During the last few years of his life, the work of the late Italian historian and philosopher Domenico Losurdo began to gain increasing popularity in the English-speaking world, beginning in earnest with the publication of the English edition of his most well-known book Liberalism: A Counter-History, in 2011 and continuing since his untimely passing in 2018. His 2008 book on the figure of Stalin and the historiography surrounding him, which challenged the hegemonic interpretation—largely shared by reactionaries and many “leftists” alike—of the history of the Soviet Union during the period of so-called “Stalinism,” unsurprisingly proved to be highly controversial. Likewise, his last book on Western Marxism was originally published in 2017 and then published in English with Monthly Review Press in 2024. English translations of more of his works are forthcoming from Iskra Books, which published the English translation of his book on Stalin in 2023. His work has been inspiring to many Marxists with a particular focus on anti-imperialism, and so, given the increasing tendency towards social chauvinism on the western “left” in recent years^[1], particularly at a time when U.S. imperialism is acting in an increasingly aggressive manner, Losurdo’s work is of undeniable importance.

In this context, at the beginning of September of last year, a series of articles appeared under the title “Neo-Stalinism and Philosophy: Domenico Losurdo’s New School of Falsification.” It was released in three parts: “Against Losurdo” (subsequently cited in-text as AL) “Losurdo’s Lies” (subsequently cited in-text as LL), and “Revisionism Revisited” (subsequently cited in-text as RR).^[2] The author of these articles, Ross Wolfe, in fact interviewed Losurdo in 2012 with the “Platypus Affiliated Society.”^[3] As the flattering titles immediately suggest, Wolfe makes a litany of strange and fantastic accusations against Losurdo in an attempt to completely discredit the man and his entire body of work, in addition to polemicizing against Monthly Review, the publishers of the English edition of his Western Marxism as well as other works critical of that tradition, such as the recent Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? by Gabriel Rockhill, with whom Wolfe also takes issue.^[4] He has apparently been taken seriously by some, having done two interviews on YouTube regarding this piece, one with the Marxist-adjacent podcast “Emancipations with Daniel Tutt” as well as another with the left-liberal podcast “1Dime Radio.”^[5] Losurdo’s work is, of course, far from perfect; his interpretations of Marxist theory and of the history of the communist movement are by no means entirely beyond reproach. But, as will become abundantly clear in what follows, Wolfe’s criticism of Losurdo is astonishingly shallow, and he himself is guilty of many of the charges he levels against the Italian historian. His essay is really less of a critique and more of a cheap sensationalist hit piece wrapped in an erudite veneer. At the very least, however, it serves the purpose of revealing how “Western Marxism” attempts to defend itself from criticism, as well as how intellectually impoverished “left-wing” attacks on so-called “Stalinism” tend to be. It also makes abundantly clear the fact that Losurdo deserves better critics than he has received thus far. It will not take long for us to see who has really established a “new school of falsification” here.

The Phantom Menace of “Neo-Stalinism”

As its umbrella title suggests, Wolfe’s essay is motivated by a Quixotic crusade against something called “Neo-Stalinism”—a “favorite hobbyhorse” (AL) of the Platypus crowd^[6]—of which he charges Losurdo with being a representative. Against this phantom, he purports to defend “orthodox Marxism” (LL) and “classical Marxism” (RR), although what he really defends is the tired misuse of the idea of international revolution (principally by Trotskyism and “left” communism) to discredit the achievements of the USSR and other socialist states. He never tires of repeating that “a revolution in the most advanced countries would be necessary to overthrow capitalism” (AL), “the revolution must be international in scale, and must be principally carried out by the proletariat of the most advanced capitalist countries” (RR), etc., etc., which he uses as mere phrases to, rather ironically, discount the history of the actual international revolution, which covers the whole historical cycle from 1917 to the establishment of the socialist camp of countries after the Second World War to Cuba, Vietnam and beyond, and including the globe-spanning revolution by the wretched of the Earth against colonial oppression. In his position as the defender of “Western Marxism” against Losurdo, Wolfe defends the thesis that all this was irrelevant as far as socialism is concerned. Unsurprisingly this supposedly “classical,” “orthodox Marxist” idea is at variance with Marx himself, who argued that “the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England … cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland,”^[7] as well as, of course, Lenin, whose numerous writings on imperialism and the national question make it especially difficult to recruit him to the camp of social chauvinism.^[8] A single quotation will suffice: “the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism.”^[9] It takes an incredibly selective and myopic (not to mention Eurocentric) reading of Marx and Lenin to arrive at the conclusion that they were only concerned with the colonial question in order to “destabilize the imperial core” (AL).

