of Marxism, and only by attending to it can we move from what he called the “Abstract Proletariat”—the one-sided conception derived without mediations from Marx’s presentation in Capital—to the concrete proletariat of real struggles.11
The need to incorporate the concrete, multifaceted view of the proletariat is indispensable when we turn to Global South countries. Failing to do so, and holding onto the conceptual straitjacket of the Abstract Proletariat, will lead to false conclusions about the supposed extraneousness of socialist ideals and strategies to such contexts. There is a long history of denying the possibility of socialist-oriented projects in peripheral or dependent countries, because theorists have failed to locate the Abstract Proletariat there: that is, a significant body of workers without important determinations beyond the wage relation. In that view, the “true proletariat” is being counterposed to—and thereby used to disqualify— a more complex reality that might involve a mix of informal or semi-employed laborers, along with people who manifest more as migrants, Indigenous people, or communitarian subjects and peasants rather than as workers per se. Yet, Lebowitz’s work serves as a corrective to this chimerical search for an Abstract Proletariat. He points out how the “one-sided Marxists” engaged in this search are quite often simply inverting the theory-reality relation, inasmuch as they look for a proletariat that derives wholly from the concept and not the reality. Thus, Lebowitz writes that, from the “one-sided” viewpoint, “the real proletariat has seemed to lag behind its abstract counterpart and does not appear adequate to its concept. Rather, however, than considering real workers with their expressed needs and aspirations one-sided Marxism in a doctrinaire fashion declares, ‘Here are the true struggles, kneel here!’”12
For anyone acquainted with debates about the revolutionary subject in the Global South, this becomes familiar terrain once this “one-sided” Marxism is identified as that of the Eurocentric theorists who claim to be Marx’s followers. Then we are faced with an old and recurring story: in a peripheral nation, a mass movement rises, struggles, and seizes political power, overturning the colonial-imperial order and raising the de facto banners of socialism. The eyes of the world turn toward this new beacon of hope; the people commit themselves to a project of comprehensive emancipation. Yet, despite the historic magnitude of these movements and the essentially socialist ideals they embrace, their leaders and followers are admonished by a one-sided Eurocentric Marxism to “kneel here!” before the abstract image of the proletariat that it holds up. Socialism, they are told, is impossible because there is no true socialist subject in their context. In this way, the “Abstract Proletariat” has served as a theoretical warhorse that has been repeatedly deployed against the living revolutionary movements of the Global South, including the 26 de Julio movement in Cuba, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanzania, Chavismo in Venezuela, and the heroic Palestinian resistance. One after another, such movements have been told that they fail to conform to the abstract ideal of the revolutionary subject: that they are substitutionist, petty-bourgeois, backward, or tainted by some supposed “tribal” or religious deviation.
This is a time-worn story that alternates between distorting and demonizing (as lumpen, authoritarian, or terrorist) or simply under-considering such movements, with consequences that range from the tragic to the ridiculous. However, from the standpoint of the workers’ side of Marxism, the perceived lack of an Abstract Proletariat in societies of the Global South, and even the oft-repeated nomenclature of “semi-proletarization,” should take on a new meaning.13 Instead of the multifaceted character of the Global South’s working peoples being interpreted as a lack or an absence, we should recognize the presence of other aspects of concrete and real proletarians that go beyond the wage relation, including extra-laboral bonds and relations, systems of reproductive and subsistence labor, workers’ greater embeddedness in their natural and social environments, and forms of organization and use-value production that sometimes point to socialism. These “less-subsumed” social contexts in the Global South, which are richer in the dimensions of working-class life that are not necessarily functional to capitalism, provide fertile ground for diverse forms of popular power, especially that of women, while they present many elements of contestation of the existing order, sometimes including armed resistance and self-defense. In general, recognizing these aspects of the periphery’s proletarian lifeworld and environment can only result from a two-sided Marxism that acknowledges how real workers exist in the “ensemble of their social relations,” to quote Lebowitz.14 Once we do so, we will see why there are often revolutionary subjects in such contexts—proletarians in a concrete sense—that can at least begin the march toward socialism.
