Over the past few years, the work of Domenico Losurdo has gained significant popularity in the English-speaking world. One consequence of this is that—in comparison with other territories where he has long been recognized as a major thinker—few developed critiques of it have appeared in this language. In this interview, which took place via email between January 8th-March 25th, 2025, Losurdo’s work is discussed with Roberto Finelli. A longtime professor in the History of Philosophy at Roma Tre and ‘frenemy’ of Losurdo, as well as author of the duology of Un parricidio mancato (A Failed Parricide) and Un parricidio compiuto (A Parricide Completed),^[1] Finelli is best known for his advocacy of a “Marxism of abstraction.” This refers to the idea that—after The German Ideology—Marx increasingly distanced himself from the rubric of contradiction in order to stress the irreducibility of capitalism to its constituent material elements (thereby shifting from a philosophically unsatisfactory ‘inversion’ of Hegel to a reconception of his work according to which capitalism serves as the subject moving from abstract to concrete). Here, this view is expounded as well as contrasted with the ideas of Losurdo, whose stress on the plurality of contradictions—and in particular, the national contradiction—make him an ideal foil in many respects for Finelli’s project.

The Critique of Losurdo

CH: You’ve mentioned before that you had a sustained dialogue with Domenico Losurdo over the years. I find this interesting, not leastly because your work is so different. Whereas he stresses the immanence of slavery and colonialism to the history of capitalism, for instance, for you capitalism is radically open-ended, in the sense that it assimilates the world to specific relations of production without having any determinant essence (apart from an impersonal ‘principle’ of accumulation that arises therefrom). Then again, maybe these theses aren’t as contradictory as they seem. Can you shed some light on this discussion?

RF: I had many meetings and discussions with Domenico Losurdo, at least since the early 1980s, especially on the occasion of the very rich and interesting international congresses he organized as president of the “International Hegel-Marx Society for Dialectical Thought.” But even outside of those occasions my frequent visits to Urbino, the splendid Renaissance town where he taught History of Philosophy for many years, were occasions for meetings and discussions between us. Our visions of Marxism were profoundly different. But what always allowed us to discuss and confront each other with loyalty and frankness was a common respect that perhaps stemmed from our shared southernness and frequenting of the peasant world of southern Italy. He by direct belonging to that world, having been born in a small town in the countryside of Bari in Apulia; I by indirect descent, from the paternal branch of my family, originally from a town in the province of Avellino, where I found myself spending a large part of my adolescence and early youth and that’s peasant culture, although now waning, represented a singular fusion of bucolic and urban culture.

I say this because, as I will explain immediately, the peasant world of the war and immediate post-war periods in southern Italy had a profound influence on the formation of Losurdo—a cosmopolitan intellectual, wide reader of history and philosophy, polyglot of several languages and protagonist of Marxist, Italian and international theoretical and political debate. In fact, I believe that Losurdo’s Marxism was not the Marxism of the metropolis, of the confrontation between labour power and capital in the places of advanced capitalist development, but rather a Marxism of the world’s peripheries, of the revolt of colonial countries based more on a peasant class struggle than a workers’ one. A Marxism of poverty and underdevelopment rather than a Marxism of wealth and of large urban and industrial concentrations. It was, as he called it, much more an Eastern Marxism than a Western Marxism.

It is from this point of view in fact that he continued to value, to the end, without questioning it at all, the political and cultural heritage of the Soviet revolution and Marxism-Leninism. That is to say, the way Lenin not only accelerated the time of history, breaking its spatial and linearly progressive conception, but also expanded history in terms of space, conceiving a new image of the world in which all colonial peoples and underdeveloped continents have the right to organically participate, through the world revolution. Leninism meant for the first time, in more than just theoretical or merely ideal terms, the enactment of a unification of the human race. And it is precisely to this international and cosmopolitan horizon of Leninism that Losurdo always remained faithful.

