Gabriel Rockhill: I would like to begin this discussion by addressing, first and foremost, a misconception regarding Western Marxism, which I know is of mutual concern. Western Marxism is not equivalent to Marxism in the West. Instead, it is a particular version of Marxism that, for very material reasons, developed in the imperial core, where there is significant ideological pressure to conform to its dictates. As a dominant ideology regarding Marxism, it conditions the lives of those working in the imperial core and, by extension, capitalist states around the world, but it does not rigorously determine Marxist scholarship and organizing in these regions. The simplest proof thereof is the fact that we do not identify as Western Marxists even though we are Marxists working in the West, very much like the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo, whose Western Marxism was recently published by Monthly Review Press. What are your thoughts on the relationship between “Western Marxism” and “Marxism in the West”?
John Bellamy Foster: I am not fond of the term “Western Marxism,” partly because it was adopted as a form of self-identification by thinkers rejecting not only Soviet Marxism, but also much of the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as well as the Marxism of the Global South. At the same time, very large parts of Marxism in the West, including the more materialist, political-economic, and historical analyses, have tended to be excluded from this kind of self-identified Western Marxism, which nonetheless posed as the arbiter of Marxist thought and has dominated Marxology. Usually, in addressing the question of Western Marxism theoretically, I indicate that what we are dealing with is a specific philosophical tradition. This began with Maurice Merleau-Ponty (not Georg Lukács, as commonly supposed), and was characterized by the abandonment of the concept of the dialectics of nature associated with Engels (but also with Marx). This meant that the notion of Western Marxism was systematically removed from an ontological materialism in Marxist terms, and gravitated toward idealism, which fit well with the retreat from the dialectics of nature.
Moreover, while not part of the self-definition of Western Marxism, but rightly stressed by Losurdo, was a retreat from the critique of imperialism and the whole problem of revolutionary struggle in the third world or the Global South. In this respect, self-identified Western Marxists tended toward a Eurocentric perspective, often denying the significance of imperialism, and thus we can speak of a Western Eurocentric Marxism.
So in dealing with these issues, I tend to stress these two aspects, that is (1) a Western Marxist philosophical tradition that rejected the dialectics of nature and ontological materialism, thereby separating itself off from both the classical Marxism of Marx and of Engels; and (2) a Western Eurocentric Marxism, that rejected the notion of the imperialist stage of capitalism (and monopoly capitalism) and downplayed the significance of revolutionary third world struggles and the new revolutionary ideas they generated. Marxism, in this narrow Western Marxist incarnation, thus became a mere academic field concerned with the circle of reification, or structures without a subject: the very negation of a philosophy of praxis.
GR: Indeed, these are significant features of so-called Western Marxism, which I agree is an expression that can easily lend itself to misunderstandings. This is why, in my opinion, a dialectical approach is so important: it allows us to be attentive to the discrepancies between simplifying concepts and the complexities of material reality, while striving to account for the latter by nuancing and refining our conceptual categories and analysis as much as possible. In addition to the two features you highlighted, I would also add, at least for the theoretically oriented core of Western Marxism—such as in the work of the leading luminaries of the Frankfurt School and much of postwar French and British theoretical Marxism—the tendency to withdraw from political economy in favor of cultural analysis, as well as the critical dismissal of many, if not all, real-world socialist state-building projects (which, of course, overlaps with your second point).
In trying to identify as precisely as possible Western Marxism’s contours and the driving forces behind it, I think it is important to situate its unique form of intellectual production within the overall relations of theoretical production, which themselves are nested within the social relations of production more generally. In other words, a Marxist analysis of Western Marxism requires, at some level, an engagement with the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. This is what allows us to identify the socioeconomic forces at work behind this particular ideological orientation, while nonetheless recognizing, of course, the semi-autonomy of ideology.
Drawing on the work of Marx and Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin incisively diagnosed how the material existence of a “labor aristocracy” in the imperial core, meaning a privileged sector of the global working class, was the driving force behind the Western left’s tendency to align more on the interests of its bourgeoisie than on the side of the proletariat in the colonial and semicolonial periphery. It strikes me that if we want to go to the root of matters, then we need to apply this same basic framework to an understanding of Western Marxism’s fundamental revisions of Marxism and its tendency to ignore, downplay, or even denigrate and reject the revolutionary Marxism of the Global South, which has not simply interpreted the world, but has fundamentally altered it by breaking the chains of imperialism. Are Western Marxists not, in general, members of what we might call the intellectual labor aristocracy in the sense that they benefit from some of the best material conditions of theoretical production in the world, which is easy to see when compared, for instance, to the Marxism developed by Mao Zedong in the Chinese countryside, Ho Chi Minh in besieged Vietnam, Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the Sierra Maestra, or other such examples? Do they not benefit, like the labor aristocracy more generally, from the crumbs that fall from the table of the ruling class’s imperialist feast, and does this material reality not condition—without rigorously determining—their outlook?
JBF: The point on the withdrawal from political economy that characterized much of Western Marxism is important. I started graduate studies at York University in Toronto in the mid-1970s. I previously had a background in economics, including both received neoclassical economics and Marxist political economy. These were the years in which the Union for Radical Political Economics in the United States had been leading a revolt in economics. But I was also interested in critical theory and Hegelian studies. In the philosophical domain I had studied, in addition to Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, most of Herbert Marcuse’s work, István Mészáros’s Marx’s Theory of Alienation, and many other texts in critical philosophy. So, I entered graduate school with the anticipation of pursuing studies in both Marxian political economy and critical theory. I had visited York in 1975, but when I arrived there a year later to commence my graduate studies, I was surprised to discover that the Social Political Thought program at York (and, to some extent, the left in the Political Science department there) had gone through a fractious split dividing off those who were called the “political economists” from the “critical theorists.” This was at time in which some of the main Frankfurt School writings of thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were first being made available in English translations. For example, Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx was translated into English in 1971, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment in 1972, and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in 1973. This not only meant a kind of enhancement of discussions within Marxism but also constituted in many ways a break with classical Marxism, which was often criticized in such works. Thus, the first thing I heard when I entered a critical theory class was that the dialectics of nature was inadmissible. Marx’s early “anthropological” discussions on the interactions of humanity and nature were summarily dismissed. The only Hegel course being taught was on Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel, which was the rage both for the French left, and, paradoxically, for some conservative thinkers. I came to focus in these years more on Marxist political economy. Mészáros, who was a big draw for me in deciding to go to York, left the same year as I arrived, in his disgust with both sides of the split.
In that first year at York, I was working with a liberal professor who was an authority on China. He indicated that he was confused about the development of Marxism, and he put in my hand Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism and asked me to read it and explain to him what it was all about. I sat down and read Anderson’s book and was quite shocked at the time, since he used various techniques to emphasize a shift in Marxist theory toward philosophy and culture and away from political economy and history—which was not actually the case, but fit with the thinkers he chose to lionize. Thus, “Western Marxism,” in Anderson’s terms, mainly excluded political economists and historians. Along with that, it was seen as separated from “Classical Marxism,” including the main emphases of Marx and Engels themselves. Naturally, Anderson could not altogether deny the existence of Marxist political economists and historians in his discussion of “Western Marxism,” but their exclusion was quite evident.