Intermezzo: Marx Himself Identifies Peripheral Revolutionary Subjects
Marx’s own work provides clear examples of his recognizing revolutionary subjects in peripheral contexts. Although Capital tends toward one-sidedness and the projected book on Wage Labour was never written, the “workers’ side” nevertheless surfaces in Marx’s other works and in his correspondence, as well as in Frederick Engels’s work (which is one reason the latter is a necessary complement to Marx’s).15 From Marx’s late correspondence, we get a window on how the great theorist himself responded to the challenge that so many Global South revolutionaries have faced from the nineteenth century to the present from those who deny the presence of a subject for socialist revolution in countries outside the capitalist core, because they remain trapped in the search for an Abstract Proletariat. In one well-known exchange of letters, the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx in 1881, relating the claims of some of her more doctrinaire colleagues, such as Georgi Plekhanov, that a socialist revolution was impossible in their peripheral context. The problem they saw was that, instead of a classical proletariat, Russia had a huge mass of rural workers, still organized in “archaic” communes. On behalf of her group, Zasulich asked Marx if the rural communes would have to disappear, driving the displaced Russian communards to “the streets of the large towns in search of a wage” for them to become a true proletariat. Would the socialist revolution therefore have to be preceded by a long period of capitalist development for the proletarian subject to emerge?16
The responses that Marx drafted to Zasulich, manifesting the richness of an approach that includes the side of the workers, highlight repeatedly the need to “descend from pure theory to Russian reality” and look at “the unique combination of circumstances in Russia.”17 In that spirit, he encouraged Zasulich and her colleagues to examine the concrete situation and consider the whole configuration of social relations, including powerful exploiting forces and interests. Doing so would reveal that what appeared to them as simply the “lack of a classical proletariat” among Russia’s rural workers, should really be considered as the presence of a specific kind of worker: highly oppressed and burdened peasants who nevertheless maintain common land ownership and the cooperative practices of the artel. This insight allows for the possibility that the embattled rural commune in Russia could become a fulcrum of social regeneration (“point d’appui” was the term he used) and a potential nucleus of socialism. Nevertheless, Marx made clear that activating that socialist potential required a political revolution led by a vanguard “intelligentsia” who would have “to concentrate all the living forces of society.”18 They would have to defeat Tsarism in a process of national liberation, free the rural workers from parasitical usurers and an onerous tax burden, promote the coordination of communes, and incorporate the modern technological advances of the West.
There are two important themes that stand out for our purposes among Marx’s claims in the Zasulich correspondence. First, with regard to the question of the revolutionary subject for socialism, Marx insisted that we abandon the world of abstractions and descend to reality to look at the concrete, multifaceted workers of Russia in the ensemble of their social relations. This is what the workers’ side of Marxism bids us to do, inasmuch as it eschews the search for an Abstract Proletariat in favor of a concrete proletariat. Second, as we follow Marx’s reasoning in the letters to Zasulich, we can see how his nonabstract approach leads not to the impossibility of socialist revolution in this peripheral context (which was the perspective of Plekhanov and his colleagues), but rather to a complex field of possibility that in this case involves socialist potential. Because of this complexity—the multidimensional character of workers’ lives in the Russian countryside and the powerful oppressions they live under—activating their revolutionary potential requires the vigorous political work of a vanguard. In a way that has been highly relevant to Global South contexts ever since, Marx centered the national question and emphasized that the revolutionary movement needs to undertake, to quote his words to Zasulich again, “the concentration of all the living forces of the country” to make the revolutionary seizure of state power a reality.
