reviews

Domenico Losurdo, Il marxismo occidentale: Come nacque, come morì,

come può rinascere
Editori Laterza: Bari 2017, €20, paperback
220 pp, 978 8 85812 747 6

David Broder

EASTERN LIGHT ON WESTERN MARXISM

The subtitle of Domenico Losurdo’s book promises an investigation into

‘how Western Marxism was born, how it died and how it can be reborn’.
Leafing through its pages, however, we would be hard pressed to find any
trace of calls for Western Marxism’s ‘rebirth’. Losurdo prefers to assume
the stance of a doctor faced with an ailing patient, telling the worried rela-
tives why they may as well turn off the life support. The book’s combative
tone will come as no surprise to readers of Losurdo’s work so far available
in English. This is a library that extends from a critique of Heidegger and the
Ideology of War (2001) through Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns (2004),
to Liberalism: A Counter-History (2011), War and Revolution: Rethinking the
Twentieth Century (2014) and Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth (2017),
with an intellectual biography of Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel due to
appear early next year. These form only a small part of Losurdo’s prodigious
output in his native language, which comprises some thirty-five books and
numerous co-authored volumes, making him one of the most prolific Italian
thinkers of his generation. Holder of a chair in the history of philosophy at
Urbino, few have rivalled his combination of energy and erudition. Born in
1941 near Bari, he belongs to the generation radicalized in the sixties, when
he was a youthful militant in the small wing of Italian communism that ral-
lied to Chinese positions in the Sino-Soviet dispute and hailed the Cultural
Revolution, before splitting into different groups that faded away after the
death of Mao in 1976. In the eighties he was a contributor to the pages of
the pci’s daily l’Unità, and became a member of the party. When it aban-
doned its name in 1991, he threw in his lot with those who left it to create
Rifondazione Comunista, in turn reduced to a wraith after its participation

new left review 107 sept oct 2017 131

 132 nlr 107

in the Prodi government of 2006–08. Since 2016 he has joined the attempt
to recreate a second pci, under the party’s old name, an organization cur-
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rently claiming some 12,000 members.

Il marxismo occidentale offers, without question, an original construction
of its subject. Losurdo’s key move is to contrast ‘Western Marxism’ system-
atically with an ‘Eastern Marxism’, presented as its productive antithesis.
The Western variant, Losurdo agrees with other accounts, was born out of a
reaction against the slaughter of the First World War, and the magnetism of
the revolution in Russia. The outlook of its earliest thinkers—Bloch, Lukács,
Benjamin—was, however, from the outset impregnated with a set of themes
that went back to the anarchism of Bakunin’s time: notably a hostility to sci-
ence, associated with capitalism, and to the state of any kind, associated with
tyranny. To these it added a messianic streak of eschatological expectation,
inherited from a judeo-christian past, that looked forward to salvation for
humanity in communism, conceived as the proximate coming of a class-
less society in which money and the state would disappear. Such utopian
hopes vested in a beleaguered ussr were bound to be disappointed. The
Western Marxism they generated, unable to come to terms with the realities
of building a state capable of withstanding the pressures of imperialism,
was condemned to impotence and involution. The ensuing theoretical and
political blindness had its roots in the formative reaction of the generation
of 1914 to the catastrophe of the Great War itself, which instilled in them a
detestation of nationalism, held responsible for the mutual massacre of the
peoples of Europe, an aversion to technology which had enabled killing on
an industrial scale, and a simplistic belief that the path to socialism could
therefore come from class struggle alone.
The outlook of what crystallized as Eastern Marxism after the October
Revolution was altogether distinct. In Europe, the collapse of the masses into
chauvinism, Social Democracy’s betrayal on 4 August, and the splintering of
the Second International led Western Marxists to see the Russian Revolution
as the antidote to this scourge, and to hope for a general overcoming of
‘social patriotism’ with a rapid spread of proletarian revolution across the
continent. Even when this failed to materialize, the European Left remained
imbued with a strong anti-militarist and—in Losurdo’s term—‘anarchoid’
contempt for the nation. In Asia, on the other hand, World War I was not the
unique cataclysm it was in Europe. For Chinese or Vietnamese revolutionar-
ies, as Ho Chi Minh pointed out, colonial blood-letting had long predated
1914; if anything, the Great War had weakened the grip of European empires
on the peoples of Asia. For them, the appeal of the Russian Revolution lay
not in the image of an ‘anti-war’ or ‘anti-national’ revolt but, on the con-
trary, in its ‘national’ inspiration for an anti-imperialist struggle. In 1919–21,
the Bolshevik-led state had proved able through its own resources to free
 broder: Western Marxism 133

itself from the imperialist powers who attempted to subdue it. It was this
that allowed the Soviet Union and the new Communist International to

