Western Marxism
By Domenico Losurdo
Edited by Gabriel Rockhill
352 pages / $32 / 978-1-68590-062-5
Reviewed by Brendan Duncan-Shah for Red Ant
The theoretical coordinates of Marxism in the “West” are changing—and they should. The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism in English will no doubt contribute to a process that is already underway—a process of reorientation and renewal behoved by the critical appraisal of the dominant Marxist formations within the imperialist countries, in particular: of Frankfurt School critical theory, including its two doyens, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; of Perry Anderson’s late-pessimistic New Left; of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Deleuzo-Marxism; and of Slavoj Zizek’s borromean knot of Lacan, Hegel and Marx.
These thinkers, Losurdo argues in Western Marxism, constitute not so much a distinct tradition of Marxism, with defined disciplinary norms and boundaries, central points of philosophical reference, and a shared outlook on questions of theory and politics. Rather, they are expressions of a dynamic or tendency of Marxist thought and practice within the imperialist countries—one marked by a messianic or utopian conception of social progress; by an erasure or, at times, disavowal of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the great many of humanity in the Global South; by a correlate revolutionary defeatism and withdrawal from practice and organisation; and by a ‘distance from power’ through which is secured ‘the privileged and exclusive right to rediscover an “authentic” Marxism.’[1]
To reply to Losurdo’s challenge with the claim that these thinkers have something to contribute to Marxism is to miss the thrust of the argument: of course they do. Losurdo himself is quick to credit, for example, the Frankfurt School’s ‘brilliant and acute analyses of the social, political, and moral problems peculiar to capitalist society.’[2] The question is rather this: if these thinkers remain the central and indeed sole frame of reference for professed Marxists in the imperialist countries, then what state is communism, the “real movement that abolishes the present state of things,” left in? Does communism in the Global North possess a theoretical framework that can properly appreciate the revolutionary experience of the 20th century? One that can supply determinate answers to the questions what is to be done? and how can we do it? Can the constellation of Western Marxism function as ‘a guide-line for all concrete action’ in our current conjuncture, or does it function, otherwise, as a paralytic?[3]
To get a minimal sense of the stakes of these problems, we can cite the experience of the consummate Leninist Alan Shandro[4] within the milieu of the world’s foremost Western Marxist:
Around 2001–02, Slavoj Žižek invited me to a conference that he organized on Lenin. I went, and felt like a fish out of water. I remember talking with one of Žižek’s associates who supposed that the working class was nothing. Nonetheless, Žižek is supposed to be a representative of Marxism. Much later, it struck me that a number of my students understood Marxism to be the Frankfurt School. I.e., Marxism is now a recognition that the working class is not revolutionary and a matter of grappling with what to do now.[5]
Are Shandro’s students really to be blamed when one can read, in a passage cited by Losurdo, Adorno’s declaration in Negative Dialectics to the effect that ‘the transformation of the world [has] failed’?[6] Elsewhere we find the same thinker announce perhaps too forthrightly that ‘we do not live in a revolutionary situation’ and that ‘any appeal to form a left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda.’[7] These latter statements, uttered by one for whom ‘Praxis [is] delayed for the foreseeable future,’[8] were made in 1956—at the outbreak of the Cuban revolution, the early victories of the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle, the height of the so-called Malayan Emergency, five years after the communist-led Telangana rebellion in India, two years after the conclusion of the decade long Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, and during the period in which the Communist Party of Indonesia was consolidating a base that would grow to 25 million persons in 1965, ‘the biggest communist party in the world outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.’[9] Situated in this period, at a time when nearly the whole of South-East Asia was on the cusp of going over to communism, Adorno’s claim concerning the lapse of practice can only be rendered plausible by the theoretical, and not merely practical, foreclosure of real struggle.
The question, then, is this: what move licenses this foreclosure, effected in various ways by the luminaries of Western Marxism? Losurdo provides a book length answer—but foremost among his answers is Western Marxism’s negation of the ‘principal question of the twentieth century’: the world anti-colonial struggle inaugurated by the October Revolution.[10] As Losurdo explains:
[T]he revolutionary cycle that began in October 1917 ended with two gigantic national wars, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union and the War of National Resistance against Japanese imperialism fought by China. Not only was a barbaric colonialist and pro-slavery counter-revolution [i.e. the Third Reich] defeated, but the world anti-colonialist revolution was born, which marked the twentieth century and would put an end to a world system that had lasted for more than a century under the banner of the most illiberal and oppressive forces.[11]
This “red star over the third world,” as it has been called by Vijay Prashad,[12] was given expression by Ho Chi Minh in 1967, who wrote that ‘Like the shining sun, the October Revolution illuminated the five continents, and awakened millions and millions of oppressed and exploited people. In human history, there had never been a revolution with such great and profound significance.’[13] But how was this ‘movement of national liberation, which ha[d] become a surging wave’ by 1957—and which constituted the most militant expression of global class struggle in the twentieth century—represented theoretically by Western Marxism?[14] Consider again Adorno, who in 1959 wrote that ‘today the fascist wish-image unquestionably blends with the nationalism of the so-called underdeveloped countries’ such that ‘there exists a convergence of fascist and communist nationalism.’[15] Is it unfair to read barely concealed chauvinism when one sees, overleaf, the claim that nationalism is ‘the heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes’?[16] Or consider Hardt and Negri’s polemic against what they disparagingly refer to as ‘national “liberation”’ in Empire, which concludes by citing approvingly the revolting proposition of Jean Genet that ‘The day when the Palestinians are institutionalised, I will no longer be at their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like the other nations, I will no longer be there.’[17] This, as Losurdo says, ‘means that sympathy for the Vietnamese, the Palestinians, or other peoples can only be felt as long as they are oppressed and humiliated; a liberation struggle is supported only to the extent that it is unsuccessful!’[18] What clearer example can there be of the refusal of Western Marxists ‘to contaminate themselves with constituted power!’[19] But what better example can there be, also, of a failure of theory to live up to the maxim that ‘Marxism learns … from mass practice.’[20]
Contrast the passages from those Western Marxists cited above to any of Lenin’s writings on the national question, which affirmed the unrestricted right of oppressed nations to self-determination, and which gave occasion to Ho Chi Minh to exclaim in his empty room ‘as if addressing large crowds: “Dead martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!”’[21] Or compare Mao’s dictum, cited by Losurdo, that ‘in the final analysis, a national struggle is a question of class struggle’—a thesis which, as Losurdo has argued elsewhere, can be found in Marx himself.[22] This is not to say anything of the work of Marxists who are not themselves leaders of great anti-colonial revolutions, but who comport their theory and practice to this “principal question” nonetheless. In the work of the Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, for example, one finds a theory according to which ‘the struggle for social liberation from class exploitation is indissolubly linked to the national liberation struggle of the people of Asia and Africa.’[23] Compared to the formations of Marxism found in the Global South, then, the central operation of Western Marxism is to insert a theoretical distance between—not only itself and power—but also the most advanced dynamics of mass practice in general.