But to accept Leninism in its entirety - and on this point the discussions and the distances between us were very strong - meant, in my opinion, accepting a conception of the construction of socialist society based on an extensive development of the productive forces and of the technology appropriate to it that could guarantee the satisfaction of the primary needs of all members of society. That is to say, it meant fundamentally accepting a neutral conception of technology and the productive forces that, again in my opinion, had also negatively marked some of Marx’s most famous passages, such as those included in The German Ideology, on the transition of a capitalist world market into a communist society, and in the Preface to the 1859 Critique of Political Economy. In the latter text, Marx, I argue, had schematically constructed, not a science of history, but a philosophy of history, founded precisely on the continuity of the progress of the productive forces—a progress delayed and contradicted, from epoch to epoch, by relations of ownership and distribution of the wealth thereby produced.

Our discussion was very bitter, because I reproached Losurdo for starting from an anthropology of scarcity, typical of backward or colonial societies, but also characteristic of the peasant world, according to which the elementary needs to be satisfied were material needs: to be satisfied for everyone even at the cost of an authoritarian State and Party structure and an uncritical acceptance of industrial society and an organization of production and work substantially analogous to that of capitalist society.

Losurdo, as is well known, was a great scholar not only of Marx and the communist tradition, but also of Hegel. In fact, he had the profound insight to read Hegel, not as a thinker of monarchical absolutism and conservatism, but as the highest representative, together with Marx, of modern culture.^[2] He always opposed, especially in Italy, the view that a large part of the revolutionary left in the 1960s and 1970s accepted via the Marxist school of Galvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti: that Hegel was a thinker, on the theoretical-philosophical level, of Plotinus’s mysticism of the 3rd century A.D., and on the social and political level, of the absolutism of the Prussian state. On this level Losurdo was a protagonist in a heated cultural battle that, as I said, saw in Hegel a thinker fully immersed in modernity and its contradictions, who must be engaged with in order to access the Marxian vision of society founded on Capital.

Now the surprising thing - and this was my criticism - was that in this valorization of Hegel, the decisive anthropological extension that Hegel made in terms of the theory of needs with his theory of recognition did not enter at all.

As should be well known, Hegel theorized in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the essential difference between the needs of animals and humans is that in the latter, beyond the materiality of the body with its biological needs, there is a social need for “recognition”: that is, the desire of each person to be recognized, by another or by others, in the dignity and value of his or her own individual singularity. The life of the human being, which is both natural and social, cannot but interweave and mediate with otherness from the outset. Hence, alongside material need, there is a need for confirmation of one’s own identity, which is satisfied only in being recognized by the gaze of another.

From this point of view, I believe that the anthropology of Marxism has always had great difficulty and in accepting within its perspective this side of Hegelian anthropology, with its inescapable values of a culture of individuation and differentiation between subjectivities (something that owes much to its preoccupation with class struggle and the thematic of value). When I speak of a limited and inadequate ‘anthropology of scarcity’, based on and accepted by many Marxisms, I refer precisely to a conception of social development linked to the satisfaction of purely material needs—no matter what degrees of authoritarianism, both political and technological, this licenses.

Domenico Losurdo accepted this anthropology of scarcity and completely disregarded the Hegelian problematic of recognition.^[3] He highly valued Hegel’s Outlines of Philosophy of Right of 1821. In that text he found a very advanced treatment of modernity, particularly in the section devoted by him to the sphere of ‘civil society’ and its being organized, in the ‘System of Needs’, according to the modern institution of the market and commodity exchange. There he found the activation of welfare through the institution of the Polizey, not to be understood in the contemporary function of repression, but in the cameralist and late 18th-century meaning of a complex of measures in favour of the polis, i.e. of the collective welfare against the extremes of wealth and poverty with which the economic market is burdened. And he even found in it the theorization of the trade union as an organization to defend workers.

But what must be emphasized, beyond this, in my opinion, excessive modernization of Hegel, is that Losurdo has completely removed the theme of recognition as a possible nexus of socialization that even in the Hegelian text of 1821 plays a large role (albeit a different role from the one played in the Phenomenology). Nor is it by chance that in Losurdo’s studies the Hegel of the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic is completely absent - that is, the anthropological and logical Hegel - because what is highlighted is only the socio-political Hegel; the thinker, not of pre-modern authoritarianism, but of modern freedom (through the institutions of socialization and the welfare state).

