Der Westliche Marxismus: Wie er entstand, verschied und auferstehen könnte

by Domenico Losurdo, Christa Herterich (Translator)

»Westlicher Marxismus«, mit diesem Etikett werden sehr unterschiedliche Theoretiker versehen, gemeinsam ist ihnen die Abgrenzung zum »klassischen« oder »orthodoxen« Marxismus. Domenico Losurdo argumentiert, dass dem eine Loslösung von den epochalen Emanzipationskämpfen zugrunde liegt. Dies reiche zurück bis in die Periode, »in welcher der Erste Weltkrieg und die Russische Revolution theoretisch verarbeitet wurden«. Hier und nicht erst in der Stalin-Ära sucht er den Ursprung dieses Strangs der Marx-Diskussion. »Und wenn die Risse und die darauffolgende Entfremdung«, so fragt er, »außer auf die Unterschiedlichkeit der objektiven Situation und der kulturellen Tradition zurückgingen auf die theoretischen und politischen Grenzen vornehmlich des westlichen Marxismus?« Von dieser Frage ausgehend setzt er sich auseinander mit namhaften Theoretikern von Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno über Louis Althusser und Michel Foucault bis zu Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri und Michael Hardt. Außerdem bezieht er Hannah Arendt in seine Betrachtung mit ein.

Genres: Politics, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Economics, 21st Century

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism.

He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.

From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.

Reviews

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the single greatest distillation of so-called "Western Marxism" is its fetish for defeat. Losurdo does not mince words here, documenting the academic and scholarly history of the bifurcation that takes place in the beginning of the 20th century between Eastern Marxism and Western Marxism, centered primarily around the colonial question. Our typical framing of the twentieth century being a "short century" starts in 1914 and ends in 1989, but this is infected with Eurocentrism. The choice of 1914 is only a turning point in that the colonial-capitalist policies well-understood by the East were finally experienced in Europe proper. More consequential was the eruption of October 1917: a revolution that brought hope to the colonial world to break their chains.

One of the crucial distinctions that Losurdo lays out that separates Eastern Marxism from Western Marxism is what happens after winning power. Faced with an onslaught of imperial barbarity and capitalist pressure, the governing powers of the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba (constituting the Eastern strain of Marxism) dedicate(d) themselves to the building up of the productive forces so as to prevent their descension into semi-colonial states - an objective made plain by the United States with respect to China, for example. To the Western Marxist, any such deviation from the dissolution of the state is unorthodox and therefore costs them their support. This binary reading of social conflict - reducing everything to worker vs capital - becomes what Losurdo calls "a prison marked by the most narrow-minded corporatism." The anticolonial revolution is both armed struggle and economic struggle, and as soon as a socialist state moves from the former to the latter, it is abandoned by Western Marxists as "impure", "illegitimate", "state socialist" and other pejorative lies.

The result of Western Marxists ignoring or sidestepping the colonial question has, to me, two fundamental consequences that make them not only irrelevant but dangerous: (1) it compromises our understanding of Hitler and Nazism; and (2) it precludes any discussion or inclusion of African Americans and other colonized people in our analyses. One example he gives is Foucault. He denies the reality of colonialism, saying "in Europe and in the United States, the entire economy of punishment was redistributed...the great public ritualization of death gradually began to disappear." Here, the history of lynching as sport is alone sufficient to dismiss him. But these points are not isolated - in sanitizing the U.S. and Western Europe in this way, we see Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg refer to the U.S. South as a model for building the racial state in Germany. The other antagonist that gets deserving attention by Losurdo is Arendt, whose conceptualization of "totalitarianism" grossly puts Stalin's Soviet Union on the same plane as Hitler's Nazi Germany. This blurs the decidedly colonialist and imperialist ambitions of Hitler by equating him to the leader of the country that led the world's greatest anti-colonial revolution (including facing colonial enslavement by the very same Hitler!) while also conferring a positive role to the countries of the West, such as the U.S., who, even at the time of Arendt's writing, had a sizable colonial empire! In fact, shockingly, Arendt says: "the colonialism and imperialism of European nations-that is, the one great crime in which America was never involved"! One must infer that this intentional omission of the genocidal slavery that marks the founding of the United States - not to mention the violent dismemberment of Mexico and its multiple colonial conquests (one thinks of the Philippines) - is in fact part of the ideological requirement to sanitize Hitler, who was inspired by the United States' genocidal westward expansion.

Writing in 2017, one year before he died, Losurdo holds true to his analyses, reminding us that colonialism is not a thing of the past: "one need only look at the people of Palestine." One of the most frustrating things (that he speaks directly to in this book) is the tendency of Western Marxists to only support Palestinians when they are humiliated and without power: "We can support their struggle for national liberation only as long as it continues to be defeated!" Thus defines the Western Marxist, who refuses to be "contaminated" with "constituted power". We have seen this acutely in the days following October 7, when suddenly the Palestinians' right to rid themselves of their chains in the great tradition of anti-colonial revolutions is abrogated the moment they take it upon themselves to do so.

Losurdo's prescription for renewing Western Marxism as a serious ideological current is simple: take seriously the colonial question, and understand the material requirements for maintaining autonomy and economic growth in the face of capitalist-imperialist behemoths. Whining about "capitalism in China" or "markets in Cuba" does nothing to advance the development of socialist state-building projects.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A welcome corrective to decades of incessant neglect of the question of imperialism and colonialism by the Western Left. A book length polemic put together with Losurdo's characteristic incisive wit and thorough sourcing. Losurdo demonstrates yet again that the near universal dismissal of the socialist and anti colonial liberation movements outside the capitalist metropole is centered on eurocentric chauvinism. Returning again and again to the concrete form taken by the class struggle in the most oppressed nations, communist and anti colonial revolution and wars of national liberation, he shows how to minimize or neglect them is to lose sight of the whole course of history.

More relevant now in the midst of another holocaust carried out by the white supremacist West in the name of maintaining their colonial holdings than ever.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If, in one respect, they may increase the clarity of vision, distance from power and disdain toward it can also obstruct vision."

"Western Marxism's break with the anticolonial revolution is also the refusal to take up the problems arising from taking power...Addicted to the role of opposition and critique, and to varying degrees influenced by messianism, [Western Marxists] look with suspicion and disapproval at the power that the latter are called upon to wield by the victory of the revolution."

