Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn
by Domenico Losurdo
edited by Gabriel Rockhill
352 pages / $32 / 978-1-68590-062-5
Reviewed by Vernon Shaw
Thought-provoking and polemical as ever, the recent publication of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, finally provides English readers with access to the prolific Italian philosopher and militant’s penultimate book. Composed just a few years prior to his untimely passing, this book sees Losurdo chart a course through both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ lineages of Marxism with the unparalleled erudition and vast intellectual scope that can only come from a lifetime of intense study cutting across disciplines and geographies. This truly global perspective and the typically wide breadth of Losurdo’s sources foreshadows an important distinction which arises from his East-West taxonomy. As Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León emphasize in their worthwhile introduction to this new translation, ‘[f]ar 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’ (12; emphasis added). For these reasons, Western Marxism will prove to be a useful compass, if not a totally comprehensive guide, to scholars of philosophy, history and political theory, as well as anti-imperialist activists and organizers worldwide.
In many ways, Western Marxism is positioned as a foil to Perry Anderson’s influential Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), but Losurdo takes a decidedly different approach from the Trotskyist philosopher by tracing the bifurcation in Marxism all the way back to the crisis of 1914, the eve of what he refers to as the ‘Second Thirty Years’ War’, and the epoch-making event that was the October Revolution of 1917 (91). During these tumultuous years, the Second International unraveled over key differences in theory and strategy concerning antagonisms between strategies of reform versus revolution, nationalism versus internationalism, and imperialism versus anti-imperialism. The famous Zimmerwald Conference of 1915 saw those on the left who sided with Lenin against the war and for the creation of new ‘Third International’ evolve into the nascent core of ‘Eastern’ Marxism; while those on right and in the center – including Leon Trotsky – who took more moderate positions on imperialism and revolution would go on to play similarly key roles in the formation of ‘Western’ Marxism. Losurdo’s narration of this fraternal twin birth evinces a number of leitmotifs of Western Marxism that arise vis-à-vis its privileged position in the inter-national political economic hierarchy. Principally, these include: a political ‘messianism’ derived from Judeo-Christian theology which readily manifests in utopianism, anarchism – traits that Rockhill and de León aptly describe as ‘magical thinking’ – and the subsequent foreclosure of actually existing socialist projects and struggles for national liberation that seek to wield state power; a libertarian tendency toward populism and ‘rebellionism’ characterized by an opportunistic support for insurgency and revolt for their own sake; a fetishistic and accommodating attitude toward capitalism and colonialism which often leads to the minimization or outright denial of imperialism and its inherent role in capitalism; an inclination toward Eurocentric social chauvinism and class collaborationism, particularly in the white supremacist Euroamerican settler-colonies; and an idealistic rejection of science, technology, economic development and the idea of modernity tout court on the grounds that these are inherently tainted by capital (23).
Once acquainted with these tendencies, some might be tempted to do away with the moniker ‘Western’ Marxism altogether, since the aforementioned traits elucidated by Losurdo obviously rear their ugly heads all over the world. Similarly, Losurdo’s own position as a communist philosopher born and educated in the Western imperial core at first seemingly obscures the division he is trying to demonstrate. However, these shortsighted critiques risk missing the proverbial forest for the trees insofar as Losurdo’s crucial distinction, albeit imprecise in some ways, points to the dialectic of uneven and combined development – perhaps better characterized as the dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism – engendered and perpetuated by the monopolistic tendencies of capital. Historically, the material unfolding of this dialectical process has positioned the West and its preeminent vassals on the interior of capitalism’s fortified perimeter, the likes of which has gone largely unchanged in the last five centuries with only a few notable additions and challengers. Meanwhile, the majority of the world continues to be subjected to imperialist domination and super-exploitation as their collective wealth is drained into the over-developed capitalist core. This geopolitical economic reality underlying the ‘great divergence’ between East and West – as well as between the Global North and the Global South – provides the structural basis of Losurdo’s trenchant historical materialist critique over and against any of the various bourgeois-inflected cultural essentialist, psycho-pathological and/or deterministic conceptions of history.