Setting aside the specific ways in which political and economic thinkers were dismissed, one can just look at the index to see the nature of Anderson’s demarcations. Philosophers and cultural theorists are prominent in his characterization of the Western Marxists. Thus, Louis Althusser is mentioned on thirty-four pages, Lukács on thirty-one, Jean-Paul Sartre on twenty-eight, Marcuse on twenty-five, Adorno on twenty-four, Galvano Della Volpe on nineteen, Lucio Colletti on eighteen, Horkheimer on twelve, Henri Lefebvre on twelve, Walter Benjamin on eleven, Lucien Goldmann on eight, Merleau-Ponty on three, Bertolt Brecht on two, and Fredric Jameson on one. However, when we turn to Marxist political economists and historians (including cultural historians) of roughly the same period, we get quite a different picture: Isaac Deutscher is mentioned on four pages, Paul M. Sweezy on four, Ernest Mandel on two, Paul A. Baran on one, Michał Kalecki on one, Nicos Poulantzas on one, Piero Sraffa on one, and Raymond Williams on one.
Marxist scientists are not mentioned at all, as if they were all nonexistent. While some Marxists, who were central to the discussions in the West, were considered by Anderson to be more Eastern than Western since choosing to live on the other side of the so-called iron curtain, namely Brecht, who is referred to on two pages, and Ernst Bloch, whose name appears on none.
To me, then, Anderson’s characterization of “Western Marxism” was peculiar from the start. Although Anderson, like any thinker, is entitled to emphasize those closest to his analysis, his approach to the classification of “Western Marxists,” emphasizing primarily those in the realms of philosophy and culture, broke decisively with classical Marxism, political economy, class struggle, and the critique of imperialism. “Western Marxism,” in Anderson’s characterization, was then a kind of negation of core aspects of classical Marxism together with Soviet Marxism. Anderson should not be entirely faulted for this. He was dealing with something real. But the reality here was the enormous distance from classical Marxism, even if major theoretical advances were made in some areas.
There is no doubt, then, that Western Marxism, according to Anderson’s definition, or even in accordance with the more theoretical demarcation determined by the abandonment of the dialectics of nature, was stripped of much of the original Marxist critique, even if it explored more fully some issues such as the dialectics of reification. By excluding Marxist political economists, historians, and scientists, and thus materialism, Western Marxism in these terms also became removed from class and imperialism, and thus the very idea of struggle. The result was to create an exclusive club, or what Lukács critically referred to as a set of thinkers who sat in the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” increasingly removed from even the thought of revolutionary practice. I do not think it makes much sense to attach this directly to the labor aristocracy (though that analysis is itself important). Rather, these thinkers emerged as some of the most elite members of the bourgeois academy, hardly conceived as Marxists at all, much less workers, often occupying chairs and covered with honors. They certainly were better off on the whole than those who remained steadfastly within the classical Marxist tradition.
GR: In his two books on the subject, Anderson provides a Western Marxist account of Western Marxism. This is, in my opinion, precisely what constitutes the strengths and the ineluctable weaknesses of his approach. On the one hand, he offers an insightful diagnosis of select aspects of its fundamental ideological orientation, including its withdrawal from practical politics in favor of theory and its embrace of political defeatism. On the other hand, he never goes to the heart of the matter by situating Western Marxism, as he understands it, within the global social relations of production (including theoretical production) and international class struggle. He ultimately provides us with an account that is not rigorously materialist because it does not seriously engage in the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption, nor does it place imperialism at the center of its analysis.
From a Marxist vantage point, above and beyond its Western travesty, it is not ideas that drive history but material forces. Intellectual history, including the history of Marxism as a theoretical enterprise, therefore needs to be clearly situated in relationship to these forces, while of course recognizing that ideology functions semi-autonomously from the socioeconomic base. Marxist intellectuals in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often worked outside of the academy, sometimes as political organizers or journalists, and they tended to be much more organically linked to practical class struggle in various ways. When the split occurred in the socialist movement during the First World War, some of these intellectuals turned their backs on the international proletariat and aligned themselves, wittingly or not, with the interests of their national bourgeoisies. Others, however, agreed with Lenin that the only war worth supporting was an international class war, clearly manifest in the Russian Revolution, not the interimperialist rivalry of the capitalist ruling class. This is why Losurdo uses this split to frame his book on Western Marxism, and it is one of the reasons that it is vastly superior to Anderson’s account: Western Marxism is the tradition that emerged out of the social chauvinism of the European Marxist tradition, which turned up its nose at the extra-European anticolonial revolutions. As Lenin decisively demonstrated, this was not simply because the Western Marxist intellectuals made theoretical errors. It was because there were material forces conditioning their ideological orientation: as members of the labor aristocracy in the capitalist core, they had a vested interest in preserving the imperialist world order.
This original split grew into a great divide as the interimperialist rivalry of the First World War continued through the Second World War and eventually led to a global stalemate of sorts, opposing the victor of the imperialist camp (the United States) to the growing socialist camp led by the country that played a decisive role in defeating fascism and supporting many anticolonial revolutions around the world (the Soviet Union). In the context of the Cold War, Western Marxists were increasingly university professors in the West who tended to be skeptical of the practical developments of Marxism in the Global South and engaged in significant theoretical revisions of the classical Marxism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. For very material reasons, their anticommunist revisionism tended to bolster their standing within Western institutions and the theory industry. This did not occur all at once, and objective social forces and subjective orientations did not march in lockstep, as there were a number of contradictions that characterized these developments.
The leading figures of the Frankfurt School, namely Adorno and Horkheimer, were dogmatic anticommunist critics of actually existing socialism, and they were funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class and the leading imperialist states for proffering these views. In France, Sartre discovered his subjectivist version of Marxism during the Second World War, supported some aspects of the global communist movement in its wake, but also increasingly evinced skepticism as the Cold War dragged on. Althusser aligned himself with the postwar French Communist Party, but he also embraced the anti-dialectical theoretical fad of structuralism, and particularly Lacanianism.
These contradictions have to be taken seriously, while also recognizing that the general arc of history has led, for instance, to a Sartrean Althusserian like Alain Badiou being the most famous Western Marxist in France today. Waving a theoretical red flag and claiming to be one of the only living communists, he maintains that “neither the socialist states nor the national liberation struggles nor, finally, the workers’ movement constitute historical referents anymore, which might be capable of guaranteeing the concrete universality of Marxism.” Thus, “Marxism today… is historically destroyed,” and all that remains is the new “idea of communism” that Badiou proffers from one of the leading academic institutions in the imperial West.1 If Marxism as a theory embodied in practice is dead, we are nonetheless encouraged to rejoice in its spiritual rebirth via a Marxian version of French theory. Brazenly merging his messianism with opportunistic self-promotion, Badiou’s implicit marketing slogan for his work reads like a Christological perversion of Marx’s famous statement on revolution: “Marxism is dead. Long live my idea of communism!” In his enthusiasm for theoretical resurrection, however, Badiou fails to mention that his purportedly new idea, in its practical essence, is in fact a very old one, which was already soundly criticized by Engels. It is the idea of utopian socialism.