Western Marxism vs. the Marxism of Abstraction

CH: One thing that occurs to me is that the readings of Marxism you and Losurdo favour, in spite of certain acrimonious disputes, may not be completely opposed. You’ve critiqued him for advocating a “Marxism of poverty” which emphasizes the need for, or at least provisionally defends, the narrow development of the productive forces via a top-down party-state (perhaps ironically, your language hems very close to the reproach that Deng Xiaoping leveled at the Cultural Revolution—that it sought to bring about a “socialism of poverty,” or 贫穷的社会主义 , through the privileging of utopic designs that ran ahead of the material base). At the same, you’ve situated this with respect to development—while Losurdo’s work, you seem to imply, owes to his experience of scarcity in the Italian South, yours is more attuned to the needs of socialist struggle in the sites of “advanced capitalist” societies.

I wonder then: is it possible you’re both right? In a superb essay on Lenin—“Lenin in the Postmodern Age”^[4] — Terry Eagleton stresses that if Lenin seems so contradictory, in the sense of being simultaneously productivist and politically avant-garde, it’s because he understood (unlike his postmodern readers!) that the latter was immanent to the former: that bold political designs ultimately presuppose the fulfillment of basic material needs. I think debates between socialists often suffer from a lack of context in this way, so that what appears to be at first a fundamental disagreement will in reality stem from the projection of an ideology developed under specific conditions onto a context in which it doesn’t apply. Maybe Losurdo—who found in May ’68 only an anti-Marxist reboot of anarchism, distanced himself from sexual liberation and contemporary feminism, and rejected the withering away of the state as a utopian fable that would lead to the withering away of rights—suffered from this defect. At the same time, we might be making the same mistake if we dismissed his standpoint. What do you think?

RF: Since 1968, and then throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I have been part of a current of critical Marxism that I would call 'libertarian Marxism', which has always had two irreducible enemies. Workerism on the one hand and Marxism-Leninism (à la Losurdo) on the other. We have had a very strong polemic between us, and this polemic has sharpened divisions that cannot be healed, and which have also given rise to a certain course of political and social history in Italy. That is to say, we did not fool around, even if—ultimately—exponents of 'critical Marxism' basically lost.

Within critical Marxism we were radically opposed to both workerism and Marxism-Leninism, precisely because of what we see as their false interpretation of the 'productive forces'. The workerists, led by Negri, have always seen the productive forces as generating a common and already communist intellect, i.e. as capable of generating an emancipated and revolutionary class subjectivity (not seeing at all how the technology of capital is based on processes of abstraction and the physical and mental impoverishment of labor power). The Marxist-Leninists also had, albeit in a different way, an emancipatory vision of science and technology, which fell into the same error of not considering how much "technology" for Marx meant primarily the capitalist use and exploitation of labor power. That is to say, as far as Marxism-Leninism is concerned, we have always been highly critical of the hypothesis of a socialism that would first develop the satisfaction of material needs and then all other processes of individual and social liberation.

This is why the rift with Losurdo was so deep, especially with regard to his assessment of '68 as an experience of anarchist and bourgeois decadence (thus embracing our famous Pier Paolo Pasolini^[5]).

For us libertarian Marxists, the revolutionary and emancipatory culture of 1968 meant wanting to integrate the old ideal of equality with the new value of anti-authoritarianism: that is, with the value of developing the individuality of each person with the least possible degree of self-censorship and self-repression.

This is why we identified all Eastern communisms as 'egalitarian totalitarianism', in which all dignity accorded to individual difference disappeared and coercion was practiced, turning external coercion into self-coercion and internal mortification. Whereas for us it was fundamental to understand the value of self-determination within a horizon of emancipation and collective liberation.

We lost in this attempt. Not least because it is certainly not easy to reconcile socialization and individualization. But we have not stopped thinking that this is the best bet for the future, the only way to restore dignity and meaning to the hypothesis of a communist society.

Domenico Losurdo always thought in terms of material poverty. He never thought about the cultural and ideological poverty of the advanced capitalist countries, produced by capital as a process of abstraction and emptying out of labor power. That is why he always focused on the external link between capital and the colonies, between capital and underdevelopment. And he did not focus on the internal nexus between capital and labor power, with the effects of economic, cultural and political totalitarianism that capital as a progressive totality realizes in the Western world.

