Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can be Reborn
309 pages / $32 pages / 978-1-68590-062-5
By Domenico Losurdo
Edited by Gabriel Rockhill
Reviewed by Joseph Jamison for ML Today
This is an important book by a major Marxist thinker. It’s a pity so many of Domenico Losurdo’s works have not yet been translated. Fewer than ten of his nearly fifty books are currently available in English. Monthly Review has rendered the public a service by bringing out his penultimate work, Western Marxism. According to his editors, it is the “culmination of decades of research on the history of the Marxist tradition and its internal struggles. It elucidates one of the major splits in global Marxist debates that marked Losurdo’s generation and continues to structure many contemporary controversies.”
The title of the book requires an explanation. Marxism, as everyone knows, was born in Western Europe. From the 1840s to the 1890s Marx and Engels labored in Germany, Belgium, France, and, above all, Britain to develop their revolutionary theories. In 1976 the term “Western Marxism” became widespread after Perry Anderson, a Trotskyist writer associated with New Left Review, published Considerations on Western Marxism.
Perry Anderson’s book exhibited most of the major traits of Western Marxism:
“idealism and the primacy of theory, Eurocentric social chauvinism in the sense of an attitude of patronizing cultural superiority, the dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism, politics of defeat based on historical misrepresentations, a willful dilution of Marxism with bourgeois theory and petty bourgeois theoretical practices, a celebration of marketable novelty at the expense of practical relevance, and self-promotional opportunism that perpetuates cultural imperialism and disdain for Marxism in the Global South.”[1]
Western Marxism by Losurdo is, in one sense, a rejoinder to Anderson’s work.
Accordingly, Western Marxism is not all Marxist thinking in Western countries. Rather, Western Marxism is a very specific perversion of Marxism. Professor Rockhill, the book’s editor, would prefer the term Imperial Marxism, but alas, thanks to Perry Anderson, we seem stuck with the geographic terminology.
Losurdo’s main argument is that Western Marxism is an ideological product of the main imperialist countries (US; UK; the European Union). It is part of the imperial superstructure. In these countries there is a bourgeois cultural apparatus policing political discourse and attempting to deal with a theoretical opponent — Marxism-Leninism — that cannot be defeated theoretically. Revolutionary Marxism — Marxism-Leninism — is a powerful science of liberation. In the 20th century national liberation movements and socialist revolutions succeeded when led by Marxist-Leninists. Bourgeois state managers and their ideological allies, such as the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and other top foundations have long been aware of this. Hence, they have sought to develop a pseudo-Marxism that turns Marxism into something compatible with the capitalist and imperialist status quo. Western Marxism is this pseudo-Marxism, calling for a withdrawal from action into the academy, and a shift from political and economic struggle in favor of philosophical and esthetic concerns.
What do Western Marxists believe? While they don’t agree on every detail, anti-communism is fundamental to all of them. Western Marxists oppose actually existing socialism. They assert the primacy of theory over praxis. Western Marxism is revisionist. It is severed from actual political struggle. It rejects the dialectics of nature. Its focus is on culture – the superstructure — not political economy, the base. It asserts that culture drives history, often accepting such fanciful notions that art can save us, not revolutionary class struggle. Hence it is characterized by left-wing melancholia and defeatism. Its communism is often messianic; communism is an ideal that transcends anything imperfectly socialist in the messy real world. Western Marxism celebrates rebellion but disdains unglamourous political work and realistic strategic political planning. It shows contempt for the political party form. It opposes the seizure of state power. It rejects a dialectics of socialism that often requires flexible tactics. Western Marxism is oriented to the academic world. Western Marxists, rewarded for their loyalty to the existing capitalist order, often enjoy elite positions in the academic world, occupying the top of the academic pyramid with easy access to commercial publishers and literary honors.
Western Marxism, ultimately, sides with capitalism.