This is one of the reasons why a dialectical assessment of Western Marxism is so important. It allows us to engage in a variegated analysis of individual thinkers and movements, highlighting where and when they align on the dominant ideology of Western Marxism, but also how they might part ways with it in certain regards or at specific points in time (like Sartre and Althusser). Moreover, this dialectical approach needs to be thoroughly materialist by grounding itself in an analysis of the social relations of intellectual production. The most well-known contemporary Western Marxists are university professors in the imperial core, some of whom are global superstars in the imperial theory industry, and this has most definitely had an impact on the type of work they do.
Moreover, the integration of Marxism into the bourgeois academy has subjected it to a number of significant changes. In the capitalist core, there are not academies of Marxism where one can be trained, and then educate others, in Marxism as a total science embracing the natural and social worlds. Instead, there is a system of intellectual Taylorism founded on the disciplinary division of labor between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. This system, as part of the superstructure, is ultimately driven by capitalist interests. In this regard, Marxism has, to a large extent, been sidelined or rejected as a framework for the bourgeois natural sciences, and it has often been reduced to an—incorrect or insufficient—interpretive paradigm in much of the bourgeois social sciences. Many of the most well-known Western Marxists teach in the humanities, or humanities-adjacent social science departments, and they traffic in theoretical eclecticism, intentionally combining Marxist theory with bourgeois theoretical fads.
Given this material context, it is not surprising that Western Marxists tend to reject materialist science, abandon rigorous engagements with political economy and materialist history, and indulge in theory and bourgeois cultural analysis for their own sake. The point of Marxist theory, for the crassest Western Marxists like Slavoj Žižek, is not to change the world that promotes them as leading luminaries, but rather to interpret it in such a way that their careers are advanced within the imperial academy and culture industries. The objective, material system of knowledge production conditions their subjective contributions to it. What they tend to lack is a self-critical, dialectical-materialist assessment of their own conditions of intellectual production, which is due, in part, to the way that they have been ideologically trained by the very system that promotes them. They are ideologues of imperial Marxism.
JBF: What you present here is a classic historical-materialist critique focusing on the class foundations of ideology, in relation to the Western Marxist tradition. It was from Marx, as Karl Mannheim famously explained in his Ideology and Utopia, that the critique of ideology first arose. Nevertheless, Marxism, Mannheim charged, had failed at the self-critique necessary for a developed sociology of knowledge due to its inability to disassociate itself from its revolutionary proletarian standpoint (a failing he attributed to Lukács in particular). Yet, contrary to this, it is such self-critique, namely, radical changes in revolutionary theory and practice in response to changing material-class conditions, as Mészáros contended, that helps explain the continuing theoretical vitality of Marxian theory, in addition to the actual revolutions in the Global South.
For Western Marxism as a distinct tradition, such self-critique was of course impossible, without giving the whole game away. It is no accident that the bitterest polemics of the Western Marxists were directed at Lukács when he extended his critique of irrationalism by implication to the Western left and its enthrallment with Martin Heidegger’s anti-humanism. In the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, all positive ontologies, even those of Marx and Hegel, were rejected, along with historical analysis. What remained was a circumscribed dialectic, reduced to a logic of signs and signifiers, divorced from materialist ontology, the class struggle, and even historical change. Humanism, even Marxist humanism, became the enemy. Having abandoned all real content, self-identified Western Marxists helped introduce the discursive turn. This led to its merging into post-Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, and postcapitalism. Here the “post” often meant a crawling backward, rather than a forward advance.
We can sum up much of our discussion so far by saying that the Western Marxist tradition, although providing a wealth of critical insights, was caught up in a fourfold retreat: (1) the retreat from class; (2) the retreat from the critique of imperialism; (3) the retreat from nature/materialism/science; and (4) the retreat from reason. With no positive ontology remaining all that was retained, in the postmodernist and post-Marxist left, was the Word or a world of empty discourse, providing a basis for deconstructing reality but empty of any emancipatory project.
The present task, then, is the recovery and reconstitution of historical materialism as a revolutionary theory and practice, in the context of the planetary crisis of our time. Max Weber famously said that historical materialism is not a car that can be driven anywhere. One might respond that Marxism, in its classical sense, is not meant to convey humanity everywhere. Rather the destination is a realm of substantive equality and ecological sustainability: complete socialism.
GR: This fourfold retreat constitutes a withdrawal from material reality into the realm of discourse and ideas. It is therefore an ideological inversion of classical Marxism that turns the world upside down. The principal political consequence of such an orientation is an abandonment of the complicated and often contradictory task of building socialism in the real world. The Four Retreats, which eliminate what Lenin called the revolutionary core of Marxism, thereby feed into a withdrawal from the primary practical task of Marxism, namely, to change the world, not simply interpret it.
In order to maintain a thoroughly dialectical analysis, it is important to insist on the fact that the Four Retreats and the overall abandonment of real-world socialism do not function as mechanical principles that reductively determine all aspects of every Western Marxist discourse. It is rather that they are features of a broad ideological field that could be mapped out in terms of a Venn diagram. Each specific discourse can occupy rather different positions within this ideological field. At one extreme, there are superstitious idealist discourses that have taken flight from all forms of materialist analysis in favor of various “post” orientations—post-Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so on—that are profoundly regressive. At the other extreme, there are discourses that lay claim to being solidly Marxist and do engage, to some extent, with a rationalist version of class analysis. However, they misapprehend the fundamental class dynamics at work in imperialism, and they tend to reject real-world socialism as an anti-imperialist state-building project in favor of utopian, populist, or rebellious anarchist-inflected versions of socialism (Losurdo insightfully diagnosed all three of these tendencies in his book on Western Marxism).
While the various “post” orientations are relatively easy to contend with from a rigorous materialist vantage point, Western Marxist analysis can be more difficult to contest because of their institutional power and their ostensible dedication to historical materialism. It is therefore crucially important, in taking up the task of revitalizing dialectical and historical materialism as a revolutionary theory and practice, to combat the self-declared Marxists who misrepresent imperialism and the world-historical struggle against it. Your recent essays on this topic in Monthly Review are essential reading because you go to the heart of one of the most important issues of contemporary class struggle in theory, namely how to understand imperialism.2 As you pursue your critical analysis, I hope that you will continue to shed light on one of the most perverse Western Marxist ideological inversions: the depiction of those countries involved in anti-imperialist struggle—from China to Russia, Iran, and beyond—as being fundamentally imperialist, mirroring the collective West in their deeds and ambitions, or even engaging in a more authoritarian and repressive form of imperialism than the bourgeois democracies of the West.
