Go East, young Marxist? A review of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism
Tom Canel
Platypus Review 172 | December 2024 – January 2025
Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, ed. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).
THE PUBLICATION OF the late Domenico Losurdo’s last work Western Marxism has aroused a flurry of interest within particular milieus within the online and the offline Left. A reviewer of the book is tasked with examining whether such interest is warranted or not. I want to argue that one’s evaluation of whether this interest is warranted or not will depend upon what one is attempting to glean from the work. The text purports to be both a political and a theoretical engagement with the “Western Marxist” tradition. “Western Marxism” has become associated with a form of 20th–century Marxism generated largely in the West that broke with official Soviet and then Sino-Soviet Marxist orthodoxy. The tradition is thought to have started with the work of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, in the years after the October Revolution of 1917, with the Frankfurt School led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer taking up the mantle thereafter. However, Losurdo includes within the category later and/or disparate thinkers such as Lucio Colletti, Noberto Bobbio, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Louis Althusser. Losurdo’s book clearly articulates his reasons for denouncing Western Marxism. As a result, although it may be politically seminal, it does not provide, however, an informative or fair account of what the thinkers it attacks actually thought, and is therefore flawed as a work of theoretical engagement.
Any break with the Sino-Soviet line, however diffident or nuanced, is denounced on political grounds by Losurdo. As a political product of the 1980s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events of Tiananmen Square in China, I, like most of my generation, thought that we had seen the end of such uncritical support for the official Sino-Soviet understanding of Marxism-Leninism. Not only Losurdo’s work but the renascence of self-described Communism within the Zoomer Left has proven us definitively wrong. Losurdo’s text provides invaluable insight into the motivations behind this lionizing of the Sino-Soviet tradition that has so defied my and others’ expectations. Even the symptomatic silences, to plagiarize from Althusser, of Losurdo’s discourse, such as a downplaying of the Sino-Soviet split, and other fissures within what Losurdo would describe as “Eastern Marxism,” are deeply instructive and revealing indices of the politics at play. The bifurcation of Western and Eastern Marxism arguably represents a fundamental crisis in Marxism as such, a crisis engendered by the refusal by the industrial working class of advanced capitalism to play the historical role demanded of it by classical Marxism. In their discussion Towards a New Manifesto (1956), Western Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno express their doubts of whether it is even possible to be a Marxist in the absence of proletarian revolutionary subjectivity incarnated in the party. If Losurdo’s alternative of Eastern Marxism is deemed not to be genuine Marxism, any essential lack of proletarian revolutionary subjectivity might constitute the death of Marxism as such.
It would be tedious to go through every thinker that Losurdo treats unfairly, so I will focus on the treatment of a target central to the argument and argue that the attribution of failings in this treatment can be legitimately applied to the book as a whole. Losurdo presents himself as responding to Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976). Losurdo sees Anderson as celebrating and validating the Western Marxist tradition and producing in the process an apology for imperialism and neo-colonialism. The first judgement is a plain misreading of Anderson’s intent, while the second seems to involve an arguable understanding of what constitutes anti-imperialism. Rather than endorsing Western Marxism, Anderson is arguing that Western Marxism is actually a capitulation to political defeat and is therefore fundamentally inadequate. Anderson rejects what he sees as Western Marxism’s retreat from politics into philosophy, aesthetics, and other rarefied realms, and reaches for a more or less orthodox Trotskyism to take its place. (Unlike the Platypus Affiliated Society, for example, Anderson was uninterested in synthesizing Trotsky and the Frankfurt School.) To suggest that orthodox Trotskyism is apologetic for colonialism and imperialism would be to take a tendentious and questionable side within one of the decisive intra-Leninist divisions since the containment of the Russian Revolution. For the moment I want to focus on the fact that Losurdo seems to misrepresent Anderson as a lionizer of Western Marxism. Since Anderson is presented as the primary target of the argument, the fact that Losurdo misrepresents Anderson in this way is symptomatic, I claim, of his cavalier treatment of other thinkers.