Today my Marxism is a Marxism of abstraction and not of contradiction. In the sense that I see the capitalist process and all the effects of the emptying of consciousness that an abstract subject is capable of producing as the dominant and 'total' subject. That is, I study capitalism much more in its effects of dissimulation and concealment of its nature than in its generation of contradiction. The contradiction remains, of course. But it does not become conscious and consequently does not construct a critical subjectivity. That is to say, it is the processes of misery of mind and consciousness that interest me, as opposed to those of material poverty and misery.

Especially when, with AI, capitalism is developing a technology that encourages everyone to think that there is no need to know and study because there are algorithms that take care of everything.

What I am interested in discussing is why Western Marxism failed to focus on capital as a process of dissimulation before it was a process of contradiction: that is, to see capital as a process of diffusion of the abstract before it was a creator of contradictory and antagonistic subjectivities.

This is why I have always been a Gramscian, even if the basis of Gramsci's Marxism is, in my view, the thesis that a revolutionary subject is never a presupposition, found and given by class relations, but always a result, a product of an action of collective self-education. But even on this point my reading of Gramsci was very far from that of Losurdo, who never conceived of political praxis as the self-education of a collective subject.

As you can see, it seems to me that the task of mediating and synthesizing what I consider to be so different positions is a truly unattainable undertaking.

CH: Right. So what you’re saying is that we have to understand the abstract edifice erected by capital, the way everything from technology to labor power is shaped by and set on by it, rather than merely focusing on second-order contradictions. But I was curious about your claim that Western Marxism has failed to achieve this breadth of perspective. Of course we know many identified with this tradition—from Colletti^[6] to Althusser^[7] to Negri^[8] — have rejected Hegelian contradiction (or at least what they see to be Hegelian contradiction) as a heuristic tool, with Spinozism having been a particularly fashionable alternative in the pre-Zižek period. Can you provide some examples then of Western Marxism’s overdependence on contradiction, and contrast this with the “libertarian Marxism” of abstraction you avow? This is also interesting because these two terms—“libertarian” and “Western”—are often used synonymously as descriptors of Marxism, including by Losurdo.

RF: You’ve asked me what were the fundamental impediments that prevented so-called Western Marxism from embracing a radical and totalizing vision of the abstract as the basic production of the capitalist economy and at the same time as a fundamental factor in the emptying of consciousness and the ideological valorization of surfaces.

Expressing myself very schematically and succinctly, I would say that if Eastern Marxism (that of Marxism-Leninism as its basic inspiration) was the Marxism of contradiction, Western Marxism is the Marxism of fetishism and alienation. Beginning with György Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, and continuing through the Frankfurt School, it is a Marxism focused on the analysis of the commodity and money, on Capital as the sphere of circulation and the externalization/reification of the social nexus that this entails. More recent Marxism, from Rosdolsky to Backhaus and the Wertform theorists, to some extent to Postone, is also powerfully influenced by it. But to locate real abstraction, through the movements of commodities and money, in the sphere of circulation, I believe is to remain on the surface of the class relations that structure the world of production and to fail to grasp the real locus of production in the form of abstract labor. It is no coincidence that this myopia and undue overlapping of social planes (between the outside and the inside, between surface and depth) was the basis of the criticism and abandonment of Marxism that Lucio Colletti made in the 1970s, refusing to conceive of Marx's work as a work of science.

This Marxism, which comes from afar (from the sociology of modernity of Georg Simmel and Max Weber), does not realize that it has basically replaced Marx with Hegel. Because it was Hegel who first radicalized Adam Smith's discourse on the division of labor and the market in modern society as a place of impersonal automatism where no one can command over others because instead everyone depends on everyone else and thus on the action of the invisible hand that acts behind the backs of individuals socializing through the market. Hegel, as we know, especially with his 1821 Philosophy of Right, took up the impersonality of the social nexus of the modern market theorized by Adam Smith (on the basis of Newton's theory of universal gravitation) and radicalized it in the sense of abstraction-reification.