Throughout his essay, Wolfe employs a number of blatant historical falsehoods—of the exact kind that Losurdo criticizes all throughout his work—to undergird his arguments. He mentions the “revelations” of “Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech,’ where he revealed the crimes of Stalin” (AL), apparently unaware that even official bourgeois historiography has in large part “revealed” the “crimes” of Khrushchev against history by his many falsifications.^[10] He repeatedly insinuates that the idea of “socialism in one country”—the conviction that it was possible to build a socialist society in the USSR in the wake of the failure of the revolution in the rest of Europe—was exclusively Stalin’s idea, ignoring the fact that many other Bolsheviks, such as Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, not to mention Lenin himself, all shared this belief (although, of course, some of them had differing ideas as to how socialism would be built). His characterization—for which, of course, he provides no evidence—of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the “repartition of Poland” which he tries to paint as an alliance (though he doesn’t explicitly use the term) between Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union by reference to “the joint military parade of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in Brest-Litovsk” (LL) is simply primitive and outright reactionary. Even most modern bourgeois historiography is not this crude. “In fact,” says one fervently anti-communist (though apparently not as fervent an anti-communist as the “orthodox Marxist” Wolfe) historian, “the treaty was not the product of a real friendship, but of Stalin’s belief that he had no alternative. The British had little real interest in a formal anti-Hitler military alliance, whilst Stalin could not risk war with Germany.”^[11] He claims that Losurdo considered the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR to have been an “error” (RR), a claim which is wrong, we may say, both subjectively and objectively. Nowhere when Losurdo discusses collectivization does he say—or even imply—that it was an “error.” Throughout his work he repeatedly emphasizes that “collectivization and industrialization were—or, at any rate, were considered—necessary if the USSR was to be capable of facing the dreaded new aggression, already clearly heralded by Hitler in Mein Kampf,”^[12] although he never dismisses the “horrible social and human costs it entailed.”^[13] It is wrong objectively because it is impossible in light of the facts of history to view collectivization as having been an “error.” It was only because of collectivization, according to Mark Tauger, that Russia’s “long history of famines” was finally ended^[14], and that “collectivisation brought substantial modernisation to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s.”^[15] In addition, Tauger argues “that collectivisation allowed the mobilisation and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history,” and thus “that collectivisation, whatever its disruptive effects on agriculture, did in fact function as a means to modernise and aid Soviet agriculture.”^[16] Yet again modern historiography buries the myths of the anti-communist “left.”

On another topic, Wolfe writes that Losurdo’s “portrayal of 1776 as a ‘counterrevolution’ was dictated by Cold-War anti-Americanism, a vulgar byproduct of the campism that was de rigueur during that period.”^[17] Here Wolfe “simply outed himself as a poor reader” (LL) of Losurdo, or in this case also a poor listener since this is referencing his 2012 interview of the Italian historian. All Losurdo says is that he “quote[s] several contemporary US historians who claim that the American Revolution was, in reality, a ‘counterrevolution,’” and that they say this because “if we consider the case of the natives or the blacks, their conditions became worse after the American Revolution."^[18] One of Losurdo’s central claims in his book Liberalism is that the liberal revolutions were characterized by a dual tendency towards emancipation on the one hand and dis-emancipation on the other.^[19] Is Wolfe arguing that the conditions of the natives or the blacks did not worsen after 1776? Of course, he respectfully declines to provide any kind of counter-argument, instead resorting to one of his “favorite hobbyhorses” (AL), so-called “campism” (to which we will return below). How anyone, let alone a “Marxist,” could make so many elementary errors, so many “embarrassing inaccuracies” (LL) and then go on to accuse another of “careless, and at times even unscrupulous, scholarship” (AL), that is “shoddy” and “so transparently motivated as to render it worthless” (RR), is astounding, quite “careless” and maybe “even unscrupulous” of him. Perhaps this, we dare say, “scholarly malpractice” (LL) may have been “dictated” by Cold-War anti-Sovietism, “a vulgar byproduct of the campism that was de rigueur during that period” (RR). Or perhaps it is simply characteristic of the essence of “Western Marxism,” to which we can now more fully direct our attention. In any case what is certain is that such argumentation is the result of an attempt to force a conclusion which could not have been derived from the facts of the matter themselves, which is typical of the mental gymnastics practiced by “left wing critics of Stalinism,” of whom what Marx said of the parson Thomas Malthus is in large part equally applicable: “when a man seeks to accommodate science to a viewpoint which is derived not from science (however erroneous it may be) but from outside, from alien, external interests, then I call him “base.”^[20]

A Note on the English Edition of Losurdo’s Western Marxism

But before examining it in detail, a brief aside is necessary concerning the Monthly Review Press English edition of Losurdo’s Western Marxism. It is clear that this book (along with the one on the figure of Stalin, though less directly) is the one Wolfe finds the most problematic. It will thus occupy most of our attention here.^[21] There are several errors in this edition, and one of the few merits of Wolfe’s piece is that he correctly identifies a couple of them. In the section discussing Timpanaro^[22], he correctly points out that the citation in the English edition mistakenly points to the English translation of the first edition of Timpanaro’s On Materialism, when the reference to Bakunin actually comes from the third Italian edition (LL, note 34). He also identifies a quite significant error in the first section dealing with Foucault, where it is said that “[i]n the 1960s, Althusser credited him [Foucault] with being the most prestigious Marxist philosopher of the times.”^[23] Wolfe mistakenly attributes this error to Losurdo himself—“Losurdo wrote that…” (LL)—but it is actually a mistake of the English translation. The Italian original reads: “Assieme ad Arendt, a rendere irreparabile la rottura del marxismo occidentale con la rivoluzione anticoloniale provvedeva un altro autore, già negli anni ’60 accreditato da Althusser (Althusser, Balibar 1965, pp. 27, 46, 110), in quel momento il filosofo marxista più prestigioso."^[24] Considering that nowhere on pages 27, 46 or 110 of the Italian edition of Reading Capital^[25], cited by Losurdo, is Foucault referred to as a Marxist, it is likely that the appellation “the most prestigious Marxist philosopher of the times [viz., of the 1960’s]” refers to Althusser himself, and not to Foucault. He points out (LL, note 130) another incorrect citation of Marcuse, where the English edition of Western Marxism does not specify that the quote in question comes from the Italian edition of The End of Utopia^[26], and is not available in any English edition of Marcuse’s works. However, Wolfe uses this particular mistake in a highly dishonest manner, since earlier on he says that it is “unclear where Losurdo actually sourced a series of long blockquotes, attributed to Marcuse, that shows up in the second chapter. The lines quoted there occur nowhere in the transcript of ‘The End of Utopia,’ the talk he gave in the late sixties that is cited in the endnotes” (AL). He clearly knew where Losurdo’s quotations came from, but apparently did not feel the need to go back and correct himself here in what is a clear instance of him slandering Losurdo and making him look incompetent or like he’s maliciously falsifying those he criticizes.^[27] This from someone willing to casually throw around accusations of “scholarly malpractice” (LL) at those with whom he disagrees!