"And so, we can be sympathetic to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Palestinians, or any other people only so long as they are oppressed, humiliated, and without any power--that is, as long as they are in the hands of colonialism and imperialism. We can support their struggle for national liberation only so long as it continues to be defeated! The defeat or the inconclusiveness of a revolutionary movement is the precondition for certain exponents of Western Marxism to celebrate themselves and enjoy being rebels who, in any circumstance, refuse to contaminate themselves with constituted power!"

"The bifurcation between Eastern Marxism and Western Marxism comes down to a contrast between Marxists who exercise power and Marxists who were in opposition and concentrated increasingly on "critical theory," "deconstruction," and denouncing power and power relations as such. A "Western Marxism" thus took shape, which, in its distance from power, claimed the privileged and exclusive right to rediscover an "authentic" Marxism, no longer reduced to state ideology."

"If one examines the capitalist countries together with the colonies ruled by them...there are two kinds of legislation, one for the race of the conquerors, the other for the race of the conquered...the racial state accompanies the history of colonialism in its entirety like a shadow."

"Thus, "Eastern Marxism," unlike much of the Western variety, understood how to illuminate the colonial barbarities of capitalism very well."

====================================================================
The early great hope of many Bolsheviks was that their revolution would spark the ignition of a global spread of revolution. When events conspired rather to put the USSR in the trenches, and where workers in the advanced capitalist West won concessions from a ruling class faced with fears of a spread of revolution, a bifurcation took root. This book is the historical materialist analysis of that development. In short:

Western Marxism is:
- Focused on economic gains for workers
- Skeptical of revolutionary practice in the East
- Couched largely in clinical academic theory as the measuring tape by which revolutions are judged.

Eastern Marxism is:

- Inextricably tied to decolonization as conscious politics, over mechanistic economism
- Urgently seeking development/technical advancement for security against subjugation
- Revolutionary practice involving compromises for survival

The October Revolution had come to power launching an appeal to the West to make the socialist revolution and one to the East to make the anticolonial revolution. The latter, therefore, was never lost sight of and, within a short time, assumed an unexpected centrality, one looked on with suspicion by Western Marxism.

With this point top of mind, Losurdo targets jabs in rapid succession at both classical liberal figures (see Liberalism: A Counter-History) and more frequently of course, ostensible radicals such as Deleuze, Marcuse, Zizek, Althusser, Sartre, or Arendt.

The key point at which the rupture exploded is clear:

the great historical crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, which we have defined as the Second Thirty Years' War, caused both at its start and at its end a bifurcation between Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism...the defeat inflicted on Germany, Japan, and Italy flowed into the world anticolonialist revolution, which would spread worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century.

Completely erasing the fate of colonized peoples from their balance sheet, Žižek, Hardt, and Negri reproduce the basic limitation of Western Marxism by diluting it even further. From this point of view, the success that Žižek especially has enjoyed in our own times brings to mind, rather than a revival, the last gasp of Western Marxism. The removal of the colonial question is an integral part of the theoretical and political platform of the Slovenian philosopher.

That removal/passing over of colonialism will come up again and again in summaries of Althusser, Foucault, and others. Where it is nominally acknowledged, Losurdo charges some with a lack of seriousness in considering the practical implications (Sartre---romanticizing the initial revolt but with less care toward the 'unsexy' managerial stuff in the "practico-inert" revolutionary state).

This blind spot toward colonialism goes right back to days of romanticized bourgeois revolution. Revisiting a contrast from Liberalism: A Counter-History, Losurdo again contrasts the Haitian revolution with the American revolution:

It was Alexandre Pétion, president of Haiti from 1806 to 1818, who got Simon Bolivar to commit himself to the immediate liberation of slaves in return for support for the struggle of Latin America for its independence from Spain.

Haiti was, therefore,

the country that, notwithstanding the despotism of its political regime, still embodied the cause of abolitionism and of freedom for blacks.

Whereas "the [American Revolution] was more of a counterrevolution so far as the relations with the colonized peoples or those of colonial origin were concerned."

This, right here, distills the essence of Losurdo's critique of "idealist" (some would call it "ultra-leftist") Western Marxism: abstract, absolutist, a priori rejection of an actual revolutionary political structure in spite of its crucial 'progressive' historical function---coupled with idealized presentation of opportunities through "formal equality" in the American experiment (ignoring the lack of even "formal equality" for substantial populations therein).

One could object that colonialism is now in the past. But one need only look at the people of Palestine. An arbitrary power can expropriate, jail, and execute them extra-judicially. There is no aspect of public and private life of the members of a colonial people that escapes the control, intervention, and bullying of the occupation forces.

Finally:

All told, the two liberal revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic saw the rise to power of classes that had a consolidated practice of administration and governing. The picture changes radically with the French Revolution, above all in its Jacobin phase, and with the October Revolution. In 1794, it was obviously not the slave owners who abolished slavery but rather the "beggars of the pen", the "abstract" intellectuals, who, just for this reason, were deaf to the appeals and calculations of the owners of human beasts. And in 1917, those calling on the "slaves of the colonies" to break their chains were not the beneficiaries of colonial exploitation but their antagonists, yet again the "abstract" intellectuals. However, the merits of these social figures should not blind us to their limitations.

As someone who tends to be skeptical of the claims, which Losurdo takes seriously, that China's market reforms merely served/serve a necessary function to "build up the productive forces", I'm willing to concede that the historical technical disadvantage of revolution in the periphery present a genuinely difficult dilemma. Even further, the history of "going it alone" in that situation has clear shortfalls. As unprecedented as the revolutions in Russia & China were, expectations of miracles don't follow and a need for resources has its ugly implications.

On Marx's/Engels's take on colonialism:

centuries of developing the world capitalist system, long hegemonized by countries of stable liberal traditions, have not completed political emancipation. In elaborating an abstract theoretical model by definition, Marx could well state that it was the very internal dialectic of bourgeois society that moved in the direction of "complete political emancipation." In reality, this tendency was neutralized by a still stronger tendency of capitalist colonial expansionism. This brought about monstrous forms of inequality and unfreedom not only in the colonies but also in the capitalist metropoles themselves.