Needless to say, that is precisely what the Global South’s most successful revolutionary movements and leaders have done over the course of history. Paradigmatic examples include Fidel Castro, who insisted that revolutionary politics was essentially the art of sumando fuerzas (uniting forces); Ho Chi Minh, with his patient work in building a coalition of the patriotic and progressive sectors in Vietnam; and Amílcar Cabral, whose very movement was based on a dynamic conception of unity and struggle.19 Through vanguard parties and/or strong revolutionary command centers inside the state, Global South leaders have worked to forge and maintain revolutionary blocs capable of national liberation and socialism.20 To do so, they have appealed to unifying aspects of working people’s experience such as grassroots nationalism and the aspiration to self-determination, popular culture (including the religions of the oppressed), historical memory (for example, bolivarianismo, katarismo, or martianismo), and the endogenous mística and myth of the socialist revolution (as Mariátegui proposed).21 These are, needless to say, aspects of actually existing social classes that are left by the wayside in the stripped-down visions of the working class that come from one-sided Marxism. Since the latter sees the Abstract Proletariat as issuing from the mode of production through an automatic and inexorable logic, it has no need for such culturally responsive, nationalist, and vanguardist “deviations.”
A key historical reference for building unity among the Global South’s heterogeneous toilers—showing consciousness of the workers’ side of Marxism avant la lettre—is the worker-peasant alliance as it was developed in Russia’s peripheral context about one hundred years ago.22 In open rejection of spontaneism, Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary subject acknowledged that the party had to carefully establish and maintain the revolutionary bloc, doing so with a sensitivity to the expectations of the less advanced part of the alliance.23 In dialogue with M. N. Roy, Lenin acknowledged the diverse oppressed groups and popular strata in the national revolutionary movement. Today, that model can be applied and extended to the political projects of aggregating the mass of what Walter Rodney called the working people in the context of Global South countries, who must be addressed both in their sites of labor and in their territories and communities.24 Popular education, as well as mass-line-type practices—that is, repeatedly consulting the bases concerning their needs and aspirations—necessarily play an important role in maintaining the bonds among class sectors and between the masses and leadership.25
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Economic Conditions for Socialism: The Global South’s Productive Forces
A second major area that Lebowitz’s interpretation of Marx helps clarify concerns the level of economic development necessary to initiate socialist construction in peripheral countries. It is often asserted that dependent countries lack sufficiently developed productive forces to embark upon a socialist project.26 Lebowitz’s theses, however, reveal that such claims often abstract too much from the class struggle and thus become characteristic expressions of one-sided Marxism. By contrast, the “workers’ side” of Marxism, as he reconstructs it, leads to a more nuanced understanding, one that opens the possibility of socialist construction beginning under conditions where capitalism remains markedly underdeveloped.
The one-sided viewpoint that fuels skepticism about economic conditions for socialist revolution in the Global South is based on an erroneous conception of capitalism’s limits as purely objective and quantitative. This view commonly appeals to Marx’s argument about limits in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he affirms that a mode of production never is “destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed,” and that “new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”27 The core idea is that the old system must be developed to its limit—and thus be exhausted—before a new one can emerge, such that socialism will not arise before capitalism has run its historical course. Yet, one can accept the validity of Marx’s claim in this text without conceding that the relevant limit-point—the moment at which existing social relations become fetters on further development—can be determined independently from class struggle, and therefore without reference to the actions, perceptions, and capacities of historically situated subjects.
One indication that Marx does not conceive this process without the intervention of the subject is that in the very next line of the Preface, he characterizes the transition to a new mode of production as a matter of “mankind” setting itself “tasks.” Moreover, even a cursory examination of capitalism’s trajectory over the past century undermines the notion that capitalism possesses an objective limit that can be identified in advance on the basis of purely economic criteria. That trajectory demonstrates how what have often appeared to be objective limits to capitalist development in the Global North have repeatedly been transformed into temporary barriers, that are overcome through a variety of “fixes.”28 A central mechanism in this process is the transfer of imperial and colonial surpluses from the peripheral to the core countries. These surpluses contribute to, among other things, the continual expansion of socially conditioned needs for a large swath of the Northern working class, generating what Marx called “golden chains” that bind them to the system. If that is the case, how and where will it be determined that the productive forces have been completely exhausted under capitalist social relations such that those relations are transformed into insurmountable “fetters”?
