I’ve seen how American political leaders toy with the idea of change, how they dress up their campaigns with grand ideas about peace and justice. Yet each president brushes off our reality. Barack Obama promised hope and “change we could believe in,” yet we got more bombs. Joe Biden offered a different approach, pledging unyielding support for Israel, leaving us to live through even more horror. Vice President Kamala Harris’ niceties included no concrete promises to protect Palestinians, but she did pledge to continue financial support for Israel. And Trump’s bluntness, as he promises to come back swinging, reminds us not to hold out hope for change. | more…
It is not a hard-headed attitude which drives Western Marxists’ suspicion of intellectual and political currents which they dismiss with the label of “Third Worldism”, but rather an inability to suspend a race-based emotional solidarity which has no adequate normative grounding. The appeal to emotional solidarity implies that a proper understanding of the Eurocentric character of Western Marxism and the positions that Western Marxist intellectuals have taken on the pivotal events of the twentieth century can only be understood in terms of a detailed sociology of knowledge… | more…
“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.” – Domenico Losurdo | more…
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…
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…
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
Edited by Gabriel Rockhill
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
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…