The point here isn't that the crudely mechanistic "economic reductionist" reading is a correct reading of Marx (it's not---Marx wasn't blind to the uniquely harsh conditions of colonies even if less lucid than those who later took up his struggle), but that the countervailing forces against mass political organization were more persistent and potent than predicted.

tl;dr summary:

- Could've been a fairly standard "What has the Western left ever done?" critique, but the exploration of colonialism as a persistent blind spot, using celebrated theorists' own words, gave this unique polemical depth.
- Dengism bad. Well, at least, the emphasis on the difficulty of China's position is appreciated, but comparison of post-Mao market reforms to the much earlier Soviet NEP is so starkly lacking in context that you can feel the stretching.
- The takedown of Zizek was satisfying.
- A lot to think about re: Althusserian structuralism and how it might be tweaked to better account for colonialism (if I ever update this review, more notes on this!). Losurdo presents the colonized as colonial subject and so inherently troublesome for Althusser's "history as a process without a subject", and further problematizes the notion of an "epistemological break" between an early humanistic and later scientific Marx. I deeply appreciated this passage for elucidating what's been my own response on the 'morality vs. science in Marx' issue:

So scientific rigor and moral indignation are closely intertwined, and only this connection can explain the call to revolution. The description of existing society alone, however exact and merciless it may be, does not spur action for the overthrow if mediation through moral condemnation is lacking, and this moral condemnation arises in Marx from the representation of the dehumanizing processes inherent in the capitalist system...The continuity in Marx's development is evident, and what Althusser calls an epistemological rupture is merely the transition to a discourse in which the moral condemnation of misanthropy and anti-humanism of bourgeois society is expressed in a more concise and succinct way.

[Vic u · Rating 5 out of 5]

every anarchistic, liberal and Maoist needs to read this and STFU

[Omar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thought-provoking and polemical work. This book is a thrashing of the Western Left and the disappointing intellectual tradition they built after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution. Instead of following the anti-colonial edicts of the Third International and Soviet Union, Western Marxism developed a hazy relationship with this principle and instead adhered to a form of credulous idealism.

At times, Western Marxism preferred to critique those resisting foreign occupation/colonial expansion, thereby feeding into the chauvinism of Western imperialist powers. At other moments, they developed elaborate works that completely ignored or do not take into account the experience of the Global South. And lastly, their intellectual bankruptcy is evident today with their inability to protest blatant acts of imperial aggression.

From my perspective, Western Marxism seems to be descendant of the Second International. Without an explicit anti-imperial and anti-colonial politics, the works they produce - even the interesting ones- will always be flawed and will always align with the harmful and destructive politics of their respective countries.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Read the German translation) An interesting overview of the different developments in Western and Eastern Marxism (socialism, "leftism" broadly etc, as the book covers many decades and many thinkers), which at times was quite amusing and had rather pointed commentary, and sometimes made me get lost in sentences that could have been shorter and less convoluted.

Since I haven't read all of the thinkers he mentions in their original publications, I can't comment on whether I agree with his opinion about them, but since he did cover a lot of names that I had heard but just don't have the time to get into deeply, it was helpful to have someone put them into a historical context.
And even though the book was originally published in 2017, a lot of his critique of the "Western Left" (and even more the German left...) more broadly, and especially on the recent topic of the genocide in Gaza and the clear colonial structures at play in Israel, make a lot of what he is saying very relevant for the current moment.

The general argument of the book seems to be that in order to be anything more than A. pure intellectual dreaming about a future beyond capitalism, or B . the romanticisation of revolutionary moments, that become less interesting once reality sets in and the question of HOW to structure societies beyond the initial rupture moment has to be solved, Western Marxism/Leftism needs to be in real solidarity with the struggle against colonial, neocolonial oppression that IS happening all around us, despite processes that might not always be ideal or beautiful.

I'll probably need to do a re-read of this at some point.

[Fábio de Oliveira Martins Martins · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Observações gerais:*
- ótimo projeto gráfico
- não sobra um autor marxista sem crítica
- nem mesmo Foucault e Hannah Arendt são perdoados
- a tese principal do livro é de que os autores do marxismo ocidental, ainda que eventualmente se encontrasse com a luta anti-imperialista, distanciou-se dela e fomentou o racismo europeu: negligenciaram e afastaram de si autores marxistas asiático e o movimento revolucionário de independência no Haití. A consequência disso foi a morte do marxismo ocidental e sua conversão em dogma.

