I recently read this article criticizing Losurdo’s ‘Western Marxism,’ curious what others think about it. I’ve yet to read Western Marxism, but I definitely don’t agree with some of the conclusions in the article. Article text follows:
Domenico Losurdo is going through some thing of a renaissance in Marxist circles of late, with several of his works having been translated and published since his death. Western Marxism certainly promises to ruffle some feathers in left-wing academic circles, where anti-communism disguised as sophisticated Marxism no longer needs to be demonstrated.
Indeed, what passes for Marxism in much of the “Western” mainstream runs the gamut from ashamed to openly hostile to dismissive of the working class and socialist revolution.
However, instead of serving up a clear catalogue of the revisionism and opportunism that has plagued so much of the Marxist intellectual production in the West, Losurdo’s work actually muddies the waters further and doesn’t provide us with a coherent assessment of the problem.
Losurdo himself is an interesting figure. He left the Italian Communist Party after siding with the Chinese side during the Sino-Soviet split, and spent the years since in frenzied intellectual activity, writing more than twenty books on various subjects from Nietzche to Hegel, Stalin to liberalism. Western Marxism was originally published in Italian in 2017, a year before he died, and is the last of his works published while he was alive.
The book is structured chronologically, starting from WW1. In each period Losurdo analyses the shortcomings of certain leading lights of Marxism – from Ernst Bloch to the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Hardt and Negri all the way to Zizek today.
It is useful to have laid out, in a relatively straightforward way, the reactionary character of these authors, despite their prestige and power of attraction to campus radicals for generations. It’s grotesque, for example, how Horkeimer supported the US invasion and war against the Vietnamese people; or the ways that Foucault theorized “power” in the most abstract way to try and justify comparisons between the USSR and Nazi Germany while ignoring the whole history of colonialism and violent racism in the US.
That said, despite the long list of theoretical and historical aberrations and nonsense of these authors, the book doesn’t offer a very convincing diagnosis of the problem. If we were to sum up the main idea of the book, it would be “Marxism is actually anti-colonialism; without anti-colonialism, Marxism loses its revolutionary character.” While this is true in a sense, Losurdo gets his wires seriously crossed and can’t seem to disentangle geography from ideology, ending up creating a binary based on geographical determinism where “Western” almost implies revisionism and vice versa.
Some might say that he isn’t that crude, but I would argue that the sloppiness of his argumentation doesn’t do him any favours, and that this horrible conflation of categories actually becomes the message through his constant repetition.
Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the communist movement historically.
The plot hole which in my estimation fatally condemns his analysis, is that he virtually never compares the works of actual Marxists in the West with these frauds from the academy. How productive and illuminating it would be for research to show the ways that Western Communist Party theoreticians have criticized opportunism and chauvinism! Instead, and perhaps unintentionally, Losurdo hides the ways that opportunism has also played a role in the “Third World,” including within communist movements there. This is perhaps illustrated most famously in the case of the Sino-Soviet split, an issue which Losurdo was incidentally on the wrong side of.
Besides almost passing references to Italian giants like Gramsci and Togliatti, one is left with the impression that Western Marxists are either academic ethno-chauvinist hucksters, Eurocommunist revisionists, or unimportant. This does a disservice to history and to struggle.
This major omission is ultimately a reflection of how poorly argued and partial this book has turned out to be, despite some of its strong elements. The author misses the forest for the tree – to be fair, these are some really awful trees, but serious Marxists should know the difference.
In the end, Losurdo elevates two lesser contradictions over the fundamental ones: above capital vs. labour, he places the Third World vs. the West; and above socialism vs. imperialism, he places anti-colonialism vs. colonialism. These mistakes can be quite dangerous in a time such as ours when ideological confusion reigns supreme, especially in the West.
This fact underlines the importance of criticizing this book and maintaining a firm ideological base in Marxism-Leninism.
I can assure you the one writing the “critique” is a western leftist.
Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the communist movement historically.
Nazi Germany intentions with eastern europe were indeed to settle the region, or to “germanize” it, this is clearly stated by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf, what does the author mean by “analysis of the communist movement historically”? He complains Losurdo is not explicit enough but he does the same here.
In Class Struggle, Losurdo explains how capitalist nations have historically pursued settlerism as a way to quench the dissent of their working class, effectively seducing them by promising them land abroad, this is social imperialism.