How “Western Marxism” Defends Itself from Criticism

Wolfe’s attempted defense of “Western Marxism” goes a great deal in showcasing which of the two men’s work is really “transparently motivated” (RR). As expected, he takes great issue with Losurdo’s highlighting of the inattention to the world anti-colonial revolution on the part of “Western Marxism.” He begins in Italy, where he lambastes Losurdo for “not tarry[ing] with [Galvano] della Volpe’s Logic as a Positive Science, for example, choosing instead to dwell on an obscure exchange with Norberto Bobbio over rights” (AL), apparently not understanding that Losurdo uses this “obscure exchange” to highlight the limitations of Della Volpe’s political thought, which he links to that of the latter’s student Lucio Colletti. It’s obvious that the point of Losurdo’s Western Marxism was not a blanket condemnation of everything that has come out of that tradition, in the same way that its representatives tend to treat the Marxism of the Soviet Union or People’s China. He takes issue with Losurdo situating this exchange between Bobbio and Della Volpe within the context of the then ongoing French colonial war against Vietnam. Wolfe considers this “a cheap tu quoque argument on behalf of the socialist East” (LL), like a typical 1950’s ideologist of imperialism, who replies to any attempt to point out the hypocrisy and contradictions of the self-congratulatory ideology of the imperialist liberal bourgeoisie with the charge of “whataboutism.” But why should Della Volpe not have challenged—as Togliatti did—Bobbio’s hagiographic portrayal of liberalism and the West as the champions of civil rights and formal freedom, at a time when liberal France (backed by the USA) was preoccupied with crushing the Vietnamese people’s attempts to assert their rights and their freedom? Wolfe shies away from any attempt to prove that Losurdo is wrong, apparently in the hope that the ideological prejudices of the reader (i.e. western chauvinism) will do the arguing for him.

His defense of the late Mario Tronti fares little better. He attempts to defend Tronti’s statement that “they [the miraculous struggles of the working class] have alone made, and are making, more revolutionary history than all the revolutions of all the colonized peoples put together,”^[28] with the excuse that while it may have been “hyperbolic,” “it spoke to the lofty aspirations workerism held during that decade” (LL). But anyone with the slightest awareness of history should be able to see that it was not only “hyperbolic,” but utterly incorrect, and absurdly so. The workerists’ “lofty aspirations” seem to have been so “lofty” as to be completely removed from reality. “We are in 1966.” While the Vietnamese people are fighting off the imperialist aggression of the USA, in what was to become one of the most significant victories in the struggle against imperialism (and therefore against capitalism) in the 20th century, Tronti publishes a work which—whatever its real merits might be—completely discounts the real, ongoing struggle against imperialism, triumphantly declaring its total irrelevancy as far as the struggle for socialism is concerned. (A position which could not be further from that of Lenin, “in England” or anywhere else, or Marx for that matter.) What is this if not blatant social chauvinism? It was certainly not irrelevant to the U.S. imperialists, who at this time clearly saw the risings of the masses across the Third World as a significant threat to their interests, that is, the interests of global capitalism. Although Tronti was, in a sense, correct in his skepticism towards Third-Worldism (though in a sense that neither Wolfe, nor Tronti himself more than likely, really understood)^[29], it doesn’t excuse social chauvinism, as well as a general blindness to historical facts. “The workerists,” according to Wolfe, “looked to cities like Detroit, in the heart of advanced capitalism, for inspiration” (LL). Well and good, but it begs a very simple question: what could possibly have been happening in Detroit in the 1960s that was more significant for socialism than the worldwide struggle against imperialism, including but not limited to that of the Vietnamese people? The USA, “the heart of advanced capitalism” at this time, was also “the heart” of “advanced” reaction at home and abroad, of “advanced” social chauvinism, and of the “advanced” labor aristocracy (in the direct sense that, say, the AFL-CIO represented an aristocracy of labor).^[30] The workers’ movement in Italy itself (in spite of the revisionist degradation of the PCI) was far more advanced than that of the USA at this time. He says that “Tronti had nothing but contempt for those who saw the periphery as ‘the epicenter of the revolution.’” But who could have looked at the state of the world in 1966 and not thought that the periphery was “the epicenter of the revolution”? What was the “epicenter” then? Detroit? This sort of sentiment is exactly what Losurdo is criticizing all throughout Western Marxism. This is exactly what it means to not comprehend one’s own time in thought.^[31] What Tronti is doing here is nothing more than ultra-revolutionary phrase-mongering—a habit he shares with Trotsky, Bordiga and others of their ilk—in order to theoretically justify social chauvinism. The essence of this phrase-mongering was already exposed by Marx in his critique of the “Young Hegelian ideologists,” who “in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ phrases,” turn out in reality to be “the staunchest conservatives.”^[32] Wolfe defends Tronti’s sidelining of imperialism by saying that it was “the latter’s laser focus on the fundamental opposition in capitalist society that made Workers and Capital such a thrilling read,” and praises Tronti’s “ingenious application of the central categories of the Marxian critique to the problems of his day” (LL). Yet, however much of a “thrilling read” Workers and Capital might have been, it doesn’t change the fact that “the problems of his day” don’t seem to have included the struggles of the vast majority of the world’s population against imperialism. (And it’s not like those struggles had nothing to do with his home country. Italy was a member of NATO, was it not?)