The many ones, atomized by the division of labor and the freedom of the modern individual, are in fact socialized for the Berlin master^[9] only through things, such as commodities and money, externalizing their social nexus by necessity: carrying it in their pockets as a thing and thus radically alienating themselves in it. Making themselves, by this reversal, from subjects of historical action and initiative, to predicates of their predicates. The entire analysis of the system of needs in Hegel's Philosophy of Right is founded on this dialectic of the many-one who overthrow themselves and lose themselves in the domain of the abstract-One of money-commodities and make this practice of reification and externalization the model of their knowing and thinking.

On closer inspection, it is exactly this theoretical model of the many-one finding their alienated unity in the abstract-One that Ludwig Feuerbach, being the good Hegelian he was, then placed at the basis of his conception of religion as alienation.

That is, much Western Marxism has read capitalism more through Hegel than Marx, refusing to see the degree of disempowerment suffered by labor power in its capitalist use in factories and production and preferring instead to speak of alienation in consumerism, in the externality of appearance, in the penetration of advertising, in the separation and impersonality of political institutions. That is, I think that much Western Marxism has looked much more to a socialization that occurs through the institutions of circulation than to a primary socialization that occurs in the institutions of production. A consequence of this is that it has conducted a critique of the capitalist economic and cultural system based more on the phenomenology of the surface than on the depth of the extraction of surplus labor and the reduction of human beings to mere personifications of economic roles, i.e. to Charaktermasken, as Marx writes in Capital. That is to say, it has been very difficult for Western Marxism to think about the dialectic between “inside” and “outside” that in my opinion structurally characterizes contemporary society. For there is a deep connection between the processes of emptying that the accumulation of abstract wealth in the world of production sets in motion and a consciousness and knowledge that is only seduced by the surface of the world of production. Capitalism is intrinsically structured on this dialectic between essence and appearance, whereby the emptying of the concrete by the abstract leaves of the former only a shiny and seductive surface film, which becomes the object and content of culture and ideologies. With the consequence, I stress, that all culture runs the risk of being a culture of appearance. As has happened, I believe, to much of contemporary radical French culture, which has celebrated the world of postmodernism, of the fragment, of rhizomes, while no longer seeing the deep world of capital production and the violence of its social relations.

Western Marxism refused to continue to cultivate a dialectical tradition based on the dialectical nexus between social structures of the deep and ideological-political representations of the surface, produced with the intention of concealing and disguising the relations of the former. In this way, the original Hegelian reading of modern civil society as based on the module of fragmentation of the many Ones and the recomposition through alienation in the One has come to radicalize itself as the (especially French) theorization of post-modernity as a celebration of difference and as a rejection of any form of totality or system.

The Question of Anti-Imperialism

CH: Right, so on your reading the problem with both Western and Eastern Marxisms is that they fail to fully penetrate the hidden abode of production, with the former focusing on circulation and the latter embracing a productivism that conceals the political character of technology. And we could see this even in Postone, who focuses on abstract labor but nevertheless embraces a (reformist) teleology of the value-form according to which capitalism inclines towards its own self-overcoming by opening up an ever-widening gulf between the productivity of labor and the value allotted to workers.^[10] But presupposing you’re correct, how do you think this standpoint can inform our political practice today? I think rigorous theoretical exposition is absolutely necessary. But I also think—and Losurdo is totally right on this, in my view—that the theoretical god’s eye view has often resulted in an equivocation over important questions, including pro and anti-imperialism. Whereas if you read Marx his support for communism did not stop him from backing Lincoln, or the Ten Hours’ Bill^[11], or anti-colonial movements in Ireland and Poland. Today, of course, the ‘new Cold War’ is on the agenda, with John Bellamy Foster having claimed—in a timely article—that the split over imperialism is the deepest it’s been on the left since the First World War.^[12] So I’m wondering how the critique of abstraction you advocate for might relate to or position itself with respect to these pressing issues.

