Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, And How It Can Be Reborn
Metadata¶
- Title: 'Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, And How It Can Be Reborn'
- Author: Domenico Losurdo
- Source: epub
II. Socialism vs. capitalism or anticolonialism vs. colonialism?¶
Highlight (yellow) - 1. From "proletarian only" revolution to anti-colonial revolutions > Location 776¶
the «division of nations into dominant and oppressed [...] represents the essence of imperialism » and the struggle to overcome it must constitute «the central point» of the revolutionary program; yes, «this division [...] is unquestionably substantial from the point of view of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism»
Highlight (yellow) - 1. From "proletarian only" revolution to anti-colonial revolutions > Location 781¶
The new motto was: «Proletarians of all countries, and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!».
Highlight (yellow) - 1. From "proletarian only" revolution to anti-colonial revolutions > Location 783¶
class struggle is not only that of the proletarians in the capitalist metropolis, but also that waged by the oppressed peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies.
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Daniel'son's dilemma and the two Marxisms > Location 903¶
which of the two inequalities should first be targeted, the internal one in Russia or the global and planetary one?
III. Western Marxism and anticolonial revolution: a missed encounter¶
Highlight (blue) - 12. '68 and the mass misunderstanding of Western Marxism > Location 1766¶
Mao, who had already warned in 1949 against the danger for the People's Republic of China of "becoming an American colony" on an economic level, felt strongly committed to erasing two types of inequality: that existing within China but also, and perhaps even more, that which separated China from the more advanced countries.
Highlight (yellow) - 12. '68 and the mass misunderstanding of Western Marxism > Location 1785¶
Laboriously defeated by Marxism at the time of the Second International, anarchism experienced a sensational revenge in the '68 movement and in relevant sectors of Western Marxism of those years.
Highlight (yellow) - 13. Sartre's populist and idealist anticolonialism > Location 1830¶
An anti-colonialist revolution (or in any case in a country located on the margins of the more developed capitalist world and therefore exposed to the dangers of colonial or neocolonial aggression and subjugation) is truly victorious only if it proves capable of giving impetus to economic construction.
Highlight (yellow) - 13. Sartre's populist and idealist anticolonialism > Location 1846¶
Concentrating his attention only on the desperate effort of the "wretched of the earth" to break the chains of colonial slavery and reserving his sympathy exclusively for the group in fusion, protagonist of the magical but brief moment of the revolution, that of the choral enthusiasm that presides over the overthrow of a universally hated ancient regime, Sartre is the champion of a passionate and meritorious anti-colonialism, which however is at the same time populist and idealist.
V. Resurgence or last flicker of Western Marxism?¶
Highlight (orange) - 3. Harvey and the absolutization of "inter-imperialist rivalries" > Location 2860¶
imperialism cannot be adequately understood if we lose sight of the "enormous importance of the national question".
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Ah, if Badiou had read Togliatti! > Location 2880¶
Badiou is right to define the Jacobins as the "ancestors" of the communist movement; in fact, it was first the Jacobins and then the Bolsheviks and the Communists who dealt two fatal blows to the world colonialist-slavery system.
Highlight (yellow) - 5. "Transformation of power into love," "critical theory," "merging group," renunciation of power > Location 2993¶
What does all this matter if the real problem is to "change the world without taking power"?
Highlight (yellow) - 5. "Transformation of power into love," "critical theory," "merging group," renunciation of power > Location 3000¶
The self-dissolution of Western Marxism is configured here as the abandonment of the terrain of politics and the arrival at religion.
Highlight (yellow) - 6. The struggle against the "phrase" from Robespierre to Lenin > Location 3064¶
to the extent that it is satisfied with criticism and indeed finds its raison d'être in criticism , without posing the problem of formulating viable alternatives and building an alternative historical block to the dominant one, it is the illustration of the conceit of having to be; when it then enjoys the distance from power as a condition of its own purity, it embodies the beautiful soul.
Highlight (yellow) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3072¶
Reduced to religion and a religion of escapism, Western Marxism is unable to provide an answer to the problems of the present and in particular to the growing worsening of the international situation.
