Part I: The “Clean Hands” Fixation and Political Paralysis

Politics, by its very nature, is a “dirty” terrain. Direct contact with the harsh reality of class conflict, historical necessity, and the immense mechanisms of the imperialist system is not a stage available to a subject who desires to remain “spotless.” Yet in a significant section of today’s global communist movement, “ideological purity” is sanctified as a theoretical defense mechanism. This pursuit of flawlessness is, in fact, a withdrawal from the grey, uncertain, and risky terrain of politics — a kind of political monasticism disguised as a “clean hands” fixation.

This fixation causes movements to touch nothing in practice, to intervene in none of the system’s fractures, and ultimately to cease being a “political will” and become instead “custodians of historical legacy.” This is the picture we face today: structures that are theoretically sharp, rhetorically “orthodox,” yet practically inert. By declaring “neutrality” in the imperialist system’s zones of conflict, these structures grant an indirect endorsement to the preservation of the status quo. The phrase “they are all imperialists, we will stand beside none of them,” viewed analytically, amounts to a wish for the weakening of the imperialist system’s greatest geopolitical rivals and the consolidation of a unipolar world order. This is not a “class politics”; it is the rationalization of an escape from responsibility, a retreat into the comfort of self-satisfaction detached from reality.

Part II: Reification and Institutional Ideology

In Marxist literature, reification (Verdinglichung) is the perception of social relations as an “objective reality” possessing laws independent of and unchanging by human beings. The dogmatism within today’s communist movement is the inverse reflection of this societal reification: revolutionary organization and strategic principles, severed from the very masses that created them and from the living class contradictions, have been turned into a self-sustaining, untouchable “objective mechanism.”

The movement’s sanctification of its own organizational forms, past historical experiences, or theoretical texts — transforming them from living guides into “ahistorical objective facts” — is precisely this process of reification. Institutions and concepts built by human will come to be seen as “objective obstacles” that now determine and constrain that very will. Theory thereby ceases to be an instrument for changing the world; it becomes, before the world and before politics, an untouchable “thing” to be reverently preserved.

This inverted reification causes the movement to lose its capacity to generate politics in the face of concrete geopolitical ruptures, by treating its own self-created strategic principles as “social laws.” Those who regard the principles they themselves produced as more “real” than their own actions have, in effect, reified their own will. This detachment from reality arises when theory is positioned as an “object” standing above social reality — beyond all class contradictions and the shifting material ground.

Part III: The Fallacy of the “Imperialist Pyramid” — Is Greece an Imperialist Power Too?

The most striking theoretical aberration produced by this line is the schema they call the “imperialist pyramid.” According to this schema, every state in which capitalist relations of production prevail is a “tier” of the imperialist system, with the United States at the apex and others arranged below. By this approach, Russia, China, Iran, Türkiye, and even Greece are classified as different “tiered” components of the same system.

Yet here a fundamental analytical collapse occurs. At the center of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism stand the international export of finance capital, the struggle among monopolistic great powers for the division of the world, and the dominance of finance capital. Which of these criteria does Greece satisfy? A country that has spent decades under the pressure of IMF programs, that writhed in the grip of European creditors during the debt crisis, whose territory is used as a NATO logistics hub, and whose own ports have been seized by foreign monopolies, is not a subject of imperialism but precisely its object.

Türkiye is no exception to this picture either. The historical line running from Sèvres to Lausanne, from the Truman Doctrine to the 1971 military ultimatum and the 1980 coup, from the Gladio structure to today’s NATO encirclement, demonstrates beyond dispute that Türkiye is a country targeted by imperialist intervention. To declare this country “imperialist” is nothing other than inverting Lenin’s analytical categories: confusing the object of imperialism with its subject is, beyond being a theoretical error, a political deviation that in practice reinforces the discourse of the dominant power.

Moreover, the internal inconsistency of this theory cannot be ignored. When practical solidarity is at stake, this same line does not hesitate to organize joint actions — for instance in the struggle against NATO bases — with countries it has declared “imperialist.” Treating a country one calls “imperialist” as a tactical ally is the most striking evidence of how this theory collapses in practice.

Part IV: Lenin’s Criterion — Not a Moral Test, but Geopolitical Function

The fundamental methodological error of this line is this: taking the character of a regime’s internal politics as the criterion for evaluating a power. Lenin’s analysis, however, asks a different question: what objective function does this power perform in the face of imperialist hegemony? Is there some axiom stating that “whatever is not socialist is imperialist?”

In his 1915 pamphlet “Socialism and War”, Lenin set out this criterion with great clarity:

“If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be ‘just,’ ‘defensive’ wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory ‘great’ powers.”