*Principais Trechos:*

* Tendo considerado o taylorismo "um sistema científico para espremer o suor" do "escravo assalariado", Lênin, depois da Revolução de Outubro, destacava que "o poder dos sovietes"tinha de aprender a aumentar a produtividade do trabalho, ensinando o trabalhador russo, tradicionalmente um "mau trabalhador", a trabalhar melhor e promovendo a assimi;ação crítica do "sistema de Taylor" e dos "mais recentes progressos do capitalismo". 42
* Compreende-se, então, a conclusão de Gramsci: sempre tratadas como multidão infantil e, poranto, consideradas incapazes de entender e querer no plano político, as massas populares podem ser tranquilamente sacrificadas pela classe dominante no altar de seus projetos imperiais. E, assim, é preciso fazer com que o "povo trabalhador" não permaneça na condição de "presa fácil para todos" e de simples "material humano" à disposição das elites, de "matéria bruta para a história das classes privilegiadas". 47
* Lênin sobre o imperialismo: O que o caracteriza é a "obsessão não apenas de conquistar territórios agrários [como pretendia Kautsky], mas também de se apoderar de países fortemente industriais" 54
* Mencionemos Lucio Colletti. Em seu período marxista, ele demonstrou os limites fundamentais da liberdade cara ao mundo liberal-capitalista, referindo-se às "casas de trabalho (case di lavoro)"ou "casas de correção" (nas quais eram aprisionados, frequentemente através de simples medidas policiais, desempregados e miseráveis ou todos aqueles considerados ou suspeitos de ser "ociosos vagabundos") 76
* A desumanização dos povos coloniais se manifesta de maneira ao mesmo tempo plástica e repugnante. Pode-se então compreender o balanço delineado no final do século XIX por um autor que mais tarde virá a se tornar caro ao nazismo: enquanto saúda o século XX já às portas como o "século das raças"e o "século das colônias, Houston S. Chamberlain zomba da "assim chamada 'unidade da raça humana'", a seu ver desmentida pela ciência e pela história e à qual permaneceriam pateticamente agarrados apenas os "socialistas". 80
* Sobre olhar para o Oriente: O movimento comunista não se comporta de maneira diferente. Lênin chama a atenção para o fato de que, aos olhos do Ocidente, as vítimas das guerras e go expansionismo colonial "não merecem sequer o apelativo de povos (seriam talvez povos os asiáticos e os africanos?)"; em última análise, elas são excluídas da própria comunidade humana. Ainda mais explícito é Gramsci. Escrevendo nos anos 1930, ele observa que, até para um filósofo como Henri Bergson, "de fato, 'humanidade'significa cidente"; e é assim que argumentam os paladinos da "defesa do Ocidente", os "defensistas do Ocidente", a cultura dominante no Ocidente. O comunismo, ao contrário, é sinônimo de "humanismo integral", de um humanismo que desafio os preconceitos e a arrogância dos "super-homens brancos". 82
* Citando Mao Tsé-Tung: "O cruel sistema colonialista-imperialista se desenvolveu com a escravização e com o tráfico dos negros, e certamente chegará ao fim com a completa libertação deles" 89
* ainda que penosamente redescoberta, entre incertezas e oscilações, a categoria de "imperialismo" tende a abalar outra categoria, aquela de "totalitarismo". Marcuso compreende bem os problemas enfrentados pelos países que conseguiram se livrar do jugo colonial. Eles tendem "a pensar que, para permanecer independentes, é necessário que a industrialização seja rápida"e que rapidamente se aumente o "nível de produtividade". 102
* Em 1937, Mao Tsé-tung insistira no fato de que a verdade nasce não da especulação solitário, mas "no decorrer do processo de prática social" 114/115
* Um ano depois do advento do Terceiro Reich, Du Bois comparava o Estado racial que Hitler erguia na Alemanha ao Estado racial que há muito vigia no Sul dos Estados unidos e ao regime da white supremacy e de domínio colonial ou racional que o Ocidente como um todo fazia valer em escala planetário. Alguns anos depois, ao publicar sua autobiografia, o autor afro-americano reiterava um ponto essencial: "Hitler é o expoente tardio, cru, mas consequente, da filosofia racial do mundo branco" 122
* Temos então de nos conscientizar de que o primeiro grande golpe ao sistema capitalista-escravista foi dado pela revolução dos escravos negros de São Domingos, dirigida por Toussant Louverture. 194
* [sobre Hegel] trata-se de assimilar a grande lição segundo a qual "a filosofia é o próprio tempo apreendido com o pensamento". Não por acaso, o aturo dessa definição, como diz seu biógrafo, "costumava ler um imenso número de jornais - algo que em regra somente um homem de estado pode fazer" 206/207
* agora que a excomunhão do marxismo oriental pelo marxismo ocidental promoveu o fim, não do excomungado, mas do excomungador. A superação de todo comportamento doutrinário e a disponibilidade de se confrontar com o próprio tempo e de filosofar em vez de profetizar são a condição necessária para que o marxismo possa renascer e se desenvolver no Ocidente. 213

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely important contribution to 21st century Marxism and political theory. Losurdo essentially and effectively asserts that so-called "western Marxism," or in other words the academic Euro-American additions to Marxist theory since the mid-20th century, is nothing more than racist, imperialist, utopian anti-communism.

It's a stinging rebuke that goes a long way toward explaining the frustration I've long experienced when trying to engage with so-called "radical" academics (and I've taken a class with one of Losurdo's principal villains here, Michael Hardt). They rarely feel like they're talking about anything materially relevant to present-day struggle, and Losurdo highlights why: they've essentially forsaken any current anti-imperialist struggles along with all actually existing socialist states. They always have reasonable sounding justifications for doing so, but they coincidentally never seem to deviate from the pattern of siding with imperialism against poor, non-white nations.

Probably the most memorable passage comes when discussing Hardt and Negri's Empire and their downright weird, anarchist claim that no state deserves any support from Marxists(p.202):

...'from India to Algeria, from Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.' Yes, the Palestinians can count on the sympathy and support of Western Marxism. But, from the moment in which 'the Palestinians are institutionalized,' one can 'no longer be at their side.' The fact is that 'as soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state, its progressive functions all but vanish.'

And so, we can be sympathetic to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Palestinians, or any other people only so long as they are oppressed, humiliated, and without any power -- that is, as long as they are in the hands of colonialism and imperialism. We can support their struggle for national liberation only as long as it continues to be defeated! The defeat or the inconclusiveness of a revolutionary movement is the precondition for certain exponents of Western Marxism to celebrate themselves and enjoy being rebels who, in any circumstance, refuse to contaminate themselves with constituted power!

Of the four Losurdo books I've started, this is probably the 3rd most engaging/important (behind Liberalism and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend). It suffers from being fairly repetitive, and I wish Losurdo had spent more time dissecting the failures of contemporary Marxists. E.g. Hardt, Negri and Zizek come off really poorly here, but they're not the only contemporary Western Marxists, and even in criticizing those three Losurdo stays pretty superficial. For me some of the most compelling arguments would be examining their positions on contemporary events - e.g. Hardt's support of the Yugoslavia bombing, and Zizek's repeated antipathy toward China. Those parts were great and I just wanted more.

In any case, this book is important to read for any Euro-American Marxists, especially white ones and especially university students. If you're studying Marxism at the undergrad or graduate level it is vital that you understand the history and failure of the ideology you're imbibing, and I doubt anyone can elucidate that for you more quickly than Losurdo in this book.

Not Bad Reviews

[Ali Jones Alkazemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is perhaps not a reflective book and does not even flinch a second when polemicizing against many of the most well known Western philosophers, both Marxists and poststructuralists. By this I, for instance, mean that Losurdo actually never explains what is Marxist about his exclusive attention towards anti-imperialism. Not all anti-imperialism is Marxist, though I do accept that there is Marxist forms of anti-imperialism. Not least, Losurdo merely refers to Marxist and Communist figures to make anti-imperialist claims, but he does not in any way show what their anti-imperialist politics and thinking has to do with the Marxist analysis of the commodity in Das Kapital. Still, the criticism Losurdo directs is so refreshing and worth discussing, that the book nevertheless was worth the thorough read I gave it.