Highlight (yellow) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3119¶
the USA has long aspired to guarantee «for itself the possibility of an unpunished first [nuclear] strike» (Romano 2014, p. 29), in order to exercise a terrible power of blackmail on the rest of the world : other countries would effectively be forced to choose between obedience to Washington's sovereign and annihilation.
Highlight (blue) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3125¶
The war for which the United States is preparing if necessary is the war against China, the country born from the greatest anti-colonial revolution in history and directed by an experienced Communist Party, and/ or against Russia, which with Putin had the wrong, from the White House's point of view, to shake off the neocolonial control to which Yeltsin had bowed or adapted (thanks to wild and predatory privatization the West was on the verge of controlling the country's immense energy assets).
Highlight (orange) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3132¶
Harvey's thesis of eternal rivalries and "inter-imperialist wars" is also inadequate and misleading. It is certainly not with this category that we can understand the military expeditions implemented by the West and above all by its leading country after the triumph achieved in the Cold War and in a period in which the USA was a solitary superpower with absolutely no rivals.
Highlight (yellow) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3134¶
December 1989: invasion of Panama; 1991: first war against Iraq; 1999: war against Yugoslavia; 2003: second war against Iraq; 2011: war against Libya; in that same year the intervention in Syria began as a continuation of a regime change operation invoked by the US neoconservatives already in 2003.
Highlight (yellow) - 7. War and the death certificate of Western Marxism > Location 3141¶
Emerging from the horror of the carnage of the First World War, Western Marxism proves incapable of countering the neocolonial wars that follow one another and of understanding and countering the large-scale war that looms on the horizon. It is the death certificate of Western Marxism.
VI. How can Marxism be revived in the West¶
Highlight (yellow) - 1. Marx and the future in four times > Location 3178¶
It is worth immediately noting that things went very differently from what Marx and Engels predicted. In the West, "accomplished political emancipation" was in no way the result of a spontaneous dialectic within bourgeois society.
Highlight (yellow) - 1. Marx and the future in four times > Location 3181¶
the second great discrimination, which, together with the exercise of political rights, denied women the possibility of accessing liberal professions, confining them to domestic slavery or to the lower segments of the labor market.
Highlight (orange) - 1. Marx and the future in four times > Location 3183¶
Above all, the history of the third great discrimination is important, that against colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin.
Highlight (yellow) - 1. Marx and the future in four times > Location 3189¶
in reality this tendency was neutralized by an even stronger one, by capitalism's tendency towards colonial expansionism. This led to the emergence of monstrous forms of inequality and unfreedom not only in the colonies but in the capitalist metropolis itself. In
Highlight (orange) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3203¶
In reality, we have seen that the settlers' revolt which led to the founding of the USA was rather a counter-revolution, as regards relations with colonial peoples or peoples of colonial origin.
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3205¶
must be the focus of our attention for two reasons: it is in the colonies that the harshest system of power emerged, often involving slavery and even genocide against subject peoples; the vast majority of humanity was, in fact or potentially, subjected to this system of power.
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3213¶
a British liberal historian in the mid-nineteenth century calling attention to the "reign of terror" imposed by England on India in moments of crisis, a "reign of terror" against which "all the injustices of the previous oppressors, Asian and Europeans, appeared as a blessing"
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3218¶
The dominion exercised by the British Empire on the unhappy island is spoken of as the extreme limit of Evil, as absolute Evil; it is a configuration nowadays mostly reserved for the Third Reich.
Highlight (orange) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3223¶
Here is the testimony of an important political figure of the Union on the climate prevailing in the South of the North American republic in the years preceding the civil war: the abolitionist party is not absent but "is driven by fear to submission"; those who oppose slavery "do not even dare to exchange opinions with others who think like them, for fear of being betrayed".
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3227¶
In addition to abolitionists, those who are and feel threatened are those who would like to distance themselves from this ruthless witch hunt. Everyone is driven by terror to "keep their mouths shut, kill their doubts, bury their reservations." There is no doubt: it is an effective description of totalitarian terror and totalitarianism.
