Tendance CoatesyWestern Marxism. How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn. Domenico Losurdo. (2024) Review: from Marxism to Power.
Western Marxism How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn by Domenico Losurdo Edited by Gabriel Rockhill Monthly Review Press.
As the student revolutionary, Nigel Molesworth, the Curse of St Custard’s, would say, ‘Any fule know’ that Perry Anderson in Consideration on Western Marxism ended by expressing hopes for the “eventual reunification of theory and practice in mass revolutionary movements”. That “the growth of international class struggles since the late sixties has for the first time since the defeat of the Left Opposition in Russia, started to create an objective possibility of the reappearance of the political ideas associated with Trotsky in central areas of working-class debate and activity” (P101).
In his afterword the once radical New Leftist wrote of Lenin’s failure to develop a “systematic theory of the representative bourgeois democratic state in the advanced capitalist countries” (P 117). One is no doubt supplied much later by Anderson’s attacks on the European Union’s “lacquered synarchy” and belief that outside the EU British sovereignty, would be the new site of popular struggle. (Hostile summary: Why the UK’s system of government is vastly superior to the European Union)
Exeunt leftist Anderson, and his New Left Review colleagues, for the Peculiarities of the British.
The late Domenico Losurdo (1941 – 2018)) had a different take. In Western Marxism he shouts, “Anderson proclaimed the excellence of Western Marxism finally liberated from the suffocating embrace of Eastern Marxism” (P 41) “Abandoning to their fate Eastern Marxism, Western Marxism would be rid of something that had clipped its wings and prevented it from flying high. in reality, the success and even the triumph of Western Marxism and Eurocommunism would be revealed be short-lived. The times rapidly brought about the death of both.” (P 143-4)
The book continues to have an influence. In the Introduction Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill (author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?) put the Western Marxist phrase-mongers in their place, “professional intellectuals ensconced in elite networks in the global north and are part of what some call the new petty bourgeoise, meaning the professional-managerial stratum in the imperialist core. P 26 – not exactly what Nicos Poulantzas had in mind when he coined the term, he referred to salaried employees who work in offices, sales, and service sectors.
Western Marxism is largely a rogues’ roll-call of these intellectuals. Althusser, Bloch, Horkheimer, and Michel Foucault (who is referred to, yes, in this context..), with some nasty jibes at Hannah Arendt. She had, no a doubt contestable, admiration for the US independent Constitution. that was (indeed the case) of a slave-owning society. But…. and who advanced the “thesis that colonialism and imperialism are foreign to the united state” ? (P 163) . It is a long long list, from Toni Negri and Michel Hardt, to, more recently, Slavoj Žižek. The Slovenian philosopher has “cleared the terrain of the categories of the Third World, imperialism, anti-imperialism, and so forth..” (P 188)
The Index includes no reference to the much deeper influence of the British Marxist historians, like E.P. Thompson or indeed Isaac Deutscher, whose book, Stalin: A Political Biography (1949; expanded edition 1966) is recommended in the context of the present book.
To return to the Introduction “The Chinese development model offers a crucial alternative to the capitalist West as the Chinese Communist Party seek a form if modernisation characterised by people-centred development and the ‘harmonious coexistence between man and nature.” (P 31). Remote from power Western Marxism “has nothing but contempt for the independence of China and Vietnam and their efforts in the economic sphere, to make “as Deng Xiaoping declared, a real contribution to humanity’ ” (P 262)
As Cde Molesworth would say: Chiz!
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“About Losurdo’s work on Western Marxism, Marxist historian Mario Maestri wrote that this is “a false split and a false controversy”, and accused Losurdo of replacing “the proletarian internationalism and class struggles of the ‘Western Marxists’ with the unified nation – that is, bourgeoisie and united proletarians – in the name of national developmentalism – as if development, as well as science and technology, were ideologically neutral and not dictated by the interests of the dominant versus the dominated classes.”[62] Maestri, who defends the thesis “we live in a historical counterrevolutionary phase”, whose “milestones were the capitalist restoration in China in 1978 under the leadership of reformer Deng Xiaoping and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 – events that consolidated the globalization of capitalism”, accused Losurdo of presenting “an apology for the capitalism of the Chinese Communist Party and its many business projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America”, establishing this “as the only alternative for its economic development and the only way for the emancipation of European and American imperialism.” According to Maestri, Losurdo defended that “the working classes of the countries on the periphery of the capital – Asia, Africa and Latin America – give up their political independence and pragmatically ally themselves with the capitalism of the Chinese CP.”[62]
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See also: Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part One) Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss
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