In addition to all of this, Tronti made the claim—which Wolfe also defends—that “the workers’ movement was defeated by democracy.”^[33] At this point, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this claim is also completely and utterly wrong. It is worth dwelling on because it reveals certain characteristic features of the view of history generally held by “Western Marxism” and its advocates. We need not even dwell on the fact that what Tronti and Wolfe are really referring to by “democracy” is the normal functioning of the bourgeois republic, and that there is precious little that is “democratic” about this form of state, as this would take us too far beyond our present aims. Is it at all true that the workers’ movement was “defeated” by “democracy,” by the bourgeois republic? How about in Tronti’s own country, Italy, where the (then) “Stalinist” PCI was poised to win the elections of 1947, only to be thwarted by direct interference on the part of U.S. imperialism? Were the Italian workers “defeated” by “democracy” (i.e. by the normal functioning of the bourgeois republic) here, or was it “democracy” that was “defeated” by imperialism?^[34] To bring it closer to home for Wolfe, in the 20th century, were the American workers “defeated by democracy” or by severe state repression? The answer should be obvious to anyone with even the most modest grasp of the history of the last century.^[35] Beyond even the standard “Western Marxist” practice of erasing the colonized peoples from history, such a claim amounts to an erasure of the workers themselves from history (ironically coming from so-called “workerism”), replacing the real facts of history with the stock-and-trade of Cold-War imperialist mythology, reminiscent of someone like Francis Fukuyama more than any kind of “Marxism.”

The train of “careless, and at times even unscrupulous, scholarship” (AL) continues unabated with the authors of Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Wolfe attempts to defend them from Losurdo (and John Bellamy Foster) by arguing that “they may have been right” that “the conditions described by Lenin in his famous pamphlet on imperialism no longer obtain” (LL). It is, of course, irrelevant whether or not the world today is exactly the same as that described by Lenin over a century ago (it obviously is not). It doesn’t change the fact that 1. Losurdo was entirely correct when he “objected emphatically to their [Hardt’s and Negri’s] seeming acceptance of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States was not an imperialist power” (LL) and 2. though (obviously) not in exactly the same form as it was in Lenin’s time, the imperialist stage of capitalism has remained.^[36] Wolfe’s essay was written in September of 2025, a few months after the brief American-Israeli war against Iran, during the Gaza genocide and during the ongoing Ukraine war.^[37] Do these events have nothing to do with imperialism?

The only instance where Wolfe’s criticisms of Losurdo actually hit their mark is in connection to the latter’s criticisms of the Italian Trotskyist philosopher Sebastiano Timpanaro. Losurdo’s criticisms of him are uncharacteristically poor (and as mentioned above also Wolfe correctly identifies another mistake in the English edition of Western Marxism). Losurdo’s only real arguments against Timpanaro are that he did not share Losurdo’s own ideas concerning the relation of socialism to the state and the market. Losurdo comes close to claiming in this section that you cannot be a consistent anti-imperialist while also being a consistent Marxist.^[38] But does Losurdo disparage Stalin for “contradicting” his anti-imperialism by replacing the market with planning? He does not. He praises Stalin for “realiz[ing] the hollowness of the messianic expectation of the disappearance of the state, of nations, of religion, of the market, of money.”^[39] Mentioning “the market” is odd since, while there was never a trace of utopianism in Stalin, he nonetheless never lost sight of the necessity of eventually fully socializing the Soviet economy, thus entirely eliminating commodity production and consequently distribution by means of the market.^[40]

Returning to Timpanaro. Losurdo characterizes him as having “cast a heavy shadow of suspicion on national liberation movements when they assimilated ‘racial hatreds and national conflicts.’”^[41] It is worth quoting at length what Timpanaro himself was actually saying here.

When Marxists affirm the “decisive primacy” of economic and social structures, and therefore designate this level and not the biological level underlying it as the “base” of human society and culture, they are right in relation to the great transformations and differentiations of society, which arise fundamentally as consequences of changes in economic structures and not of the geographical environment or physical constitution of man. The division of humanity into social classes explains its history infinitely better than its division into races or peoples; and although, as a given fact, racial hatreds and national conflicts have existed and continue to exist, and although the ambiguous and composite concepts of nation and of homeland always have a racist component, there is nevertheless no doubt that these conflicts, at least from the end of prehistory onwards, are fundamentally disguised or diverted economic and social conflicts (increasingly so), not “genuinely” biological or ethnic contrasts. Hence the immense methodological superiority of Marx’s historiography by comparison, not merely with a vulgar racist historiography, but even with an ethnic historiography such as that of Thierry.^[42]