[M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

La tesis central del libro aborda el concepto de «marxismo occidental», un marxismo característico de los centros imperialistas que esencialmente olvida -consciente o inconscientemente- la cuestión colonial/anti-imperialista. Entre sus páginas Losurdo diserta ampliamente sobre la ruptura entre este marxismo y un «marxismo oriental», encarnado en las experiencias asiáticas (China, Vietnam) y la URSS, poniendo de relieve la importancia de la cuestión colonial.

Losurdo no deja títere con cabeza: desde Bloch a Zizek, pasando por Horkheimer o Arendt, el hilo conductor para el italiano es el desprecio de todos los autores marxistas contemporáneos a las revoluciones anti-imperialistas bien por intereses objetivos en el negocio colonialista, bien por considerar que esta cuestión no es lo suficientemente «pura» de cara a una concepción escolástica del marxismo, bien por simple y llana ignorancia. Sin ser especialmente incisivo o mordaz, Domenico Losurdo pinta un recorrido cronológico donde destaca la deuda pendiente de ese marxismo académico, que no se mancha las manos con el trabajo duro diario, con una cuestión que ha gobernado buena parte de las relaciones de producción capitalistas desde hace más de 100 años. Algunas de las posturas expuestas en el libro aún son, por desgracia, perfectamente vigentes en el panorama militante.

Es sin duda mi lectura del año. Ojo: si no se es estudiante de Filosofía y Letras, recomendado tener a mano un diccionario.

[Jasmine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Losurdo’s most important intervention in this work is to reframe the idea of Western Marxism as “a product of defeat” — to borrow a phrase from Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism, to which Losurdo is directly responding. Writing in the 1970s, at the peak of the socialist national liberation movements, Anderson explains:

The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corruption inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period. Its major works were, without exception, produced in situations of political isolation and despair.

As Losurdo argues, this period was not a failure of the spread of socialist revolution, but a striking success. It was simply not recognized as such by Western Marxists due to their lack of appreciation of the demands of social construction (necessary for satisfaction of economic needs and evasion of neocolonialism) and their expectation that the state should “wither away” more rapidly (impossible when it is needed for construction of a new society). Having taken on idealistic and dogmatic characteristics, Western Marxism neglected the historical and geographical context of these early socialist revolutions.

The final section in the book presents Losurdo’s argument for how “Marxism in the West can be reborn” and is also valuable. Losurdo argues that Marx and Engels saw the path to communism as a long and gradual one. Interestingly, he also highlights that Marx anticipated that the bourgeois revolution would extend political rights more universally; history instead showed that these gains came through the pressures exerted by worker-led and anti-colonial revolutions. These revolutions faced conditions of economic underdevelopment and imperial pressure, and achieved neither universal political emancipation nor economic emancipation. Western Marxism criticized these nations for not quickly delivering on the promises of later stages of communism envisioned by Marx:

The concrete history of the new post-revolutionary society, which seeks to develop itself among the tentative contradictions, difficulties, and errors of every kind, is defined en bloc as a degeneration and betrayal of the real movement in the name of the remote and utopian futures, an attitude foreign to Marx and Engels and which deprives Marxism of any real emancipatory project.

To take such an attitude means arbitrarily amputating the plural temporalities that characterize the revolutionary project of Marx and Engels. It means a temporal amputation that is simultaneously spatial. It concentrates exclusively on the remote future, read in a utopian vein, and leads to the exclusion of the vast majority of the world and humanity that has begun to take the first steps toward modernity and has sometimes even stopped at its threshold. And so the essential condition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West is the transcendence of this temporal and spatial amputation of the revolutionary project it has carried out.

Western Marxism criticized without being part of “real struggles” — a practice Marx mocked. Its leading figures instead yearned for an immediate rupture with the state of things, while refusing “to take up the problems arising from taking power” (Part V, 5 — also an essential section). Losurdo’s ultimate conclusion is that “Overcoming doctrinaire attitudes, the willingness to measure oneself against one’s own time, and philosophizing rather than prophesying are the necessary preconditions for Marxism’s rebirth and development in the West.”

Published in Italian in 2017 and in English in 2024, this book is both the most recent of Losurdo’s works to be translated into English and one of his final works before his death in 2018 at the age of 76. Perhaps aware that he had not much life ahead of him, this book reads a little rushed, although I agree with his overall thesis, the need for this critique of Western Marxism and his prescription for a path forward. This hurriedness is unfortunate, because his argument has been rather summarily dismissed by Western Marxism.

A more unavoidable critique would have taken the form of an intellectual biography and critical balance sheet of Western Marxism, as Losurdo provides for Nietzsche in his paradigm-shifting Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel . Instead, Losurdo engages very briefly with each thinker — many of whom fit awkwardly into the Western Marxist canon, like Arendt. His critiques tend to follow the pattern of a quote by a Western Marxist praising Western Liberalism juxtaposed against the materialist, realist, ambitious and optimistic positions taken by revolutionary figures in the anti-colonial movement (Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, etc). Again, I don’t think Losurdo is wrong to criticize these writers for ignoring colonialism, but I find his attacks rather superficial and unsystematic, particularly compared to some of his other works.

For new readers, I’d recommend instead Liberalism: A Counter-history or Democracy or Bonapartism? as entry points into his works. For those that want a more systematic presentation of Losurdo’s support for national liberation movements and defense of actually existing socialism, I would recommend Class Struggle instead — in particular, his insistence on technological progress and on the consideration of class struggle as the struggle for recognition are ideas touched on in this book but better developed in that work.

For readers familiar with his work, you might be surprised how little new you find in these pages. There are passages remixed from all three books recommended above, as well as from his 2004 essay on Arendt (“Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism”), his 1999 essay “Flight from History?”, and his book on Stalin. There’s nothing wrong with this — I, too, revisit ideas and examples over and over. But I think a remix should add up to more than the sum of its parts and your most vital blows must land on your targets.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction, written by Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill, it is highlighted that “after the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and China’s formal alliance with the USSR in 1950, approximately one-third of the world’s population was living in socialist countries” (Page 15), a stunning statistic to consider. This makes the defeatist and dismissive attitude of Western Marxists towards actually-existing-socialism all the more frustrating and baffling. How could they so easily discard the staggering achievements of communists in the East?