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3235¶
liberal Belgium reduced "the indigenous population (of the Congo) from 20-40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911."
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3243¶
It is arbitrary to detach from the colonial tradition the darkest pages of the twentieth century, those written by Nazi-fascism.
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3254¶
In the words of a conservative British historian (A.J.P. Taylor), «about 50 million Africans and 250 million Indians» were forced by England to fight and die en masse in a war they knew nothing about5.
Highlight (orange) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3256¶
If slavery is defined by the power of life and death exercised by the master, Lenin's definition is apt: the great colonial powers arrogated to themselves the power of life and death over the peoples they subjected!
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3279¶
From Africa we move to Latin America. Also in those years we see the USA not only establishing ferocious military dictatorships but also carrying out or helping to carry out "acts of genocide": this was underlined in Guatemala by the "truth commission", which refers to the fate of the Mayan Indians, guilty of having sympathized with the opponents of the regime dear to Washington
Highlight (pink) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3282¶
This world made of slavery, semi-slavery, servile work relationships, monstrous forms of unfreedom, strident discrimination and frightening exclusion clauses sanctioned or tolerated even on a legal level, this world, after having suffered the first harsh blows at the hands of the Jacobins of Paris and above all of the black Jacobins of Santo Domingo, was radically put into crisis only by the communist movement, thanks to its direct action and the influence it exerted.
Highlight (yellow) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3289¶
Here is an African American declaring in defiance: «If fighting for one's rights means being Bolsheviks, then we are Bolsheviks and people must put their souls at rest» (Franklin 1947, pp. 397-98).
Highlight (orange) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3290¶
blacks determined to shake off the colonial and racial yoke constituted an essential component of the Communist Party that was being formed. The whites who collaborated with them were also considered "foreigners" and members of an inferior race and treated accordingly: yes, being a communist (and challenging white supremacy) meant "facing the possibility of prison, beatings, the kidnapping of person and even death"
Highlight (blue) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3293¶
These were the years of the Great Depression and of mass unemployment and poverty but, despite the harsh competition that resulted from it on the job market, all this did not silence the fight against the white supremacy regime and did not undermine the unity between the whites and blacks engaged in that struggle and mostly organized in the Communist Party.
Highlight (blue) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3297¶
1952 the US Minister of Justice sent an eloquent letter to the Supreme Court, which was busy discussing the issue of integration in public schools: «Racial discrimination brings fuel to communist propaganda and raises doubts even among friendly nations about the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith."
Highlight (orange) - 2. The long struggle against the world colonialist-slavery system > Location 3303¶
In summary: the dismantling of the white supremacy regime in the USA (a tenacious legacy of the global colonialist-slavery system) cannot be understood without the challenge of the October Revolution and the communist movement.
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3314¶
Napoleon's France (with the use of a powerful war machine) and Jefferson's USA were jointly fighting against the country and the people who had shaken off the colonial yoke and the chains of slavery. (with the use of an embargo and a naval blockade explicitly aimed at condemning disobedient and rebellious blacks to starvation).
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3320¶
Unfortunately, this reading of the twentieth century, which places the most ferocious expression of the global colonialist-slavery system and its most consequent enemy on the same level, has been adopted to a more or less large extent by Western Marxism or by quite a few of its exponents.
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3332¶
According to the Communist Manifesto, the introduction of "new industries", which do not have an exclusively national dimension and which are up to the "world market", is "a question of life and death for all civilized nations" ( MEW, 4; 466). This is a task that in itself does not surpass the bourgeois framework.
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3340¶
two Marxisms emerge under the banner of two very different temporalities: the current future and the beginnings of the near future as far as Eastern Marxism is concerned; the most advanced phase of the near future and the distant and utopian future as far as Western Marxism is concerned.
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3347¶
here is the second condition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West: taking advantage of the lessons of Marx and Engels, it must learn to build a bridge between the two different temporalities. When this task is ignored or disdained, the superficiality and conceit that love to contrast the poetry of the remote future or of the long-term perspective with the prose of immediate tasks does not take long to appear. There is nothing easier and more idle than this operation.