Lebowitz’s reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism teaches us that this is never a purely objective question but rather requires that workers come to recognize “the inadequacy of capitalist relations and proceed to do away with them.”29 It is at this point that they set themselves what Marx called the “solvable task” of overcoming capitalism. Rejecting any notion of an automatic or purely objective determination of capitalism’s limits, Lebowitz writes:
Why does the fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations of production lead to the replacement of the latter? Not because capitalist relations of production sheepishly step aside to let the new era begin. The implicit argument is that people recognise the inadequacy of capitalist relations and proceed to do away with them. Yet, inadequate in what respect? Presumably inadequate with respect to their needs as socially developed human beings.30
By bringing the implicit workers’ side to the foreground, Lebowitz resolves one of the longstanding aporias concerning the material conditions for socialist revolution. The limit to the development of the productive forces under capitalist social relations is not a purely objective threshold that can be calculated from the standpoint of capital alone but hinges on the perspective of concrete workers and their needs, who therefore constitute the real limit of capitalism, by becoming its conscious gravediggers.31
Despite the profundity of this insight, Lebowitz remains too abstract, because he disregards the question of where such recognition is likely to occur. That is, he does not fully locate the concrete workers, the actually existing gravediggers of capitalism, in their geographical and historical situatedness. In reality, those workers who are most prone to determine that capitalism has reached its limits and must be overcome are found within the nations of the Global South. The reason is that, under conditions of colonial or neocolonial domination, capitalist development in peripheral societies systematically takes the form of underdevelopment, as Andre Gunder Frank famously argued.32 At the same time, workers in dependent countries are bound by chains far more brutal and materially real than the “golden chains” that tie workers in the Global North to the imperial mode of life. The South’s working peoples experience capitalist and imperialist barbarity to the fullest, through multifarious assaults on their existence and dignity as human beings. In this sense, workers’ recognition of capitalism’s limits—key to determining their option for socialism—is always overdetermined by the contradiction between nation and imperialism.
In fact, the contradiction with imperialism produces a complex dynamic in the processes of national liberation of dependent countries. On the one hand, capitalist-induced underdevelopment—or what Samir Amin termed “lumpen development”—will play a decisive role in working peoples’ decision to throw off the fetters of capitalism in such contexts and pursue national liberation under an alternative economic model, meaning that the process of socialist construction can begin at low levels of development.33 On the other hand, those same working masses in a dependent country will respond to their currently dire conditions of material scarcity by earnestly aiming to raise as quickly as possible levels of productivity and material well-being. Here Lebowitz’s work shows both its usefulness and its shortcomings. If his uncovering of the workers’ side of Marxism is helpful in revealing the possibility of socialist construction being initiated under low levels of development, his positioning of the “development of human potential” as virtually the unique aim of socialism amounts to a universalization of the condition of the Northern working classes, and shortchanges the legitimate aspirations of working peoples of the Global South to prioritize obtaining adequate levels of material development.34 Moreover, the U.S.-led imperialist system’s disposition to attack, invade, sanction, and blockade countries pursuing national liberation under an alternative social and economic model will provide an additional—essentially military—motive for reaching high levels of material and technological development. For the sin of wanting to survive such imperialist aggressions, avoid recolonization, and attain an even moderately prosperous society, these liberation processes are routinely accused of developmentalism, militarism, and authoritarianism by the defeatist left.