Losurdo explains how for the Eastern Marxists, the construction of a complete socialist society in which the state withered away had to be pushed somewhat down the immediate list of priorities upon coming to power, as rapid industrialisation and modernisation had to take precedence. “Far from being replaced or lost sight of, socialism became a goal spread over a much longer period than had been foreseen” (Page 85), something unacceptable to the idealism of Western Marxists. This delay was necessary to see off the imperialist threat of once again becoming a colony or semi-colony, which, for instance, was the exact situation faced by China after 1949 under the leadership of Chairman Mao. Losurdo expands on his analysis by adding that not only would this path consolidate independence, but it would also “foil once and for all the danger of recurring famine and to make concrete the ideal of equality at every level.” (Page 84) To summarise, “only the development of productive forces could make national independence real and end the threat of neocolonial dependence.” (Page 84)

Discussing the differences between Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism, Losurdo explains how, “addicted to the role of opposition and critique, and to varying degrees influenced by messianism, the former look with suspicion and disapproval at the power that the latter are called upon to wield by the victory of the revolution.” (Page 200) He continues: “Only the initial moment of the revolution is exultant and magical, when a power considered intolerable by public opinion at large is overthrown, but certainly not so is the consideration of the new power and the construction of the new order. Power corrupts.” (Page 201) This perspective is of course in total agreement with the dominant ideology and is shaped by the erasure or distortion of the anti-colonial struggle. Losurdo takes aim at the likes of Hannah Arendt and Michael Foucault, stating that “erasing colonialism from history makes understanding capitalism impossible. If we analyse the capitalist countries together with the colonies, we realise that we are looking at a double standard: one for the race of the conquerors and one for the race of the conquered.” (Page 167)

But why are Western Marxists like this? To understand this, one must look at the material conditions in which their theoretical development occurred. “In the West, the radical, indeed apocalyptic historical turning point is undoubtedly represented by the scale and the flames of the First World War and the victory of the October Revolution.” (Page 42) However, Losurdo points out that this was not the same elsewhere in the world: “In the colonies and semi-colonies, the capitalist-colonialist system had revealed it’s terrible capacity for oppression and violence well before August 1914.” (Page 45) This had an impact on the way that Marxist critiques within and without the colonies developed, and so “in Europe, because the rejection of the war inspired the choice of revolution, critics of the existing order aimed mainly at the state apparatus and the military.” (Page 48) Losurdo continues: “The influence of anarchism is quite evident…denouncing obligatory military service, ended up identifying and jointly criticizing violence, law, and power. It would be in vain to search for these anarchistic tones in the Marxist and Communist movement that was forming the East in the wake of the October Revolution. ” (Page 48-49)

Having already debunked the common equation of Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union in his book on Stalin, Losurdo tackles it once again here, examining the theory of totalitarianism pushed by Arendt: “The traditional theory of totalitarianism drags in and equates more or less radically Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But a great distance and even an ideological antithesis remain between them. The former country openly proclaimed that it was building a colonial empire founded on white and Aryan supremacy. The latter, instead, was a champion of the struggle against colonialism and racism.” (Page 170) To place fascism and communism on the same plane is of course little more than a crude smear happily promoted by the dominant ideology. In order to arrive at such mistaken conclusions regarding the nature of fascism and communism, you must remove the anticolonialist revolution from history. Without acknowledging the crucial role of the Soviet Union in inspiring and materially supporting anticolonial movements, it is impossible to understand the true character of actually existing socialism and you end up with “memorable judgments with which Zizek makes Stalin into a champion of the industrial production of corpses and Mao into an Oriental despot who, on a whim, condemns to death by starvation tens of millions of his own citizens.” (Page 222) Losurdo differs from a figure such as Zizek by encouraging those on the left to recognise “the international role of the Soviet Union of Stalin, which, frustrating the attempt by Hitler to reduce Eastern Europe to the ‘German Indies’, sounded the death knell for the world colonialist system (at least in its classical form).” (Page 191) He also challenges Zizek’s viciously anti-communist view of Mao as little more than a mass murderer, explaining that “by removing the struggle between colonialism and anticolonialism and Mao’s troubled race to escape from the desperate mass misery that had resulted from colonial aggression and domination, puts it all on the ledger of the homicidal folly of the Chinese leader.” (Page 193)

Looking at the impact of the communist movement worldwide, Losurdo points to how racial discrimination in the US provided more than enough ammunition for communist propaganda, recruiting people of colour to the communist cause. It was in part because “of this concern that the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation unconstitutional in public schools”, and therefore “we cannot understand how the regime of white supremacy was dismantled in the United States (itself a tenacious heritage of the world colonialist-slavery system) without noting the challenge of the October Revolution and of the communist movement.” (Page 221) However, when looking back at the Soviet Union today, Western Marxism of course condemns it without reservation as a failure and something the left needs to forget and move past.

To conclude, I very much enjoyed this book and it has helped me to understand exactly why adherents of Western Marxism (many of whom subscribe unwittingly) have the theoretical shortfalls that they do. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to understand the different approaches of Marxist intellectuals in the West, far removed from any practical application of Marxism, and Eastern Marxism, engaged in the actual material construction of socialism.

[Jiho Burrows · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry to my comrades but I do not understand the hype with this book.

Yes Western Marxim is everything that Losurdo says it is, but because Losurdo groups such a diverse amount of thinkers into one Camp, and I mean one camp, alot of the arugementation is just confusing. It seems that Losurdo is directing alot of his efforts at a cannonization of certain Western Marxist thinkers. That is to say, the most popular ones by moralizing dialectical materialism! If you view socialism as being when a third world country improves the means of produciton via rampent industiralization vis-a-vis captialism thats fine! But whe is it gonna stop! If the arguement is that any 'third-world' previsouly colonized country is justfied in some form of state-capitalism because they are up against an antagonist bigger then them, then any thing that they do, regardless of what they actualy do, can be said to be socialism! Thats just formalizing the dialectic my dudes! Thats saying, the US is always ahead, and the US will always be ahead, but other countires need to make advancements, that is to keep up with the US, as such the US will still be ahead, but its ok because China (I am using china as an example, regardless of the name this is my issue) is also moving up and as long as it moves up its socialism. What I wanna know is what happens after the US is not ahead, would it still be socialism then?

