Daniel Seixo. 11/23/2025
“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force.”
Karl Marx
“Over a long period, we have come to form this concept for fighting the enemy: strategically, we must disregard all our enemies, but tactically, we must take them very seriously. That is to say, when considering the whole, we must despise the enemy, but take them very seriously in each of the specific issues. If we do not despise the enemy when considering the whole, we will fall into the error of opportunism. Marx and Engels were just two people, but even in their time they declared that capitalism would be overthrown throughout the world. However, when facing specific issues and each enemy individually, if we do not take them very seriously, we will commit the error of adventurism. In war, battles can only be fought one by one, and enemy forces annihilated piece by piece. Factories can only be built one by one. Peasants can only plow the land plot by plot. Even eating is the same.” From a strategic point of view, we don’t take eating a meal very seriously: we’re sure we can finish it. But in the actual process of eating, we do it bite by bite. We can’t gobble down an entire meal in one sitting. This is called a piecemeal approach. And in military literature, it’s called destroying enemy forces piecemeal.
Mao Zedong
“To accept combat when it is manifestly advantageous to the enemy, but not to us, is criminal; the political leaders of the revolutionary class are utterly useless if they do not know how to ‘maneuver’ or propose ‘conciliation and compromise’ in order to avoid a clearly unfavorable fight.”
Lenin
Let’s be clear, even blunt if the interaction demands it: our current understanding of the world requires us to rise above the immediate appearance of events. In international politics, especially in this era of organic crisis of capitalism that we are experiencing, petty-bourgeois moralism clings to gestures, while history unfolds beneath the surface in macro-processes confronted by the fleeting pen and the futile coquetry of the pundit. Today, strategic patience is vital, a fundamental category of revolutionary diplomacy from Lenin to Zhou Enlai.
In the immediacy of political events, the common consciousness, even when cloaked in leftist rhetoric, tends to become trapped in the mere appearance of phenomena, ignoring the true essence of history. By now, you will know that the recent UN Security Council resolution on Palestine and the subsequent abstention of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have unleashed a wave of petty-bourgeois moralism on social media and in the European microcosm. Incapable of grasping the dialectic of the concrete totality, this moralism cries “treason” where there is only a calculation of historical timing and material needs.
In the turbulent international landscape we observe today in the brief respites afforded by daily life, the nations of the Global South continue to experience, one after another, the same fundamental contradictions that Lenin analysed more than a century ago. Imperialism continues to extend its dominion through hybrid warfare, sanctions, economic blockades, soft coups, and propaganda campaigns. And it is no coincidence that the most unstable scenarios correspond precisely to the regions where Western powers have made plunder their historical method of interaction.
Politics is not a tribunal of abstract ethics, but rather the science of the correlation of forces in the international class struggle. To analyse the recent vote in New York by Beijing or Moscow in isolation from the war in Sudan, the contradictions in the Sahel, the Abraham Accords, and the logistics of a future global confrontation with NATO, is to fall into the reification of bourgeois diplomacy: it is to turn a diplomatic act into a fetish, divorced from the organic reality of imperialism.
The European left, or those who call themselves leftists, observe all this as if watching a documentary: with detachment, impotence, and a disembodied moralism that substitutes empty slogans for analysis and sentimental tweets or the usual inane processions for whatever cause is currently in vogue for solidarity. These are sectors that demand abstract “international communities,” “condemnations,” “dialogue,” and “resolutions,” as if the balance of power in the world could be altered by press statements or the noble intentions of parties with more real interest in the distribution of parliamentary perks than in any action for real transformation of their immediate realities. They do not understand, or more commonly they do not want to understand, that international politics is not a theatrical act, a farce to entertain us, but a concrete material struggle between opposing interests.
In contrast to them, to their false moralizing and their shadow theater, the peoples who resist dispossession do not live on rhetoric: they live on logistics, energy sovereignty, access to markets, trade routes, and real military defense. Mali could not expel France without the diplomatic and technical support that Moscow provided. Nigeria will not be able to maintain sovereignty over its own resources if weapons and technologies not dictated by Western interests do not circulate. Iran would not maintain its historic position of independence, nor its support for the Palestinian people, if it did not have allies who buy its resources without conditions or blackmail. Nor would there be a challenge to Zionism without an arms supply with an easily traceable origin. Cuba, bled dry by a criminal blockade, survives in part because China and Russia continue to invest in infrastructure and energy even under the threat of sanctions. And Palestine, agonizing, devastated, and boycotted, only exists as a people because there is a real power on this planet capable of containing the total destruction sought by the United States and Israel.