And he’s entirely correct here. Likewise, Wolfe is definitely correct that Losurdo’s portrayal of Timpanaro is a mischaracterization, and quite a glaring one at that. There is also another error in the English edition of Western Marxism, regarding Timpanaro’s comments on the NEP^[43], which are not from the 1975 English edition of On Materialism, but are actually in the preface to the third Italian edition.^[42] In the said preface, however, Timpanaro does make some blatant historical errors, Losurdo’s somewhat shallow criticisms of him notwithstanding. He does something here that Wolfe accuses Losurdo of often doing, namely taking quotations (or paraphrases in this case) from disparate periods of time and connecting them while ignoring their original contexts. As opposed to what Timpanaro implies, Lenin was not even talking about “wage inequality” in the strict sense in The State and Revolution. He was talking about paying state officials “workmen’s wages,” and that “equality” should be “correctly interpret[ed]” as “meaning the abolition of classes.”^[44] What he says here has nothing at all to do with “the transformation of the professional revolutionary into a bureaucrat.” What is more, the NEP did not become “a lasting reality” after Lenin’s death; this is simply factually incorrect. The NEP outlived Lenin by about 4 years, which is hardly “a lasting reality.” And in what way could the end of the NEP be characterized as having been ended “too late”?^[45] Could the socialist economy have been built in the USSR in 1924, which he seems to be implying? This is the sort of argument that Losurdo would characterize as resulting from the “idealism of practice”—the idea that revolutionary practice can simply overcome the constraints of the conditions within which it is situated, which is, of course, impossible in reality.^[46] He then characterizes the collectivization as the “extermination” of the kulaks, which is, of course, also ridiculous. Only someone with the contempt for historical facts of a bourgeois ideologist could characterize the liquidation of a class as a class in the form of an “extermination.” Had the construction of socialism begun in 1924, as Timpanaro seems to be suggesting here, it would have been carried out with even more “ferocious fanaticism,”^[47] considering the significant economic progress made in the period 1924-1928, and would have resulted in even more chaos and hardship. Thus, insofar as he speaks specifically as a Trotskyist, Timpanaro can do nothing but spout historically inaccurate and superficial drivel.

Moving from Italy to France, Wolfe’s objections to Losurdo’s criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre leave much to be desired. He accuses Losurdo of “misreading” the “intent” of Sartre’s universalization of scarcity in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. “He certainly did not have in mind some sort of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes” (LL). But the effect of the usage of particular concepts is the same regardless of the subjective intent behind their use. In the words of Lukács, “there is no such thing as an ‘innocent’ philosophy. Such a thing has never existed.”^[48] In addition, Losurdo is completely correct in arguing against the perpetual reliance in socialist construction on “mass mobilization and enthusiasm and the illusion that such enthusiasm could manifest itself enduringly or indefinitely.”^[49] And he is likewise correct in faulting Sartre for the latter’s inattention to the developmental phase of the anti-colonial revolution.^[50]

We remain hard-pressed to find any more serious criticism of Losurdo by Wolfe when we get to Louis Althusser. He shields Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism” from the attacks of “the Italian Stalinist” (LL) in connection with the struggles for recognition by the colonized peoples in this way: “the validity of a position cannot be determined simply based on whether movements in far-flung places are looking to inscribe it as a slogan on their banners” (LL). But whether such movements are in “far-flung places” or not is irrelevant. This very framing is indicative of “Eurocentric chauvinism,” of the kind with which Losurdo reproaches Ernst Bloch,^[51] on Wolfe’s part. Marxism, especially since 1917, is not an exclusively “European” phenomenon; Marxist theorizing in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter) has consequences the world over. One should think this would be clear to someone claiming to espouse “internationalism.” He is correct, however, when he points out that “Althusser’s intervention was, if anything, a highly local one, at most continental, directed against what he saw as an opportunistic tendency among various European communist parties,” and that Althusser’s arguments were principally made in response to the phenomenon whereby “[c]lass dictatorship was replaced by the more anodyne idea of a people’s state guided by humanist principles.” (LL) But this is a textbook “Stalinist” argument. In fact, Althusser was explicitly put off by the revisionist USSR’s humanistic sloganeering.^[52] It was the Khrushchevites who explicitly replaced the “class dictatorship” with “the more anodyne idea of a people’s state guided by humanist principles.”^[53] The reactionary ideology of Gorbachev and Yakovlev was likewise under the banner of “humanist principles” as against the Leninist-“Stalinist” principle of class dictatorship. So here the Trotskyist Wolfe and the “left wing critic of Stalinism” Althusser^[54] are arguing a “Stalinist” position as against the revisionism of Khrushchev—who, we might recall, “revealed the crimes of Stalin” (AL) according to the former—and the reactionary demagogy of Gorbachev and Yakovlev, two other emphatic opponents of “Stalinism”!

In general, the question of humanism and its relation to Marxism is more complex, and Wolfe’s treatment of it here is inadequate to say the least. Althusser and Losurdo are both correct in a sense. Althusser is correct in identifying the potential opportunist danger in humanism as an ideology (and, again, this is a textbook “Stalinist” argument). However, the kind of humanism that Losurdo argued for contra Althusser is one that is not necessarily stamped with the contradictions of bourgeois humanism as such. Of these contradictions, and the dichotomy “human/inhuman” which Marx and Engels point out in The German Ideology and which Althusser also emphasizes,^[55] the United States, which declared its independence from Britain on the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” while expanding Black slavery and the dispossession and genocide of the Indians, is exemplary. The bourgeois concept of “Man” also did not include women, at least not until after 1917 (which was the result of the struggles of the women’s and workers’ movements, and not due to some sort of internal dialectic within liberalism). Such “exclusion clauses” of bourgeois ideology are often emphasized by Losurdo in his works.^[56] What Losurdo defends is a humanism that is a real universalism, in contrast to the entirely false universalism of bourgeois ideology^[57], and that it was under this real universalism that many of the great struggles for recognition in history (which Losurdo maintains are integrally connected with the class struggle for socialism), such as those of colonized peoples, of women as well as that of the proletariat itself, have been fought.^[58] So what he’s really criticizing Althusser for is for the latter’s blanket condemnation of all humanism, essentially giving over all humanism to the camp of bourgeois ideology.^[59] Wolfe’s criticism of Losurdo operates “at a much lower level” (LL) because he’s principally concerned with tarnishing Losurdo’s image, while ignoring all of his arguments that he can’t simply dismiss by contrasting it with the letter of what Marx or Lenin wrote.