The historical trajectory of really existing socialist revolutions is a south-pointing vector that reaches from the Soviet Union to China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela, and it speaks loudly and in bold letters for the role of working peoples in determining the limits of capitalism and the need for the socialist alternative in a way consistent with Lebowitz’s theory. What must be added, however, to make his innovations touch down in the real world is that if, as he pointed out, the degree of development of productive forces that is ripe for overcoming capitalism is inevitably conditioned by class struggle, it is a class struggle that must include not just the capitalist dimension but also the imperialist one. In fact, the real-world option for socialism begins not just anywhere in the globe but in the countries of dependent capitalism—capitalism in the colonial and neocolonial condition—for it is in these national contexts that capitalism’s fundamental inability to satisfy working people’s needs becomes evident first. It is the Global South’s workers, within the frameworks of their respective nations, who will recognize that no capitalist-oriented trajectory will result in “catching up” but will instead drive their societies to social ruin and underdevelopment, along with environmental destruction.
This is a recognition that is widespread, if often in a diffuse way, in the everyday life of Global South societies, where capitalism is typically seen as a foreign imposition, while anticapitalism expresses itself in the commitment to various kinds of moral economy that oppose purely market-determined prices and the complete monetarization of use-values. Widespread though often latent, these attitudes only become decisive during moments of crisis, and they acquire durability only through organization. This means that, as with the question of the forging of the revolutionary subjective bloc discussed above, here too we are brought face to face with a manifestly political determination and political decision that cannot be left to the spontaneous course of capitalist development. Instead, it requires the activity and educating leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party or state-based command center that will be charged with managing the project of socialist construction while safeguarding national independence and sovereignty. Ultimately, the level and character of development pursued will be shaped less by the socialist project in isolation than by its ongoing confrontation with imperialism.
Conclusion
In the foregoing, we have shown how Lebowitz’s work, specifically his reconstruction of the workers’ side of Marxism, opens up a space within the field of Marxism today that allows us to better comprehend the socialist-oriented projects that develop in the Global South. Lebowitz’s workers’ side of Marxism, a restoration of a part of Marx’s original vision that has generally been overlooked, sheds light on two key issues. First, it demonstrates how the diverse mass of toilers in Global South countries potentially constitutes a revolutionary proletarian subject for socialism. Second, it shows how the level of economic development needed to initiate a process of socialist construction turns greatly on workers’ consciousness of the need for socialism to replace capitalism at least as a strategic goal. Where such consciousness emerges is conditioned by capitalism’s uneven historical development on the globe. It does not emerge first in the Northern countries but in those of the Global South, where it is always traversed by the imperatives of anti-imperialism and the need for sovereignty, which in turn means that the really existing socialist alternative always takes shape within the framework of a process of national liberation. Lebowitz’s theoretical innovations, which are really recoveries of original Marxism, can thus be utilized to map Marxist studies onto the reality of the world today, where socialism is not “impossible” due to absent conditions, as Northern pundits often claim, but is actively being pursued in countries whose combined populations exceed 1.5 billion.
The arguments advanced here would be open to criticism, if there were not abundant pathways from Lebowitz’s work to that of key thinkers and leaders working in Global South contexts. However, we have seen how Lebowitz’s conception of the workers’ side, both with regard to the nature of the revolutionary subject and the economic conditions for socialism, actually coincides or connects with many of the theorizations and practices developed by the most distinguished revolutionaries and theorists in the Global South. Beyond those connections already mentioned, it is worth noting how the expansion of agency in Lebowitz’s “workers’ side” resonates with the views of Fanon and Che Guevara regarding armed struggle as a formative praxis through which new political subjects are forged, as well as with Hugo Chávez’s reliance on workers’ protagonism to build a national system of socialist communes. In general, Lebowitz’s theses find themselves at home in Latin America’s extensive practices and theoretical elaborations of popular power. Further, the importance of vanguard leadership, as exemplified by Mao, Ho, Fidel, Cabral, Chávez, Xi Jinping, and Nicolás Maduro, is also validated, once we recognize (in a step that Lebowitz did not make but should have) how the multifaceted, diverse, and sometimes segmented character of working peoples that he identified—the real and not the Abstract Proletarians—requires vanguard leadership, usually within state-directed processes, to maintain unity and direction. Finally, the role of subjective, and not purely economic, criteria in determining when to embark on the socialist path echoes theses advanced by figures such as Mariátegui and Che.35 Overall, such convergences underscore how Lebowitz’s recovery of the workers’ side of Marxism finds its most compelling confirmation in the historical experiences of the revolutionary Global South.