Here Lenin openly counted the Ottoman Empire among the “semi-colonial” states and evaluated the nature of the imperialist war waged against it within this framework. Whatever the character of its internal class structure — feudal remnants, despotic rule, reactionary institutions — the defensive war of the side resisting imperialist encirclement is legitimate. This is not a test of moral purification, but a concrete test of geopolitical function.

The line that today declares “every imperialist is equal” follows not Lenin’s concrete analysis but an abstract template produced in his name. Russia’s internal class structure is debatable; its capitalism is real. But Russia’s objective geopolitical position is also a fact: it is one of the greatest military obstacles to the imperialist unipolar world order. This does not make Russia “socialist”; but viewed through Lenin’s framework, it performs an objective function as a power resisting the encirclement of the imperialist center.

The case of China requires a different but equally coherent analysis. Capitalist relations of production exist in China; this cannot be denied. But the decisive question is this: can private entrepreneurs seize political power? Can they dominate parliament, the media, the universities, state planning? No. Capitalists operate in the economic sphere, but control over the political superstructure remains in the hands of socialist state institutions. This structure is, in essence, a long-term variant of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that Lenin launched in 1921 and which was cut short by necessity: capitalist instruments are being used, under socialist state control, to develop the productive forces. Socialism cannot be built by equalizing everyone in poverty; this is the ABC of Marxism.

Part V: Iran, Hamas, the DPRK — The Practical Bankruptcy of the “Purity” Test

The most concrete testing ground for this methodological error is found in today’s hottest zones of conflict.

Iran

Iran’s internal regime does not alter its objective character in the face of imperialist hegemony. Its theocratic internal structure is the Iranian people’s own internal matter, just as the internal structures of other countries are their own affairs. Viewed objectively, Iran is one of the greatest obstacles to American hegemony in the Middle East. It stands against the imperialist project in Syria, in Yemen, in Palestine.

This line, however, places theoretical distance by branding it the “capitalist Iranian state” and leaves Iran outside geopolitical analysis. But the joint military attack launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28, 2026 has, in practice, condemned this theoretical sterility. The Iranian people, who resisted externally imposed regime change even through the harshest periods of repression, have positioned themselves overwhelmingly on the side of their government in the face of this imperialist assault. Even sixty-six percent of the Iranian diaspora in the United States has opposed the war. This in practice confirms Lenin’s fundamental thesis: external imperialist threat temporarily suspends internal class contradictions and activates the reflex of national defense.

To dismiss this reality by saying “capitalist Iranian state” is not Marxist analysis; it is an unwarranted theoretical cover for imperialist intervention.

Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance

Hamas possesses, internally, a sharia-based character. But does this fact alter its objective position within the Palestinian people’s struggle against imperialist encirclement and Israeli occupation? No. The secular PLO surrendered and was liquidated during the Oslo process; it has since become an instrument of the US-Israeli political project. To maintain ideological distance from Hamas while simultaneously supporting the Palestinian resistance is practically impossible. The result is the rejection of organized Palestinian resistance.

Moreover, this line displays its theoretical inconsistency most nakedly on the Palestinian question: a position that everywhere else insists “bourgeois reformism is insufficient, socialism is necessary” defends, in Palestine, a capitalist two-state solution — a “compliant” Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. The bankruptcy of Oslo has proven the practical impossibility of this project for decades.

The DPRK

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) possesses, in its internal structure, an authoritarian character. Yet for more than seventy years it has not bowed to the world’s foremost imperialist power. Thanks to its nuclear deterrent, it has escaped the fate of Iraq and Libya. Its authoritarianism at home cannot conceal its objective positioning in the face of imperialist hegemony. If the criterion of internal regime were applied consistently, the same logic would have to condemn the Soviet Union’s wartime alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War as “ideological unprincipledness.” Did Stalin do this? He did not. Because objective imperialist threat opens the way for tactical alliances.

Part VI: Geopolitical Realism and the Dialectics of Politics

Revolutionary practice is not a sterile laboratory experiment; it is a “dirty” battlefield in which the balance of forces, geopolitical ruptures, and class positions are in constant flux. For the Marxist current that maintains a line of political intervention in social life, every step aimed at weakening imperialist hegemony is an inseparable part of revolutionary strategy and the very form of its realization. Marxist politics does not erect impassable walls between tactical steps and the strategic goal; on the contrary, revolutionary politics is the concrete path by which the strategic goal is reached through the dialectical accumulation of tactical maneuvers.

When the “pure” line equates the concrete actors of imperialism, or the parties to a geopolitical crisis, by declaring “they are all the same,” it displays not revolutionary neutrality but a capitulation that feeds imperialist hegemony. From Ukraine to the Middle East, and from there to the resistance centers of the Global South, the system’s “weak links” are well known, and these links carry historical importance often not because they are “socialist,” but because they resist the domination of the imperialist center or exploit the structural openings created by that domination. The task of the current that maintains a line of intervention is not to subject these actors to a test of “moral purity,” but to coolly analyze how much they shake the imperialist hegemonic bloc and how deeply they deepen the contradictions at the center of the system.

