Marxism–Leninism is not part of the Left               

The term “left” was born in bourgeois politics. It came out of the French Revolution, when republican factions sat to the left of the monarch. From its birth, the “left” carried the outlook of the rising bourgeoisie, championing progress, secularism, and equality before the law. These ideals came from the Enlightenment, which spoke of human emancipation in universal terms but always within the boundaries of private property, commodity production, and the institutions of bourgeois rule. Its so-called “universal” values served one class: the bourgeoisie.

Marx tore through this illusion. He showed that talk of equality and justice under capitalism only hides the dictatorship of capital. The working class cannot free itself inside a system built on exploitation. Capitalism cannot be perfected; it must be overthrown. Marx rejected idealist philosophy, replacing it with historical materialism. He stripped away hollow abstractions and replaced them with a scientific understanding of class struggle and revolutionary transformation. Marxism is not an extension of the bourgeois left; it is its negation, standing outside the liberal political spectrum altogether and representing the organised consciousness of the proletariat, fighting not for reform but for the abolition of class society itself.

Lenin exposed imperialism as capitalism’s highest and most predatory stage, the dictatorship of monopoly and finance capital feeding on global plunder. It sustains itself by buying off the labour aristocracy and petty-bourgeois base that supports the social-democratic left. This “left” is not a challenge to imperialism but its political front, protecting empire behind slogans of fairness, equality, and reform.

The social-democratic “left” is a controlled opposition. It promises only marginal reforms, its role is to serve the ruling class as a safety valve designed to disarm any incipient revolutionary challenge to the capitalist mode of production and imperialist parasitism. Its “progressive” rhetoric traps discontent within the boundaries of bourgeois order, turning rebellion into managed dissent.

Marxism–Leninism stands apart, and in stark contrast to the left of imperialism, it is anti-imperialist in content, scientific in method, and revolutionary in aim. Socialism cannot be won one reform at a time through parliamentarism and bourgeois elections. It demands revolution, the organised power of the proletariat destroying class society, seizing power, and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat to build socialism. Imperialism is the primary contradiction. The political divide is not between left and right but between those who oppose and those who serve imperialism. The “left” is bourgeois fools’ gold, sparkling with deceptions. We are not part of that delusion.