Along with his partner Marta Harnecker, Lebowitz traveled late in life to Venezuela, and lived here for seven years (from 2003 to 2011). He even worked as an advisor to Chávez and drew inspiration for his writing from the Bolivarian Process.36 However, Lebowitz always considered his work as universally applicable to socialist construction and did not make any specific connections between his main theses and the conditions of countries in the Global South. As a result, he never addressed how or why the workers’ side of Marxism plays out most fully in that context. There may be various reasons for this oversight. However, they surely include Lebowitz’s tendency, like that of many Marxists in his academic context, to undervalue the actually existing socialist projects that emerged in the twentieth century, which they generally assessed without sufficient attention to the role of imperialism in putting up obstacles to real socialism’s hard-won and yet world-changing achievements.37 Undervaluing real socialism, Lebowitz veered toward a utopian, model-making approach, largely detached from the geopolitical realities that structure socialist experimentation.38 This abstraction from geopolitical and historical determinations is likely the main reason that Lebowitz never explicitly theorized why the workers’ side of Marxism connects most fully to the Global South and its projects of socialist construction that emerge within processes of national liberation from imperialism. This oversight was unfortunate, for whatever his work gained in rhetorical power—and it did inspire readers everywhere—it lost in terms of concrete situatedness and historical plausibility. By contrast, it is with vivid attention to both history and the battles of the present that I have endeavored to remap features of the “workers’ side” of Marxism onto Global South struggles, where they are most relevant and fruitful, albeit in a modified form.
Notes
1- ↩ In this article, the concept of national liberation is used in a broad sense to refer to the process of overcoming not just the colonial but also the neocolonial condition.
2- ↩ Lebowitz frequently referred to the “side of wage labor” as well as to “the side of workers.” However, I prefer the formulations “the side of the workers” or “the workers’ side,” since, as Lebowitz himself argued, it is misleading to reduce workers to wage labor alone.
3- ↩ Lebowitz first expounded his interpretation of Marx in Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). However, it was a lifelong project, and he further elaborated his main theses in later books, including a reworked version of Beyond Capital (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), and in his final book, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020). All references to Beyond Capital in this text refer to the 2003 edition.
4- ↩ In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx described the six projected books as follows: “1. On Capital (contains a few introductory Chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market” (letter from Karl Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, February 22, 1858). Marx also repeatedly mentioned this six-book plan in the Grundrisse.
5- ↩ Note that Lebowitz’s argument never turned entirely on Marx’s intention to write the projected book on Wage Labour. From the beginning, he insisted that, whether or not Marx intended to write such a book, it would have been necessary to do so. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 50.
6- ↩ My claim here is not that the working class of the Global North is completely and permanently integrated into the system, which was the erroneous argument of Western Marxists, but rather that it is relatively more instrumentalized and relatively more bound. For an excellent critique of Western Marxist defeatism in this regard, see John Bellamy Foster, “Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism’s Adamantine Chains,” Monthly Review 77, no. 9 (February 2026): 1–11.
7- ↩ “With the objective material bases of anti-imperialism deepening today, the chief question becomes one of the subjective material basis, that is, the revolutionary subject.” Notes from the Editors, Monthly Review 77, no. 4 (September 2025): 63.
8- ↩ “[I]t is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society,” Marx wrote in the Preface to the first edition of Capital. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976), 92.
9- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, chapter 3.
10- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 151.
11- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 138.
12- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 138.
