Making Defeats Out of Victories

Rather than withering away as Karl Marx had forecast, the state stood tall as socialism’s vital bastion. Marxism’s success, then, lay less in prophesy than in providing the tools for developing countries to break the chains of imperial conquest by rousing peasant societies to arms against metropolitan exploitation. In a brisk and piercing survey of what he calls the “second thirty years war,” Losurdo establishes in the book’s first two chapters the theoretical gifts bestowed by Marxism via the Soviet example to China, North Africa, and Vietnam in their response to the “rape of Nanking,” Adolf Hitler’s project of building a “continental colonial empire” in Europe, and the scourging of Tunisia and Algeria.

While the sharpest minds of the European left — among them Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Louis Althusser — kept the socialist dream alive in a mood of desperation, lamenting alienation while cogitating over ideological state apparatuses, a less paralyzed, combat-ready Marxism was taking shape as the motor force of national states buoyed by ideals of collective ownership, workers’ power, social conscience, popular will, and the repossession of stolen resources. By the mid-1970s, two-thirds of the world was nominally socialist. But this startling triumph, along with communism’s routing of fascism in World War II and the consequent rise of social democratic reforms in Europe, was mostly greeted by the Western left with a yawn, on Losurdo’s telling.

Maybe Losurdo’s scrappiness has kept him off the list of Marxist philosophers deemed central to the conversations of our time, but there is injustice in that. His service to left counter-histories has for a long time been incomparable, each of his books a multilingual tour de force, with bibliographic sweep and an eye for the ephemeral quotation. In Western Marxism and elsewhere, he consistently unearths rare passages from his sources, interweaving textual evidence with readings that overturn conventional wisdom. Incorporating juvenilia, discarded drafts, and lecture notes as well as major texts, his Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (1992), Heidegger and the Ideology of War (1991), Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (2002), and Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005) have chipped away at the Anglo-American theory industry by demonstrating its shameful, if subtle, gravitation toward the right wing of Continental philosophy. 

In their bracing and informative introduction — which, among other things recounts Losurdo’s intellectual trajectory and life as an activist in the Italian Communist Party and its offshoots — Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León reveal an important secret behind Losurdo’s dazzling scholarly productivity. Many of the raw materials were dug up, as it turns out, by his partner and comrade, Erdmute Brielmayer.  Their joint achievements impressively distill arguments out of a mass of particulars. If there is a disadvantage to this method, it is that Losurdo’s works do not so much savor ambiguities, accommodate exceptions, or work through contradictions. Brilliant in their learnedness if not, say, in their self-reflection, they are powerful thesis books that pound their points home with a scholarly mallet. (Rockhill’s own recent work, which includes a marvelous and well-researched account of the CIA’s enthusiasm for French theory, displays many of the same merits and drawbacks.)

As Losurdo tells the story, the failure of the metropolitan left to recognize the real trajectories of communism had not only to do with its micro-battles of philosophical escape or its petty bourgeois distaste for the labors of organizational struggle, but an identification with their own imperial fatherlands — one they could scarcely admit to themselves and fought hard to hide from others. There is in that sense, Losurdo argues, a contradiction at the heart of Marxist criticism in the West, one that capitulated to — and even solidarized with — the liberal capitalism that it avowedly opposed. To varying degrees, Losurdo aims his ire at Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Louis Althusser, Norberto Bobbio, Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou . . . even Jean-Paul Sartre and Sebastiano Timpanaro (although not Georg Lukács or Antonio Gramsci). All of them, he argues, at best waffled, at worst promoted an “imperial universalism” and a “philo-colonialism.”

By contrast, the revolutionaries who actually held power in Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, West Bengal, Angola, Egypt, Vietnam, and other countries had to contend with the messy realities of feeding people and maintaining popular support in the face of blockades, sabotage, brutal invasions, and waves of disinformation. That impure process, naturally, involved compromises, and the policies of its leaders in lands with small proletariats and little technical development conformed to almost no one’s revolutionary playbook. For that reason, the very term “Western,” for Losurdo, refers less to a geopolitical location than this recoil from disappointment in advance, and a failure to take account of the seeds of global change in these on-the-ground struggles. “Eastern,” by contrast, designates simply socialism in power rather than the hand-wringing of toothless Western left savants.

The anti-capitalist victories represented by the independence of India and China in the late 1940s up through the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 went largely uncelebrated by many of the most widely read and revered Marxists of Europe and the United States, Losurdo says. Was not Marxism supposed to abolish the state? What of the bureaucratic excesses of Soviet orthodoxy, and the crudeness of the mass slogans of the peasant guerillas of Asia and Africa? Where was there a hint of the rich complexities of value theory in this appropriation of Marx for nationalist ends, of history as an absent cause, the part of no part, or the “event”? To praise these caricatures of Marxism in the Third World was not to keep faith with the intellectual architects of the classless society who thought in terms of freedom from labor and the development of the whole person. Neither value is affordable for poor countries racing toward modernity.