We are not talking about a romantic idealization of the rising powers of the East, but about recognizing the cold, hard mechanics of survival. Russia and China are acting out of an existential necessity that, fortunately for oppressed peoples and those of us who never accepted the so-called end of history, objectively converges with the existing possibilities for anti-imperialist struggle. Both nations are currently on a path of revolutionary construction and national reconstruction that compels them to be the bulwark against unipolar barbarism. And that, in material terms, is worth more than a thousand manifestos of pure but impotent solidarity.
These are not moral judgments; they are material facts. Verifiable for anyone with the courage to look at them without the distorted lens of European progressivism. While some draft manifestos or launch plaintive laments that they abandoned when they voted against Palestine in their cabinets, others are neutralizing drones, sustaining economies, providing intelligence, financing infrastructure, and breaking blockades. The weapons that allow people to defend themselves don’t fall from the sky, nor do they come from seminars in Brussels. They come from countries that, for their own strategic reasons in the pursuit of a multipolar balance, have decided to defy the Western military monopoly, thereby risking the future of their own people. Because they, indeed, know what it means to bleed, to lose resources and lives by standing up to Washington.
The fundamental error of those who demand a performative veto lies in their misunderstanding of the current stage of late capitalism and its imperialist phase. We are living through the Gramscian interregnum, the time between a world that is dying and one that is struggling to be born. In this chiaroscuro, the premature rupture of the global economic order is not a revolutionary act, but strategic suicide. A gift to the Empire.
Russia and China, as the objective vanguards of the multipolar bloc, understand that sovereignty is not won with gestures in that den of thieves that is the UN, now transformed into a theater of impotence, but with the material guarantee of survival.
Why not break the system now? Because the infrastructure of the new world—the BRICS, alternative trade routes, de-dollarized payment systems, diplomatic and military alliances—has not yet completely replaced the old reality. Breaking it up today, vetoing and paralyzing the international system at a stroke, would condemn peripheral and small economies to utter collapse. Russia and China are not seeking autarky for themselves, but rather to build an architecture where nations of the Global South can move toward sovereignty without starving due to the blockage of supply chains controlled by the West.
It is here that the dialectic becomes cruel but necessary. Just as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was not an ideological alliance with fascism, but rather an essential maneuver to buy time and relocate Soviet industry to the Urals in the face of the impending war of extermination, or like the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, when Lenin ceded vast territories and resources to Germany, accepting a humiliating peace to prevent the October Revolution from being crushed in its cradle, the current diplomatic skill of Moscow and Beijing is a clear delaying tactic. In all these cases, history has shown that ideological purity at the tactical moment leads to strategic defeat. The ironclad logic that guided those decisions is the same one at work today: they are buying time. Time to secure the Red Sea, the Strait of Malacca, and the Arctic before the imminent head-on clash with NATO.
The European pseudo-left, trapped in an illusion of unreal purity, repeats the dogma that multipolarity is insufficient, that it is not “socialist,” that it is not enough to simply restrain the United States. But they forget or are unaware that Vietnam would not have won without Soviet weapons, that Algeria would not have triumphed without training and support from the socialist bloc, that Cuba resisted because the USSR guaranteed oil, sugar, and weapons, that Angola survived because thousands of Cuban internationalists understood that the anti-imperialist struggle is a global endeavor. This is the memory that is demanded, not the abstract and sentimental memory that repeats “I am for peace” while bombs have been falling on the same people for a century.
Vulgar leftist criticism forgets that imperialism has sown the minefield. The Abraham Accords are not mere signed documents; they are the structuring of a military and intelligence architecture that unites Zionism with the reactionary monarchies of the Gulf. Let us look toward the Sahel and North Africa. The situation in Mali, the conflict in Western Sahara, and the civil war in Sudan are not isolated events; they are integral parts of a larger, contested whole. Russia is waging an asymmetric battle in the Sahel to break French and American colonial control over uranium and gold. In this context, Algeria’s position is key.
Algeria, a historical bastion of anti-colonialism, voted in favor of the resolution and even celebrated it. Should Russia, from its seat on the Security Council, veto a resolution that the Algerian representative himself is demanding, thereby delegitimizing a crucial ally in the Mediterranean and in the gas sector? That would be imposing an imperial will, replicating the exact modus operandi of the United States.
If Russia and China were to act like the American hegemon, they would force Arab countries to follow their line through coercion. But the multipolar proposal is based precisely on the unrestricted respect for sovereignty, even when that sovereignty is exercised contradictorily or erroneously by the Arab national bourgeoisies. Russia and China cannot be “more Palestinian than the Palestinians,” nor “more Arab than the Arabs.” Their role is to offer the umbrella under which, when the objective conditions are ripe, these peoples can liberate themselves.
