Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn
by Domenico Losurdo
with Gabriel Rockhill
352 pages / $32 / 978-1-68590-062-5
Reviewed by Mat Callahan for Socialism and Democracy
Western Marxism makes a vital contribution to a much needed debate. It poses the question: “Why did Marxism, after being extraordinarily successful and even the koine (common language) of the 1960s and 1970s, fall into such a deep crisis in the West?” To young people this may seem like ancient history, but the question must be asked, both to provide context for the emergence of Western Marxism as a particular phenomenon and to make a comparison between a high point of revolutionary struggle worldwide and the current state of affairs. For it did seem, in 1968, that not only revolution but socialist revolution was on the ascendant and capitalism/imperialism was in terminal decline. The debate this book is calling for and contributing to concerns what happened in the aftermath of that great revolutionary upheaval, including the causes and effects of the collapse of the the Soviet Union, but more specifically, “the internal weaknesses that Marxism exhibited in the West even in the years when its hegemony seemed unchallenged” (235).
The Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de Leon provides biographical information necessary to understanding Domenico Losurdo’s perspective and clearly presents what is at stake: “Losurdo’s analysis … seeks to bring to the fore the objective social forces that have produced Western Marxism as a remarkably consistent ideology in imperialist countries (as well as in class strata in the periph- ery that aspire to imperialist rewards). At the same time, it eschews mechanical explanations or reductivisms in favor of a complex, nuanced account of the dialectical play of forces between subjects and objective reality” (19–20). They conclude with a stirring call: “In a world facing intensifying capitalist degradation and imperialist barbarism, with the increasing threats of nuclear apocalypse and the thor- oughgoing destruction of the biosphere, it forces us to reply to the same straightforward question posed by Lenin: which side are you on, that of the imperialists and their well-paid ideological lackeys, or that of the people in their struggle for liberation and a sustainable world?” (33–34).
Losurdo follows with his Premise making clear that the term “Western Marxism” came to prominence with the publication of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism in 1976. Losurdo points out that the French philosopher Marcel Merleau-Ponty actually coined the term some years prior (1955) without, however, suggesting that the Eastern variety was in any way inferior to its Western counter- part. Anderson’s was at once a critique of Western Marxism-offering Trotskyism as its corrective-and a disparaging of the theoretical backwardness of Eastern Marxism seen as the offspring of Stalinism.
This resulted in an academic brouhaha which amplified the very current Anderson was ostensibly criticizing but was in practice embodying. Indeed, Anderson gave the clearest articulation of Western Marxism one could ask for: “The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corrup- tion inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period” (16).
Anderson’s reader is asked to accept a statement which is patently false. Socialism did spread outside Russia. It spread to Eastern Europe, to China, to Korea, to Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, did it not? So what does this tell us about Western Marxism as it describes itself, let alone how it is interrogated by Losurdo? Yet this is only the first of a multi-layered inquiry. Peeling back the layer which sedimented in the wake of the tumultuous 1960s, Losurdo finds the basis for the geographic designation: Western/Eastern in the period leading up to World War I and the intense struggle in the Second International waged by Lenin against Kautsky and “social chauvenism.”
This is crucial on three counts: first, Russia was viewed as the East, Lenin was its representative and his was a view of socialist revolution that vigorously upheld the national liberation struggle. It was also anathema to many socialists not only from the point of view of Marxist orthodoxy, it was also that many socialists in the West sup- ported colonialism and opposed the demand for independence evident in many revolutions that appeared before the First World War (such criticism was levelled at James Connolly and the Easter Rising of 1916, for example.).
This, on the other hand, was the very basis for Lenin’s popularity in the colonial world. Losurdo amply demonstrates the vast influence of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism developed by Lenin. Mao Zedong’s and Ho Chi Minh’s personal accounts of first encountering Marxism are representative examples. Thus Marxism–Leninism was born and conveyed to China and many other countries where Communist Parties were forming. This was the West–East division as it was being drawn by events. But that was only the beginning.