This opting for doctrine over process, Losurdo complains, reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of war. The weakening of imperialism may not be pretty (it is on the contrary filled with terrible sacrifices, crushing labor regimes, and militarization), but it is the real-word performance of capitalism’s defeat. Vladimir Lenin, Losurdo observes, certainly understood this when he defended the Easter Rising against British rule in 1916 when so many of his comrades wrote it off as an Irish putsch.

In a series of penetrating contrasts, Losurdo portrays a chauvinistic “clean hands” mentality on the Western left. The developing nations saw science and technology as their ticket to autonomy even as European Marxist theory associated both with reification, mechanization, and war. In the postwar philosophical tomes of Western Marxism, a noncapitalist future began to take on the guise of an “Absolute Other” in language that, whether in Bloch’s “not yet” or Negri’s multitudo fidelium, was inflected by a Judeo-Christian messianism. Perhaps the biggest irony is that just as the nations of the periphery sought to establish their common humanity with the denizens of the overdeveloped West, Western Marxists and their theoretical interlocutors like Michel Foucault discovered anti-humanism as the key to a “science” of history. It found solace in “the lazy arbitrariness of the hermeneutics of innocence.”

In Defense of Western Marxism(s)

Although elements of this general picture are persuasive, many of the specific claims made in Western Marxism leave the reader scratching their head. Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), for example, is held up as exhibit A of the fatal turn away from a battle-hardened Marxism, though it seems gratuitous to refer to Anderson (as the authors of the introduction do) as the “grandee of the Western theory industry.” The charge is not only too harsh, but inaccurate, if one considers Anderson’s displeasure with the excesses of theoreticism across his many interventions.

Is it really the case that Anderson in that study announces Western Marxism’s “total distinctness and independence from the caricature of Marxism in the official socialist countries,” as Losurdo contends? Anderson was lamenting, not praising, the textualist bent of Western Marxism, in contrast to the immediate dangers, sacrifices, and warrior spirit of Lenin’s era, in which Marxists took themselves to be, above all, organizers of workers and members of parties seeking state power. His book’s opening epigraph, in fact, quotes Lenin to that effect: “Correct revolutionary theory assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.” Moreover, he makes the point, in a manner similar to Losurdo, that the rise of Bolshevism was in significant part a reaction to the acceleration abroad of “imperialist expansion.”

The overall argument of Anderson’s book was in fact that “Western” Marxism was the work of peripheral — that is, Eastern and Southern — Europeans.  He applauds rather than ignores the fact that Lukács and Gramsci were militants, and he regrets that their efforts were thwarted by the repressive conditions in the Soviet Union and the terrible conditions of prisons in Fascist Italy, respectively. Where Anderson differs from Losurdo is that he blamed the academicization of Marxism in the West on the “constricted alternatives of institutional obedience and individual isolation” within the communist movements, which dampened “a dynamic relationship between historical materialism and socialist struggle.” As far as Anderson is concerned (and here he agrees with Losurdo), Western Marxism discredited itself by reversing the direction of Marx from philosophy to economics and political struggle. For that reason, Western Marxism developed, in Anderson’s damning judgment, into a “second-order discourse” that gave it “an increasingly specialized and inaccessible cast.”

It is exactly this feeling of discomfort, even helplessness, to which the critics in Anderson’s orbit (such as Terry Eagleton and Tariq Ali) constantly drew the Left’s attention, both as reprimand and as call. Verso Books and the New Left Review (the two major left publishing ventures that Anderson helped build) have tirelessly worked to bring the international left into an awareness of the complexities of the struggles in China, Bolivia, Greece, Argentina, South Africa, and everywhere between. To that degree, Losurdo confuses Anderson’s account of the logic of Western Marxism with an embrace of its invidious distinctions.

When confronted by its own selectivity, the declaration that “those who enjoy the wages of imperialism are more likely to have disdain for, or disinterest in, the complex struggles for national liberation in the periphery” hits a snag. Are not George Padmore, Willi Münzenberg, Aijaz Ahmad, John Bellamy Foster, Adolph Reed, Louis Aragon, Mike Davis, or Jodi Dean Western Marxists? All of them lived, or live, in the bourgeois West, are not part of movements that ever held state power, and are steeped in the classics of Western Marxist theory — and yet for all of them the questions of colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism remain central. By this light, it is difficult to make the East/West mapping hold, given that these figures do not seem to betray the weaknesses that Losurdo identifies in thinkers like Horkheimer, Negri, Althusser, and Žižek.

So we may in fact be talking about something else, rather than a grand territorial divide of ideology between the decolonizing East, on the one hand, and an effete flank distracted by the allure of bourgeois urbanity, who for that reason slip into anarchistic dead ends and moralizing postcapitalist idylls. Apart from the Cold War flirtations of Horkheimer, aren’t we talking instead about the internal conflicts within Marxism after the Fall, the rise of poststructuralist theory, and the advent of postmodernism — in other words, digressions and effacements that find no place in Losurdo’s analysis? And given his relatively short and selective list of targets, why does Losurdo devote long sections to Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, who are not Marxists at all?