“Risking contamination” is neither an ideological concession nor a drift into unprincipled pragmatism. On the contrary, it is to liberate communist politics from that naive rhetoric of “a quest for moral purification” and to make it a genuine actor in the real “war of powers” of history. The rejection of alliances, or insistence on “neutrality,” is often not a revolutionary stance but the concealed pacifism of those who shrink from taking responsibility and from putting their hand to the wheel of history.

Part VII: The National Line — Independence and Regional Solidarity

A country’s rupture from imperialist blocs and from military-political encirclement apparatuses such as NATO is not merely a foreign-policy choice; it is a revolutionary breakthrough capable of fundamentally transforming internal class balances. Yet “pure” doctrinaire movements generally dismiss moves toward national independence as “bourgeois nationalism” or “a tactical maneuver,” missing their revolutionary potential entirely.

Imperialist encirclement does not end with the conquest of revolutionary power; on the contrary, it intensifies into a war waged against the people who have declared their sovereignty — a war fed by far more systematic economic embargoes and shaped ideologically. Building an independent national line is therefore a vital strategy not only at the moment of revolution but for protecting the power established after the revolution. The decades-long experience of Cuba, Vietnam, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Venezuela demonstrates this beyond dispute.

The labeling of such solidarity practices as “betrayal” or “ideological unprincipledness” by the “isolated orthodox” line is, in fact, a pacifist purity undisturbed by the continuation of imperialism’s domination over us. For them, revolution is a sterile transfer of power; but we know that revolution is the process of building the historical blocs that will frustrate the imperialist system’s policies of containment and encirclement.

Part VIII: The Power Machine — Not a Debating Society

Communism is a project of will; but this will is not an intellectual pastime that imprisons itself in indifference through an obsession with “remaining pure.” Today, the ultimate destination of the search for ideological purity is to cease being a revolutionary force and become instead a discussion platform, a debating society, or a thought club isolated from practice — one in which theoretical texts are endlessly dissected and the only contest is over who is more “Marxist.”

A genuine revolutionary will defines itself not merely in “debate” but essentially in “struggle.” Marxist reality takes as its criterion not merely the correctness of ideas, but how useful an idea proves, through tactical steps, in the seizure of power, and how it changes objective reality. That this line, despite decades of organizational existence and deep-rooted traditions, remains so far removed from a power perspective even in its own countries is the most concrete proof of the practical impasse of theoretical “purity.”

The project of will that we defend is not a voluntarism detached from objective historical processes. On the contrary, it is a daring process of construction that turns objective contradictions, the cracks in imperialist hegemony, and historical necessities into its own lever. The communist movement must be a power machine, not a thought club.

Part IX: Conclusion — The Wheel of History Does Not Turn Through Purity

History is not a spiral turning of its own accord; it is a concrete process advancing on the ground of the conflicts, ruptures, and upheavals produced by class struggle. Those who champion the fallacy of the “imperialist pyramid” have reduced Lenin’s analysis of imperialism to a conceptual template; in doing so, they have confused the object of imperialism with its subject, as in the case of Greece; failed to perceive the objective geopolitical function of powers such as Russia and China; contented themselves with merely observing, through their own theoretical sterility, the Iranian people’s stance in the face of imperialist attack; and, by subjecting Hamas and the DPRK to a test of “moral purity,” have withdrawn from the resistance of the Palestinian and Korean peoples.

The summary of this picture is this: the criterion of internal regime has displaced the criterion of geopolitical function. The question “is it socialist?” has taken precedence over the question “does it shake imperialist hegemony?” In place of Lenin’s concrete historical analysis of 1915 now stands a dogma produced in his name.

For the Marxist current that maintains a line of political intervention in social life, today’s task is not to passively await the cracks in imperialist hegemony. The real task is to organize class struggle on every front, and through the leverage created by this organized power, to widen the cracks in imperialist hegemony and ultimately to conquer popular power.

The genuine revolutionary will is not that of those who keep their hands clean by remaining “pure”; it is the will of those who do not shrink from plunging their hands into the muddy reality of history, from sitting at the table of alliances, and, when the moment demands it, from forging tactical partnerships with anti-hegemonic forces. It is not a pure ideology, but a powerful will rising above concrete contradictions and using those very contradictions as a lever, that turns the wheels of history.

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Özcan Buze studied Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University before completing his graduate education in History and Philosophy at the University of Oslo. His writing has appeared in newspapers and journals across Turkey and Scandinavia, and he has served on the editorial boards of the journals Teori and Bilim ve Ütopya, the latter of which he also edited. He has worked in radio in both China and Norway, produced and hosted television and radio discussion programs, and presented Papirüs, a book review program. His translations from English and the Scandinavian languages have been published in Turkey and China.

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