13- ↩ The thesis of semiproletarianization has been widely employed by the Agrarian South Network. See, for example, Lynne Ossome and Shirisa Naidu, “The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour” in Praveen Jha, Walter Chambati, and Lyn Ossome, eds., Labor Questions in the Global South (Singapore: Palgrave, 2021), 77, 79, 81–82. An earlier use is that of Cristobal Kay in “Latin America’s Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization and Proletarization” in Deborah Bryceson, Cristobal Kay, and Jos Mooj, eds., Disappearing Peasantries?: Rural Labor in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Rugby: Practical Action, 2000), 123–38.
14- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 155.
15- ↩ Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England has a fascinating and holistic perspective on the working class, addressing reproductive labor, and workers’ territorial and environmental embeddedness—in brief, workers’ lives and not just their labor. Also, the much-criticized presence of “Weltanschauung Marxism” in Engels’s Anti-Dühring should be understood as a valuable attempt to encapsulate and develop the workers’ perspective, even if Engels’s effort is necessarily limited by representing the workers’ side at a particular historical place and time.
16- ↩ Vera Zasulich to Karl Marx, February 16, 1881, Marxists Internet Archive, Marxists.org.
17- ↩ Karl Marx to Vera Zasulich, February/March, 1881, First Draft, Marxists Internet Archive, Marxists.org.
18- ↩ Marx to Zasulich, First Draft.
19- ↩ During a visit to Salvador Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s, Fidel lectured members of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, saying: “The art of revolution is the art of joining forces…joining…joining…joining…and joining” (Punto Final, September 22, 2000, author’s translation). On the views of Hồ (Nguyễn Ái Quốc), see Simin Fadaee, Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 60. Cabral called for “a broad front of unity and struggle that is vital for the success of the national liberation movement,” pointing out how building it requires “a rigorous analysis of the indigenous social structure and the trends of its evolution” (Amílcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979], 132).
20- ↩ The configuration of the revolutionary bloc is not fixed but changes over time. Part of the genius of both Lenin and Mao lay in their ability to draw the boundaries of the revolutionary bloc and, crucially, to revise those boundaries in response to shifting circumstances and the advances or setbacks of the struggle. Similarly, Cabral distinguished between the population (a demographic category) and the people (who belong to the struggle), emphasizing that the latter is a historically variable category. As Cabral put it: “We have to understand clearly, therefore, that in each phase of a nation’s history, of a land, of a population, of a society, the people are defined in terms of the main stream of the history of that society, in terms of the highest interests of the majority of that society” (Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 89–90).
21- ↩ Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik observe that Third World anti-imperialist nationalism has historically been inclusive, not looking for internal enemies, as in the case of right-wing chauvinist nationalism. Moreover, the nationalism in Third World contexts has not positioned itself above the people but in the service of them, nor has it been aggrandizing but rather seeks “fraternal links with anti-imperialist struggles elsewhere” (Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021], 335–36). On the question of revolutionary mythmaking, Mariátegui is the most salient theorist. He understood myth as a revolutionary force, both in the capacity of socialist ideals—such as the concept of the Final Struggle—to mobilize the masses in dependent countries, and in the way millenarian imaginaries, including the rebirth of the Incan Tawantinsuyu (Four Regions) in contemporary Peru, could be articulated with modern socialism. José Carlos Mariátegui, El Alma Matinal y Otros Estaciones del Hombre de Hoy y El Artista y la Época (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2011), 51, 53–56.
22- ↩ It may be objected that many peasants are proprietors and some live by exploiting the labor of others. However, most peasants in Lenin’s context, as in the world today, subsist primarily through their own labor, while being exploited indirectly by creditors and through the monopolies that buy their products and sell them agricultural inputs. Unlike Plekhanov, who dismissed the peasantry since they were not industrial workers, Lenin saw revolutionary potential in them, and he included the poor and middle peasants in the overarching category of the toiling masses.