RF: Regarding the question of imperialism, I believe that in the historical phase we are going through, imperialism should be interpreted in the sense not of a power and an affirmation of an empire, but in the opposite sense of a decline and an impoverishment of power of an empire. We are of course talking about the decline of the U.S. empire that dominated much of the 20th century. If we follow Wallerstein's interpretation of the world economy and the lessons of Giovanni Arrighi, we’ll read world history, with a particular Eurocentric point of view, as a transition from the 16th century to the present of economic and politico-military hegemonies. From Spanish hegemony to Dutch hegemony, from Dutch hegemony to British hegemony, and finally from British hegemony to U.S. hegemony. Each hegemonic transition has been marked and legitimized by war. Consequently, one has to ask whether the American decline and the passing of a hegemonic centre to, arguably, the People’s Republic of China should not also be dramatically marked by a war. The basic question of contemporary history I believe is this.

In this perspective of a modern history read in its complexity as passages of hegemonies I would have had no doubt in stating with some certainty that the decline of the American empire was now inevitable due to the structural causes of its economy. Over the last forty years, in fact, American capitalism has become progressively less and less industrial and more and more financial. But it has been able to continue to sustain its internal consumption through massive imports of manufactured goods from Europe, China, and the BRICS countries, being able to pay for the enormous amount of imports it consumed through the power of a dollar that was constantly overvalued due to it being the indispensable currency of international trade and finance. From this point of view, the enormous increase in productivity and industrialization in China could only mean that capitalism, in terms of real production and exchange with labor-power, was progressively moving to the Pacific coast, being able to utilize the labor market of gigantic masses of the population, of peasant origin, and a capillary and extremely effective structure of party-political control. At the same time, we could see that the financialization of the American economy, with its deep and recurring crises, was no longer able to sustain the confrontation with the ‘materialistic’ power of the Chinese economy and its destination to become the next world power.

Once again only a Marxism of abstraction can cast doubts today on the linearity of this historical pattern and the inevitability of its future. With digital technology, capitalist abstraction has in fact reached a new configuration, which we could define as the era of cloud capital. The possibility of codifying and mechanizing according to the binary language 0 and 1 a large part of human action, and in particular the modes of writing and communication, has created profound economic transformations in the direction of a flexible capitalism that has left behind the Fordist typology of production and commercialization. But the most important fact, I believe, is that this flexibilization has created the possibility for the most advanced algorithms to collect a mountain of information that users of computer systems unwittingly and unknowingly provide. This progressively gives rise to a digital mind, impersonal and at the same time private, which when deposited in the cloud can command behaviour, lifestyles, types of consumption and production. That is to say that today, unlike the ‘classical’ productive capital, which continues to exchange labor, there is an annuity capital that absorbs information. This information comes to it effortlessly from below, and is thereby processed and transformed into a political-economic power of command and subtraction of surplus value.

The struggle between empires and the clash of hegemonies today is played out through the techno-science of A.I. and the enclosures of information that the community bestows without compensation. From this point of view, it is still undecidable what the confrontation on this ground between the U.S. and China will be. All that remains to be said is that a communist movement today would have to fight strongly against this new form of enclosure, in favour of a general intellect that has so far existed only in the fantasies of operaism and that should instead serve as the outcome and end of an entire reorganization and collective appropriation of knowledge and science.

CH: Your remarks here on China serve as a good segue to something else I wanted to ask you. Over the past few years—since, perhaps, his book on Nietzsche was translated to English in 2021—there has been a significant increase in interest in Losurdo’s work in the English-speaking world. Indeed, there are now even a couple of public figures on the left who we might call ‘Losurdians’—I’m thinking here of Gabriel Rockhill and Daniel Tutt.^[13] This seems to me to have much to do with timing. Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel—a text many see as his finest—was unveiled just as electoral left populism was imploding, just as China was deriving moral cachet from its response to COVID, just as online left spaces unbound by the normal bona fides of Western Marxism were experiencing a boom due to the lockdown. So, beyond the clear strengths of his work, I think it was favored by this conjuncture. But I’m curious to ask you: what do you think the appeal of Losurdo is for our moment? Given his early debt to Althusser as well as the role of the ‘overdetermined contradiction’ in works like Class Struggle,^[14] it seems to me we also might classify this as a roundabout (if disavowed) revival of Althusserianism by way of a positive appreciation of state socialism.

