Losurdo’s scrappiness has kept him off the list of Marxist philosophers deemed central to the conversations of our time, but there is injustice in that. His service to left counter-histories has for a long time been incomparable, each of his books a multilingual tour de force, with bibliographic sweep and an eye for the ephemeral quotation. In Western Marxism and elsewhere, he consistently unearths rare passages from his sources, interweaving textual evidence with readings that overturn conventional wisdom. Incorporating juvenilia, discarded drafts, and lecture notes as well as major texts, his Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (1992), Heidegger and the Ideology of War (1991), Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2002), and Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) have chipped away at the Anglo-American theory industry by demonstrating its shameful, if subtle, gravitation toward the right wing of Continental philosophy. | more…
In the service of furthering public knowledge of the roots of the current horrors in Gaza and beyond, Monthly Review Press is offering you the full introduction to A Land With A People. Please circulate widely!
ALSO: MRP is offering deeply discounted copies of A Land With A People in an effort to encourage people to form study groups–as just a first step towards action. Reach out! | more…
Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker
Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.
The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and
Singh’s brilliance belies his young age and his essay “To Young Political Workers” shows a political maturity that any older revolutionary would have been proud to have written. Similar to Vladimir Lenin’s What is to be Done, he expounds on the state of the political crisis facing the Indian liberation movement and offers a new conception of the party-form that the HSRA should take. His understanding of strategy, of when to go on the offensive, when to retreat, when to go underground, and his application of military maneuvers to politics reveals his cogent sense of tactics. His criticisms of the Indian National Congress party – Nehru and Gandhi in particular – for their unwillingness to organize the factory proletariat and peasantry were both timely and necessary when written… | more…
“…what makes you shudder is when he declares: ‘Now I’m going to pull up all the trees around the property so that it looks nice.’
Yes, the gleaming, stupid façade must look clean, bare, with its brazen colors that profane the softness of the rural tones. People must say: ‘This is the new house of so-and-so, that man who is now so rich.’ It must be possible to contemplate the monument to so-and-so’s endeavors without obstruction. Trees are surplus to requirement: ‘They block the view.’ And there is not only vanity in this eagerness to strip the ground: there is hatred, hatred of trees.
Is this possible? Hatred of beings that, unmoving, with their noble limbs always open, offer us the caress of their shade without ever tiring; the silent fertility of their fruits; the multifarious, exquisite poetry that they raise up to the sky? They claim that there are harmful plants. Perhaps there are, but that should not be reason to hate them. Our hatred condemns them. Our love would perhaps transform them and redeem them….” | more…
An overarching theme in this volume maps the changing factors and forces around Uncle Sam’s role atop the global system. What are the meanings of American leadership in a world system evolving from unipolar order to one that is multipolar? | more…
Western Marxism
By Domenico Losurdo
352 pages / $32 / 978-1-68590-062-5
Excerpted from the introduction:
Premise: What is Western Marxism?
This book takes its title from a 1976 book in which an English philosopher, Marxist, and communist (Trotskyist) militant invited “Western Marxism” to finally declare its total distinctness and independence from the caricature of Marxism in the officially socialist and Marxist countries, all of which were in the East. The Soviet Union was particularly targeted. There, notwithstanding the October Revolution and the example of Lenin, Marxism was by now “a memory of the past”; Stalin and “collectivization” had put “an end to all serious theoretical work.” Nor
The closure of the Ramallah office isn’t merely an Al Jazeera or local concern — it’s a global one. It’s a pattern of slow, deliberate attempts to dismantle the free press entirely…. | more…
Recently Helena Sheehan spoke about her experiences during the Soviet period, on episode 43 of the Irish Left Archive Podcast. In this episode she discussed her life in the global left, the development of her political views, first hand accounts of political struggles and debates, as well as lessons she has for Left wing politics today. | more…
“In 2020, Blacks owned less than 3 percent of American businesses. Even this was misleading. The bulk of them were still mom-and-pop sole proprietorships, with one or two employees”…. | more…
A cautionary note: a report from Columbia Law School in 2021, eight years after Lage’s book was first published, cites Cuban statistics showing “a drop of almost 40% in exports of chemical products and related products between 2015 and 2019 … [And] medicinal and pharmaceutical products make up around 90% of the total exports of chemical products.” It seems that income derived from biotechnology exports is down. | more…
Gabriel Rockhill y Jennifer Ponce de León han escrito la Introducción a la versión inglesa de El Marxismo Occidental, titulada “El socialismo como liberación anti-colonial: lecciones contemporáneas de Losurdo”, en la que no sólo delinean las ideas-fuerza de Losurdo y el método de análisis que aplica en esta obra, sino que también ofrecen interesantes reflexiones sobre la “industria de la teoría” y el “socialismo realmente existente”…. | more…
Cabral goes so far as to ask whether in fact ‘the national liberation movement is not an imperialist initiative’ since he judges the character of the struggle as tending to bring the petit bourgeoisie to power…. | more…