I really, really did not understand many of the movements Losurdo made. It is evident he produces his thesis about Eastern Marxism first, and then goes, "see Western Marxism is what Eastern Marxism does not have." In all though, it seems like there would of been a better way to demarcate the sections in the book. As I see it, the main problem with the first German thinkers he critiques is that they had a naive-ideological idea of about pre-modern germany and that supported much of there critiques against captitalism. And you know who else did, someone so imporant that they helped with so much of the post-modern discourse that Losurdo critiques: Heidegger!

I find it ironic that the one of the few guys that he likes within the history of western marxism is the dude from Hungary. Now I am tiered and do not feel like writing any more.

[Ciro Cicogna · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'unica critica da porre a questo libro è che se nel suo essere perfetto nel scardinare questo falso marxismo moderno di cui si riempiono la bocca in tanti non attacca con la ferocia di uno Stirner, pur annullando le tesi dei vari Agamben Badiou Foucault e compagnia (non cialtroni, ma politicamente non rilevanti) non li detronizza davvero perché sorprendentemente, e forse come ogni buon marxista, non procede davvero a costruire qualcosa ma solo a definire gli errori logici/storici di questa "sinistra" (che sostanzialmente non esiste più). Critica l'affidamento ai cattivi maestri, senza proporne uno vero al di fuori di un Marx inutilizzabile. Reputo comunque un capolavoro la capacità di scardinare internamente più generazioni di autori che non hanno mai fatto prassi e non ci hanno neanche mai pensato

[Kamiab Ghorbanpour · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book isn’t getting enough hate, so I thought I’d do the job. I don’t understand why Losurdo doesn’t face more criticism, even though he’s so heavily cited.

The book is called Western Marxism, and Losurdo spends half of it whining about Hannah Arendt and Foucault, criticisms I don’t even entirely disagree with. But why? Neither Arendt nor Foucault were Marxists. The attacks on the Frankfurt School are just as absurd, relying on anachronistic assumptions about people’s Marxist affiliations.
Bottom line: it’s an extremely weak book when it comes to criticizing Western Marxism --read: non-Stalinist Marxists, and even non-Marxists, or basically anyone Losurdo didn’t like.

Rockhill’s sequel, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, is probably even more ridiculous. I’m sure he’ll spend half the book arguing that the CIA read Foucault or something.

[Comrade Zupa Ogórkowa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Domenico Losurdo continues to establish himself as one of the best western intellectual Marxists. For anyone who has felt frustrated with the moral cowardice of condemning every socialist project, the self-indulgent defeatism, and bourgeoisie idealism rampant in western communist spaces and movements- this book is incredibly validating and provides much needed criticism. Also fantastic intro by Gabriel Rockhill

[Matthew Webber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. I'm so glad this was translated I to English. Communists should read this and Losurdo's book on Liberalism. They complement each other very well.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Rockhill outlines, Losurdo makes a strong claim here:

This work is the culmination of decades of research on the history of the Marxist tradition and its internal struggles. It elucidates one of the major splits in global Marxist debates that marked Losurdo's generation and continues to structure many contemporary controversies. He described the emergence of this schism in the 1970s in an interview with Stefano Azzarà, a scholar who has authored an insightful book on Losurdo's work. The Eastern Marxists, as he explained, were identified as those who actually exercised power, as in the USSR, Vietnam, Korea, China, Cuba, and so forth." The Western Marxists, by contrast, were intellectuals who opposed these efforts to construct socialism, rejecting the quest for power in favor of diverse forms of critical theory, while sometimes presenting their distance from power as an epistemological advantage for discovering so-called authentic Marxism.

Though this book isn't meant to turn on polmic:

His study of Western Marxism is not an ideological analysis that focuses solely on superstructural elements, nor is it an immanent critique or an ad hominem attack that lambasts these thinkers for their individual ideas. On the contrary, as in his other work, he elucidates the objective forces driving the ideology of Western Marxism, which he sees as a cultural product of the imperialist core. This is surely one of the reasons why he uses geographic terminology. It is not to imply that all Marxists in a particular region necessarily suffer from the same ideology, which would be reductivist. It is rather that there are very real material forces that foster within the imperialist center a particular ideology that can—and should be—resisted.

Losurdo's key argument is the division between Eastern and Western Marxism is largely shaped around attitudes towards anticolonial struggle against imperialism and neoimperialism:

Thanks to the attention paid to colonialism and its intrinsic barbarism, the Hungarian philosopher [Lukács] was far from the idealist transfiguration of the liberal West, of which Bloch, Horkheimer, and Adorno repeatedly wrote. He called attention to Marx's denunciation of the "enslavement of Ireland" by the British Empire and lamented that this denunciation had found little echo in "the contemporary English labor movement" and the Second International. Unfortunately, we must add that even the thesis (that Lukács derives from Lenin) of the centrality of the colonial and national question in the context of the world revolutionary process found little echo in Western Marxism.

Despite being characterized by various positions, ranging from a committed anticolonialism but an often fragile theoretical platform to a declared pro-colonialism, on the whole Western Marxism missed the meeting with the world anticolonialist revolution.

I give the book five stars because of its great attention to this topic, which I think is among the most important, as well as Losurdo's clear dedication to it. However, I have a quibble: I'm not sure Losurdo's terse East/West division is not so reductivist:

In the West, the nation-state was the bloodthirsty Moloch that sacrificed millions of people to the greed for power and the interests of big business, in the East, it was a question of shaking off the colonial yoke and putting an end to the genocidal and enslaving practices used by the great capitalist powers against the "barbarians." In the two zones into which the world was divided, imperialism was experienced in different ways; there is no contradiction but rather a full convergence between these two aspects. But have Western and Eastern Marxism ever met? Has the first ever really grasped the second?

This East/West framework is fine in the abstract, but does not serve its purpose when Losurdo gets far into the concreate details. Not to say his abstraction does not have a lot of truth to it, it certainly does—many criticized attempts to create socialism in practice from the sidelines, and many turned their backs on the East/Global South. However, of course there are many Western Marxists dedicated to the anticolonial struggle, such as Mike Davis, John Bellamy Foster or Paul Sweezy. Rhetoric can only take you so far until you have to take into account the what is actually happening on the ground and "read one's own time," as Losurdo wrote:

Now, the thesis that to philosophize is to conceptually apprehend one's own time has acquired an additional meaning. Reading one's own time is no longer only a question of conceptualizing and structuring a rigorous categorical apparatus; it is also to identify the presence of a determinate historical moment (with its contradictions and its conflicts), also in the seemingly most "abstract" conceptualizations and philosophical systems.

