Like an electric shock, Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How It was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn can either open your eyes or cause a painful jolt. His indignant broadside against European and American Marxist philosophy does a bit of both with its jarring thesis that “actually existing socialism” is simply another name for anti-colonial liberation. The real-world success stories of socialism, he suggests, lie not with gray factories, Five Year Plans, or overweight bureaucrats, nor with the welfare-state victories of Western social democrats, but with sampans, Cuba libres, and Great Leaps Forward.

The claim, in this form at least, is not exactly new. Already in 1955, Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarked that the legacies of 1917 had “become more and more a politics for . . . semi-colonial countries . . . to change to modern modes of production.” But Losurdo’s premise is much bolder than that. For him, socialism had, however unexpectedly, actualized itself in the national independence movements. As Deng Xiaoping succinctly put it: “Deviate from socialism, and China will inevitably regress to semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism.”

Losurdo’s provocative central contention, pressed vigorously throughout the book, is that the thinkers of “Western Marxism” never understood this development, and consequently have been dismissive of or downright hostile to anti-colonial socialist movements. Yet while there is no doubt that many European and American Marxist writers failed to appreciate sufficiently the achievements and challenges of these national liberation struggles, he ends up with a broad-brush condemnation that does not do justice to the variety and complexity of perspectives of the intellectual tradition he attacks.