Although he doesn’t entirely disagree with Losurdo’s censure of Alain Badiou, Wolfe still feels compelled to take Losurdo to task for “go[ing] on a tangent about Isaiah Berlin’s conception of negative and positive freedoms” (LL). But the reason Losurdo brings up Berlin is obvious. By painting the revolutionary movement as the champions of “justice” as opposed to “freedom,” Badiou was inadvertently conceding to reaction the cause of “freedom” (at the very least the cause of the “negative freedom” so dear to Berlin). This is a major and completely unwarranted concession to reactionary ideology (not to mention blatantly historically inaccurate, as Losurdo likewise is at pains to point out in his work), and so Losurdo was completely correct against Badiou on this point. Wolfe’s only actual criticism of Losurdo here is that he “barely touched on the core tenets of Badiou’s philosophy” (LL). While a more thorough engagement with Badiou’s thought may have been warranted (Wolfe himself correctly points to several of the former’s flaws),^[60] Losurdo’s criticisms are in no way “almost random” (LL). They are consistent with the general argument that Losurdo was making throughout Western Marxism: how the “Western Marxists” variously concede on crucial points to bourgeois ideology (“authoritarianism,” “democracy” vs. “totalitarianism,” “freedom” vs. “justice,” hagiography of the west, anti-communism, “Eurocentrism,” etc., etc.), which is intrinsically connected to, and in part the cause of, their almost complete political ineptitude.

Without a doubt, Wolfe’s lowest point throughout this whole tirade is his stint as the self-appointed attorney of Slavoj Žižek. “The popularity of books by Hardt, Negri, Žižek, and Badiou,” he writes, “was widely seen to grant Marxist theory a new lease on life in the West” (LL). Considering how little “Marxism” remained in Hardt, Negri, and Žižek (Badiou maybe less so than these, but only slightly; he still shares many of the same limitations), Losurdo’s contention that these thinkers rather symbolized the “last gasp” of “Western Marxism” is more accurate.^[61] Wolfe, of course, takes issue with this. “According to Losurdo, Žižek’s mortal sin was to complain that the critique of capitalism had been replaced by the critique of imperialism, that the social conflict between classes had been dropped in favor of a geopolitical conflict between states. Losurdo saw nothing wrong with this picture” (LL). What does Losurdo actually have to say about Žižek? He initially identifies that Žižek, consistent with those other “Western Marxists” throughout the book, judges the epoch (or in this case the year 2011) by its sacred space while ignoring its profane space, i.e. yet again erasing the colonized peoples from history. “Completely erasing the fate of colonized peoples from their balance sheet, Žižek, Hardt, and Negri reproduce the basic limitation of Western Marxism by diluting it even further.”^[62] This is why Losurdo says that the popularity of figures like Žižek signifies, rather than a revival, the death of “Western Marxism.” Žižek is more or less the embodiment of everything wrong with that tradition, and has clearly not learned a single lesson from its trajectory in the 20th century. What does Žižek have to say about imperialism? It is necessary to quote him at length here:

The most reliable sign of capitalism’s ideological triumph is the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last two or three decades …

So what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? Not at all: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to ‘the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself (centred on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction) into a critique of “imperialism”.’ In this way, when one talks about ‘globalization and its agents’, the enemy is externalized (usually in the form of vulgar anti-Americanism). From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight ‘the American empire’, any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so unbridled Chinese ‘communist’ capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus (see Chavez’s visit to Belarus in July 2006), may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms … What we have here is instead of a critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get a critique of imperialist ‘excess’, with the (silent) notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more ‘progressive’ framework.^[63]

Two things are immediately apparent from this:

1. 1. Žižek (and Boltanski and Chiapello, who he quotes near the beginning,^[64] and by extension Wolfe, who defends this position from Losurdo) does not understand imperialism at all. Only vacuous bourgeois geopolitical theories, which can only grasp at the surface appearances of things, could claim that imperialism is not itself “centred on economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction.” Even if the above argument isn’t explicitly directed against Marxists but against so-called “anti-globalists,” the implication is the same. The very fact that these supposed “Marxists” separate imperialism from capitalism is itself proof that they understand nothing of either.
2. Žižek, as Losurdo points out in Western Marxism, is guilty of the same thing he disparages “anti-globalists” for, but in the opposite direction. He uncritically accepts the vulgar bourgeois categorization of “democratic” versus “authoritarian” states (which is the exact contemporary equivalent of the old dichotomy of “civilized” versus “uncivilized” countries), and implicitly (or sometimes even explicitly) supports the former against the latter. Losurdo correctly identifies that Žižek, despite his hostility to the category of “Third World,” in fact reproduces this category (along with its corollary the “First World”) but in such a way as justifies “First World” imperialism against the “authoritarian” states, and like a typical bourgeois-imperialist ideologist “he does not even ask whether the authoritarianism of Washington is not in some way the cause of the authoritarianism of Caracas.”^[65] And it is precisely because he does not understand the “economic mechanisms, forms of work organization, and profit extraction” of imperialism that he falls into this vulgarity.