[Douglas Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of if not the last works of Losurdo, Western Marxism serves as a good swan song for his career as the premiere Leninist philosopher in the post Cold War era. While I did anticipate having the same critiques as an E Asian diaspora living in the west, there were some interesting points that Losurdo brings up historically and of course in his methodical fashion, he is complete in addressing all of the major western leftist "Marxist" philosophers since the October Revolution on.

Losurdo's primary thesis is that Western Marxism retained its own separate identity after the October Revolution, where he identifies Leninism with Eastern Marxism. Unlike many of his western Marxist contemporaries, Lenin saw imperialism and capitalist exploitation of the colonies to be the key to its maintenance. During the beginnings of WWI he was perplexed that many so-called Marxists would support militarism and nationalist causes, rather than supporting the masses who were called to fight for this capitalist exploitation and using the opportunity to turn it against their governments, as he later achieved in Russia after years of bloodshed for the Russian poor. He retreated into his study of Hegelian logic and through dialectical materialist analysis, developed his now famous work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

From then on, Western Marxism became about discrediting the Soviet Union, and then later on the People's Republic of China, for not dogmatically following Marx's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as both the USSR and the PRC would have to improvise with programs like the NEP, the Great Leap Forward and other heterodox policies that more had to do with the material conditions on the ground than following proper Marxist theory. This in itself shows a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism, which Marx himself never prescribed, and which loses the point of Hegelian dialectical logic itself, that the truth in Marxism isn't a fixed point, but a constantly evolving one where the ideology has to adapt as the bourgeois itself reacts to Marxist movements themselves.

Losurdo then points to how eastern AES figures like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong viewed Marxism, that they viewed it as a tool to guide their own countries to liberation against direct slavery conditions of colonialism, and that Western Marxism simply ridiculed their efforts out of views that such struggles were merely primitive in form and thus not a true reflection of Marxist thought. Losurdo critiques this western chauvinistic thought and ultimately concludes that western Marxism died because it lacked the life of its own self movement, as merely being an ideal for leftist academics to critique other socialist projects. He ends the books with ideas for how this could turn around and how western Marxism could experience a revival.

As an E Asian Marxist Leninist, this was helpful to read to fill in some gaps but was much of a confirmation of what I've already observed about western Marxists as a whole. This book is therefore most necessary for any western Marxist Leninist movement to have as a primary educational starting point, if they are ever going to ever render any success to a revolution in the west.

[jac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why would the Venezuela of Chavez and Maduro be considered more "authoritarian" than the country that tries by every means to destabilize it and to subjugate it and that seeks to exercise its dictatorship over Latin America and over the world?

A scathing critique of the half of the world that has yet to produce a successful revolution. Clarifying the logics of defeat and utopianism that pervade the west.

Rather than a philosopher determined to conceive and promote a radical project for transforming the world starting from the contradictions and the conflicts of the present, he was a prophet who pined nostalgically or from love for a world that would be entirely new, one without any relationship to the gigantic conflict between emancipation and de-emancipation occurring at that moment.

Increases my personal project to defend actually existing socialism and advocate for changing the world by taking power.

And so, we can be sympathetic to the Chinese, Vietnamese, Palestinians or any other people only so long as they are oppressed, humiliated, and without any power - that is, as long as they are in the hands of colonialism and imperialism. We can support their struggle for national liberation only as long as it continues to be defeated! The defeat of a revolutionary movement is the precondition for certain exponents of Western Marxism to celebrate themselves and enjoy being rebels who, in any circumstance, refure to contaminate themselves with constitute power!

Mr. Losurdo I will happily join you in tankie jail any day.

Western Marxism ends up departing from the terrain of politics and settling into the land of religion.

[Justin Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fabulous rebuttal to anarchists and those on the left that refuse to factor in the obstacles that socialist states encounter such as poverty, being behind technologically, and imperialism. The Western left is full of hypocrites who harshly judge socialist countries while not being active critics of their own imperialist countries. One point he made that really stuck out with me was that China is on the verge of ending the Columbian epoch of the last 500+ years. That is powerful and it really makes you understand why the U.S. is so hostile to China and why the U.S. lies about them constantly.

[poslyn rosen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like Losurdo quite a bit especially Nietzsche aristocratic rebel which gives its subject its total due diligence, this is sloppy and can really only be appreciated by people who have not seriously engaged with most of the philosophers and theorists he discusses. His stuff on Agamben and Adorno is so loose and unscholarly there isn't much to be said. I do not recommend to anyone.

[Nikos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seite für Seite sargt Losurdo hier alle Philosophen sämtlicher neomarxistischer Unsinnigkeiten ein. Die eklatanten Mängel und gefährlichen Verharmlosungen die behandelte Autor:innen zur Thematik der kolonialen Frage aufweisen, werden von ihm systematisch ausgearbeitet und demonstriert.

[Babasa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Immensely clarifying on how differing reactions to the anti colonial struggle over the 20th century and to the experience of being in power led to a split in Marxism. I I also always like Losurdo for his humanism and his willingness to draw from philosophy.

[S · Rating 1 out of 5]

a confused piece which is only rated highly by those who haven’t seriously engaged with the political content of the communist left. standard stalinite drivel which ends up justifying their opportunist thinking and blatant revision of revolutionary scientific socialism and historical materialism.

[Tobin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great to reflect and see your colonial/western supremacist positions with regards to the world. We should work on how to concretely move forward with its proscriptions. Western leftism will continue to fail without confronting these mistakes

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another spicy serving from Losurdo.

A good read about a challenging reality we have to deal with, but honestly the last 30 pages are a transcription of a speech he gave on the subject and I think just reading that would be sufficient for most people.

[fabia24 · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A autodissolução do marxismo ocidental se configura aqui como o abandono do terreno da política e a aproximação do terreno da religião."

[Matthew O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential book for anyone on the left. I particularly enjoyed the sections talking about Max Horkheimer and hannah arendt

[Anna Nicole Smith & Wesson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it.