JBF: The relation of Western Marxism to imperialism is enormously complex. Part of the problem is that what we need to analyze first is the Eurocentrism intrinsic to Western culture (including, of course, not just Europe, but settler colonial states: the United States and Canada in North America and Australia and New Zealand in Australasia, plus, in a somewhat different context, Israel). Martin Bernal argued in Black Athena that the Aryan myth with respect to ancient Greece that constituted the real beginning of Eurocentrism arose at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century—though traces of it certainly existed before that. Eurocentrism got a further boost with the rise of what Lenin called the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which was symbolized by the mutual carving up of Africa by the great powers.
Eurocentrism should not be seen as simply a type of ethnocentrism. Rather, Eurocentrism is the view, most acutely expressed by Weber in his introduction to his Sociology of Religions (published as the “author’s introduction” in the main English translation by Talcott Parsons of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). There Weber took the position that European culture was the only universal culture. To be sure, there were other particular cultures around the world, in his view, some of them very advanced, but they all were forced to conform to the universal culture of Europe if they were to modernize, which meant developing in European rationalist and capitalist terms. Other countries, in this view, could develop, but only by embracing the universal culture, which was seen as the basis of modernity, a particular product of Europe. It is Eurocentrism in precisely this sense that Joseph Needham critically took on in his Within the Four Seas (1969) and that Samir Amin historically deconstructed in his Eurocentrism (1988).
Nineteenth-century European thought had developed in a context of an emerging Eurocentrism in this sense. One can think of the colonialist and racist model of the world presented in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Yet, the work of Marx and Engels was remarkably untouched by such Eurocentrism. Moreover, by the late 1850s, while still in their thirties, and from that point on, they strongly supported anticolonial struggles and revolutions in China, India, Algeria, and South Africa. They also expressed their deep admiration for the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America. No other major nineteenth-century thinker, when compared to Marx, so strongly condemned what he called “the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines, of the indigenous population of the Americas,” nor so strongly opposed capitalist slavery. Marx was the fiercest European opponent of the British and French Opium Wars on China and the famines that British imperial policy generated in India. He argued that the survival of the Russian commune or mir meant that the Russian Revolution could develop in other terms than in Europe, even possibly bypassing the path of capitalist development. Engels introduced the concept of the labor aristocracy (later developed further by Lenin) to explain the quiescence of British workers and the poor prospects for socialism there. The last paragraph, apart from a few letters, that Engels wrote, two months before his death in 1895, was a reference—in the closing lines of his edition of volume 3 of Marx’s Capital—to how finance capital (or the stock exchange) of the leading European powers had carved up Africa. This was the very reality that was to underlie Lenin’s conception of the imperialist stage of capitalism.
But the position of Marxists in the next generation can hardly be said to have been closely attuned to the problems of imperialism or strongly sympathetic with colonized peoples. In the First World War, nearly all of the socialist parties in Europe supported their own imperial nation-states in what was primarily, as Lenin explained, a dispute over which nation(s) would exploit the colonies and semicolonies. Only Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and the small Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht fought against this.
Following the First World War, Lenin’s analysis of imperialism in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism was adopted and developed upon, with Lenin’s backing, in the Comintern. It was in the Comintern documents that we see the first appearance of what was to be called dependency theory, which was then developed further in Latin America and elsewhere and later expanded into unequal exchange analysis and world-system theory. This was a period of revolutions and decolonization throughout the Global South. In response to these developments Marxism was to split radically. Some Marxist theorists in the West took the position, most clearly enunciated by Sweezy in the 1960s, that revolution, and with it, the revolutionary proletariat and the proper focus of Marxist theory, had shifted to the third world or the Global South. In contrast, most of those who belonged to the self-defined Western Marxist tradition thought of Marxism as the peculiar property of the West, where it had originated, even though the main revolutionary struggles around the globe were taking place elsewhere. Naturally, this went hand in hand with a sidelining at best and at worst a complete rejection of the phenomenon of imperialism.
This dynamic was interrupted by some of the main third world revolutions, which were impossible to ignore, such as the Algerian and Vietnamese Revolutions. Thus, a figure like Marcuse, who generally belonged to the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, was deeply affected by the Vietnam Revolution. But still, that was quite removed from his theoretical work. For the most part, the Western Marxist tradition in its more abstract academic form acted as if Europe remained the center of things, ignoring the deep effects of imperialism on the social structure of the West and having relatively little respect for Marxist theorists outside of Europe.
John S. Saul, whose work focused on liberation struggles in Africa, drilled into me the notion of the “primary contradiction.” Lenin had seen the primary contradiction of monopoly capitalism to be imperialism, and in fact revolution after revolution in the Global South (and the counterrevolutionary responses in the Global North) confirmed that. But not only was that frequently ignored by the Western left, but we saw more and more desperate moves to deny that the North economically exploited the South and to reject the idea that this was at the heart of Lenin’s theory. This went along with frequent attacks on the theories of dependency, unequal exchange, and world-system theory. One thinks of the work of Bill Warren, who tried to argue that Marx saw imperialism as the “pioneer of capitalism,” that is, playing a progressive role (even if Lenin did not); and of Robert Brenner’s attempt in New Left Review to designate Sweezy, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein as “neo-Smithian Marxists” on the basis that they, like Adam Smith (and supposedly in opposition to Marx), criticized the exploitation of the countries on the outskirts or periphery of capitalism. (Smith’s own criticisms were directed at mercantilism and in favor of free trade.)
In the United States, Marxist political economy was very prominent in the 1960s. Most of those who came to Marxism at that time did not do so as a result of left parties, which were practically nonexistent, as was a radical labor movement. Hence, leftists were drawn to historical materialism in the 1960s and ’70s largely by the critique of imperialism and rage over the Vietnam War. In addition, Marxism in the United States was always deeply affected by the Black radical movement that had always centered on the relation of capitalism, imperialism, and race, playing a leadership role in the understanding of these relations.
Nevertheless, in North America as well as Europe, the critique of imperialism waned in the late 1970s and ’80s due to a prevailing Eurocentrism. There was also the problem, in more opportunistic terms, of being shut out of the academy and of left movements if one put too much emphasis on imperialism. Obviously, the left made certain choices here. In the United States, all attempts to create a left-liberal or social-democratic movement come up against the fact that one must not actively oppose U.S. militarism or imperialism or support revolutionary movements abroad if one wants a foot in the door of the “democratic” political system. Even in the academy, there are unspoken controls in this respect.
Today we see a growing movement among intellectuals who profess to be Marxists, who are openly rejecting the theory of imperialism in Lenin’s sense, and in the sense of Marxist theory over the last century or more. Various arguments are used, including narrowing imperialism simply to the conflicts between the great powers (that is, seeing it primarily in horizontal terms); replacing imperialism with an amorphous concept of globalization or transnationalization; denying that one country can exploit another; reducing imperialism to a moral category such that it is associated with authoritarian states and not “democracies”; or making the concept of imperialism so ubiquitous that it becomes useless, forgetting the fact that today’s G7 countries (with the addition of Canada) are exactly the same great imperial powers of monopoly capitalism that Lenin designated over a century ago. This represents a sea change that is dividing the left, in which the New Cold War against China—also a war against the Global South—is leading much of the left to side with the Western powers, viewed as somehow “democratically” superior and therefore less imperialist.