The justification that Losurdo has for seeing Anderson as an apologist for imperialism is interesting, however. For an alleged booster of Western imperialism, Anderson is surprisingly appreciative of what Losurdo calls the Eastern Marxist, and others would call Stalinist contribution to opposing U.S. imperialism. Admittedly, this orientation of Anderson is gleaned from other writings than Losurdo discusses. Anderson recognizes the role of Stalinists in building movements that have helped to overthrow capitalist regimes. He feels that much Trotskyism has tended to seriously exaggerate the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism for example; Anderson clearly defends movements and regimes in the Sino-Soviet tradition on the basis of their opposition to American imperialism. Anderson is the doyen of the New Left Review that generally supported national liberation movements in the Third World, while Losurdo suggests that Anderson is an apologist for neo-colonialism. The closest to a wobble on this question in the New Left Review was an intervention by Fred Halliday, in the context of the first Iraq War, questioning whether, now that the Soviet Union was no longer existent, the Left should still leap to support all anti-American Third World nationalisms however “fascistic” they may be.[1] Halliday saw the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq as exemplifying a fascistic Third World nationalism. The New Left Review, as a whole, received vigorous rebukes for publishing Halliday’s musings, and almost immediately, the New Left Review reverted to firm support for all “anti-imperialist” and “anti-colonialist” movements that opposed American power. However, Anderson has articulated these anti-imperialist politics in a manner which does maintain some critical distance from Sino-Soviet orthodoxies and that, Losurdo seems to argue, makes Anderson some kind of geopolitical “scab.” I admit that Losurdo does not use this precise terminology.
What motivates this line of argument? It seems to be a recasting by Losurdo of how the global class struggle for communism should be understood, now that global capitalism has entered an imperialist phase involving the growth of monopoly capital, an increasing coordination of national capitals with the national imperial states, and the much debated and disputed establishment of an aristocracy of labor within the advanced capitalist nations. For Losurdo since this shift, the dialectic of world history revolves not around the struggle between the global industrial proletariat and the global industrial bourgeoisie but in the struggle of (previously) colonized and enslaved peoples for recognition. The attainment of such recognition would involve not only the defeat of Western imperialism, Losurdo suggests, but also requires the establishment of post-capitalist regimes that will build socialism. The major historical significance of the October Russian Revolution for Losurdo is that, since it established a counterpoint to imperialism, it became the essential support for the struggle by enslaved and colonized peoples for recognition. Losurdo’s Eastern Marxism depends upon understanding the historical centrality of the struggle for recognition by previously colonized and enslaved nations and the indispensability to that effort of what has been termed the Actually Existing Socialist states. Now the Soviet Union is gone, a revitalized and dynamic People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes central to sustaining this struggle in Losurdo’s eyes. Such a revised (!) Marxist philosophy of history seems to demand that one uncritically stands not only with ostensibly anti-colonial movements such as Hamas but also authoritarian “socialist” regimes, not just the PRC but also Maduro’s Venezuela for example. Any deviation, however slight, from this, it is argued, only aids imperialism. Obviously, the scare-quotes I put around the word “socialist” above are not innocent and reflect that this reviewer’s politics are profoundly different from Losurdo’s. My politics in fact could be legitimately labeled as “Left anti-Communist.” However, rather than engage in the kind of “anti-Stalinist” screed that a younger version of myself would have engaged in, I want to engage in an immanent critique of Losurdo’s argument. Within Losurdo’s own terms, does the Eastern Marxist philosophy of history adequately capture what is going on globally, and, if so, do these processes actually put socialism on the agenda?