Lenin, understanding Clausewitz, taught us that war and diplomacy are a continuum. Abstaining at the UN does not mean inaction on the ground. While diplomats raise their hands in New York, Russian and Iranian military engineers, using Chinese technology, are redesigning the firepower of the Axis of Resistance.
Who is arming Yemen to close the Red Sea to Zionist trade? Who is propping up Iran’s economy in the face of Western sanctions? Who is protecting Venezuela from a direct invasion by allowing its oil industry to recover?
Russia and China understand that the liberation of Palestine will not come from a UN resolution. The UN is an ossified structure, incapable of transforming reality. Liberation will come from the military and economic defeat of the Zionist project and its American sponsor. And to achieve that defeat, it is necessary to prevent the United States from consolidating a united global front against Eurasia prematurely.
By abstaining, Russia and China are denying Washington the perfect propaganda narrative: “The world wants peace, but the Russian and Chinese autocracies are blocking it.” They defuse the ideological trap, letting the very reality of the Israeli genocide demonstrate the futility of the US resolution, without them bearing the blame for the deadlock. It’s a geopolitical judo maneuver: they use the adversary’s evident strength within their own institutions to demonstrate the profound injustice and incapacity of those institutions in the emerging world.
And let’s ask ourselves, how many of those European leftists would be happy to blame Russia and China if war broke out because of their stance, as the US representative threatened before the vote? How many of the thousands of protesters taking to the streets in Europe truly support Hamas or the armed resistance, and how many would be willing to replace the role that Russia, China, or Iran play in the direct confrontation against the empire? How many in Europe will still be paying attention to what happens in Palestine tomorrow, having already bought into Trump’s peace plan, no matter what?
American imperialism operates through the denial of history and the imposition of its will: aircraft carriers, sanctions, coups, unilateral vetoes. It is the dictatorship of the global financial bourgeoisie.
The Sino-Russian proposal, on the other hand, seeks to restore the historical agency of the people. If the Arab countries, trapped in their own contradictions and dependencies, decide to support a flawed resolution, Russia and China respect that formal decision, while working behind the scenes to change the material conditions that force those countries into submission. Even confronting these countries with direct contradictions and military threats, if necessary, Saudi Arabia knows this well.
Imposing a veto against the explicit will of the region would have been an act of colonial paternalism, an assertion that Moscow knows what is best for the Arabs better than the Arabs themselves. Breaking the unity of the “Global South” or the BRICS over a symbolic vote would strengthen the main enemy: imperialism.
Smaller economies, those just beginning to trade in yuan or seeking security in Wagner Groups or agreements with Beijing, are watching. If they perceive Russia and China as using their power to overrule their diplomatic decisions, however misguided, they will simply see a new master. But seeing Russia and China allow the regional process to run its course, while offering material alternatives, consolidates the necessary confidence for the counter-hegemonic bloc.
The anguish over the genocide in Gaza is real and legitimate. But the political response to that anguish cannot be wishful thinking; we cannot jump over our own historical shadow.
We are in a phase of palpable force accumulation; total war is approaching. The need to guarantee supplies, to secure grain, energy, and semiconductors for the imminent moment when the Taiwan Strait or the Baltic Sea burns, is the absolute priority for any people who think in terms of survival and ultimate victory.
Russia and China have not sold out Palestine. On the contrary, they are meticulously constructing the only global scenario—a multipolar, dedollarized, and logistically independent world—in which the liberation of Palestine is materially possible. And no, that will not be achieved with an empty slogan in a New York hall.
History does not advance in a straight line, but through painful contradictions. Today’s abstention is the tactical silence that precedes the roar of the new world being born. To criticize it from a position of moral purity is to forget that in the war against imperialism, victory requires, above all, that the anti-imperialist vanguard not self-destruct before the decisive battle. In the end, what best portrays that European left that today cries out against a mobilized, active, and combative South is its own misguided approach: a superficial, voluntarist, and puerile leftism that confuses politics with moral venting, that substitutes study with the clever tweet, and strategy with sentimental affectation. They talk, they talk, they talk… They always talk, but their words are hollow, their gestures cynical, their denunciations innocuous, and their solidarity merely an ornament for their own conscience. They pretend to interpret the world without getting their hands dirty in its realities, they opine on wars they don’t understand and in which they don’t participate, they parrot headlines like complacent parrots, and they write analyses that can’t withstand even the first contradiction. They are pundits of the immediate, cartographers of the surface, lightweight spirits who let their pens fly before they grasp the blow that will bring them down when history, always implacable, reminds us once again that politics isn’t made by moralists, but by the balance of power. And that balance, today, is not theirs to move. May those who resist protect us from depending on all those who, from the North, continue to demand purity from a South hardened by a thousand battles. A South that learns, remembers, and moves forwa