All of this takes us back to the question of Eurocentrism. Postcolonial theorists lately have condemned Marxism as pro-imperialist or Eurocentric. Attempts to attribute such views to Marx, Engels, and Lenin are easy to refute on a factual basis. As Baruch Spinoza said, “ignorance is no argument.” But it becomes a deeper problem insofar as many postcolonial theorists take as their measure of Marxism the main Western Marxist cultural and philosophical conceptions from which postcolonial theory itself is in large part descended. There is no question that Western Marxist theorists, with their eyes only on Europe or the United States, were often prone to Eurocentrism. Moreover, Western Marxism projected a view of classical Marxism as economic determinism, and thus insensitive to national and cultural questions. All of this led to distortions of the historical and theoretical record.
There is in fact a whole world of Marxist analysis, most of it arising out of material struggles. I have been reading an interesting book by Simin Fadaee titled Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics, published by Manchester University Press in 2024. She argues that Marxism is global and provides separate chapters on Mao, Ho, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Che, and others. She writes at the end of the introduction to her book: “It is in fact Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric, because this entails dismissing the cornerstone of some of the most transformative movements and revolutionary projects of recent human history. Instead of making such sweeping claims, a more fruitful engagement with history would instead urge us to learn from the experience of the Global South with Marxism and ask what we can learn from Marxism’s global relevance.”
GR: Western Marxism is an ideological product of imperialism, the principal function of which is to obscure or conceal imperialism, while misconstruing the struggle against it. I mean “imperialism” in the most expansive sense, as a process of establishing and enforcing systematic value transfers from certain regions of the world, namely the Global South, to others (the Global North), through the extraction of natural resources, the use of free or cheap labor, the creation of markets for offloading commodities, and more. This socioeconomic process has been the driving force behind the underdevelopment of the majority of the planet and the hyper-development of the imperial core, including its industries of knowledge production. Within the leading imperialist countries, this has given rise to an imperial superstructure, which is comprised of the politico-legal apparatus of the state and a material system of cultural production, circulation, and consumption that we can call, following Brecht, “the cultural apparatus.” The dominant industries of knowledge production in the imperial core are part of the cultural apparatus of the leading imperialist states.
In claiming that Western Marxism is an ideological product of imperialism, I mean, then, that it is a specific version of Marxism that has arisen within the superstructure—and more specifically the cultural apparatus—of the foremost imperialist states. It is a particular form of Marxism that loses touch with Marxism’s universal ambition to scientifically elucidate and practically transform the capitalist world order. In my forthcoming book with Monthly Review Press, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, I situate this version of Marxism within the imperial superstructure and examine the political-economic forces that have been driving it. One remarkable feature is the extent to which the capitalist ruling class and imperialist states have directly funded and supported it.
To take but one telling example, the Rockefellers—who are among the most notorious robber barons in the history of U.S. capitalism—invested the equivalent today of millions of dollars in an international “Marxism-Leninism Project.” Its principal objective was to promote Western Marxism as an ideological weapon of war against the form of Marxism invested in developing socialism in the real world as a bulwark against imperialism. Marcuse was at the center of this project, as was his close friend and academic supporter Philip Mosely, who was a high-level, long-term CIA advisor deeply involved in doctrinal warfare. In addition to being one of the most well-known Western Marxists, Marcuse had worked for years as a leading authority on communism for the U.S. State Department. This is significant because it brings into relief the extent to which elements of the bourgeois state have worked hand in glove with factions of the bourgeoisie to promote Western Marxism. They share the same fundamental goal, namely that of cultivating a version of Marxism that could be widely disseminated, because it ultimately serves their interests. There is no doubt that this is a class compromise, since the imperialists would much rather eliminate Marxism across the board. However, since they have been unable to do so, they have instead engaged in a soft-sell approach by endeavoring to promote Western Marxism as the only acceptable and reputable form of Marxism.
The core issue, in many ways, is that Western Marxism does not grasp the primary contradiction of the capitalist world order, which is imperialism. It also does not scientifically understand the dialectical emergence of socialism within the imperialist world, and it does not recognize that socialist state-building projects across the Global South have been the primary impediment to imperialism. Its lack of understanding of imperialism and the fight against it means that it is ultimately devoid of scientific rigor. By obfuscating the principal contradiction and its material overcoming via real-world socialism, it ideologically inverts material reality in various and sundry ways. Although there are different degrees of Western Marxism, as we discussed above, it always has a dose of a-scientificity. Its rejection of materialist ontology is an extension of its overall retreat from materialist science. This hopefully goes without saying, but “science” is not understood here in terms of the positivist version often vilified by Western Marxists. Science, or what Marx and Engels called Wissenschaft, which has a much more expansive meaning in German, refers to the ongoing, fallibilistic process of collectively establishing the best possible explanatory framework by constantly testing it in material reality and modifying it based on practical experience.
Coming full circle, then, we might say that Western Marxism would be better described as “imperial Marxism” in the precise sense that it is an ideological product of the imperial superstructure that ultimately obscures imperialism—in order to advance it—while combating actually existing socialism. The universal project of Marxism, by contrast, is resolutely anti-imperialist in the world in which we live and rigorously scientific: it recognizes the material reality that makes socialist state-building projects into the principal manner of fighting imperialism and moving toward socialism. This does not imply, of course, that universal Marxists uncritically embrace any project that waves the flag of socialism or claims to be anti-imperialist. In its dedication to scientific rigor, universal Marxism is invested in critical scrutiny and precise materialist evaluation.
To be clear, this does not mean that all of the work done in the tradition of imperial Marxism is to be jettisoned. We should, instead, approach it dialectically, recognizing when it has made contributions, for instance, to the analysis of capitalism and Marxist theory in various ways. This makes perfect sense given the high level of material development of the imperial superstructure supporting it. However, it is of the utmost importance to point out that a Marxism that does not grasp the principal contradiction of the socioeconomic world order cannot be considered scientific or emancipatory. It is equally crucial to recognize why it is that this version has become the dominant form of Marxism within the imperial theory industry. Rather than combating imperialism and contributing to the practical struggle to build socialism, it is ideologically compatible with imperialist interests.
JBF: From a Marxist perspective, to say that imperialism is the primary contradiction of capitalism in our time is to say that it is the reality of revolutionary struggles against imperialism that constitutes the primary contradiction of capitalism. For more than a century, revolutions have been occurring in the Global South against imperialism, rooted in the actions of oppressed classes and carried out in the name of or inspired by Marxism. The struggles against the structure of monopoly capitalism by workers in the Global North can be seen as objectively part of this same dialectic.
The Western Marxist tradition was defined initially by its extreme opposition to Soviet Marxism in its entirety, not simply in its Stalinist form. Western Marxists thus often supported the Cold War efforts of the West with its imperialistic structure. Ideologically, Western Marxists condemned Engels and all that came after him in the Second and Third Internationals, along with materialist dialectics. Revolutions against imperialism in the Global South were treated as largely irrelevant to Marxist theory and practice, which were seen as the sole product of the West. Although European Eurocommunist movements for a time presented more radical alternatives, these movements were largely disowned even at their height by the Western Marxist tradition, before they succumbed completely to social democratic politics.