RF: Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel is an excellent book. It goes through a large part of Nietzsche's works, has an enormous bibliography and provides a lot of information about the eponymous thinker. But in my opinion it offers a very short-sighted and partial, interpretive perspective. In fact, Losurdo gives an exclusively political reading of Nietzsche, from the point of view of class relation; of the contempt that a 'lord' like Nietzsche could not fail to have for the 'servants' of the popular masses. The myth of the superman in Nietzsche is read precisely as a defense of the life and agency of the ruling classes against the cowardice and passivity of the popular classes, which brings into play a profound contempt for the herd ideal of socialism.

In this way, Losurdo, incredibly, completely avoids the question of the extent to which Nietzsche's pathology and very personal experience of life were decisive in shaping his theoretical and philosophical thought. Many of Nietzsche's seemingly political aphorisms, in my opinion, refer back to the struggle and clash of passions that painfully accompanied his life until his death. That is to say, Nietzsche's philosophy is very often a psychology, in the sense that it furnishes metaphors for the clash between parts of the ego and the self, which marked and disrupted the existence of a man who was often assaulted and upset by the movements and reversals of his unconscious.

This radical elimination of Nietzsche's pathological and psychic experience in the evaluation of him provided by Losurdo corresponds perfectly to his ‘Eastern’ Marxism. This is a Marxism without individuation and without subjectivity: that is, a Marxism that designs and prescribes a practice that is entirely collective and common, with no room for differences and their cultivation and expression. From this point of view, I think there can be significant affinities between Losurdo and Althusser. For Althusser's thought was also characterized by a similar rejection of subjectivity and individuation. Under the influence of Lacan, for Althusser the place of the subject is the place of disvalue and of imaginary belief and representation. It is the place of a falsification of reality, of a reality that he argues is organized through inherently 'subjectless' structures. This is why I believe that Althusser's Marxism is inscribed in a fundamentally authoritarian framework of Stalinism and anti-humanist science.

In this sense, Losurdo and Althusser can be considered together in relation to state socialism, which once again sees the centralization of decision-making as the key to the construction of socialism. But today the technosciences reveal all the dangers of a concentration and centralization of knowledge. They show the creation of an 'imperial' concentration of decisions. They are giving rise to a digital empire that, through the impersonality of algorithms, collects and processes a constant influx of information, data and knowledge, directing productive capitalism and the lives of us all from the heights of the cloud. This could mean that Eastern Marxism and the imperialism of the technosciences paradoxically shake hands in a perspective where numbers command and give orders. Meaning is no longer found in the actions and purposes of living bodies, as a truly materialist and vital socialism would want. Rather it is found in the accumulation of information, increasingly linked to the accumulation of capital.

I have always thought that Losurdo's Marxism is a Marxism of externality, which does not look at the depth of the systemic nexus of capital as an economic vector capable of constructing an entire socio-economic formation. Just as he reads Nietzsche externally, so he reads all the classics of liberalism from the outside, starting with the philosophy of Locke, who was criticized not for the conceptual structure of his liberal individualism, but for owning shares in companies dedicated to the slave trade.^[15] In this way, Losurdo has always practiced a simplification of reality, looking more at anecdotes than at the substance of conceptual and material relations. This is why I think his Marxism has spread so easily. Because it is a Marxism that, in its simplification, avoids rising to the level of the economic, social and existential problems raised by the drama of contemporary history.

In many ways, the key question raised in the interview is: what is the role of contradiction today? While he does not deny the presence of contradictions, in Finelli’s view capitalism has become so all- encompassing as a system that they no longer “become conscious,” thereby failing to “construct a critical subjectivity.” This motif—which is most strongly associated with the Frankfurt School, even as Finelli differs from the thinkers linked to it in the import he assigns to production—should not be dismissed. It is true, after all, that capitalism today—more expansive than ever before, and increasingly subtended by a global technoscientific apparatus—is capable of neutralizing contradictions, making ‘alienation’ (as Fredric Jameson once observed) seem like an artifact of modernity.^[16] But at the same time, has not this process of globalization—and its corollary, neoliberalism—generated profound discontents that have become apparent in the post-2008 period in particular? Perhaps the most obvious of these is wealth inequality, which has now regressed to nearly nineteenth-century levels in the West, fueling far-right fantasies of the restoration of national purity. Yet we could also speak of the anti-imperialism Losurdo is so tied to, since the shift of investment to China, while premised on the idea that a nation could be turned into an indefinite site of semi-peripheral superexploitation, has more recently posed serious challenges to the American-led world-system (as have major conflicts — and one could argue, proxy conflicts — in Russia-Ukraine and in the Middle East). In this sense, the work of Finelli and Losurdo, in addition to reflecting greater concern with the core and periphery respectively, channel different aspects, both very real, of our current dispensation: on one hand, the ongoing repression of contradiction by advanced capitalism; and on the other, its conspicuous re-appearance in a number of forms due to the transformation of it into a more ‘purified’ global system.