Losurdo’s philosophy of history suggests a view of contemporary geopolitics that seems credible. If the “West” is understood to represent the imperialist core, Losurdo’s account arguably is consistent with the increasingly predominant “the West versus the rest” dynamics of contemporary geopolitics. Certainly, anti-Western movements and regimes seem to challenge the kind of capitalism associated with the U.S. and Western imperialism, and therefore can be cast as being post-capitalist in some sense at least. However, is this process really raising socialism as a historical possibility? Given the centrality of the PRC to this account, the question of whether Chinese economic and political development is socialist, or at least proto-socialist, becomes decisive in answering this question. It should be noted here that neither the arguments of supporters of the PRC that point to the extraordinary economic successes of the PRC (and the human benefits derived thereby), nor the arguments by critics of the PRC, such as myself, alleging brutality and oppressiveness by the regime are strictly relevant to this question. On the one hand, one cannot a priori dismiss the possibility that non-socialist economic forms could produce extraordinary economic results, or, on the other, that the transition to socialism might not involve the greatest brutality against and oppression of those that resist it. Conducting an immanent critique of Losurdo’s argument requires bracketing both lines of argument. Losurdo does make a case, it seems to me, for why the allegedly non-socialist market reforms were of real benefit to the Chinese people. Again, this may be a reason to defend the PRC’s regime, but it does not constitute an argument that the PRC is (proto-)socialist in any way. The latter would require a structural analysis of the PRC’s political economy and a delineation of any socialism immanent within it. This analysis, I would argue, Losurdo does not provide.
I claim that if contemporary China had the same socio-economic structure as it does but was not governed by a one-party state with a ruling self-described Communist Party endorsing a Marxist-Leninist ideology, one would have no reason or inclination to label the contemporary Chinese society as socialist or even proto-socialist. Thus, taking an ostensibly objective point of view, socialism with Chinese characteristics seems not necessarily to be socialism at all. However, Losurdo and co-thinkers would claim that such an “objective” viewpoint misses the point. The unquestioned domination over the state by a genuinely Marxist-Leninist party supposedly allows for economic development to appear non-socialist in form but nevertheless inexorably lay the groundwork for a transition to socialism, he would argue. Skeptics such as myself will still demand a further fleshing out of how such groundwork is actually being laid. Why should the ruling elites within and without the Chinese Communist Party, enriched as well as entrenched in power by the current process of economic development, ever enable a transition to a socialist order that would undermine their dominant position? What Losurdo does argue is that constructing a viable post-capitalism requires ongoing learning. This would seem crucially important. In online discussions, Gabriel Rockhill, the editor of the book being reviewed here, suggests that socialism itself needs to be understood as the process of learning how to make post-capitalism viable. That seems to me to be way too nebulous. Of course, constant learning will be integral to the construction of socialism, but to paraphrase Lenin, we must ask WHO needs to learn WHAT? Losurdo criticizes those who counterpose an allegedly utopian, abstract, model of what socialism should be to the reality of Actually Existing Socialism. However, how could one evaluate the claim of Actually Existing Socialism to actually be socialism without some abstract concept of what socialism would be? The alternative Losurdo seems to offer is to aver that what is termed Actually Existing Socialism can just be assumed to actually be socialism. This may fly with some, but it definitely won’t fly with many others.