All that remained of classical Marxism, then, within Western Marxism, despite its grand intellectual claims, was a limited sphere of philosophical arabesques inspired by Marx’s critique of capital. Western Marxism was divorced from the working class in the West and globally from third world revolution, from the opposition to imperialism, and, ultimately, from reason. Here it is worth remembering that Marx and Engels pointedly gave to their early work The Holy Family the subtitle A Critique of Critical Critique. They strongly opposed an analysis that had descended into nothing but “critical criticism,” a pure “speculative idealism” that had nothing to do with “real humanism,” real history, and real materialism. Not only did such critical criticism, unmoored from materialism and praxis, fail to identify with the struggles of workers, it fell short of the struggle of the revolutionary bourgeoisie itself. It was to vanish altogether after the 1848 revolution.
A Western left that disavows or closes its eyes to the main revolutionary struggles occurring in the world, and that ignores or downplays the role of imperialist exploitation, which for centuries now has been promoted by the West, has, as a result of such withdrawals from reality, severed all practical as opposed to merely philosophical relations to Marxism. In this sense, Western Marxism, as a particular paradigm, needs to give way to a more global dialectical perspective, represented by classical Marxism, and today by what we might call global Marxism or universal Marxism. The Four Retreats can be reversed as today’s global system of accumulation reunites the struggles of workers around the world on materialist grounds.
Your references to Marcuse, though, highlight for me the issue that what we are engaged in here is a critique rather than an absolute condemnation of the post-Second World War Western Marxist tradition (excluding the question of postmodernist French Theory and the turn to irrationalism). Marcuse was definitely a Western Marxist, rather than simply a Marxist in the West. But he was far more radical than Adorno or Horkheimer, and in fact was very critical of both of them for their increasingly rightward course.
I was heavily influenced by Marcuse when I was young, during my first two years of college. I always had deep reservations about One-Dimensional Man because of the dialectic of retreat built into it. Marcuse made it clear there and elsewhere that he had abandoned materialist dialectics. He also retreated from any belief in the working class as such. Nor was imperialism integral to his overall analysis. The Great Refusal, in the face of one-dimensional mass society, was too weak a conception to constitute critical reason and praxis, as in Marx. His statement in his conclusion to One-Dimensional Man, where he wrote that “on theoretical as well as empirical grounds the dialectical concept pronounces its own hopelessness,” went against the spirit of his earlier Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Marcuse was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. His Eros and Civilization, though a major work of the Freudian left, represented a move toward psychologism that tended to deconstruct the subject in the name of greater concreteness while placing less emphasis on history, material conditions, and structure. From Heidegger, Marcuse took a view of technology, that, while critical, was largely divorced from the question of social relations, embodying a negative, anti-Enlightenment view that was discordant with much of the rest of his thought. It was these influences from Freud and Heidegger, the latter going back to his earliest years, plus the lack of genuine historical analysis, that resulted in a view of the 1950s United States as something more solid and set in place than it really was, which gave rise to a notion of crisis-free capitalism and the hopeless dialectic of One-Dimensional Man.
Still, Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, published in 1941 (thus preceding the Cold War Era), was an entirely different and more revolutionary kind of work. I can still remember my excitement when I encountered it in my late teens. This led me and many others to an intensive study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Then, in the midst of the economic and energy crises of 1973–1975, he wrote his Counterrevolution and Revolt. His chapter “The Left Under Counterrevolution” was clear on imperialism, even if a larger theoretical integration of this was missing in his analysis overall. One cannot easily forget the opening lines where he stated: “Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called ‘communist’ or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries.” In his chapter on “Nature and Revolution,” he sought to bring an environmental Marxist perspective to bear on an emerging ecological movement, going so far as to break at one point with the Western Marxist proscription against dialectical naturalism. The chapter on “Art and Revolution” that was to point to his work The Aesthetic Dimension was his last attempt at a critique of capitalism.
But there was another aspect to Marcuse’s biography that seems incongruous with this. How do we explain his direct involvement for a period in the anticommunist, Marxist-Leninist project to which you refer? It was not until later, in graduate school, that I read his 1950s book Soviet Marxism, which seemed to be a mixture of realism and propaganda, unfortunately with more of the latter than the former. It was very much a work that represented an iron curtain divide within Marxism itself. Marcuse, like other leading Marxist thinkers who joined the military in the Anti-Nazi War, including Sweezy and Franz Neumann, was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Marcuse’s research at the OSS, as revealed by his reports, was directed at providing an analysis of the German Reich under Adolf Hitler. However, he continued to work for the intelligence services into the early years of the Cold War, and in 1949 wrote a report on “The Potentials of World Communism” for the Office of Intelligence Research, which was to be the basis of his Soviet Marxism. This puts an entirely different color on things.
However, there was an enduring radical quality to Marcuse’s work within the self-imposed limits of Western Marxism. He remained committed to the critique of capitalism and to revolutionary liberation, and the great works that he is best known for from Eros and Civilization (1952) to One-Dimensional Man (1964) are perhaps less important than his more scrambled attempts to support the radical movements of the 1960s. This is something for which he was hardly prepared, as it meant turning his own assessment of the one-dimensionality of mass society on its head. Nevertheless, from An Essay on Liberation (1969) to perhaps The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) we see a Marcuse, no longer the supreme lecturer, but the intellectual in the trenches who was beloved in the student movement in the 1960s and ’70s.
Marcuse thus represents perhaps the full tragedy of Western Marxism, or at least the Frankfurt School part of it. Although Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly regressive in their endless pursuit of reifications, Marcuse retained a radical perspective. His final position combined a pessimism of the intellect with an aestheticism of the will. Art became the ultimate basis of resistance, and while he tended to see this in a rather elitist way, it has the potential of being incorporated into a genuinely materialist perspective.
This suggests that critique, incorporating the positive element rather than absolute condemnation, is the appropriate approach to what can be genuinely referred to as Western Marxism, in those cases where, as in Marcuse, one finds a fourfold retreat but not a complete capitulation. The problem with the Western Marxist tradition, in the sense in which Anderson addressed it and in the way that Losurdo criticized it, is that it represented a dialectic of defeat, even during the decades when revolution was expanding throughout the globe.
There has always been a Marxism, from Marx and Engels’s day to the present, in which there can be no room for a fundamental retreat or lasting compromise with the system, and which is unreservedly anticapitalist and anti-imperialist, because it finds its basis in genuine revolutionary struggles around the globe. In any critique of Western Marxism, the simultaneous existence of a more global or universal Marxism, even in the West, must eventually be taken into account. But this is something that we cannot address here. Still, it is important to recognize that the reason a critique of Western Eurocentric Marxism is so important today is because of the current New Cold War division between a Eurocentric left and global Marxism. The Eurocentric left downplays, denies, or—in extreme cases—even embraces the core imperialist powers. Global Marxism is no less determined in its total opposition. Western Eurocentric Marxism is on its last leg, undermined, as Jameson pointed out, by globalization. Seeing itself as the authentic basis of all Marxology, Western Marxism is being replaced by universal or global Marxism, in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the main theorists of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Here the analysis is not confined to that small corner of the world in the northwest of Europe in which industrial capitalism and colonialism/imperialism first emerged, but finds its material basis in the struggles of the world proletariat.