It is here that the upshot of Losurdo’s project can be found. It is not an exercise in digging up the dead only to bury them again. Rather, by situating Western Marxism in the context of class struggles globally, in terms of the balance and dynamics of class forces the world over, Losurdo’s project makes possible an appraisal of Western Marxism’s contribution to class struggles historically, and an evaluation of the possibilities it offers for advancing them in our current conjuncture. The strength of Losurdo’s book lies in its demonstration that Western Marxism is lacking in both of these respects. On the one hand, Western Marxism renders unintelligible the theme that dominated class struggle in the twentieth century: the communist-led movements for national liberation. On the other hand (as a consequence of the first) it is incapable, on the strength of its own resources, of mounting an analysis of our determinate historical situation today—for the relations of economic domination that obtained between the Global North and the Global South in the twentieth century obtain equally today, in transfigured form.[24] These relations, which, to use Lenin’s formulation, divide the world ‘into a large number of oppressed nations, and an insignificant number of oppressor nations’, still constitute the central structuring feature of the world capitalist system, and in fact make themselves felt in every ‘sphere of present-day social life’.[25] A communism which receives its sole orientation from Western Marxism—that is, not in addition to or supplementary to the great anti-colonial revolutionaries and thinkers of the twentieth century, but to their exclusion—is incapable of grasping this fact, and is therefore incapable of grasping the ‘total process’ of the current capitalist system.[26]
Guided solely by the Western Marxist architectonic, a ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ towards the actuality of class struggles continues to be the normal way of proceeding for some professed Marxists in the imperialist countries.[27] Consider, for example, the eminent Marxist Journal Crisis and Critique, which, in its 2023 issue devoted entirely to the concept of class, contained, in its seventeen contributions, a total of two citations to thinkers from the Global South.[28]
In this dire landscape, then, what are the prospects for the reconstruction of Western Marxism? This question constitutes the final chapter of Losurdo’s book, which begins by asking: ‘Can Marxism revive in the West, and under what conditions?’[29] But as Hegel says in the Science of Logic: although it is hard enough to build a new city in a devastated land, even greater is the difficulty ‘when the task is to give a new layout to an ancient and solidly constructed city, with established rights of ownership and domicile.’ For ‘one must also decide, among other things, to not make use of much otherwise valued stock.’[30] Minimally, however, it is clear that, as Losurdo says,
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.[31]
As mentioned at the beginning of this review, this process of reconnection has already begun. Losurdo’s book, by drawing attention to the lines of demarcation between Western Marxism and those revolutionaries from the Global South, itself functions in part as an effective counterhistory of twentieth century anticolonial Marxism—especially with regard to the revolutionary leaders Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, whose influence can be discerned on nearly every page of the book. But we can also look towards the Tricontinental Institute’s attempt to reconstruct a lineage of “National Liberation Marxism,” or towards Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s attempt to reclaim the tradition of “Red Africa.”[32] A reconstituted Western Marxism might—and in fact must—also take influence from the great Marxist theoreticians of the Global South: to name a few, from Peru José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), from India D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), from Guinnea-Bissau and Cape Verde Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) from Egypt Samir Amin (1931-2018), from Brazil Ruy Mauro Marini (1931-1997) and Heleith Saffioti (1934-2010), from Lebanon Mahdi Amel (1936-1987), and from Guyana Walter Rodney (1942-1980).
It goes without saying that the communist-led national liberation movements themselves must be studied, and their lessons internalised and transformed into a Marxist culture and Marxist vernacular in the same way as the Russian Revolution has. And that, moreover, connections must be built with existing socialist formations in the Global South. It is necessary, also, to recenter those historical moments in which the working classes of the imperialist countries themselves contributed to national liberation struggles – whose victories so often provided their own conditions of emergence.[33] For contributing to this process of reorientation, and for diverting anglophone Marxism away from an ‘abstract internationalism’ and towards the actuality of class struggle in the twentieth century, the publication of Losurdo’s book is to be welcomed.[34]
See Red Ant for this review
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