But, perhaps, the PRC and other anti-(American) imperialist states do not need to be actually socialist or proto-socialist themselves to be a force for socialism; perhaps, enabling the struggles of the previously (and the still) colonized and enslaved peoples of the world will be enough; within the Eastern Marxist philosophy of history these peoples seem to be assigned the historical role of putting socialism on the agenda that classically Marxists assigned to the proletariat. Eastern Marxism and Western Marxism disagree about much, but they both agree that the industrial proletariat in the advanced capitalist world has lost something of its revolutionary edge. While Western Marxists agree with New York intellectual and social democratic stalwart Irving Howe, who declared a desire to yell at the New Left, “There is no substitute proletariat!,”[2] Eastern Marxists see the revolutionary mantle, arguably abandoned by the Western working class, taken up by previously enslaved and colonized peoples. The question then becomes, leaving sentiment aside, should we expect the struggles of these peoples to have socialist implications? Marx argued that, while the proletariat was the first, and so far, only, class to be capable of revolutionizing society in a communist or socialist direction, they were not the first or only class, by a long shot, Marx acknowledges, to struggle against exploitation and oppression. The distinctiveness of the proletariat’s struggles in this regard lay in the fact that, according to Marx, proletarian pursuit of class self-interest necessarily leads to challenging private property as such, in the way that the resistance of slaves or feudal serfs, for example, would not. Taking a Hegelian turn, Losurdo presents the struggles of colonized and enslaved peoples to be a struggle for recognition. It is difficult to gainsay the value of that. However, if Eastern Marxism is to maintain its Marxist street cred, it has to establish why this struggle for recognition will have the historical significance that has been attributed hitherto by Marxists only to the proletarian class struggle, i.e., that of necessarily positing a historical potential for socialism.
There is historical precedent for the attribution of socialist and emancipatory potential to the struggle for recognition by oppressed peoples. Moses Hess was genuinely a communist, although a “true socialist” with fundamental disagreements with Marx. He was also one of the first, if not the actual first, modern advocates of Zionism. Zionism sees itself as a struggle for recognition by a nation historically colonized and enslaved. Many of the early Zionists, in particular the Labor Zionists and partisans of the Kibbutz movement, sincerely thought, like Moses Hess, that they were engaging in a socialist project. (This understanding led much of the Left until relatively recently, at least until the New Left, being surprisingly sympathetic to Zionism.) For better or worse, for example, the Soviet Union beat the U.S. to the punch and was the first to recognize a newly established state of Israel in 1948. With the benefit of historical hindsight, whatever degree of disaffection one has with Zionism, one can surely say that actually existing Zionism has ended up belying any imputed potential for socialist transformation. Whether the struggle of particular oppressed nations or peoples have a socialist potential will surely depend upon the particular context, so it has to be something for which one provides an argument in each case. I do not claim to be in a position to disprove the socialist potential of the struggles for recognition that Losurdo invokes; I merely claim that in this text at least, Losurdo does not adequately justify discerning this potential, which he would need to do to consolidate his case. If one reads the U.S. foreign-policy-establishment house journal, Foreign Affairs, as every anti-imperialist should do of course, one might infer that while the imperialists fear military self-assertion by the PRC in a manner similar to the way they would have feared such self-assertion by the Soviet Union, they do not fear Chinese incitement of anti-imperialist movements globally the way they did fear (more or less realistically) such incitement by the Soviet Union. Rather than revolutionary internationalism, the destabilizing effect of the PRC feared by Foreign Affairs authors is that of destabilizing Western economies through the dumping of underpriced products on the global market. (This they claim is possible and is in China’s interest because of chronic overproduction by Chinese producers.) The judgement of the foreign-policy establishment is not that the PRC wishes to foment international revolution, but that it will follow an aggressive and economically destabilizing mercantilism (a commitment to dominate production and trade rather than to maximize profits) with the purpose of establishing China’s position within the global capitalist order. On this point at least, I am far from convinced that the foreign-policy establishment is wrong.
Given my political history and past commitments, it was never likely that someone like me would end up accepting the “Eastern Marxism” that Losurdo and his followers have endorsed. However, the admittedly impressive Chinese economic performance and the apparent current salience of challenges to Western imperialism globally may make this variety of Marxism potentially appealing to new generations of Leftists. Thus, my theoretical and methodological objections notwithstanding, this work may end up being of great significance for the future development of the Left. For better or worse though, this would be a Left in which I would not find a place. |P
[1] See Fred Halliday, “The Crisis of the Arab World: The False Answers of Saddam Hussein,” New Left Review I, no. 184 (November–December 1990).
[2] See Irving Howe, “The Decade That Failed,” New York Times Magazine, September 19, 1982, <https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/19/magazine/the-decade-that-failed.html>.