The determined assault by the Western Powers on the newborn Soviet state began immediately and never ceased. Imperialism’s justifications were always an eclectic mix of liberal cosmopolitanism and blood and soil nationalism, the latter emerging with a vengeance when the Nazis assumed power and launched their invasion of the USSR. No matter how it manifested, Western thinking expressed a con- tempt for “the backward, uncivilized masses,” who, despite being the vast majority of the world’s population, nonetheless were incapable of agency, much less liberating and governing themselves. Losurdo shows that Western Marxism, as much as conventional Liberal thought, displayed these traits.
Such thinking, however, overlooks an obvious historical fact: the vast majority of revolutions in the last two hundred and fifty years have been directed at a colonial Empire. Among the cluster of revolutions that marked the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century, namely the American, French and Haitian revolutions, only the French Revolution took place in an Imperial center. The Mexican and Chinese Revolutions in 1911 and the Easter Rising in 1916 continued the pattern. When the Russian Revolution erupted it was thought that a general European revolution would follow. The defeat of the German Revolution (1919) dashed such hopes.
The Russian Revolution did, however, inspire successful revolutions outside Europe. Some, such as the Chinese, commenced almost immediately but that was only the prelude. The entire post-war period, from 1945 to 1980 was characterized by anti-imperialist revolutions leading at the very least to nominal independence and in some cases to socialist governments. Despite this history, the West–East divide is often expressed by a one-sided focus on the French and Russian Revolutions. From the point of view of self-proclaimed Western Marxists, the revolutions outside the metropole have all failed to live up to criteria ostensibly based on the “correct” reading of Marx.
This reading characterizes the struggle between capital and labor, in technologically advanced countries, as the only one “authorized” by Marx, excluding the peasantry and the struggle for national liberation. Losurdo quotes many texts from thinkers such as Ernst Bloch and Max Horkheimer to illustrate this point, while showing how far this is from what Marx and Engels actually wrote. There are so many references throughout the works of Marx and Engels that emphasize the colonial basis of European capitalism that it is remarkable how theorists claiming the mantle of Marxism could have missed them.
Yet a broad range of Western intellectuals, including non-Marxists, anti-Marxists and post-Marxists, from Arendt to Adorno, from Althusser to Foucault, consistently ignored, downplayed or disparaged the great revolutionary movements taking place even as they wrote, not to mention those that occurred before they arrived on the scene. For example, Arendt’s, On Revolution, barely mentions slavery or the struggle to abolish it, nor does it address the question of the indigenous population extirpated by colonization. While favorably comparing the American to the French Revolution on the grounds that small town- ships in New England were inherently democratic as opposed to the Reign of Terror that made the French revolution inherently anti-demo- cratic, Arendt blithely omits mention of the most significant revolution of the period, namely, the Haitian. This of course explains why she fails to mention that in its Jacobin-led phase, the French Revolution sup- ported the Haitian Revolution and abolished slavery (only to have it reinstated by Napoleon). Nowhere does she acknowledge that the United States refused to recognize Haitian independence and actively sought to prevent the “contagion” spreading to its Constitutionally- guaranteed slave system.
Arendt’s dubious scholarship did not, however, prevent her being made an icon of Liberal thought. Her notion of the equivalence of Nazism and Communism has been twice enshrined, in 2009 and 2019, by the European Parliament. This continues the utter falsification of history regarding the First and Second World Wars, the rise of fascism (inclusive of German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish fascism) and its subsequent defeat. It is beyond dispute that the Soviet Union was the main force responsible for defeating fascism in Europe and, allied with communist-led resistance in China, Vietnam and Korea, also Japan.
To a greater or lesser degree similar pronouncements were made by Western Marxists in regard to the anti-imperialist wave sweeping the world in the wake of the Second World War. Horkheimer and Adorno were explicit: they opposed the anti-imperialist revolutions in general, the Vietnamese, in particular. Others, like Marcuse and Bloch, did support anti-imperialist struggles at least to the extent that they targeted egregious wrongs done by England, France and the US, but such support waned when the struggles were victorious and the question of state power emerged. This leads to one of Losurdo’s salient critiques: Western Marxism is characterized by a certain utopianism. In this case, a utopianism that salutes the valiant rebel but condemns the victorious revolutionary. Or put another way, communism is heaven, unachievable on this earth, while rebellion, struggle and sacrifice are noble, but only in defeat.