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win not only the allegiance of Ho—who explained that ‘what first drove me
to believe in Lenin and the Third International was not communism but
patriotism’—but even the favour of non-Marxist yet anti-colonial militants
such as Sun Yat-sen. So, too, for Eastern Marxism there could be no question
of any hostility to science or to the state. Asian struggles for national libera-
tion urgently required the use of science, to build both a modern economy
capable of lifting the masses from misery and a strong state able to defend
the independence of the nation from foreign attack. Eastern Marxists had no
illusion that a socialist revolution could deliver all this overnight. Far more
people had died during the Taiping Rebellion in China than on all sides of
the Great War in Europe, inoculating revolutionaries against any such mes-
sianism, and preparing them in advance for decades of the harshest struggle
first to win power, and then to consolidate it with the creation of a powerful
state capable of fending off imperialist counter-revolution.
In Russia the Bolsheviks were initially infused with still greater politi-
cal expectancy than Marxists in the West, believing that they were merely
erecting a bridgehead for revolution in the advanced industrial societies of
Europe, and even briefly experimenting with a barter economy under War
Communism. But sobriety soon prevailed, as the hard task of building
socialism in one country, with maximum use of scientific knowledge and
modern technology, to develop the economy and arm the state against inva-
sion, took over. This was a fundamental alteration. But if the needle of the
compass could swing as it did, it was because Lenin had insisted throughout
his career, and never more sharply than during the First World War, that rev-
olutions of national liberation in colonized countries were inseparable from
those against capital in colonial states—as early as 1913, he was writing of
‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’. When the Second World War began,
and Operation Barbarossa launched Hitler’s bid to enslave the peoples of the
ussr, the battles to defeat the Wehrmacht in Russia and the Imperial Army
in China resulted in victory for the Red Army and the pla over the coloniz-
ing assaults of Germany and Japan.
With this epochal development Western Marxism, a left-wing sensibility
born of the failure of revolution to spread across Europe after 1917, never
came to terms. Defeats in Germany, Italy, Hungary and Austria impacted
not ‘socialism in one country’, which continued to build up its strength,
but European currents now detached from any real process of construc-
tion. The Soviet experience initiated a worldwide anti-colonial revolution,
while Eurocentric tendencies became marginalized. Where the Eastern
Marxists took seriously the problems of building socialist states and defend-
ing them militarily, their counterparts in the West could at most appreciate
 134 nlr 107

revolutionary experiences in a messianic mood, supporting Eastern revolu-

tions at their initial moment of seizing power, then finding distasteful the
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decisions necessary to protect them from internal subversion and foreign

attack. Judging the real achievements of the Soviet Union by an unfair stand-
ard that lay beyond the material possibilities of the time, they then failed to
see that, rather than being an embodiment of their own visions of a grand
resolution of all differences, the Soviet Union was bedeviled by poverty, the
masses’ low cultural level and the difficult tasks of stabilizing itself in the
face of foreign encirclement.
Utopian hopes nowhere realized soon collapsed into claims of dystopia,
charges of ‘totalitarianism’—epitomizing the divorce of Western Marxists
from ongoing historical processes—and complacent basking in assurance
of the cultural superiority of their own societies. What they could never
grasp was that the objective developments of world history had perforce
given priority to anti-imperialist over anti-capitalist struggles, national over
class contradictions, even if these fused wherever communist parties gained
leadership of the cause. In Europe, one outstanding figure alone understood
the significance of the anti-colonial revolutions. That was Palmiro Togliatti
in Italy. By contrast, the record of Western Marxism became one of continu-
ing ignorance, indifference or dismissal of the momentous transformations
of the world outside Europe, culminating in the twenty-first century in
outright approval of imperialist interventions to set the clock back in the
Mediterranean and the Middle East.
In this Manichean narrative, there is an obvious initial weakness to
Losurdo’s framework. The gap between aspiration and reality for which
he blames the emergence of Western Marxism emanated directly from
Bolshevik conceptions of the October Revolution. Their seizure of power
was followed by an outpouring of grand designs for a new society. Bolshevik
leaders married the rationalizing imaginary of Looking Backward with the
more libertarian aspirations of a democratic, cultural and sexual revolu-
tion. Telling was Lenin’s vision of the new state’s tasks through the prism
of the Paris Commune, rushing out progressive social legislation to lay
down a ‘marker’ even if the revolution might fail in months. This impe-
tus was governed by Lenin’s own European perspective, the intention to
ignite revolutionary upheavals in the West that would save the young Soviet
republic from isolation. When these did not come, Bolshevik ambitions
were adjusted. But if state-building and industrial development became the
immediate priority, that in no way meant nation therefore came before class,
an idea unthinkable for Lenin. Where after his death such a conception did
come to pass, it famously led to disaster when Stalin forced the Chinese
Communists to subordinate themselves to the Nationalists in 1926–27, only
to be crushed with the massacre in Shanghai, after which the ccp had to
 broder: Western Marxism 135