If one considers only North America (where much of the defeatism and idealism he regales took root), to speak sweepingly, as Losurdo does, of “Western Marxism’s break with the anticolonial revolution” is to ignore the significant recruitment to Marxism from the ranks of the anti–Vietnam War mobilizations and the solidarity campaigns against Ronald Reagan’s Contra war in Nicaragua.

His charge ignores the emphasis on the anti-colonial dimensions of anti-capitalist struggle in journals such as Monthly Review, Jacobin, Mediations, and the informed Marxism of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair’s Counterpunch (with its penetrating analyses of the Palestinian struggle in the context of contemporary US imperialism). And although outside Losurdo’s sphere of vision, perhaps, as specifically anti-colonial, Western Marxism is also found in the strong Marxist currents within critical wings of postcolonial studies as well as in the work of historians like V. G. Kiernan, L. S. Stavrianos, Harry Harootunian, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Arif Dirlik.

It is not unfair to declare that Žižek’s work is at times, as Rockhill and Ponce de Leon humorously describe it, “an unhealthy hodepodge of sophistic chicanery, anecdotal triviality, and puerile provocation.” The accusation, though, would be much more persuasive if they had spoken also of Žižek’s clever subterfuges, fake-outs, and backdoor assaults, or if they had acknowledged his penetrating readings of Hegel as well as his contempt for the postmodernism that Losurdo rejects as well. Take away the bad jokes and pop-culture inanities, and there are still piercing assaults in Žižek’s writing on pseudocommunists, the wiles of capitalist value, and the Cold War left — who, Žižek opines, need to be taught that Lenin still matters.  If it is the case that Žižek’s dismissal of revolutionary Cuba is scandalous (here Rockhill and Ponce de Leon are perfectly justified), this does not nullify the value of his theoretical defense of Marxism at a time when so few turn to it.

There are, finally, problems of method. Losurdo’s procedure of building arguments out of a roving collage of passages taken from dissimilar documents seems to undermine many of his conclusions. Even Rockhill concedes in an opening “Note from the Translators and Editors” that there are sometimes “missing page numbers . . . unreferenced quotations” as well as absent sources; a few attributions are also misleading, either taken from an early point in a thinker’s career before their views had settled or simply taken out of context.

This problem is especially evident in the treatment of Ernst Bloch, who is staged here as a champion of American capitalism over Bolshevik Russia and a great admirer of Woodrow Wilson! The statements supporting these views, though, are taken from an Italian edition of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1916) — one that is unavailable in the current German or English editions. In words unavailable to most of his readers, Bloch is made to appear a social chauvinist who supported Germany in World War I and who despised the Third World. It is possible that Bloch actually did make insupportable statements in 1916; it is hard to say.

But these views do not square with the Bloch of Heritage of our Times (1935) or The Principle of Hope (1954–59), which are explicitly pro-Soviet in their sympathies and attentive to global culture and problems of uneven development. In a later work, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (1963), Bloch dwells on the superiority of Arabic learning to that of Europe, which would seem to speak against viewing him as a purely provincial Western thinker. (In his 2017 review of the original Italian edition of Western Marxism, David Broder documents a number of similar and apparently rather egregious misrepresentations of other thinkers.)

Perhaps the most serious opportunity missed in the book is its neglect of likeminded thinkers and critics — those, for example, who have written about the cultural left’s “anarchist sublime”; the outrageous indifference of postcolonial studies toward the realities of anti-colonial struggle in today’s Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Korea; and the inspirational role played by the Bolshevik Revolution in the great wave of national liberation movements on the global periphery. I include myself among those who have toiled on these and similar themes over the last three decades in the face of strong opposition inside and outside the academy. For the sake of new generations, it would have been preferable to strengthen the argument with reference not only to the blind spots and ideological fissures of the past but also to the emerging trends and tendencies to come. Why miss an opening for a future consensus?

Surely, it is a paradox that Losurdo’s critiques repeat in some respects the most unyieldingly nativist elements of postcolonial studies — a field that its most trenchant critics have called “constitutively anti-Marxist.” It is not uncommon in those circles to see, for instance, the claim that the Third World subaltern has been utterly untouched by “Western thought,” that a fundamentally religious worldview renders struggles over wages or working conditions there irrelevant; or that socialist development strategies (in fact development at all, which is guiltily associated with the evils of modernity) are distractions from a more properly “epistemic decolonization.” Not even in the deepest recesses of arguments about “decoloniality” can one find a book that more stridently brands Western Marxism with a toxic Eurocentrism. Losurdo’s correction — his invaluable linking of a living Marxism with anti-colonial liberation — is needlessly marred by this note of loneliness and isolation. He has more allies than he thinks, even in the heart of Western Marxism, if only he would recognize them.