In short, Western Marxism disdains the struggle of the vast majority of the world’s people to find a way to secure their national liberation, improve their material well-being and determine an independent course. This leads to a second characteristic of Western Marxism Losurdo identifies, namely a vague anarchist strain-not necessarily formalized as in the case of Bakunin or Proudhon-but an anti-state posture which refuses the responsibility for organizing production, education, health care or communications. Numerous thinkers such as Hardt and Negri are called to task for their dismissal of all attempts to solve the problems posed when capital is defeated, its technicians and adminis- trators are thrown out along with its police and judicial apparatus. The core of this argument is at once philosophical and immediately practical.
To summarize this point: Losurdo is arguing that the fight for liberation presupposes that victory leads to another stage. This stage could be called freedom, but in any case it requires constructing a state and one furthermore that is not immediately withering away. Making liberation the ultimate goal is wrong on two grounds, first because it ignores the necessities of social life that persist after liberation is achieved and, second, because it assumes the individual is the basic social unit determining the content of liberation as such. In other words, equating liberation with freedom assumes that once the oppressor is overthrown everyone can do as they please.
This is of course a simplification of a more nuanced position but it is no surprise that Nietzsche is so often invoked by Western Marxists and that Lukacs’s Destruction of Reason was roundly rebuked by them for its dissection of the irrationalist strain running through Schopenauer, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger. At the point in the book where Losurdo lays bare the fake radicalism of Foucault, this becomes abundantly clear. Foucault is the Nietzschean par excellence and his entire ouvre is devoid of any concern for the revolutions of the Third World or the concrete struggles waged by oppressed peoples to emancipate themselves from imperial domination.
Returning to the United States, obvious facts make it painfully clear that Western Marxists either did not grasp or did not want to grasp the real struggles that occurred in the formation and develop- ment of the country. Not only the notorious case of genocide of the Native peoples and enslavement of Africans, but the long and continu- ous struggle of these very peoples, led in some cases by communists and revolutionaries, against the state claiming to represent “We, the People.” Western Marxists rarely consult thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, nor do they often acknowledge the many statements of solidarity and support for the Black Liberation struggle that came from socialist countries, Mao’s much heralded statements, in particular. Very few among Western Marxists concern themselves with the abolitionist movement, the Civil War or Reconstruction which were very much the concern of Marx and Engels not to mention socialists in the US itself.
The net effect has been to cast doubt on every serious attempt to fight and win against imperialism or to build socialism. As Losurdo says: “Perhaps it is no coincidence that today, there is a book that enjoys great popularity among the Western Left. Its title invites us to ‘change the world without taking power.’ Here, the self-dissolution of Western Marxism ends up departing from the terrain of politics and settling in the land of religion” (263). Instead, we should be asking where the great struggle for human emancipation is concen- trated and towards what it is aimed. Current events in Palestine bear this out with stunning clarity.
Losurdo does not end his book with critique, rather he suggests “How Marxism in the West can be reborn.” This raises questions that some who have followed Losurdo up to this point will answer differ- ently. The nature of China’s economic system is a contentious debate within which divergent views have to be considered. But one does not have to agree with Losurdo’s position that China is socialist to recognize that a great many calcified notions have to be cleared away to approach the question with all due seriousness. His emphasis on sovereignty and national development raise the question of how this will lead to socialism. That is, a socialism defined by the expropriation of the expropriators, the abolition of private property and the public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. This is not hair-splitting over definitions. Rather, it is a question of analysis.
Losurdo’s analysis is that our present historical conjuncture makes defeating Imperialism and establishing the material basis for genuine independence of states the immediate task. This has much in common with Samir Amin’s strategic view of “de-linking.” It is posited against the idealistic notions so common to theorists and social movements in the West that either see a reformed liberal capitalism as our only realistic goal or, alternatively, make a perfect stateless socialism, devoid of contradiction, the only kind worth fighting for.
While there is much more in this book than can be covered in a brief review and there is no doubt considerable room for disagreement, Losurdo’s call for reappraisal, analysis and strategy is welcome. This only makes more urgent the task of taking up the gauntlet Losurdo throws down: “Overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophising rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West” (234).
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