be rebuilt by Mao on a different basis in Jiangsi. Serving essentially as a

foil with which to condemn Western Marxism, in Losurdo’s construction

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Eastern Marxism becomes an undifferentiated bloc where such contradic-
tions are inevitably flattened out.
But whatever the faults of its framing device, these pale beside the defi-
ciencies, to put it no stronger, of the substance of Il marxismo occidentale: its
account of Western Marxism itself. Here, after opening with a description of
Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism as a celebration of the excel-
lence of its subject, promising ‘a new and brilliant life’ to it, Losurdo passes
in review Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre,
Althusser, Della Volpe, Colletti, Badiou, Žižek, Hardt–Negri, not to speak
of Foucault and Agamben. The initial move is an index of the accuracy of
what follows. Considerations delivered an admiring, but ‘limiting judgement’
of its subject, concluding that ‘Western Marxism was less than Marxism
to the extent that it was Western’, and calling for a break beyond it, with
recovery of the ways and concerns of a Marxism of more classical stamp.
Unlike its predecessor, Il marxismo occidentale does not examine in detail
the work of any of the thinkers it deals with, or attempt to trace the the-
matic commonalities linking them as a canon. It proceeds instead by brief,
decontextualized use of single phrases or sentences, at most a paragraph
or so, extracted to press home a generic indictment of utopian idealism
and oblivious Eurocentrism. The result is so loose that its evidence is book-
ended at the story’s outset by thinkers who were not Marxists at the time
of writing—Bloch and Lukács before the October Revolution—and at the
end by thinkers who never considered themselves Marxists—Arendt and
Agamben—or were even, like Foucault, vehemently hostile to Marxism. All
are grist to the same mill. None are considered in their own right, but simply
as illustrations of Losurdo’s strained construction.
In this, Bloch has pride of place, earning more references than any other
figure. But since these come overwhelmingly from the first edition of his
Spirit of Utopia, published in 1918 before his conversion to Marxism—three
times as many as from the second, issued after it in 1923—they have lit-
tle bearing on Losurdo’s nominal subject. That Bloch always conceived of
himself as a utopian thinker, if subsequently a materialist one, is no secret.
But after 1923 he was in no way anti-Soviet, indeed the very opposite, so sup-
portive of the construction of a socialist state in the thirties that he defended
the Moscow Trials and after 1945 chose to return from exile to East rather
than West Germany. Lukács, from whom Losurdo selects a text from 1914
to demonstrate his Fichtean belief that he was living in an ‘age of absolute
sinfulness’, and another from 1915 to show that he considered any state to
be an ‘organized tuberculosis’, became so convinced a revolutionary Marxist
that as early as 1924—as Losurdo grudgingly admits later on—he was the
 136 nlr 107

first anywhere to produce a lucid synthesis of Lenin’s thought, giving its ori-
entation to anti-colonial revolutions in Asia full emphasis, and for the rest of
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his life remained a loyal Communist, first in Moscow and then in Budapest.
Benjamin, presented too largely via pre-Marxist fragments, was a fascinated
visitor to Moscow in the twenties, attracted by the modern urban-industrial
experimentation of the first decade after the revolution, and an interlocutor
and friend of Brecht, who like Bloch attached such value to socialist con-
struction that he returned to East Germany after the war. Another friend
of Brecht’s in the thirties, Karl Korsch—usually considered a key figure in
the emergence of a distinctive Western Marxism—fits Losurdo’s identikit so
poorly that he is omitted from Il marxismo occidentale altogether.
The Frankfurt School, with no links to the Communist movement, offers
more promising material for Losurdo’s case. Horkheimer in particular, on
returning to West Germany after the war, often expressed just the contempt
and fear of anti-colonial revolutions, and Cold War aversion to the Soviet
Union, that Losurdo ascribes to Western Marxism as a whole. But in a typi-
cal move, ignoring the trajectory of any of his thinkers over time, he links a
Horkheimer text of 1942 noting the obvious fact that the state had not with-
ered away in Russia with one of 1967 complaining that Marxism was being
used as an ideology in Eastern countries to overcome the industrial advan-
tages of the West—treating the first as a regret the Führer would have shared
(‘Hitler would, in his own way, have felt the same anger and frustration’), and
the second as complicit with a war on Vietnam that Horkheimer all but sup-
ported. A decade earlier, however, the two were discussing the production of
what Adorno called ‘a strictly Leninist manifesto’, envisaging the prospect
that ‘under the banner of Marxism, the East might overtake Western civiliza-
tion’, marking ‘a shift in the entire dynamics of world history’ and adding:
‘We cannot call for the defence of the West.’ As for Marcuse, far from dis-
missing Soviet Marxism, he wrote a respectful book about it, and still further
from scorning anti-colonial revolutions, celebrated them, supporting in par-
ticular the struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperial attack.
Losurdo is reduced to complaining that he nevertheless doubted whether
the kind of society they could build would offer a plausible alternative to the
rich countries of the West, and that neither Bloch nor the Frankfurt School
condemned the Israeli blitzkrieg of 1967—at one point equating Adorno’s
outlook in the fifties with Eden of the Suez expedition.
Determined to find fault even where candidates for it by no stretch of the
imagination match his picture of Western Marxism, how does Losurdo deal
with two thinkers who shared his own attachment to the Chinese revolution
and the Eastern Marxism of Mao Zedong? Althusser, he concedes, may have
looked to the Cultural Revolution for inspiration, but in criticizing human-
ism he undermined the values of universality on which the revolt of the
 broder: Western Marxism 137

