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The shifting theoretical coordinates of “Western” Marxism (Western Marxism reviewed in ‘Red Ant’)

“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…

Like an electric shock (Losurdo’s final book reviewed in ‘Jacobin’)

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…

“Rise, recognize your strength” (The Political Writings of Bhagat Singh reviewed in ‘Orinoco Tribune’)

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…

New! WESTERN MARXISM, By Domenico Losurdo (EXCERPTS)

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

Science and the knowledge economy bolster Cuba’s socialist revolution (The Knowledge Economy and Socialism reviewed by CP-Maine)

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…

La primera versión en inglés del libro de este gran pensador italiano (Western Marxism reviewed in ‘Canarias Semanal’)

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…

“Eastern” light on Western Marxism? (Losurdo’s work reviewed by ‘New Left Review’)

Losurdo’s key move is to contrast ‘Western Marxism’ systematically with an ‘Eastern Marxism’, presented as its productive antithesis. The Western variant, Losurdo agrees with other accounts, was born out of a reaction against the slaughter of the First World War, and the magnetism of the revolution in Russia. The outlook of its earliest thinkers—Bloch, Lukács, Benjamin—was, however, from the outset impregnated with a set of themes that went back to the anarchism of Bakunin’s time: notably a hostility to science, associated with capitalism, and to the state of any kind, associated with tyranny. To these it added a messianic streak of eschatological expectation, inherited from a judeo-christian past, that looked forward to salvation for humanity in communism, conceived as the proximate coming of a classless society in which money and the state would disappear. Such utopian hopes vested in a beleaguered USSR were bound to be disappointed…. | more…

Self-inflicted blows (Ron Carey and the Teamsters reviewed for the New York Labor History Association)

As Reiman documents, the union’s reform faction then faced continuing resistance from well entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. In 1996, the still-powerful local officialdom, which backed two competing ​“Old Guard” candidates five years earlier, bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge to Carey. It was fronted by a local union lawyer with the most famous last name in Teamsterdom…. | more…

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