by Stephen Soukup
Pedro Sanchez’s anti-American crusade exposes a deeper truth: the global Left’s ideology remains rooted in recycled Marxism, repackaged through expediency and contradiction.
This past weekend, the self-proclaimed leaders of the global Left gathered in Barcelona to complain about Donald Trump and to declare that they are the real and legitimate representatives of the global masses, as they pushed back against the American president, his policies, and his purported destruction of the post-World War II institutions they profess to respect and cherish. The Global Progressive Mobilization conference, which drew some 6,000 elected representatives and activists from around the world, was organized and hosted by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has positioned himself as Trump’s chief international critic over the last several weeks. Sanchez said that he intends to turn Barcelona into a “hub of resistance” to Trump and the global Right and told the gathering that he will “twist the arm of the people who think they are completely untouchable.”
It is not entirely clear what Sanchez can actually do to twist anyone’s arm, literally or figuratively. As the prime minister of Spain, he oversees a lower-mid-tier EU economy and commands a lower-mid-tier global military. He talks a good game and proclaims to represent the morally superior political position, but his actions belie ulterior motives. He demands an end to American and Israeli tyranny and neocolonialism, even as he openly and unashamedly embraces ideas and partners that demonstrate, at best, an indifference to genuine tyrannical and colonial behavior.
Sanchez, it should be noted, is not merely Spain’s prime minister. He is also the president of something called the Socialist International. This organization has an interesting history, to say the least, and its members embrace an interesting set of beliefs about the world and how it works.
The Socialist International, which was founded in the aftermath of World War II, is the direct and explicit successor to the Second Socialist International, which was founded in 1889, collapsed at the start of World War I, and was officially dissolved in 1923. The Second Socialist International, in turn, was the direct and explicit successor to the First Socialist International, founded in 1864 and dissolved in 1876. The stories of the First and Second Internationals are fascinating in and of themselves and deserve a far longer and far more detailed retelling than can be provided here. That said, parts of those stories are relevant and provide needed context to Pedro Sanchez’s war against Trumpism.
The First Socialist International was, as its name suggests, the organization that first brought together (over time and in numerous venues) the various leftist sects of Europe and the United States. It was intended, more or less, to formulate a course of action to encourage the long-awaited socialist revolution. It goes without saying, I suppose, but the intellectual, ideological, and occasional organizational leader of the First International was Karl Marx himself. Marx dominated all conversations at the International, just as he dominated socialism’s direction more broadly. He made the decisions about where to headquarter the organization (in a vain attempt to stymie his rivals’ participation), and he penned its most significant and enduring pamphlet, The Civil War in France. Marx was not entirely unchallenged as the leader of the International, however. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, to name just two, fought Marx for control of the movement, and the International eventually fell apart under the stress created by the conflict between Marx’s Communists and Bakunin’s collectivist anarchists.
The Second Socialist International, formed 13 years later (and launched on the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille), was still focused on Marx and his basic economic prescriptions but was nevertheless dominated by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The SPD was built on the legacy and ideas of Ferdinand Lassalle, a pragmatic socialist who worked stealthily with German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to create and advance what we know today as “the welfare state.” The most important theorist in the SPD—and, therefore, in the Second International—was Eduard Bernstein, a politician and the primary advocate of “reformist” Marxism. In brief, Bernstein argued that the economic conditions Marx predicted would cause the proletariat to revolt were never going to happen and that socialists were required, therefore, to work through the existing institutions of the state (as Lassalle had done) to achieve their goals.
Long story short, Bernstein split the Marxist movement in two. He led the reformists, who advocated state socialism, while the traditionalists were led at first by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg and later by Lenin.
And here’s where things get really fun.
The Second International collapsed under the weight of this split and the devastation of World War I (which the revisionists supported). Lenin formed the Communist International (called the Comintern), while the revisionists fractured further. The current iteration of the Socialist International was launched in 1946 with the explicit goals of addressing socialism’s failure to prevent fascism and (in time) carrying out the Bernstein-ian Marxist program. It was—and is—dedicated to advancing Marxist ideals through the mechanisms of the state. In this sense, the International also serves as an explicit rejection of traditionalist Marxism and Leninism—with its advocacy of Bolshevik vanguardism—in particular.
Despite its overt rejection of Lenin’s theory of revolution, the Socialist International and the global Left more generally wholeheartedly embrace his theories of foreign affairs and colonial exploitation. In 1916, Lenin wrote his own pamphlet, explaining why the anti-capitalist revolution had not yet occurred. He titled it Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and the historian Neil Harding described its main argument as follows:
The capitalist economic and political civilization that had produced this access of carnage, had, in Lenin’s eyes, finally and irrevocably forfeited its right to exist. . . . Capitalism, Lenin concluded, had become monopolistic and parasitic. It could survive only through the ruthless exploitation of its colonial empires. . . . In an epoch of imperialism, capitalism became militarist and expansionist, externally exploitative and internally oppressive. Above all, militarism and war were intrinsic to its survival—they were its most essential systemic features.
While it would be simplistic to describe the modern global Left’s views about America, Israel, and “Western Civilization” as purely Leninist, it is clear that his theories form the foundation of those views. The Socialist International and its current president are aggressively anti-American, aggressively anti-Israel, and aggressively dismissive of the broader legacy of the West—all along Leninist lines. Sanchez’s Spain was among the first European nations formally to recognize Palestinian statehood, and his rhetoric about Gaza and American support for Israel is notably Leninist and “structural.” He frames the issues not as policy mistakes but as manifestations of deeper capitalist/imperial patterns.
Ironically—albeit unsurprisingly—Sanchez and his comrades on the Left have also demonstrated that their embrace of Leninist/anticolonialist structuralism is less a matter of principle than of political expediency. Last week, for example, Sanchez announced that his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping had forged tighter bonds between the two nations, had reinforced a “relationship based on trust, dialogue, and stability,” and formed the foundation for “a multipolar order built from respect and pragmatism.”
In reality, of course, China’s economic foreign policy (the Belt and Road Initiative, to start) maps perfectly onto Lenin’s model of imperialist exploitation. In turn, the Left’s embrace of China as a counterweight to American global hegemony requires profound intellectual dishonesty and opportunism. It necessitates the abdication of virtually every value that the Socialist International tradition claims to hold.
The Left’s obsession with China—and Sanchez is hardly alone here—is so intellectually and morally compromised that it suggests the anti-American structural critique has largely become an end in and of itself. Opposition to American hegemony has displaced rather than served the values the Socialist International purports to advance.
Because of his anti-Trumpism, Pedro Sanchez is the global Left’s and the media’s hero du jour. Any honest reading of his intellectual and organizational history, however, not to mention his unabashed opportunism, would suggest “hero” is the last word one should use to describe him. He is, however, a fair representative of the ideology he advocates, which is to say that said ideology remains fundamentally flawed, despite 150 years of “reform.”
Photo: BARCELONA, SPAIN - APRIL 18: Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez speaks during the Global Progressive Mobilisation at Fira Barcelona on April 18, 2026 in Barcelona, Spain. The inaugural Global Progressive Mobilisation (GPM) is taking place in Barcelona as a platform to offer a "necessary alternative to conservative and far-right forces." A plenary session on Saturday features speeches from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. (Photo by Aldara Zarraoa/Getty Images)
Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/20/sanchez-lenin-and-global-opposition-to-trump/
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