Sovereignty, Socialist Transition, and Deterrence: The Material Conditions of Survival for the Global South

Venezuelans rally in defense of their sovereignty, December 2025 -- image via Nicolas Maduro

By Bisharat Abbasi

The Venezuelan struggle against U.S. imperialism once again tears away the ideological veil with which liberalism disguises the real functioning of the world order. It compels us to confront a truth that Marxism has never evaded but which the liberal-left endlessly suppresses: national sovereignty is not a legal abstraction, a constitutional formula, or a moral right guaranteed by international institutions; it is a historically contingent relation of power rooted in class rule, state capacity, and material force. For countries of the Global South—born not through organic capitalist development but through colonial plunder, enforced underdevelopment, and imperial restructuring—sovereignty has never been given; it has only ever been contested, provisionally tolerated, or violently revoked.

Venezuela’s experience is instructive precisely because it exposes the structural impossibility of defending sovereignty within a bourgeois or semi-bourgeois state form under conditions of imperialism. Elections, legality, constitutionalism, and international law—fetishised by liberal ideology—have not protected Venezuela from sanctions warfare, financial strangulation, coup attempts, oil theft, diplomatic isolation, and permanent regime-change operations. This is not an accident, nor a deviation from some imagined “rules-based order.” It is the rule itself. Imperialism does not recognise sovereignty as a principle; it recognises only enforceable power relations. Where such power is absent or insufficient, sovereignty dissolves into dependency, and independence becomes an administrative fiction.

At the heart of this problem lies the unresolved question of class power during the transition from capitalism to socialism. Marxism-Leninism has always insisted that the abolition of capitalist domination is not an instantaneous act but a historical process—a transitional phase marked by intense class struggle, internal sabotage, and external aggression. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an authoritarian deviation from democracy, as bourgeois ideology claims, but the only real form of democracy possible for the vast majority under conditions where the bourgeoisie—domestic and international—retains overwhelming structural power. In the Global South, this transitional dictatorship is not merely a theoretical necessity; it is a condition of survival.

Without a proletarian state that consciously dismantles comprador class structures, breaks the political power of oligarchies, subordinates finance to social planning, and reorganises the coercive apparatus of the state along revolutionary lines, sovereignty cannot be defended. A state that allows imperial capital to dominate its economy, media, military leadership, and bureaucratic strata will inevitably become an instrument of its own recolonisation. The Venezuelan crisis repeatedly demonstrates this contradiction: a revolutionary process without a fully consolidated proletarian dictatorship remains permanently vulnerable, forced into defensive manoeuvres, concessions, and unstable compromises that imperialism exploits relentlessly.

Yet even a proletarian dictatorship, in the contemporary world system, confronts a second and equally decisive question: the question of deterrence. The 21st century is not merely an age of financialisation and information warfare; it is also an age in which military asymmetry has become the ultimate arbiter of sovereignty. The historical record since the end of the Cold War is brutally consistent. States that abandoned strategic deterrence—Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia—were destroyed, dismembered, or reduced to permanent zones of instability. States that retained credible deterrence—DPRK being the clearest example—were demonised, sanctioned, isolated, but ultimately not invaded. This is not because imperialism became more restrained or ethical, but because the costs of intervention exceeded the acceptable threshold.

In this context, nuclear deterrence is not a fetish, a provocation, or a deviation from socialist principles; it is a material fact of imperialist power relations. To reject deterrence in the name of moral purity is to confuse ethics with strategy and to substitute wishful thinking for historical analysis. Imperialism does not attack because a state is unjust or undemocratic; it attacks because it can. Where it cannot, it negotiates. Where it hesitates, sovereignty survives—however constrained. Thus, in the nuclear age, sovereignty without deterrence is not idealism; it is illusion.

For the Global South, this produces a harsh but unavoidable conclusion. National liberation in our epoch cannot be secured through electoral cycles, legal appeals, or diplomatic balancing alone. It requires a revolutionary state form capable of withstanding prolonged siege, internal subversion, and external coercion. This state must be grounded in the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition—firm enough to suppress counter-revolutionary forces, flexible enough to develop productive forces, and strategic enough to navigate international contradictions. Simultaneously, it must operate within a global military reality where deterrence—whether directly or through strategic alliances—functions as the final guarantee against annihilation.

Venezuela’s struggle should therefore not be reduced to a humanitarian narrative or a moral drama between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.” It is a structural confrontation between imperialism and an unfinished revolutionary project operating within an unforgiving world system. The lesson it offers the Global South is not comforting, but it is clarifying: sovereignty is not preserved by good intentions or international sympathy; it is defended by organised class power and material deterrence. Anything less is not resistance—it is postponement.

In the final analysis, the question of sovereignty returns us to the foundational Marxist insight: the state is not neutral, and power is never abstract. Either the proletariat organises its dictatorship during the transition and arms itself—ideologically, politically, economically, and strategically—or imperialism will organise its own dictatorship over the periphery. There is no third option, no liberal escape route, and no ethical shortcut. Sovereignty, like socialism itself, must be built under conditions of struggle—or it will not exist at all.

Bisharat Abbasi — M.Phil Philosophy Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Sindh (Pakistan). Research interests: Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, Third World Marxism, and Postcolonial Studies from a Global South, anti-imperialist perspective.