This brings us to one of the “favorite hobbyhorses” (AL) of anti-anti-imperialists (meaning, in practice, pro-imperialists): so-called “campism.” Undoubtedly, “campism” is an actually existent phenomenon in political thought, both historically as well as today. However, what Wolfe and others of his ilk tend to do is use the term “campism” as a tool to discredit actual anti-imperialists and use it as an excuse for not doing or even saying anything about imperialism. Wolfe claims that, according to Losurdo, “Marxists are duty-bound to support not just the few remaining socialist states (like the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Cuba) but also non-socialist states (like Putin’s Russia and theocratic Iran today, or Gaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria in the past) that are nominally opposed to US/NATO imperialism” (LL). What does Losurdo actually say regarding Russia, for instance? “The war that the United States is preparing for is against China, the country born of the greatest anticolonial revolution in history and directed by an experienced Communist Party, or against Russia, which under Putin, has wrongly, according to the White House, thrown off the neocolonial control that Yeltsin had accepted and adapted to (thanks to savage and predatory privatization, the West was in fact able to control the immense energy patrimony of the country).”^[66] He says this in the context of the outright apologia for U.S. imperialism in the post-Restoration period on the part of Hardt and Negri. That Russia threw off its neocolonial status after the 1990’s is simply true, regardless of what one thinks of the Putin regime. But this does not mean (and it doesn’t seem like Losurdo is saying this) that Marxists should “support” Russia, in the way that the social-chauvinist CPRF does in relation to the current war. Modern Russia is itself a capitalist-imperialist power which, although not to the same extent as the most reactionary of the formerly socialist countries (the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, Poland), still has anti-communism as part of its foundational mythology, irrespective of its cynical and opportunistic use of Stalin as a figure for its nationalistic war propaganda. What it does mean, however, is that Marxists should not throw grist to the mill of the western imperialist Kriegsideologie, like so many of the “Western Marxists” have done and continue to do, as Losurdo shows in the book.

On the topic of “campism” and of Kriegsideologie, Žižek (like many other “Western Marxists”) is himself a “campist,” only his camp is the camp of U.S. imperialism. We need not waste time with his absurd and inane views on the Soviet Union or China.^[67] In more recent times, on top of his general lock-step conformism with the American “party line” on the Ukraine war, he has, in fact, gone even further to the right, having openly advocated for the U.S. to give Ukraine nuclear weapons. Let us read what this “Marxist” (don’t laugh!) had to say on the matter: “Russia, having launched a war of conquest against its peaceful neighbor, now wants to keep its own territory out of the war, and it accuses Ukraine, the victim, of ‘expanding’ the conflict. If Russia is serious about its new nuclear doctrine, let us offer an equally serious counter-doctrine: If an independent country is attacked with non-nuclear forces by a nuclear superpower, its allies have the right – even the duty – to provide it with nuclear weapons so that it has a chance of deterring an attack.”^[68] These lines are indistinguishable from something any rabid neoconservative war hawk or any Ukrainian state propagandist would say. Yet this clown is supposed to be a “Marxist”? Who here, Žižek or Losurdo, is really the one with the “Manichaean outlook” (LL)? Incidentally, the Ukrainian propaganda outlet he was writing for here, Euromaidan Press, just happens to list among its donors such respectable organizations as the British embassy in Kiev and the National Democratic Institute—a U.S. government (and Open Society Foundation) funded regime-change and propaganda organization, as well as among its “partners” the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, itself funded by, among others, the U.S. embassy in Kiev, USAID, the NED and NATO!^[69] No more words need be wasted on this particular topic.

“Beyond these standard campist bromides” (LL), Wolfe takes issue with Losurdo’s characterization of Žižek as having “demonized” Mao Zedong. “There is a certain rhetorical sloppiness in his casual mention of the Chinese leader’s “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death,” but this was not what Žižek himself was saying” (LL). But here Wolfe, desperate not to concede to Losurdo on a single point (he seems to be much more willing to concede to reactionaries à la Žižek than to Losurdo), completely misreads Žižek’s words. He says that with regard to this line: “Žižek referred to it [Mao’s supposed ‘ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death’] as the ‘extension ad absurdum’ of a point someone else might make about the lengths to which Mao was supposedly willing to go” (LL, note 56). But what does Žižek actually say? Immediately after quoting Mao on the possibility of a third World War, he says: “It is all too easy to dismiss these lines at the empty posturing of a leader ready to sacrifice millions for his political goals (the extension ad absurdum of Mao’s ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s) – the other side of this dismissive attitude is the basic message: ‘we should not be afraid.’ Is this not the only correct attitude apropos of war: ‘first, we are against it; second we are not afraid of it’?”^[70] So contrary to what Wolfe argues, the one making the point “about the lengths to which Mao was supposedly willing to go” was not “someone else,” but in fact was Žižek himself. And this is consistent with what he generally says, considering the main source for Žižek’s opinions about the profane history of communism seems to be The Black Book of Communism. It is thus not surprising that Wolfe’s attempted defense of Žižek completely misses on every mark. Gabriel Rockhill’s portrayal of him is absolutely justified. Žižek is indeed capitalism’s court jester, a sophist whose almost comically reactionary views across practically the whole spectrum of political questions of today are proof positive that there is almost nothing at all worth salvaging from his radical-recuperating theoretical output. He is the clearest representative of what Rockhill terms the “imperial theory industry”^[71] and his primary objective function (aside from simply making money selling books and public speaking) is to steer young people potentially inclined towards the left into becoming politically inept social-chauvinist intellectual hacks much like himself.