colonial peoples against their oppression and discrimination by a racist West

depended. Badiou too, though he rightly denounced the events of 1989–91

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as a Second Restoration, fell into the error of accepting a division between
the values of freedom and of justice, and in scanting the first at the expense
of the second, simply inverted the order given them by Isaiah Berlin.
Timpanaro and Sartre might be unimpeachable on the score of support
for anti-colonial revolutions, but the former had no understanding of the
nation, or of the need for tactical adjustments in building a post-capitalist
economy, while the latter—notwithstanding his passionate presentation of
Fanon—conceived struggles for national liberation in subjective-idealist
style in terms of political action only, sidelining the necessary economic
action of building an independent state—a task that could not be accom-
plished by the insurrectionary ‘fused groups’ of his Critique of Dialectical
Reason. David Harvey, on the other hand, saw only inter-imperialist conflicts
in the first half of the twentieth century and a revival of them in the begin-
ning of the twenty-first, without any sense of the revolts against imperialism
that were the more significant mark of each.
Italian thinkers fare no better. Della Volpe, and following him Colletti
during his days in the pci, wrongly counterposed the libertas maior of the
socio-economic freedoms brought by socialism to the libertas minor of
the civic freedoms proclaimed by liberalism—as if these were truly such,
rather than contaminated by a long history of slavery and colonial oppres-
sion (about the revolt against which neither had anything to say), instead
of insisting, as Togliatti had done, that formal political freedoms, denied to
most of humanity by a barbarous discrimination against them, were inte-
gral to socialism itself. As for native traditions of operaismo, Tronti boasted
of his vaccination against any Third Worldism and exalted the suppression
of work, while Negri and his fellow-thinker Hardt condemned the emer-
gence of any independent nation-state as the poisoned fruit of anti-colonial
struggle, denied the existence of any latter-day imperialism, and presented
such an idyllic image of the American Revolution that even a Huntington
was more realistic about it. To the oppressed they offered, instead of a hard,
sober battle for emancipation, a modern apocatastasis in the form of a
future world of ‘love and innocence’. There could be no more graphic expo-
sure of the basic malaise of the contemporary left, its inability to grapple
with the question of power. Seeing power everywhere à la Foucault, ‘trans-
forming power into love’ or ‘changing the world without taking power’
(Holloway) were all so much idle phrasemongering: symptoms of Western
Marxism’s eschatology of the future rather than engagement with the pre-
sent in front of it.
Il marxismo occidentale, presenting Western Marxism as a surfeit of uto-
pianism over constructive efforts to build socialism, assembles a catalogue
 138 nlr 107

of arrogant, colour-blind Eurocentrism incapable of acknowledging the

world-historical achievements of Eastern Marxism. Historically, few if any of
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the figures lined up for identification—the later Negri might be considered

an exception—fit the police description (even if on other grounds a fashion-
plate like Foucault might warrant intellectual arrest). Two of the most
striking examples of why they do not, bear precisely on Losurdo’s concerns.
In the European left that was radicalized by it, the First World War inspired
a belief that there were no more intermediate stages on the path to a new
society beyond capital, and Lenin too considered that the war heralded the
end of imperialism as the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism. Yet during the war,
prompted not least by the Easter Rising in Ireland, Lenin came increasingly
to emphasize the specifically anti-colonial fronts of world-wide struggle
against the Western bourgeoisie, arguing for the impossibility of a ‘pure
social revolution’ opposing two unmediated representations of revolution
and counter-revolution against each other. Any real revolution would inevi-
tably be more mixed in its causes and components than that. Losurdo rightly
draws attention to this change in his outlook, which after October took pro-
grammatic form at the Congress of the Peoples of the East, with ‘increased
headway for the understanding that the class struggle is not only the strug-
gle of proletarians in the capitalist metropolis, but also that conducted by the
oppressed peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies’. The call, ‘workers and
oppressed peoples of the world, unite!’ embodied the Soviet state’s recogni-
tion of the colonial question and the new alliances that had to be formed
around it. What Losurdo ignores, however, is that it was one of his polemical
targets who first grasped the full effect of Lenin’s insight, and rendered it
into a theoretical principle of general political application, East and West—
Althusser in his famous essay on ‘Contradiction and Over-Determination’,
which among other things drew directly on Mao’s writing too.
An equally, perhaps even more, conspicuous case is the thinker of whom
Althusser came to figure as the antithesis, Jean-Paul Sartre. Losurdo, conced-
ing his anti-colonial credentials, minimizes them by confining his treatment
of these to Sartre’s preface to Fanon, and contending that he was interested
only in the overthrow of colonial rule, not the construction of a post-colonial
order. In reality, Sartre’s record of theoretical and practical solidarity with
anti-imperialist struggles was unmatched in the ranks of Western Marxism,
extending far beyond his preface to Fanon, with texts on Indochina, Algeria,
the Congo and Cuba, and in no way confined just to the moment of overthrow,
as a glance at his writing on Cuba would show. Nor was his concern with
Losurdo’s problematic restricted to the Third World. From his 1956 essay
on ‘The Ghost of Stalin’ to the second volume of his Critique of Dialectical
Reason, the tasks and tensions of building ‘socialism in one country’ in an
environment of scarcity were a central preoccupation of his thought as a
 broder: Western Marxism 139

