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 did “People’s China” come out much better. To see it as an “alternative model” meant confirming “the political heterogeneity of Western Marxism.” The condemnation included the Western Communist parties, characterized by their “absolute loyalty to Soviet positions” and, therefore, were also de facto Eastern or Easternizing.1
The indictment did not spare even the party of Gramsci and Togliatti, which had constantly wedded affirmation of the universal value of the October Revolution with emphasis on the profound political and cultural differences between the East and the West, and so with theorizing the necessity of developing a national path to socialism, one adequate to the needs of countries in the West. The English philosopher was implacable: “No intellectual (or worker) within a mass communist party of this period, not integrated into its leadership, could make the smallest independent pronouncement on major political issues.”2 And so: “The figure of Gramsci was converted into the official ideological icon of the Party, invoked on every public occasion, while his actual writings were manipulated or neglected.”3 How the obtuse guardians of an arid cultural desert succeeded in attracting en masse fierce and sophisticated intellectuals, exercised an extraordinary influence and hegemony over Italian culture, and enjoyed great international prestige remains a mystery.
Perry Anderson was not the first to note the divergence between Western and Eastern Marxism. Writing in the early years of the Cold War, an eminent French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, observed:
The revolutionary politics which, in the perspective of 1917, was historically to take the place of “liberal” politics—occupied with difficult organizational problems, with defense, and with improvements—has become more and more a politics for new countries, the means for semi-colonial countries (or for civilizations long since paralyzed) to change to modern modes of production. The immense apparatus that it constructed, with its disciplines and its privileges, at the moment that it shows itself to be efficacious for building an industry or for putting a new proletariat to work, evacuates the terrain of the proletariat as the ruling class and forfeits the mystery of civilization which, according to Marx, the Western proletariat carried.4
The previous year, at Dien Bien Phu, the powerful army of colonial- ist France was soundly defeated by the Vietnamese movement and the people’s army led by the Communist Party. Everywhere in Asia, echoes rang of the strategic victory of anticolonialism that had brought about the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Yes, communism was revealed as the leading force of the anticolonial revolution and, once in power, of the accelerated development that the “semi-colonial economies” urgently needed. These were undeniable results and successes, but, asked the French philosopher, were they part of the communism that the “Western proletariat” had the historic mission of building, at least in the eyes of Marx and of “Western Marxism”?5
Here we encounter the expression “Western Marxism” for the first time. It was not, however, contrasted positively to the Eastern kind. If anything, only in the context of a complex critique of Marx and communism could “Western” Marxism constitute the principal object. Once the initial hopes for a radically new society and for the “withering away of the state apparatus” vanished, one conclusion emerged: “Today’s communism verges on progressivism,” and progressivism cannot ignore the concrete conditions of the country or the area in which political action takes place.6 Done once and for all with the messianic prospect of the total regeneration of humanity, it was necessary to go on a case-by-case basis: “Where there is a choice between famine and the communist apparatus, the decision (in favor of the latter) goes without saying,” and probably for the French philosopher the decision went without saying when it was between colonial subjection and anticolonial revolution (especially led by the communists). The West, however, presented a very different picture: Was the communist revolution really necessary and beneficial, and what would be its concrete results?7
This stance had many weaknesses. To better refute it, the French philosopher accentuated the messianic tendency in Marx and Engels. He did not consider that they speak of “the withering away of the state” and, sometimes, of the “withering away of the state in a strictly political sense”; only the former formulation can be accused of messianism (and of anarchism).8 Second, Merleau-Ponty avoided interrogating the possible relationship between the end of colonialism in all its forms and the building of a post-capitalist society. Third, and above all, can we consider the anticolonial struggle as an exclusive problem of the East? To support the struggles against colonial and neocolonial sub-ordination, absolving those responsible for such policies would be inadmissible. And not only for ethical reasons. The two world wars had demonstrated that colonial expansionism flowed through ruinous inter-imperialist rivalries to have a global impact; the flames ignited a few years earlier by Hitler in his attempt to build the German colonial empire in Eastern Europe had ended by burning down the West as well, and Germany itself.
Having made this criticism, the French philosopher deserves credit for being the first to have identified the objective sociopolitical reasons that led to the bifurcation between the two Marxisms. In the East, and in practically all of the countries where communists had taken power, the principal problem of political leadership was not the “withering away of the state apparatus” but how to avoid the danger of colonial or neocolonial subjection and how, therefore, to make up for backwardness in relation to the more industrially advanced countries.