Bearing this in mind, Losurdo’s treatment of so-called Western Marxism takes us through multiple phases of its moribund development and sees him deal with expected thinkers such as Bloch, Adorno, Horkheimer and Althusser alongside unabashedly anti-Marxist and anti-communist ones like Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, whose work is decidedly downstream of Marxism even as it often resorts to pre-Marxist understandings of the world. These figures are then juxtaposed with anti-imperialist Marxist revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao, Hồ and Che, as well as ideologically conservative anti-colonial nationalists like Gandhi and Sun Yat-sen who, despite their many personal and political shortcomings, stood firmly against the foreign domination of their lands and peoples by fascist and liberal imperialists alike. Needless to say, the same generous conclusions cannot be reached when adjudicating the legacy of Western Marxism and its ideologues. Indeed, Losurdo documents with ample evidence that the fruits of this distorted tradition oftentimes bear more than a passing resemblance to the fascistic ideologies of openly imperialist ethno-nationalists like Winston Churchill, Lathrop Stoddard and Oswald Spengler – not to mention the reactionary philosophy of Burke, Nietzsche and Heidegger, which continues to dominate in Western political-philosophical discourse.
Parts I and II of the book retrace the aforementioned schism between Eastern and Western Marxism as it developed into the life-or-death struggles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on one side of the Eurasian landmass and the combined forces of anti-imperialist China against the Empire of Japan on the other. Ultimately, Losurdo proclaims ‘the historical chapter that began with the October Revolution saw the emergence of socialist countries grappling with aggression or the threat of aggression and with “an epoch of Napoleonic Wars” imposed by imperialist powers’ which forced the national and colonial questions to the forefront, ahead of any idealized “pure” struggle for socialism against capitalism sans imperialism (82). From this point on, the international communist movement was cleaved in two and principled support for these anti-imperialist struggles buttressing the construction of socialism became the key indicator of one’s distance from Western Marxism.
Part III extends this line of critique from ‘the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union and the War of National Resistance against Japanese imperialism fought by China’ through the following decades during which Marxism in the West collectively fumbled its potential encounter with the world anticolonial revolution (83). In these sections, Losurdo conducts what can euphemistically be described as a rigorous intellectual drive-by on some of Western Marxism’s most influential figures, including the aforementioned theoreticians of the Frankfurt school and their affiliates, the philosophical leaders of the Italian workerist movement and the eclectic strains of French Marxism represented by Sartre and Althusser. For Losurdo, all of the thinkers under scrutiny in these pages can be characterized as suffering from the same kind of ‘idealistic’ and ‘Eurocentric regression’ in relation to their anti-imperialist progenitors and contemporaries (105).
Losurdo’s handling of Arendt and Foucault in Part V is more focused but no more congenial. Arendt in particular is criticized at length for the intellectual sleight of hand attempted in her well known work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, through which she lent a polished philosophical veneer to the historically revisionist horseshoe-like equivalencies between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union being concocted by liberal reactionaries during the not-so Cold War. Likewise, Foucault is indicted for his participation in the construction of this East-West rift through his willful erasure of the colonial subject and his ‘esoteric history of racism’ which idiosyncratically attempts to articulate the class struggle in the Soviet Union as a form of ‘state racism’, thereby posing his own false equivalencies between the class struggle and the struggle for racial emancipation on extremely dubious grounds (166). By the time the Western Marxist camp received these theories with open arms, its diagnosis had become ‘terminal’ (160). The final section of Part V on Hardt and Negri’s infamous Empire (2000) and the whole of Part VI reflect on the state of this degraded imperialist Marxism peddled by figures like Žižek, Badiou and Harvey, whose shared disdain for anti-imperialist movements and anything resembling actually existing socialism is immediately palpable; as is their mutual confusion regarding fundamental Marxist conceptions of historical materialism and the political economy of capitalist imperialism. Harvey’s specious focus on ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ is just one expression of this befuddlement and Western Marxism’s inability to adequately grasp the primary contradiction gripping the world today (193).
Upon reading critiques such as these, radical liberal and even many self-proclaimed Marxist critics might find themselves eager to write Losurdo off on account of his bombastic style and political militancy. Others might take issue with the circumscribed sketch of Western Marxism that he offers, but members of the Western ‘Left’ can only ignore his analysis at our own peril. It is true that what Losurdo leaves us is not an encyclopedia nor a comforting panacea. Instead, like Virgil leading Dante through the inferno, he offers to help light the way as our guide through this capitalist imperialist hellscape. Like Virgil, however, Losurdo cannot see this journey through for us. Any chance at the ‘rebirth’ of Marxism in the West lies in its delinking from imperialism, the restoration of its long severed relationship with the world anticolonial revolution, and the profound overcoming of its deep-seated ‘doctrinaire attitudes’ (234). This is the path forward that Losurdo illuminates for us in Western Marxism.
Read this review at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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