GR: I could not agree more regarding the importance of eschewing non-dialectical approaches to Western Marxism, which foster either uncritical celebration or complete condemnation. Dialectical critique avoids this reductive binary by elucidating Western Marxism’s contributions, as well as its limitations, while providing a materialist account of both. The overall objective of such a critique is to advance the positive project of universal, international Marxism, which can be brought more clearly into relief and further developed by overcoming the perversions of Marxism that are, at a certain level, a byproduct of the history of imperialism. The principal reason for identifying the problems with this tradition, then, is not at all to indulge in thoroughgoing denunciation or theoretical grandstanding. It is to learn from its limitations and surpass them by moving to a higher level of scientific elucidation and practical relevance. This is precisely what Marx and Engels did in their criticisms of dialectical philosophy, bourgeois political economy, and utopian socialism (to cite the three components of Marxism astutely diagnosed by Lenin). Dialectical critique engages in a theoretical and practical Aufhebung, in the sense of an overcoming that integrates any useful elements from that which is overcome.
The dialectical assessment of Western Marxism includes, as mentioned above, an analysis of the breadth of its ideological field and the variations across it, which can be mapped out in various ways, such as in terms of a Venn diagram of the Four Retreats. This charting of the objective ideological field needs to be combined with a nuanced account of the subjective positions within it and their variations over time. It is precisely the joint analysis of the complexities of the ideological field and the specificities of subjective positions within it that provides us with a more thorough and refined account of Western Marxism as an ideology that differentially manifests itself in subjective projects with their own specific morphologies. This is the mirror opposite of a reductivist approach that attempts to boil the totality of subject positions down to a single, monolithic ideology that mechanically determines them.
The case of Marcuse is highly revealing in this regard, and much time could be spent detailing the subjective changes in his work and situating them within the broader ideological field of Western Marxism. Highlighting only his most extreme positions, we might say that he went from being a major anticommunist State Department operative during the early Cold War to a radical theorist who expressed his strong support for certain aspects of the student, antiwar, feminist, antiracist, and ecological movements. His work for the State Department and the OSS was not as benign as he would later claim, and the archival record clearly demonstrates that he collaborated closely with the CIA for years and was even involved in the preparation of at least two National Intelligence Estimates (the highest form of intelligence in the world’s leading empire). Moreover, this work seamlessly segued with the role he played at the center of ideological warfare projects run by the capitalist ruling class against Soviet—and more generally Eastern—Marxism. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he was radicalized by the New Left movements of the time, and this brought him into sharp conflict with imperial Marxists of the Frankfurt School like Adorno. Although the man promoted by the bourgeois press as the godfather of the New Left never seriously broke with anticommunism or Western Marxism, his extensive FBI file demonstrates that certain elements of the bourgeois state considered him a potential threat.
Another aspect of Marcuse’s work that is worth mentioning is its eclecticism and, more specifically, his attempt—like so many other Western Marxists—to merge Marxism with non-Marxist discourses, often those that are subjectivist, such as phenomenology and existentialism, as well as psychoanalysis. One of the guiding assumptions of certain Western Marxists is that classical Marxism overemphasizes objective social forces at the expense of subjective experience, and that more subjectivist discourses are therefore necessary as a corrective to it. This is one of the principal reasons why Freudo-Marxism has been so integral to Western Marxism, a tendency that has persisted in the Lacanian-Althusserianism of contemporary figures like Badiou and Žižek. It would take a long time to unpack the multiple problems with this orientation. This would need to begin with the mischaracterization of the dialectical account of subjectivity and objectivity within classical Marxism as not being sufficiently attentive to subjective experience or psychology, which clearly misrepresents its account of ideology. It would also have to include a critical assessment of what it means to advance the foundational claim that dialectical and historical materialism needs to be merged with liberal ideology (the guiding framework of Freudianism), rather than, for instance, engaging in a dialectical critique of psychoanalysis from a Marxist vantage point (a project to which figures like Lev Vygotsky and Valentin Voloshinov contributed).
There is not space here to analyze this aspect of the persistence of liberal ideology within Western Marxism, but it is important to note that the subjectivism of much of this tradition is often bound up with its tendency to embrace culturalism and psychologism over and against class analysis. Todd Cronan has argued, in this regard, that Adorno and Horkheimer posited superstructural elements like racial, ethnic, or religious identities as primary, allowing the economic infrastructure to recede into the background, while tending to reinterpret class as primarily a question of power. Adorno, not unlike Marcuse, also openly engaged in psychologism by endeavoring, for instance, to interpret fascism—as well as communism!—in terms of the so-called authoritarian personality. Culturalism, as Amin explained, is one of the longest-standing enemies of Marxism, and the same is true of psychologism and other subjectivist modalities of explanation.
What we have here, in a nutshell, is an inversion of the Marxist understanding of the relationship between the superstructure and the infrastructure. Much of Western Marxism engages in elevating the cultural and the subjective over the objective forces of the socioeconomic base. This is one of the reasons why I find the Western Marxist approach to art and culture so fundamentally problematic. The idea that art—and much more specifically the bourgeois concept and practice of art, since that is the primary focal point of Western Marxists—could be a major site of resistance tends to bracket the material social relations of cultural production, or only really consider them critically in the case of mass art and entertainment, not high art and theory. This approach also traffics in the bourgeois ideology of art by treating the latter as if it operated in a unique sphere of production that escapes, or at least aspires to escape, the general social relations of production in society.
It is true that Adorno wrote on the impacts of industrialization on popular forms of culture, and some of his most insightful work analyzes the effects of recording technologies on music. However, his account of the autonomy of art, which is the direct inspiration for Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension, is imbued with a significant dose of cultural commodity fetishism. Thus, instead of providing a materialist analysis of the socioeconomic forces at work in the production, distribution, and consumption of bourgeois art, Marcuse celebrates isolated works of art as being magical repositories for resistance, without ever clearly elucidating how they affect meaningful social change. Moreover, Western Marxists like Marcuse and Adorno tend to ignore or denigrate socialist art (unless it has been integrated into the bourgeois canon). Instead of identifying, as Brecht and others have done, how art can provide an adequate picture of reality and tools for collectively transforming it, the bourgeois art theorists of the Western Marxist persuasion misdirect people’s political energies into a superstitious belief in the magical powers of bourgeois art. Since they have never been able to explain how reading Charles Baudelaire or listening to atonal music could lead to a revolutionary social transformation, it should be clear that their defeatist aestheticism is a class project that ultimately preserves the status quo. It consolidates the bourgeois cultural order and shores up the petty-bourgeois class stratum as the theoretical guardian of bourgeois ideology, while generally denigrating or ignoring the popular arts of the working class and socialist efforts to democratize culture. If the only political solution these Western intellectuals have to offer is to recruit people into investing in high theoretical interpretations of bourgeois art, then this amounts, practically speaking, to further developing the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia as the custodian of bourgeois culture. Such a class project does not serve the interests of the working and oppressed masses of the world. Instead, it encourages people to withdraw from class struggle and invest in bourgeois art—meaning bourgeois ideology—as the true site of resistance. This defeatist aestheticism thereby complements Western Marxism’s political defeatism, and both contribute to an abandonment of class struggle from below in favor of an ideological belief in the magical powers of high theory and bourgeois culture (which ultimately contribute to class struggle from above).