1. While the first of these volumes has been translated to English, the second is forthcoming. See Roberto Finelli, A Failed Parricide: Hegel and the Young Marx, translated by Peter D. Thomas and Nicola Iannelli Popham (Brill, 2017 [2004]) and Roberto Finelli, Un parricidio compiuto. Il confronto finale di Marx con Hegel (Jaca Book, 2014).

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2. See Domenico Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, translated by Jon Morris (Duke University Press, 2004 [2000]).

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3. While recognition is discussed in Losurdo’s Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, Finelli’s point here is that he does not engage with it heavily as a “nexus of socialization” targeted at facilitating individuation but rather focuses on the necessary role of communal recognition (that is, ‘illiberal’ statism) in overcoming e.g. slavery and feudalism. It is in this sense that he can be said to have disregarded the “problematic of recognition” in Hegel, which—considered with respect to his wider oeuvre—deals with both of these dimensions.

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4. Terry Eagleton, “Lenin the Postmodern Age,” in Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Duke University Press, 2007), 42-58.

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5. In March 1968, after having witnessed a violent clash between police and students at the Sapienza University of Rome, Pasolini wrote a famous poem (“Il PCI ai giovani!”) in which he expresses sympathy for the police on the grounds that they were “the children of the poor” tasked with fending off “petty bourgeois” students. This did not mean he was a great fan of the Italian state, which he repeatedly labeled “fascist” in this period.

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6. Colletti rejects the Hegelian influence in Marxism as tending towards overunification and anti-materialism, arguing instead for an embrace of Kant on account of his acknowledgement of the gulf separating being and thought.

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7. For Althusser Hegelianism has negatively influenced Marxism by bestowing it with a tendency to view contradictions—such as, most notably, the contradiction between capital and labour—as prone to progressive simplification, culminating in revolution. To overcome this he proposes a “structural causality” in which economic determination, like Spinoza’s Substance, does not exist apart from the multitudinous contradictions it generates.

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8. For Negri the problem with Hegel is that his work favours the resolution of all contradictions within a higher state-centered unity, subordinating the multitude. Against this he pits the philosophy of Spinoza, which he sees as showing us how potentia (constituent, productive power) can challenge potestas (established authority or power-over) without recourse to a pacifying synthesis.

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9. That is, Hegel, who after his appointment to the prestigious chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818 became the preeminent philosopher in that city.

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10. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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11. The British Factories Act 1847, which restricted the working hours of women and young persons (13–18) in textile mills to 10 hours per day (note that this law was revisited and tightened in 1850 and 1853 in response to attempts to evade it by capitalists).

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12. “It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International—during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the interimperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states—has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions.” See John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review vol. 76, no. 06 (November 2024): https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-new-denial-of-imperialism-on-the-left.

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13. While Rockhill edited and wrote the foreword for the English translation of Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn (Monthly Review Press, 2017), and shares his critique of the eponymous tradition, Tutt draws heavily from Losurdo’s criticisms of Nietzsche in his How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche (Repeater Books, 2024).

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14. In 2013’s Class Struggle Losurdo emphasizes the usage of the plural in Marx’s claim that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” placing particular emphasis on class, national, and women’s struggles. See Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 [2013]).

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15. See especially the first three chapters of Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, translated by Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2011 [2005]).

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16. “[A]lienation is, first of all, not merely a modernist concept but also a modernist experience.” See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991), 90.

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