Domenico Losurdo is going through something of a renaissance in Marxist circles of late, with several of his works having been translated and published since his death. Western Marxism certainly promised to ruffle some feathers in left-wing academic circles, where anti-communism disguised as sophisticated Marxism no longer needs to be demonstrated.
Indeed, what passes for Marxism in much of the “Western” mainstream runs the gamut from ashamed to openly hostile to dismissive of the working class and socialist revolution.
However, instead of serving up a clear catalogue of the revisionism and opportunism that has plagued so much of the Marxist intellectual production in the West, Losurdo’s work actually muddies the waters further and doesn’t provide us with a coherent assessment of the problem.
Losurdo himself is an interesting figure. He left the Italian Communist Party after siding with the Chinese side during the Sino-Soviet split and spent the years since in frenzied intellectual activity, writing more than 20 books on various subjects, from Nietzche to Hegel, Stalin to liberalism. Western Marxism was originally published in Italian in 2017, a year before he died, and is the last of his works published while he was alive.
The book is structured chronologically, starting from WWI. In each period, Losurdo analyzes the shortcomings of certain leading lights of Marxism—from Ernst Bloch to the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, all the way to Slavoj Žižek today.
It is useful to have laid out, in a relatively straightforward way, the reactionary character of these authors, despite their prestige and power of attraction to campus radicals for generations. It’s grotesque, for example, how Horkeimer supported the U.S. invasion and war against the Vietnamese people; or the ways that Foucault theorized “power” in the most abstract way to try and justify comparisons between the USSR and Nazi Germany while ignoring the whole history of colonialism and violent racism in the U.S.
That said, despite the long list of theoretical and historical aberrations and nonsense of these authors, the book doesn’t offer a very convincing diagnosis of the problem. If we were to sum up the main idea of the book, it would be: “Marxism is actually anti-colonialism; without anti-colonialism, Marxism loses its revolutionary character.”
While this is true in a sense, Losurdo gets his wires seriously crossed and can’t seem to disentangle geography from ideology, ending up creating a binary based on geographical determinism where “Western” almost implies revisionism and vice versa.
Some might say that he isn’t that crude, but I would argue that the sloppiness of his argumentation doesn’t do him any favors and that this horrible conflation of categories actually becomes the message through his constant repetition.
Take, for example, his near-mantra that the Nazi war of extermination against the USSR was actually a colonial war. He repeats this throughout the book, giving the impression that fascism was created not to defend capital against socialism, but rather as a way of rescuing and perpetuating colonialism in a time where it was under threat. This is not the analysis of the Communist movement historically.
The plot hole which in my estimation fatally condemns his analysis, is that he virtually never compares the works of actual Marxists in the West with these frauds from the academy. How productive and illuminating it would be for research to show the ways that Western Communist Party theoreticians have criticized opportunism and chauvinism!
Instead, and perhaps unintentionally, Losurdo hides the ways that opportunism has also played a role in the “Third World,” including within Communist movements there. This is perhaps illustrated most famously in the case of the Sino-Soviet split, an issue which Losurdo was incidentally on the wrong side of.
Besides almost passing references to Italian giants like Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, one is left with the impression that all Western Marxists are either academic ethno-chauvinist hucksters, Eurocommunist revisionists, or unimportant. This does a disservice to history and to struggle.
This major omission is ultimately a reflection of how poorly argued and partial this book has turned out to be, despite some of its strong elements. The author misses the forest for the trees—to be fair, these are some really awful trees, but serious Marxists should know the difference.
In the end, Losurdo elevates two lesser contradictions over the fundamental ones: above capital vs. labor, he places the Third World vs. the West; and above socialism vs. imperialism, he places anti-colonialism vs. colonialism. These mistakes can be quite dangerous in a time such as ours when ideological confusion reigns supreme, especially in the West.
This fact underlines the importance of criticizing this book and maintaining a firm ideological base in Marxism-Leninism.
Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn
By Domenico Losurdo
Monthly Review Press, 2024
People’s Voice
See also:
Good Morning Revolution: The Decline and Fall of “Western” Marxism
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