Highlight (yellow) - 3. Two Marxisms and two different temporalities > Location 3358¶
a temporal amputation which is at the same time a spatial amputation: focusing exclusively on the remote future (moreover read in a decidedly utopian way) involves the exclusion of the majority of the world and of humanity, that which began to take its first steps into modernity or sometimes even remained stuck on its threshold.
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3369¶
Recovering this relationship means first of all fully reintroducing the colonial question into the historical balance sheet of the twentieth century and of twentieth-century Marxism.
Highlight (orange) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3377¶
"Western liberalism is founded on forced labor in the colonies" and on repeated "wars"; "any apologia for democratic regimes that ignores their violent intervention in the rest of the world or mystifies it" lacks credibility. And therefore: «We have the right to defend the values of freedom and conscience only if we are certain, in doing so, that we are not serving the interests of imperialism and not associating ourselves with its mystifications»
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3386¶
the struggle between anticolonialism on the one hand and colonialism and neocolonialism on the other has not ceased. It
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3389¶
deprecations and cries of alarm for the decline of the West or for the relative weakening of the West and its leading country make one think of the similar phenomenon that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when authors of extraordinary popularity on both sides of the Atlantic they denounced the mortal danger that "the rising tide of peoples of color" weighed on "global white supremacy"
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3394¶
the fresh homages to colonialism (and even imperialism) and the persistent celebration of the West (no longer of the white race) as the exclusive place of authentic civilization and the highest moral values are the sign that the anti-colonial revolution has not yet reached its conclusion.
Highlight (blue) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3397¶
look sympathetically not only at a people like the Palestinians, still forced to fight against a classic colonialism, but also to the countries that have an anti-colonialist revolution behind them and that are now laboriously seeking their way, being careful in particular not to fall into a condition of semi-colonial (economic and technological) dependence.
Highlight (orange) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3406¶
in Alexander Hamilton we can read that, in a situation of geopolitical insecurity, the government of law and the limitation of power and that in any case, faced with "external attacks" and "possible internal revolts", even a liberal country resorts to a power "without limits" and without "constitutional constraints"
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3411¶
thanks to the prodigious economic and technological development of China - defined as the most important event of the last 500 years - the Colombian era has come to an end, the era during which, to quote Adam Smith , "the superiority of forces was so great to the advantage of the Europeans that they were able to commit all sorts of injustices" to the detriment of other peoples, the era that Hitler, the most fanatical champion of white and Western supremacy, sought with every means to perpetuate
Highlight (yellow) - 4. Recovering the relationship with the world anticolonialist revolution > Location 3415¶
The anti-colonial revolution and the destruction of the world colonialist-slavery system, which have yet to be completed, place the problem of building a post-capitalist society in a new and unexpected context.
Highlight (orange) - 5. Hegel's lesson and the revival of Marxism in the West > Location 3483¶
At the time of the Civil War, Marx was forced to fight against those who, in the name of the fight for socialism, preached political indifferentism: in the USA, both North and South, the capitalists were in power and slavery still existed, whether it was wage slavery (denounced by Marx himself) or black slavery (Losurdo 2013, chapter IV, § 2). Those who argued in this way did not grasp the gigantic emancipation implicit in the abolition of slavery proper.
Highlight (blue) - 5. Hegel's lesson and the revival of Marxism in the West > Location 3486¶
the Hegelian lesson according to which the universal always takes on a concrete and determined form or the Marxian lesson according to which it is senseless to brand "real struggles" as "nonsense" or the Leninian lesson that those who seek «a “pure” social revolution will never see it»
Highlight (orange) - 6. East and West: from Christianity to Marxism > Location 3527¶
deserved; now that the anti-colonial revolution is in its second stage, that of the struggle for economic and technological independence, Western Marxism reacts with an attitude characterized by disinterest, disdain and hostility.
Highlight (yellow) - 6. East and West: from Christianity to Marxism > Location 3535¶
the excommunication inflicted by Western Marxism on Eastern Marxism promoted the end not of the excommunicated person but of the protagonist of the excommunication.