One of the biggest deformities of Western Marxism is its failure to take up the anticolonial cause, a deformity that Losurdo seldom fails to cite in various Western Marxist writers. In Chapter V Revival? Or the Last Gasp of Western Marxism, he singles out, among others, Slavoj Zizek, who boasted about his active opposition to socialism in Yugoslavia in the 1980s, and who wrote about “Mao’s ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s.” Zizek now supports NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Western Marxism has been translated into graceful English but readers who wish to tackle it should have some familiarity with Marxist philosophy.
Losurdo provides us with an ideological map of opportunist Continental left-wing philosophy. The Western Marxists that he criticizes are the Frankfurt School (Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas); French theory ( Alain Badiou; Michel Foucault); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of Empire); Hannah Arendt; Slavoj Zizek; Ernst Bloch; Norberto Bobbio; Leon Trotsky and his disciples (including Perry Anderson) and others. Losurdo demonstrates the influence of Western Marxism on such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who did not wholly succumb to it.
Western Marxism is organized into six chapters ( “parts”), and the chapter headings suggest the evolution of Western Marxism that Losurdo discerns: Chapter I 1914 and 1917 the Birth of Western and Eastern Marxism; Chapter II Socialism vs Capitalism, or Anticolonialism versus Colonialism; Chapter III Western Marxism and the Anticolonial Revolution: the Meeting that Didn’t Happen; Chapter IV The Triumph and Death of Western Marxism; Chapter V Revival? Or the Last Gasp of Western Marxism; Chapter VI How Marxism in the West Can Be Reborn.
In Chapter V, for example, he concludes “Western Marxism has shown itself to be unable to understand and oppose the large-scale war that looms on the horizon. It is the death certificate of Western Marxism”. As for the rebirth of Western Marxism, Losurdo states “overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophizing rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West.”[2]
Eastern Marxism, in Losurdo’s view, was identified with the theory and practice of those who actually exercised state power, as in the USSR, Vietnam, Korea, China, Cuba, and so forth. “The Western Marxists, by contrast , were intellectuals who opposed these efforts to construct socialism, rejecting the quest for power in favor of diverse forms of critical theory, while sometimes presenting their distance from power as an epistemological advantage for discovering so called authentic Marxism.”[3]
Who Was Losurdo?
Domenico Losurdo (1941-2018) blended his academic work with open political commitments. He was a Marxist professor of philosophy and history at the University of Urbino. He joined the PCI (Communist Party of Italy) at age 19. The PCI, which had led the armed antifascist resistance in Italy, emerged from the Second World War as the second largest party in the country. He left it in 1969, taking the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split. In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and many Communist parties either dissolved or else moved to social reformist positions, he joined Partito della Rifondazione Comunista. (Party of Communist Refoundation).
Losurdo traces the origin of the bifurcation of Marxism to the First World War. In August 1914 the opportunist wing of social democracy surrendered to the war fever and supported the imperialist war. But the victory of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, with their insistence on adding the anti-colonial movements to the world revolutionary front, brought Leninist Marxism to the attention of the colonized peoples of the East: China, Vietnam, Korea and elsewhere. “Eastern” Marxism was born. In the illuminating 25-page Introduction by Jennifer Ponce de Leon and Gabriel Rockhill, “Socialism as Anticolonial Liberation: Contemporary Lessons from Losurdo,” they emphasize, “far from being strictly geographic terms Eastern and Western are used more generally to refer to two different political orientations, both of which have manifested themselves around the world.”
Losurdo’s method of argument is to buttress his assertions with many quotations, often remarkable quotations. For example, in 1924 at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International Ho Chi Minh criticized the persistent underestimation of the colonial question. “I feel that the comrades have not yet sufficiently grasped the idea that the destiny of the proletariat of the whole world in is closely tied to the destiny of the oppressed nations in the colonies.” The editors must have labored hard on the 34 pages of footnotes for all the quotations, as well as a comprehensive Index.
There is an 30-page Appendix. It is a 2007 lecture given by Losurdo never before translated, entitled “How Western Marxism Was Born and How It Died.” It was delivered at a symposium in honor of the German Marxist philosopher Hans Heinz Holz.
In 1845 Marx wrote in his famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Western Marxism by Domenico Losurdo continues the struggle to defeat philosophers who only wish to interpret the world.
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