23- ↩ In considering how to maintain the worker-peasant alliance, “Lenin constantly stressed the fact that workers’ power was, as it were, ‘on trial’ before the peasants. The proletarian leaders would take the initiative in guiding the transition toward socialist agriculture, but they could not function properly if they tried to put over measures which the poorer peasants did not yet understand and desire, even if such measures seemed to express the underlying hope and purposes of these peasants” (Anna Rochester, Lenin on the Agrarian Question [New York: International Publishers, 1942], 109).
24- ↩ Rodney’s term “working people” has antecedents in the language of the Comintern such as “toiling population” and “toiling folk.” For a discussion of Rodney’s term and its continuing relevance, see Issa G. Shivji, “The Concept of ‘Working People,’” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 6 no. 1 (2017): 1–13.
25- ↩ Cabral writes: “Whether in Cape Verde or anywhere else in the world, education is the fundamental basis that underpins the work of the emancipation of every human being and the conscientization of mankind.” Cabral quoted in The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74, Studies on National Liberation, no. 1 (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).
26- ↩ First in a long line of Eurocentric naysayers, Karl Kautsky dismissed the Bolshevik’s socialist ambitions, referring to “the impotence of all revolutionary attempts made without regard to objective social and economic conditions.” Forty years later, many intellectuals with comparable biases adopted a similar position in their debate with Che Guevara about the transition to socialism in Cuba. Karl Kautsky quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Madison: Iskra Books, 2023), 104; Ernesto Che Guevara, El gran debate: sobre la economía en Cuba 1963–1964 (Melbourne/New York: Ocean Press, 2006).
27- ↩ Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Penguin, 1975), vol. 29, 26.
28- ↩ Using Hegelian terminology, Marx distinguished between limits, which are incapable of being surpassed, versus barriers that can be overcome. For Marx, capitalism continually pushes against and surpasses numerous barriers, but it ultimately encounters its true limit in the working class itself. See Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 13–15.
29- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 163.
30- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 163.
31- ↩ Lebowitz, Beyond Capital, 14–15.
32- ↩ Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18, no. 4 (1966).
33- ↩ See Samir Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism,” Monthly Review 67, no. 3 (July 2015).
34- ↩ It is true that human development is the essential and long-term aim of socialism, and material abundance is ultimately subordinate to that aim, with which it has a profound dialectical relation. However, distinguishing between the two aims is analytically useful, given the tendency, expressed in Lebowitz’s work and many others, to downplay the pressing issues of material scarcity in Global South contexts. Here I defend the importance of material development in the Global South’s socialist-oriented projects (while recognizing that a rational planning that transcends the growth-degrowth contradiction, but most likely manifests as “degrowth” in the countries of the Global North, is the overarching framework of the socialist project). This should not be confused with an argument for stage theory, since I have already pointed to both the need for and possibility of building new social relations in Global South contexts. Importantly, the distinction between material and human development is not the same as the distinction between productive forces and social relations of production. Consequently, making a priority out of material development does not mean neglecting transformations in social relations.
35- ↩ In a similar spirit, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik argue that it is not GDP growth rates but capitalist barbarism that establishes the “historical obsolescence of the system…from which only socialism can rescue it” (Patnaik and Patnaik, Capitalism and Imperialism, 338).
36- ↩ Lebowitz’s books Build It Now!: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006) and The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) both refer frequently to the Bolivarian Process in Venezuela.
37- ↩ Lebowitz’s main treatment of Eastern Bloc socialism was in The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). In the preface, he explains that, although he originally intended to trace the history of the Soviet Union’s emergence and development, he ultimately abandoned that approach. Would the abandoned historical account have forced him to consider the concrete material conditions of socialist development, and so led him to assume a more sympathetic position toward real socialism and its achievements?
38- ↩ The ahistorical, abstract-universal character of Lebowitz’s work, which treated socialism more as a categorical imperative than as a historically grounded process, is evident in his book titles, such as Build it Now! and The Socialist Imperative.