Merleau-Ponty was far from disavowing Eastern Marxism in the name of the Western version. If we want to find a precedent for Perry Anderson’s attitude, we must search elsewhere. Before the British and the French philosophers, Max Horkheimer, in 1942, called attention to the turn that had occurred in the land of the October Revolution: the Soviet Communists had abandoned “the abolition of the state” to concentrate on the problem of accelerated development of the “industrially backward fatherland.” It was a fitting observation, unfortunately, formulated as a contemptuous condemnation. The Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow, and to regret or be indignant over the fact that the Soviet leaders were not worrying about how to realize the ideal of the withering away was grotesque (Hitler, in his way, would have shared such regret and indignation!). The German philosopher did not realize that the behavior he reproached had enabled the Soviet Union to escape from the colonialist subjection and slavery that the Third Reich sought to impose on it. The desperate struggle waged in the East to resist a colonial war of decimation and enslavement seemed irrelevant to a philosopher who appreciated not Marx’s program of the revolutionary transformation of what exists so much as the pursuit of a remote future ideal of a society free of contradictions and conflict, and therefore without the need for a state apparatus.9
More than a quarter of a century later, Horkheimer returned to the theme of the abolition of the state, albeit referring this time not to the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist Party but rather to Schopenhauer. On the one hand, he paid homage to Marx—“the time has come to finally make the Marxian doctrine, in the West, one of the principal materials of teaching”; on the other, he expressed his annoyance with the idea that “in many Eastern countries [Marxism] serves as a useful ideology for making up the advantage gained by the West in industrial production.”10 The “Marxian doctrine” celebrated here bore no relation to North Vietnam’s development of its produc- tive forces, occupied as it was with defending itself against a barbaric aggression that was ready to use chemical weapons. But nevertheless, Horkheimer indulged and even supported it. As in 1942, so it was in 1968; utopia looked with disdain at the dramatic struggles in the East that were not a subjective choice but dictated by an objective situation. But without recourse to this expression, Western Marxism had already turned its back on that of the East.
We must ask: When did the bifurcation between the two Marxisms begin? With the rise of Stalin’s autocracy, as Anderson maintains? And if, instead, we find it was already present the day after the turning point of 1917? And if the first cracks had already emerged when unity appeared as firm as ever, cemented by the chorus of indignation over the foul butchery of the First World War and the capitalist-imperialist system accused of provoking it? And if the cracks and the subsequent alienation, beyond those of different objective conditions and cultural traditions, are because of the theoretical and political limits from the start of Western Marxism, that most sophisticated version, battle-tested on the academic plane?
It was a long road to the manifesto in which Anderson proclaimed the excellence of Western Marxism, finally liberated from the suffocating embrace of Eastern Marxism. A bright new life seemed to be on the horizon for the former; in fact, its premise was suicidal. We are dealing with important but largely ignored political and philosophical chapters of history that my book seeks to reconstruct, with the aim also of interrogating the prospects for a rebirth, on new bases, of Western Marxism.
Excerpted from Part VI: How Marxism in the West can be Reborn
Restoring the relationship with the world anticolonial revolution
Transcending the unfortunate temporal and spatial amputation of Marxism will not be possible if the Marxists in the West do not restore their relationship with the world anticolonial revolution, which is mostly led by communist parties and which was the principal question of the twentieth century and continues to play an essential role in the century we have entered for some years now. To restore this relationship means fully reintroducing the colonial question to the historical account of the twentieth century and twentieth-century Marxism. When Colletti broke definitively with Marxism, he amused himself by noting that he had reached a conclusion not unlike where Althusser ended up.23 Even for the latter, failure was the legacy of the communist movement. The French philosopher bitterly observed that nowhere did the process of the “withering away of the revolutionary State” promised by the Bolsheviks take place. Indeed, added the triumphant Italian philosopher, the communists were never able in any way to solve the problem of limitations on power, contrary to what happened in the liberal West.
