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.
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THE EXPRESSION “IDENTITY POLITICS” refers to a tendency among individuals who belong to a particular social group (religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) to build exclusive political alliances with members of the same social group, especially as a way of rectifying historical injustices. While identity-based movements do have the potential to raise awareness and rectify historical injustices, they can also be co-opted to reinforce systems of hierarchy.
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MILTON FRIEDMAN FAMOUSLY DECLARED, on the threshold of the neoliberal revolution he helped usher in, “We are all Keynesians now!” Also around this time, Michel Foucault said that “We are all Marxists now.” The point was to thus thrust aside, by treating as safely past, something longstanding as a banality that could be ignored — as Marx said the Young Hegelians had done to Hegel. Friedman, like Hegel, might be wrongly overlooked by subsequent generations as a “dead dog.”
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THREE DAYS BEFORE OCTOBER 7, my interview with Douglas Lain was released under the title “Are We All Terrorists Today?” In the interview, I said that the armed attacks against free speech at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in 2015, which caused a mass protest movement inside and outside of France, the Republican marches, which have adopted puritanical politics of martyrdom, that robbed Marxists of their own capacity for free speech, of their ability for ruthless scientific criticism against Charlie Hebdo and even the French capitalist state. In that sense, I do understand Chris Cutrone’s frustration with Israeli state terrorism, and the puritanical reaction to it in the Palestine protest movement in the West, a thing that led to the confiscation of his capacity to criticize Hamas ruthlessly.
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The renewed interest in “socialism” has stimulated plenty of debate about what this term means in a 21st-century context, and that discussion, of course, requires knowledge of socialist history about which most people in the United States know little. That is why Marius Ostrowski’s able translation of Eduard Bernstein’s works on the German Revolution of 1918–19 is so important.
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