Marxist. To suggest that Togliatti was his superior in anti-colonial insight,

or understanding of the sociological bases of the ‘cult of personality’, is the

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height of absurdity. It is enough to compare Togliatti’s lame reflections on
the latter in his Nuovi Argomenti interview of 1956 with Sartre’s diagnosis of
the same year to see the difference between the two. As for anti-colonialism,
the sum total of Losurdo’s claims for Togliatti consists in a single phrase in
an exchange with Bobbio of 1954, which he has to repeat three times across
the book for want of anything more substantial than this scrap. As it hap-
pens, Togliatti’s record in this area was by no means unstained. In 1935,
under his leadership, the pci journal in exile had explained that Mussolini’s
war in Abyssinia was a mistake because Italy’s ‘legitimate territorial interests’
lay in the Balkans rather than Africa. That Italy was deprived of its colonies
after 1945 saved the party from the performance of the pcf. But it would be
difficult to argue that struggles against imperialism in the Mediterranean or
elsewhere ever ranked very high on its agenda. Togliatti’s dicta bear no com-
parison with Sartre’s writing on the subject.
Losurdo’s cavalier handling of the record of so many Western Marxists
on colonial revolt and post-colonial state-building in the East is the most vis-
ible weakness of his case. Behind it, however, lies a larger one. At no point in
Il marxismo occidentale is there any acknowledgment of the extent to which
Western Marxism embodied an attempt to think through the political and
cultural mediations of bourgeois democracy and how to confront them, one
that continues to be of immediate relevance. Yet manifestly the idea that
socialist strategy must take different forms in capitalist democracies than in
autocratic feudal or semi-colonial states like Russia in 1917 or China in 1949
involved no rejection of political practice. The absence from the book’s pages
of Gramsci—who sought systematically to reflect on these differences, and
the closeness of whose political and intellectual starting-points to Lukács or
Korsch during and after the First World War is well attested—is thus glaring.
The shadow of the issues he raised does, however fall across the book, if in a
way that points up the contradictions in Losurdo’s own outlook.
Contrasted with Western Marxism throughout is the iconic figure of
Togliatti, a Communist leader at once staunchly loyal to the construction of
socialism in the Soviet Union, and strategist of a national road to socialism,
whom Losurdo implies was a beacon of Eastern Marxism within advanced
capitalism itself. The keystone of this construction is the ‘Salerno Turn’ of
March–April 1944. In ordering Togliatti to bring the pci into the Badoglio
government, formed after the flight of the King and his ministers from
Rome to refuge with Anglo-American forces in the Mezzogiorno, Stalin
emphasized the anti-imperialist intentions behind this move. With the coun-
try falling into the Western sphere of influence, a ‘strong Italy with a strong
army’ would be a thorn in the Americans’ side. Within Party ranks, the move
 140 nlr 107

was in part justified on this basis. The unity of Italians was not a conces-
sion to the Right, nor was it just a move to strengthen the fight against Nazi
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Germany. It was also a bid to free Italy of the emerging Western Bloc.
This was a strategy that fits nicely into Losurdo’s framework, given
his extremely expansive conception of what ‘colonialism’ could mean.
Drawing on a remark of Lenin’s in 1916 that the Great War could result
in a ‘Napoleonic-style subjugation’ of Europe by Germany, he argues that
even the most industrialized countries could become (semi) colonies, and
that this was in effect what happened to France in 1940 and in Italy after
1943—nations in which the lessons of the anti-colonial struggle in the East
could now be applied. Nazi Germany had drawn on Europe’s long history
of colonization and turned it back onto the continent itself; the Resistance
movements in these countries were thus, in their own way, part of the anti-
colonial struggle so central to any understanding of the twentieth century.
After expelling the German occupation of North-Central Italy, the task of
the pci was to keep an Anglo-American take-over of the country at bay. This
view of the period raises to the pci’s guiding principle a focus on bloc con-
frontation little associated with more familiar sympathetic treatments of its
tradition. There is no doubt, however, that the Salerno Turn was in good part
governed by the looming Cold War divide of Europe, and that this considera-
tion helped ease its path through Party ranks.
More than just compatible with Soviet foreign policy, Togliatti’s strategy
was thus heavily shaped by it. Always considering the ussr and later People’s
Democracies to be socialist societies, from his adherence to the Third Period
class-against-class line to the Popular Frontism of the Salerno Turn, he never
clashed with Stalin during his lifetime, nor developed his ‘Italian road to
socialism’ in angular counterposition to the ‘Soviet model’, or as a critique
of it. Yet his political approach clearly internalized a certain critical concep-
tion of the Soviet experience and its non-applicability in Italy. The initial turn
may have been Stalin-directed, but the pci’s ‘national’ policy also expanded
into a much wider conception of how an Italian socialism could come about.
Indeed, this was Togliatti’s specific contribution to Marxism, and the heart of
his political practice. He insisted that the Italian party would not follow the
model of 1917, proposing instead a gradual advance of ‘progressive democ-
racy’, relying on broad alliances with other social classes, and—in order for
that even to be possible—the weakening of bloc dynamics in Italy.
In the design of Il marxismo occidentale, this element in Togliatti’s think-
ing is elided. Although Losurdo credits Togliatti with attention to libertas
minor in general, overall veneration for him rests on Togliatti’s emphasis
on the national question, detached from any focus on democracy or Italian
‘diversity’. What explains the discrepancy? In all probability the answer lies
in the difficulty that Togliatti’s inheritance poses for Losurdo and those
around him. For what became of the pci and its strategy in the years after
 broder: Western Marxism 141

his death? Under Berlinguer, the party rallied to nato—which Togliatti had
fought to keep Italy out of—saying it felt safer within it, and declared the