It is an account that can be more usefully contrasted with one by a philosopher who is not a follower of Marxism or communism but a sharp critic, even an attentive and respectful one, of both movements. As to the representation of the Cold War as a conflict between the Free World on one side and despotism and totalitarianism on the other, he objected, “Western liberalism rests upon the forced labor of the colonies and twenty wars.”24 It lacks credibility, and “any apology for democratic regimes which is silent about their violent intervention in the rest of the world, or juggles the records to make it appear a special case . . . can only serve to mask the problem of capitalism.”25 And so, “the right to defend the values of liberty and conscience is ours only if we are sure in doing so that we do not serve the interests of imperialism or become associated with its mystifications.”26
To conclude with this first point: if, in our accounts of twentieth- century history, we avoid myopia and Eurocentric arrogance, we must recognize the essential contribution made by communism to the over- throw of the world colonialist-slavery system. The merciless white supremacy that characterized the United States in the early years of the twentieth century was denounced by a few courageous people as “an all-absorbing autocracy of race.”27 This regime, which reminds us of the Third Reich, existed worldwide and constituted the principal target of the movement born of the October Revolution.
Even if it has assumed new forms with respect to the past, the struggle between anticolonialism and colonialism and neocolonialism has not ceased. It is not by accident that, following its triumph in the Cold War, the West celebrated it as not only a defeat inflicted on communism but also on Third Worldism and as the premise for its coveted return of colonialism and even imperialism. That enthusiasm and euphoria were indeed of brief duration. But this has not led to any real ideological and political rethinking. Indeed, the deprecations and cries of alarm for the sundown of the West, or for its relative weakening and weakening of its leading country, remind us of the analogous phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century, when extraordinarily popular authors on both sides of the Atlantic denounced the mortal peril of the “rising tide of people of color” that loomed over “world white supremacy.”
Certainly, in our own time, the language has changed. There is no longer a direct reference to races and racial hierarchies. This change is a sign of the success of the anticolonial revolution in the twentieth century. On another note, however, the fresh homages to colonialism, and even to imperialism, and the persistent celebration of the West (no longer of the white race) as the exclusive site of authentic civilization and of the highest moral values are signs that the anticolonial revolution has not yet reached its conclusion. And so, Marxists in the West must restore the relationship with the world anticolonial revolution. It is right to expect that they will look with sympathy not only at a people like the Palestinians, who are still forced to struggle against a classic kind of colonialism, but also at countries that have behind them an anticolonialist revolution and that are now seeking with difficulty their own way, being cautious in particular to not fall into a semi-colonial condition of economic and technological dependence.
It is not a question of uncritically accepting the positions taken by these countries. It is enough to take into account once more the viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty: “an aggressive liberalism exists that is a dogma and an ideology of war. It can be recognized by its love of the empyrean of principles, its failure to mention the geographical and historical circumstances to which it owes its birth, and its abstract judgments of political systems without regard for the specific conditions under which they develop.”28 If the French philosopher must be considered indulgent toward Western Marxism, we can reflect on some of Machiavelli’s considerations regarding the grave difficulties that inevitably block the path of those building “new orders.”29 We can even turn to a classic figure of liberalism (who is one of the Founding Fathers of the United States). In Alexander Hamilton, we read that, in a situation of geographic insecurity, it is not possible to govern by law and through the limitation of power, and that faced with “external attack” and “internal convulsions,” even a liberal country has recourse to power “without limitation” and without “constitutional shackles.”30
Third, restoring the relationship with the world anticolonial revolution means taking into account that it is not a matter of respect for the sacred history of political and social emancipation so much as the concrete form assumed by that history in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. It has been recognized, even by acclaimed scholars in Western countries, that, thanks to the prodigious economic and technological development of China, defined as the most important event of the last five hundred years, the Columbian era has come to an end; the era during which, in the words of Adam Smith, “the superiority of forces resulted so greatly to the benefit of the Europeans, that they could commit all sorts of injustice” to the detriment of other peoples, the era which Hitler, the most fanatical champion of white and Western supremacy, tried by every means to perpetuate.
The anticolonial revolution and the destruction of the world colonialist-slavery system, which must still be brought to an end, put into a new and unexpected framework the problem of the construction of a post-capitalist society. To consider extraneous to the Marxist project of political and social emancipation the history that developed from the October Revolution and that saw at its epicenter the East means assuming the attitude Marx mocked from his youth. It is from “real struggles,” he observed, that revolutionary “criticism” starts: “then we shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle: ‘Here is the truth, bow down before it!’ We develop new principles for the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the world: ‘Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of struggle at you.’ We only show the world what it is fighting for.”31 This approach toward every doctrinaire attitude is the precondition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West.
Watch editor Gabriel Rockhill’s excellent analysis of Losurdo’s last book, below, and get your copy of Western Marxism by clicking on the book cover.
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