I would like to conclude by clarifying the primary reason why this dialectical critique of imperial Marxism is important. Theory only really becomes a force in the world when it ceases to exist in the restricted domain of the intelligentsia and comes to grip the masses. The main reason why an ideological struggle against Western Marxism is necessary is because of its broader effects on the disorientation of the left. With the sharpening of global contradictions, the New Cold War, and the rise of fascism across the imperialist world, we have a situation in the imperial core and some of the capitalist periphery where the left, including elements of the self-declared socialist or communist left, are explicitly or implicitly pro-imperialist and anticommunist (some of which is due to the influence of Western Marxism). If overcoming the Four Retreats and rejuvenating anti-imperialist Marxism is one of the most pressing tasks of class struggle in theory today, this is not simply due to the need for theoretical correction. It is rather that, if we want to successfully confront the most urgent problems of our day—including ecocide, the risks of nuclear apocalypse, incessant capitalist social murder, rising fascism, and so on—we need to rebuild and rejuvenate a powerful anti-imperialist, socialist front of struggle grounded in the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism. This is the ultimate goal of the dialectical critique of Western Marxism.
JBF: What strikes me in our discussion of Marcuse and the other Western Marxists is the degree to which they succumbed to the ideology of the system, particularly the view of the United States as an all-encompassing mass society and the rationalist result of the Enlightenment. Here they lost sight of class analysis, while adopting culturalist and idealist frames and forms of psychologism removed from materialism (including cultural materialism) that would have undermined their analysis. This was an approach that had more in common with Weber—with his culturalism, neo-Kantian idealism, and conception of capitalism as simply the triumph of rationalistic technocratic society—than with Marx. Marcuse was caught in Weber’s iron cage, as thoroughly as Weber himself. Heidegger’s one-dimensional critique of technology so impressed Marcuse that he made Weber’s iron cage into his own. Western Marxism, and particularly the Frankfurt School, in this sense was a product of its time, of what C. Wright Mills, sardonically called the “American Celebration.” French theory just took this a step further, conceding entirely to U.S. ideology in a process of deconstruction that resembled nothing so much as postmodern marketing.
For Western Marxism, including the major representatives of the Frankfurt School, the extent of the retreat is alarming. Real choices were made to join the West in its struggle, and to attack Marxists in the East. Marcuse’s Great Refusal did not keep him from working for U.S. national intelligence during the early Cold War. Nor did Adorno’s version of Western Marxism prevent him, along with Horkheimer, from accepting the backing of the U.S. authorities in occupied West Germany after the Second World War or viciously attacking Lukács in a U.S. Army-created and CIA-funded publication (Die Monat), while seated on the veranda of the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” It is significant that the most acid condemnations of Lukács’s writings to the present day, such as those of Jameson and Enzo Traverso, have been directed at the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason. There Lukács, writing at the time of the Korean War, pointed out that the United States was the heir to the whole tradition of irrationalism, with the implication that the Western left in continuing to embrace Friedrich Nietzsche, along with Heidegger and Carl Schmitt—both of whom were major Nazi ideologues—was seeding irrationalism within itself; something that Lukács seemed to be aware of before anyone else.
The main part of the Western Left thus was caught up in a fourfold retreat that at times looked like a total rout, evincing a sense of defeat and panic, in which they tended to reproduce the present order again and again as insurmountable. In all the analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist system, its real fragility and horrors were seldom highlighted, and the death inflicted on millions by the West was essentially ignored. But not all Marxists, it should be emphasized, fell into this same trap. Here I would like to end by quoting a letter from Baran, who was a lifelong friend of Marcuse, going back to when they both were at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (where Baran was an economic researcher for Friedrich Pollock). Baran went on, quite unlike the main representatives of what has been identified as the Western Marxist tradition, to write The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, the greatest Marxist work on imperialism in his day, and to write Monopoly Capital with Sweezy. On October 10, 1963, Baran wrote, in a letter to Sweezy, what I think sums up a great deal of what we have been saying:
What is at the present time at issue and indeed most urgently so is the question whether the Marxian dialectic has broken down, i.e. whether it is possible for Scheisse [shit] to accumulate, to coagulate, to cover all of society (and a goodly part of the related world) without producing the dialectical counter-force which would break through it and blow it into the air. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! If the answer is affirmative then Marxism in it its traditional form has become superannuated. It has predicted the misery, it has explained full well the causes of it becoming as comprehensive as it is; it was in error, however, in its central thesis that the misery generates itself the forces of its abolition.
I have just finished reading Marcuse’s new book (MS) [One-Dimensional Man], which in a laborious kind of way advances the very position which is called the Great Refusal or the Absolute Negation. Everything is Dreck [muck]: monopoly capitalism and the Soviet Union, capitalism and socialism as we know it; the negative part of the Marx story has come True—its positive part remained a figment of the imagination. We are back at the state of the Utopians pure and simple; a better world there should be but there ain’t no social force in sight to bring it about. Not only is Socialism no answer, but there isn’t anyone to give that answer anyway. From the Great Refusal and the Absolute Negation to the Great Withdrawal and the Absolute Betrayal is only a very short step. I have a very strong feeling that this is at the moment in the center of the intellectuals’ thought (and sentiment)—not only here but also in Latin America and elsewhere, and that it would be very much our commitment sich damit Auseinander zu setzen [to confront and come to terms with this sentiment]. There is hardly anyone else around. The official left simply yells [you have been victimized] a la Political Affairs, others are bewildered.
What is required is a cool analysis of the whole situation, the restoration of a historical perspective, a reminder of the relevant time dimensions, and much more. If we could do a good job on that [in Monopoly Capital]…we would make a major contribution and perform with regard to many a truly “liberating” act.3
What Baran was talking about here was what he elsewhere called “the confrontation of reality with reason.” This required the reestablishment of a historical approach, encompassing a longer view, while reconnecting Marxian dialectics to materialism. This would clarify the necessity and therefore possibility of a “dialectical counterforce,” in the present as history, envisioning paths toward liberation throughout the world. This view, which is the outlook of an unqualified, universal, unhyphenated Marxism, remains the task of our time—not just in theory, but conceived as a philosophy of praxis. It requires a break with Western Marxism, which led to a historical cul-de-sac.
The red mole is reemerging once again in our times, but in new and more global ways, no longer confined to the West.
Notes
- ↩ Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018), 57, 60.
- ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024), as well as John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 76, no. 9 (February 2023).
- ↩ Paul A. Baran to Paul M. Sweezy, October 10, 1963, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence, 1949–1964, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 429–30.
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