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legacy of the October Revolution exhausted, to be replaced by the fresher
principles of Eurocommunism. How does Losurdo treat these? He begins
his fourth chapter on the ‘triumph and death’ of Western Marxism by pre-
senting Eurocommunism as its end point, the ‘maturation’ of a long process
that had begun with the rejection by reformists like Turati of the Russian
Revolution. The culmination of Western Marxism, Eurocommunism was
now a simple affirmation of the ‘religion of the West: ex Occidente lux et
salus!’ After this summary dismissal, a verdict apparently delivering the coup
de grâce to the entire canon of Western Marxism, Losurdo abruptly changes
the subject. Briefly noting that a long history of constitutionalism distin-
guished Western European countries from Tsarist Russia or semi-colonies
in Asia, he quickly pivots to further reminders of the Orientalist essential-
ism of Horkheimer, Kautsky, Žižek et al., without a single further reference
to Eurocommunism in the rest of the book.
The silence is the sign of an understandable embarrassment. For the
‘second’ pci of today to which Losurdo belongs harks back explicitly to
both Togliatti and Berlinguer—lamenting the dissolution of the former’s
Communist party into a brazenly neoliberal organization of enthusiasts for
the United States, yet unable to repudiate the latter, regarded as the last
great leader of the party, yet whose efforts to distance it from the ussr
pushed it towards its ultimate collapse. For Losurdo, Eurocommunism is
the epitome of Eurocentrism. But how was it to be cleanly separated from
the ‘Italian road to socialism’ of Togliatti’s making, which its exponents
regularly invoked as its ancestry? After all, was not Berlinguer’s Historic
Compromise with Christian Democracy consistent with Togliatti’s conse-
cration of the Lateran Pact with the Vatican? Perhaps most pointedly of all,
what is to be made of the blistering Chinese attack on Togliatti, pilloried for
‘replacing class struggle with class collaboration’ in the ccp’s Open Letter of
1963—the authoritative voice of Eastern Marxism treating him as no better
than Losurdo’s portrait of Western Marxism? Questions like these are too
close for comfort. It is better to hurry past them.
In side-stepping the issues posed for Marxists by a strategy in the West, in
favour of berating them for indifference to the problems of the East, Losurdo
also avoids the question of how the Communist Parties in European coun-
tries could themselves relate to these problems. In his own terms, the divide
between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Marxism was a struggle for recognition
between two subjects that each challenged capitalism-imperialism: the
working class, or entire nations in battle against colonialism. Their unity
was possible, but could never be taken as given. In the twentieth century,
how was it to be realized? It is one thing to suggest that critics in the West
had no standing with which to dismiss the vast and difficult efforts at social
 142 nlr 107

transformation in the East. But if Marxists in Europe or the United States

did recognize the anti-colonial revolt as the greatest event of the twentieth
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century, how would this affect their own conception of socialism? Were
these states models for their own activity? Today, not only Cubans and
Palestinians are orphans of the Soviet experience. The attempt to define a
communist politics was always easier when the ussr was there: Marxists
could either identify with it, define themselves against its failure, or rec-
ognize its achievements, while also understanding that it was not simply a
model to be reproduced. After its collapse, this third option seems the most
likely way to learn from its history. This was what Togliatti at least attempted,
however the outcome of his endeavour is judged.
That Losurdo is more sensitive to these issues than might be thought
from a reading of Il marxismo occidentale can be seen from the body of his
writing as a whole. Two striking texts stand out from the nineties, which give
a more powerful and rounded account of his vision of the time. In early 1992,
after the pci had dissolved itself and those who exited to its left had created
Rifondazione Comunista, Losurdo and two colleagues at Urbino organized
a colloquium on ‘Gramsci and Italy’. At this he argued that Gramsci had
been a leader and a thinker who lived through a tragic defeat of the work-
ers’ movement, dying when fascism was still triumphant over it. Forced to
abandon any hope of a rapid revolutionary palingenesis, in prison he applied
himself to a deeper historical analysis of social and political transformations
under way over the longue durée. Though he shared the revolt against positiv-
ism that marked the revolutionary generation of 1914–18, he was free from
any trace of a hostility to science or messianic outlook, having internalized
far better than Lukács, Bloch or anyone else of his cohort Marx’s dialecti-
cal grasp of modernity—capitalism as indivisibly an engine of progress and
exploitation, the bourgeoisie at once bearer of enlightenment and agent of
destruction. From the outset, as Marx and Engels had seen, modernity thus
required a balance between recognition of its legitimacy and necessity of its
critique. The First World War had put that understanding to a far more cruel
test than anything the founders of Marxism had witnessed. Reacting against
it, horrified critique became overwhelming in Lukács and Bloch, in a trend
that was especially marked in Germany, where the Great War could take on
the aspect of a repeat of the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War. For them, it
was only when salvation came with the October Revolution that modernity
was redeemed. Twenty years later, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic
of Enlightenment, modernity stood more radically condemned—the Soviet
Union too becoming one of the exhibits of the catastrophe it brought, along
with reason itself. Nor was loss of balance confined to Western intellectuals
like these. The Bolsheviks suffered their own variant of it, transmitted to
the later Lukács. With them it took the form of a conviction that capitalism
 broder: Western Marxism 143

as an economic system, along with bourgeois culture at large, had run its
course by 1918, when Lenin pronounced it incapable of any further growth

