In 2024, Monthly Review Press published a translation of Domenico Losurdo’s 2017 Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, edited by Gabriel Rockhill. Many of the issues raised in Losurdo’s book were taken up by Rockhill and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster in a dialogue in the March issue of MR. They pointed to the “four retreats” that have characterized Western Marxism as a theoretical tradition: the retreat from class, the retreat from anti-imperialism, the retreat from materialism/nature/science, and the retreat from reason. Closely related to this critique of Western Marxism is the critique of postmodernism, sometimes referred to as “French theory,” for its role in the attempted deconstruction of historical materialism and its promotion of irrationalism—along with the contradictions that this has generated in left theory and practice. A forthcoming book on this from Monthly Review Press is Aymeric Monville and Gabriel Rockhill’s Requiem for French Theory: Transatlantic Funeral Dirge in a Marxist Key (John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill, “Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue,” Monthly Review 76, no. 10 [March 2025]: 1–25).
Yet, such critical engagements, naturally occur in an overall historical context, and ours is shifting radically today, increasingly dominated by an ideology of neofascism. In the United States, this has generated a New McCarthyism targeting so-called “Cultural Marxism.” As explained in “The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime” by Foster in this issue of MR, the attack on Cultural Marxism is offered as the rationale behind the Trump administration’s reactionary policies. Anti-Cultural Marxist propaganda is thus used to justify the destruction of the “administrative state,” attacks on media, the dismantling of environmental measures, and the forcible elimination of academic freedom throughout the education system. Under these circumstances, the question naturally arises as to whether in questioning Western Marxism and postmodernism from a classical Marxist perspective, is MR somehow giving ammunition and support to the neofascist project now looming up in the West? Our answer is a definite No.
Here it is necessary to examine the New McCarthyism directly. The propagandistic notion of Cultural Marxism can be seen in the publication by the Heritage Foundation in 2022, side by side with its Project 2025, of Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka’s How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—And How Americans Can Fight It. Their study begins with the declaration that the Marxism of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara is “dead.” Marxism, in this distorted view, was simply an “economic determinism” and has long-since expired, along with class analysis. In contrast, Cultural Marxism, according to the new Make America Great Again (MAGA) ideology, is the attempt to import Marxism into U.S. society on a purely cultural basis, focusing on race, gender, and the environment. Cultural Marxists, we are told, have succeeded in establishing a left “oligarchy,” dominating nearly every institution of U.S. society, including all levels of government, the media, the educational system, and, to some extent, even the corporations, bringing with it a contagion of “woke” intolerance. These charges against the so-called Marxist establishment are followed with hyped-up horror stories about how children in the United States are being inculcated with “woke” anti-white, extreme feminist, and transgender conceptions that violate American culture and Christian religion, demanding a right-wing counterrevolution. Hordes of immigrants, carrying un-American cultures and beliefs, are said to be threatening white America with what is referred to on the right as the “Great Replacement” or the “Browning of America,” in line with the Western Marxist agenda. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are classified as Cultural Marxist ideas (Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262, Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022; Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It [New York: Encounter Books, 2024]; Christopher Caldwell, “The Browning of America,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 1 [Winter 2014/15]).
Hence, the Office of Management and Budget memo that, in January 2025, froze federal spending explicitly stated that this was to prevent illegal expenditures on “Marxist equity” by the government (Mathew J. Vaeth, “Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies/Subject: Temporary Pause of Agency, Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs,” Office of Management and the Budget, Executive Office of the President, January 27, 2025).
Yet, what the MAGA propagandists fear most ideologically is not what they refer to as “Cultural Marxism” (or postmodernism), which is a fairly easy target as long as the criticism is confined to pure identity politics, but the revival on a more universal basis of classical Marxism, rooted in class and political economy. This necessarily encompasses equality, diversity, and inclusion, or what István Mészáros called “substantive equality.” Such a twenty-first century working-class movement rooted in historical materialism would necessarily stand for humanity as a whole. It follows that a critique of the Western Marxist and postmodernist traditions from a classical Marxist stance is essential in reconstructing Marxism and combating today’s reactionary trends. This would be aimed not at simple negation, but at the “negation of the negation,” or the transcendence of current contradictions at a higher level, leading to a unified, universalist, socialist-led movement. Just as Western Marxism’s and postmodernism’s splintering of the left played a crucial role in the reemergence of the right, so the reunification of the left on a higher plane on the basis of a genuine historical-materialist movement rooted in a diverse working class is the key to overturning neofascism today (István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015], 121–29).
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