Yeah. To anyone who has studied the Nazi rhetoric and policies with regards to their war against the Soviet Union it’s clear and undeniable that that war had a settler colonial character. Hence why the war was waged as a war of extermination in the East and not so in the West. It’s very strange to try to deny this…
I’m not sure exactly what the author of this piece is trying to achieve. There is no contradiction between the statement that the war was colonial in nature and the idea that it was also waged to save capitalism. Colonialism has historically been a way for capitalism to externalize its contradictions.
This is perhaps illustrated most famously in the case of the Sino-Soviet split, an issue which Losurdo was incidentally on the wrong side of.
Fucking western leftists love to bet on a dead horse don’t they?
for a western leftist, the right side is the losing side, always.
We aren’t all like that but most are especially the ones with the biggest
mouthsplatforms.
Yeah that’s a very strange take. Sure you can criticize a lot of the foreign policy decisions that China made during the Sino-Soviet split. That is absolutely legitimate, they did make many mistakes. But to outright say that it was the “wrong side” is very odd.
At most you could say that taking any side at all in that split was counter-productive, since the split never should have happened in the first place and greatly negatively affected both countries and the entire world communist movement as a whole.
But actually siding with the USSR is particularly confusing to me, as much as i admire the USSR and its historical achievements, because retrospectively we can now see which country’s ideological, economic and political strategy succeeded and which failed.
Communism in China survived. Whereas we can clearly see that the USSR’s revisionism and historical nihilism, especially in regards to their treatment of Stalin and the Stalin era, did them no favors and actually ended up undermining the ideological base of socialism itself.
The fact that China did not do the same to Mao is one of the reasons why it did not fall as the USSR did. I’m not saying it’s the only reason, there were many geopolitical factors as well, but the internal political line of the ruling party certainly also played a big role.
The critic is running on ideology not Historical Materialism. They paint Losurdo as being anti-west for the sake of being anti-west instead of understanding that he is anti-west because of the west’s actions, namely colonialisms, imperialism, and anti-communism. The critic does not address that imperialism is the primary antagonism for socialist movements in the world but says that Losurdo is overly focused on it.
The critic is missing the tree for the forest, bemoaning the log jam and trying to silence the man pointing at the key log.
I can’t speak on the work because I haven’t read it, but there’s a couple parts of this analysis that I do disagree with outside of that.
1.“This is perhaps illustrated most famously in the case of the Sino-Soviet split, an issue which Losurdo was incidentally on the wrong side of.” Excuse me? Were there mistakes in Chinese foreign policy in relation to this? Yes. That’s undeniable. But what happened to all the soviet aligned states? Even the most ardent of these, east Germany, fell with the USSR. Would a soviet aligned Afghanistan fared better? Neutral states like the DPRK and Vietnam had strife after the fall too. This isn’t even mentioning the Lin Biao incident. Ideologically Mao was 80% correct towards the Krushchevite soviet union
- “Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war.”
It…was? Fascism’s primary purpose certainly wasn’t colonialism necessarily, but it certainly engenders it. And the great patriotic war was certainly in defense against settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. This is completely undeniable and really odd to take issue with unless your issue is just phrased poorly.
First off, I haven’t read Western Marxism so I can’t give an informed opinion so have my hot take instead.
If we were to sum up the main idea of the book, it would be “Marxism is actually anti-colonialism; without anti-colonialism, Marxism loses its revolutionary character.” … his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the communist movement historically.
I actually completely agree with Losurdo on this.
Any revolutionary Marxist movement must be decolonial. Not just from an ideological or ethical perspective in regards to the colonized, which also demands it, but it’s necessary to decolonize even to dismantle the capitalist structure in the colonizing nations. There’s no way you can have a revolutionary party in a colonizing country that maintains its colonies. This is literally what made Ho Chi Minh turn away from other socialist schools in France and turn toward Marxist-Leninism. There are a few things that could be said that Marxism “is” and "without [which] it loses its revolutionary character” and anti-colonialism is one of them, so this is correct. Weird Westoid chauvanist argument.