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in the forces of production. This was a view still replicated by Stalin in the
fifties, and scarcely modified by the notion of ‘late’ capitalism propagated in
the ddr and elsewhere. The two keywords of this tradition were ‘decadence’
and ‘decay’—a system rotting from within, its culture in irreversible decline,
charted by Lukács right back to 1848.
Gramsci rejected all of this. His objective situation differed, in that Italy
was not at the centre of the First World War as were Germany and Russia,
and the country had a tradition of liberal thought that actively engaged with
the work of Marx, which they did not. For him modernity was a fundamental
achievement of capitalism, of which communism would be not the liquida-
tion but the consummation. Its greatest intellectual expression had been the
philosophy of Hegel, which the task of historical materialism was to reform
and develop. That meant integrating and superseding, rather than discard-
ing, the most advanced bequests of the bourgeoisie, making the full agenda
of liberalism the minimum programme of socialism. The Great War and
the victory of fascism were terrible setbacks for humanity. But they did not
warrant conclusions of any irremediable decadence or decay of the estab-
lished order. In France, bourgeois political power had remained stable for
sixty years after the Commune; in America the economic and social dynamic
of Fordism was far from exhausted; in Italy the philosophy of Croce was
no dead dog. Marxists had to measure themselves against these, not bury
their heads in the sand in hope that the Slump would swiftly put an end
to the civilization of capital, whose supersession could take centuries. As
Losurdo memorably puts it, Gramsci refused to ‘read modern history as a
treatise in teratology’. It had produced monsters, but could not be reduced
to them. The real was rational, as Hegel had argued. The task of inheritance
remained. Such was the way Marxists today, confronting a new and disas-
trous defeat with the extinction of the ussr, should view the experience of
‘actually existing socialism’, notwithstanding ‘the errors, the colossal mysti-
fications and horrors’ that ran through it. Gramsci had insisted on the need
to preserve and develop the high points of the French Revolution. The legacy
of the October Revolution was to be taken in the same spirit.
On the threshold of the new century, Losurdo set out his balance-
sheet of it in a short book pointedly entitled Fuga dalla storia? Il movimento
comunista tra autocritica e autophobia (1999)—‘Flight from History? The
Communist Movement Between Self-Criticism and Self-Hatred’. By this
time strident renegacies were common in Italy, former leaders and intel-
lectuals of the pci declaring their utmost admiration for Clinton and all that
was made in the usa. Even among those who still called themselves com-
munists, in Rifondazione and out of it, not a few were rending their clothes
 144 nlr 107

and repudiating the whole of a past to which they had once belonged. ‘To
the triumphant narcissism of the victors’ there now corresponded a ‘self-
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flagellation of the vanquished’. But self-hatred, which could only lead to

capitulation across the board, was the antithesis of self-criticism, and the
fight against it would be all the more effective, the more radically and unin-
hibitedly critical the balance-sheet was drawn of the historical experience set
in motion by the October Revolution. That would not be helped by calls for
a ‘return to Marx’, increasingly heard on the left, which Marx himself would
have mocked, scorning those who in his life-time called for returns to Kant or
to Aristotle. For historical materialism, significant theory emerges from the
material processes of history. ‘Marx himself did not hesitate to acknowledge
his theoretical debt to the brief experience of the Paris Commune. But today,
decade after decade of an extraordinarily intense period of history, stretch-
ing from the Russian to the Chinese and the Cuban Revolutions, are being
declared empty of meaning or relevance compared with the “true” message
of salvation set down once and for all in sacred texts which only need to be
rediscovered for religious re-meditation!’ In the same spirit, reverence was
due Gramsci or Guevara, not as fighters and thinkers who never quailed at
overturning assumptions of Marx, but as victims in a cult of martyrs.
Reflection on the experience of the Soviet Union should have no truck
with such pieties. The term now conventionally used to explain its fall was
the bland euphemism ‘implosion’, locating all the causes of it within the
society created after 1917. This was, of course, a myth—it might as well be
claimed that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua fell by internal implosion, as if
the Contras had never existed. Military, economic and—multi-medial—
ideological pressure on the ussr by Western imperialism had always been
unremitting. But that did not mean the Soviet party bore no responsibility
for the collapse of the ussr. On the contrary, the principal cause of its down-
fall was the fantastical theory proclaimed by Khrushchev that the country
was about to overtake the us and enter communism as Marx and Engels
had understood it in The German Ideology, a society of such abundance that
the state had withered away and the division of labour no longer held—
a valhalla requiring a prodigious development of the forces of production,
from which the post-war ussr was light years away. The blatant empti-
ness of this claim deprived ‘actually existing socialism’ of any legitimacy,
under a nomenklatura that became ever more autocratic and corrupt, its
rule stripped of any pretension to democracy and popular sovereignty, the
universal legitimation of the time. Beneath it, the world of labour camps had
become ever more intolerable to a civil society that had grown out of mass
education, cultural diffusion and a minimum of social security, while ration-
alization of the economy to restore falling rates of growth was refused as a
restoration of capitalism. In the absence of any revolutionary theory of how
 broder: Western Marxism 145

to construct a socialist society after the overthrow of capitalism, the Soviet

experience was doomed.

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In China, Mao sought to avoid the impasse into which the ussr had
fallen by mobilizing the masses to break out of the corset of bureaucratic
rule, first with the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution.
Both were failures, generating democratic regression, ethnic chauvinism
and a political order reduced to the relationship between a charismatic
leader and fanaticized masses. Permanent self-sacrifice and enthusiasm
were impossible, ignoring the inevitability of popular secularization. Before
he died, Mao probably realized that change was needed, and Deng enacted
it without demonizing his predecessor as Khrushchev had done, but situat-
ing him in the historical process that had produced him and so preserving
the legitimacy of revolutionary power where Khrushchev had undermined
it. What the Reform Era he launched would become was a gigantic,
unprecedented nep—the only possible way forward, once the ussr was
gone. The prc had to integrate itself into the world market, if China was
not to remain poor and weak. But this was an nep determined to main-
tain the political independence and achieve the technological autonomy of
the country, to enable China to advance towards a socialist society and alter
the balance of world power. Hundreds of millions had been lifted out of
poverty by it. Inequalities had also been created, as they were under the
nep, and these required attention if they were not to lead to social polariza-
tion and political instability. Vigilance was also needed against attempts by
the new rich to convert their wealth into power. But of the overall upshot
there could be no doubt. On a planetary scale, the epoch inaugurated by
Columbus in which the West clamped a ruthless dominion on the rest of
the world, creating a huge disparity between its prosperity and the misery
of those it subjugated, had come to an end, as Adam Smith had foreseen it
must. This was the commanding fact of the age, besides which all others
paled in importance.
Here, laid out more clearly than in Il marxismo occidentale, is Losurdo’s
overarching vision—that struggle between nations had for a century been,
in Mao’s terms, the principal contradiction of the world capitalist system,
struggle between classes a secondary contradiction. This is a coherent
position, for which research on global inequality in the neoliberal epoch
by Göran Therborn and Branko Milanovic´ provides statistical evidence:
inequality between nations has decreased, with the lion’s share of the
fall coming from the rise of China, while inequality within nations has
increased. World-historically, Losurdo is on strong ground in insisting on
the structural dominance of this change. That case does not require car-
icatures of Western Marxism that mar rather than strengthen it. Had he
been more careful, he might have noticed that there were leading Western
 146 nlr 107

Marxists, by his classification, who not only shared his view of the time, but
presented an empirically and theoretically more developed version of it, his
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compatriot Giovanni Arrighi foremost among them—ignored in Il marx-

ismo occidentale along with such other obvious rebuttals of his argument as
Immanuel Wallerstein or Fredric Jameson. Even at its strongest, of course,
without its unnecessary trimmings, Losurdo’s stance can be questioned
on its own terms. How far can a comparison of Deng’s Reform Era with
the nep be sustained? Could its staggering levels of debt-fuelled real-estate
speculation, crooked billionaire accumulation, and pitiless exploitation of
migrant labour be imagined under Lenin? Has corruption at all levels of the
state and party not by now exceeded that of the cpsu under Brezhnev, and if
so, what is to prevent a similar dénouement?
Behind these questions lies the most fundamental of all. Consistent
throughout Losurdo’s work is his rejection of any talk of the disappearance
of the state, whether of its immediate abolition as in the anarchist tradition
descending from Bakunin, or of its ultimate withering-away, as in Marx. In
the Marxist tradition, he argues most clearly and eloquently in Fuga, this
idea led to a disregard of the legal norms that are essential to regulate the
conflicts inevitable in any society. In a class society, the state is not just an
instrument for the domination of the ruling class: it is also a form of ‘recip-
rocal guarantee’ of fair treatment for individuals within the ruling class.
Why then, in a society where struggle between classes has disappeared,
should reciprocal guarantees between the individuals of a unified com-
munity become superfluous? Formal, juridically codified freedoms were
the foundation of the modern state for Hegel, to be complemented but not
replaced by the need for material freedoms to which Hegel was also alive.
The argument is trenchantly made. But where are the first in the prc today?
Losurdo can only fall back on lame reference to village-level elections, much
as Hegel contented himself with the Prussian estate system. If politically
Losurdo has always been an uncompromising militant of the left, intellectu-
ally he is a philosopher of the Hegelian right. The state must remain, as the
institutional integument of human liberty, and the real course of history,
whatever its apparent disasters and divagations, is rational.