And, yes, the Nazi war of extermination against USSR was a colonial war?? They literally openly admitted that they wanted to genocide and colonize those lands. Of course anti-communism was a component but that doesn’t preclude the aspect of colonization. Nazis weren’t invading USSR to simply only kill the Communists, they were going to kill everyone who wasn’t German to then colonize the lands with Germans. That is something that goes a little further than just being anti-Communist. Unfortunately as much as we like to worship USSR and Soviets, it’s not like every single person in the entire USSR supported Communism. They could have the stated goal of killing Communist leadership and their supporters and then I’d buy it was purely anti-Communism, but I don’t think it was. Further, I don’t think fascism only came into existence to defeat socialism. Fascism, in the spirit of Césaire and Fanon, existed for centuries in the colonies. The Global South experienced fascism for hundreds of years before it turned inward in Europe. Fascism developing as it did within the countries with a stunted colonial expansion makes sense, as they were trying to aggressively expand their colonial stakes—including with European lands. It seems incredibly based to me to say that 20th century fascism developed “as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat.” This doesn’t ignore the history of Europeans as fascistic colonizers pre-1930, which is how people get into that lib trap of curiously wondering “How was Hitler able to brainwash Germans into genocide?” European fucks were genociding and colonizing for so long it’s part of their culture, of course they went along with Nazism. Fascism also has a major function of “defending capital” against socialism, decolonization, or any other threat, by its very “rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat.” These are not necessarily disconnected phenomena. In fact, as the colonized world was being encouraged to decolonize via a Communist ML revolution this actually makes perfect sense. Fascism was protecting capital by defending, expanding, and maintaining colonization.
What kind of depraved Westoid kkkrakkker wrote this article?
Besides almost passing references to Italian giants like Gramsci and Togliatti, one is left with the impression that Western Marxists are either academic ethno-chauvinist hucksters, Eurocommunist revisionists, or unimportant. This does a disservice to history and to struggle.
I suspect this part is pointing at the real motivation behind this criticism: the author is a Communist Party of Canada member, i.e., unimportant (like it or not, let’s be real here), and so doesn’t like the heat that Losurdo has for Western Marxists for obvious reasons (he is one). He wants Losurdo to
show the ways that Western Communist Party theoreticians have criticized opportunism and chauvinism!
and, generally, show deference to the Western Communist Party theoreticians (like him), making the point only about the “frauds from the academy”. It’s not just about the frauds from the academy though. Our parties and party-like formations are also failures. This is demonstrably true, and if we can’t wrestle with that fact, and seriously investigate its causes, we’re never going to get anywhere.
As it happens, being a Canadian also makes the issue he takes with the colonialism lens pretty suspect. It feels a bit class reductionist to demand that Nazi expansionism be explained in terms of class conflict and only class conflict. Frankly, I think it’s valid to be suspicious of such ideas, particularly when they’re coming from a white man in a settler colony. This criticism reeks of defensiveness in general, and though it may be correct about some weaknesses in Losurdo’s work, I think it’s fundamentally reactionary.
Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the communist movement historically.
I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference in these two views, and I think you could argue each position convincingly without dramatically changing what you take away from the discussion.
Fascism is often defined as turning the super-exploitative mechanisms of imperialism inwards on the metropole. Nazi Germany famously incorporated practices of both British imperialism (concentration camps) and American imperialism (the concept of manifest destiny/lebenstraum, the exterminationist treatment of natives). Imperialism, being the “highest stage of capitalism,” can be reasonably compared to fascism, sometimes described as capitalism in (late-stage) decay. The Nazi party may have gained a lot of power early by latching on to anticommunism, but antisemitism was also one of their early policies, and they of course did not limit their violence to only communists. Similarly, the resistance to fascism (while driven primarily by communists) incorporated many other political groups in various popular fronts.
Marxism is actually anti-colonialism; without anti-colonialism, Marxism loses its revolutionary character
Substitute imperialism for colonialism, and I would actually agree with this statement. Imperialism is the primary contradiction in the world today. The article gets into this a little towards the end – " above socialism vs. imperialism, he places anti-colonialism vs. colonialism" – but the thought is not developed. What needs to be stated is that, while colonialism is a phenomena that has existed since the dawn of nations and governments, imperialism is a specific economic system, the main expression of capitalism in its monopoly stage. Not understanding this basic principle of Leninism leads to a lot of confusion.