The string of poor arguments continues in Germany. “Significantly,” Wolfe writes, the “critical German Marxists recognized 1917-1923 as a failed world revolution, whereas their Italian and French dissident Marxist counterparts mostly thought of this sequence as successfully establishing a revolutionary beachhead in the USSR” (LL). There’s a false dichotomy present here. While it’s undeniable that in the period 1917-1923 the revolution failed outside of what became the USSR, only a reactionary could claim that the establishment of the USSR was anything other than a colossal victory for the workers not only of Russia, but of the whole world. Beginning with Ernst Bloch. Wolfe takes issue with Losurdo contrasting Bloch’s attitude towards the United States with those of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong (AL). But why shouldn’t he contrast Bloch’s evident “Eurocentric chauvinism”^[51] with the attitude of Ho Chi Minh? The point is part of the entire central thesis of his book: that “Western Marxism” missed the encounter with the anti-colonial revolution, while what he calls “Eastern Marxism” was firmly enmeshed in it. There is nothing at all “jarring” (AL) in this juxtaposition. “One of the things Losurdo took him [Bloch] to task for, along with Benjamin and Lukács, was his hostility to the state.” (LL) What does Losurdo actually have to say about Bloch? He does point to the “influence of anarchism,”^[72] but it’s clearly not just because of a “hostility to the state.” In his works, Losurdo shows a similar “hostility to the state” and to totalitarian militarism on the part of Bukharin, Luxemburg, and even Robespierre,^[73] as well as Lenin.^[74] But he also shows that Lenin, at the same time, understood how imperialism denied oppressed peoples the opportunity to even build national states in any capacity, unlike Bloch who in The Spirit of Utopia completely ignores this dimension. Additionally, Losurdo is completely correct in identifying an anarchistic danger in a simplistic and one-sided attitude towards the state, although he is incorrect in also attributing such a danger to the thought of Marx, Engels and Lenin.^[75] Wolfe defends Bloch since the latter “maintained that ‘it is necessary to confront power in terms of power, as a categorical imperative with revolver in hand,’” and that “[h]e defended the Bolshevik seizure of power, and when World War II was over, he chose to live in East (rather than West) Germany” (LL). All well and good, and yet, as Losurdo shows, he also had some incredibly naïve (to say the least) things to say about the Russian Revolution and about American “democracy.”^[76] Bloch’s “romantic scorn for the money economy” is excused as “[t]his negative view was shared by many Russian communists” including Lenin. On this score Losurdo is correct, insofar as (and concerning the question of money only insofar as) the rush to abolish money in the war communism period was premature and lead to disastrous economic consequences, and it is unambiguously (and not only “supposedly”) true that the Russian Communists “became more measured after being forced to oversee messy economic realities” (LL). Again, Wolfe seems to be implying that this isn’t true but does not offer an atom of a counter-argument. He also takes issue with Losurdo’s use of quotations from the first edition of The Spirit of Utopia, since it was written when Bloch had not yet “become a convinced Marxist”^[77](AL). But does Wolfe seriously believe that Bloch’s early utopianism had no lingering influence on his later thought, after he had “become a convinced Marxist”? Losurdo’s criticism of Bloch’s uncritical (and unhistorical) acceptance of bourgeois self-consciousness, in connection with his portrayal of the United States in his work Natural Law and Human Dignity, should not be problematic to anyone not enmeshed in that country’s national mythology.^[78]

The renowned critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno fare little better in the hands of their staunch defender. Wolfe considers it a great “gotcha!” moment that Losurdo mentioned that Horkheimer’s essay The Authoritarian State—where he complains that the state had not been abolished in the Soviet Union—was written while “the Nazi army, after having subjugated the better part of Europe, was at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad..”^[79] In fact, as Wolfe is so proud to announce, Horkheimer’s essay was written in 1940, not 1942. “This is not an insignificant detail, either” (LL), he writes. But how significant is it, really? It doesn’t change the fact that 1. the prospect for the abolition of the state in the Soviet Union was almost as senseless in 1940 as it was in 1942 and 2. the essay was still published in 1942, when, as Losurdo points out, the German army was at the gates of Moscow, at its strongest position in one of the most barbaric colonial wars in history. At such a time, waxing nostalgic about the abolition of the state can serve no positive purpose whatsoever. The exact time when Horkheimer actually wrote the piece is irrelevant, and it doesn’t make Losurdo’s argument against him any less correct. Wolfe correctly points out that the colonized peoples are not completely absent from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Losurdo freely acknowledges (Wolfe’s claim that Losurdo “had to concede” (LL) this is false) because unlike Wolfe, whose criticism, which strives to portray Losurdo as being completely compromised, “operates at a much lower level” (LL), the latter is never unwilling to point to kernels of truth in the work of those he criticizes. Losurdo’s claim that “all this disappears without leaving a trace a few years later, with the coming of the Cold War”^[80]is entirely correct, despite Wolfe’s protestations. Adorno and Horkheimer both became increasingly chauvinistic—and even outright reactionary—after the Second World War.^[81] Wolfe tries to excuse Adorno’s comments on the American colonial war against Vietnam by claiming that “[h]e did not mean atrocities committed by the Vietnamese” (LL). But there’s nothing Adorno says that indicates this. Considering his comment on “Chinese methods of torture,” it’s at least equally likely that he was in fact condemning the Vietnamese liberation struggle, considering that he mentions “torture as a permanent institution” separately alongside “the atomic bomb” in “hellish unity.”^[82] Considering his other insipid statements on the colonial question—pointed out by Losurdo—these lines read more like a trite “both-sidesism” typical of faux anti-imperialism. As far as “critique” goes, what this “critical theorist” leaves us is, at best, shallow and tepid. “What he was looking to underscore,” Wolfe attempts to explain, “was the ‘bourgeois coldness’ required of everyone in order to survive in a capitalist society. Mention of this empirical fact did not amount to an endorsement” (LL). But is it an “empirical fact” that “the dictate of unilateral solidarity” and “the appeal to heroism” in the context of the Vietnamese struggle against American colonial aggression ring in a “hollow tone”?^[83] Is it an “empirical fact” that solidarity with that great struggle was a “pointless action”? Anyone not consumed by a petite-bourgeois pessimism can easily see that it wasn’t. In fact, here Wolfe “simply outed himself as a poor reader” (LL) of Adorno. He says in his correspondence with Herbert Marcuse:

We withstood in our time, you no less than me, a much more dreadful situation—that of the murder of the Jews, without proceeding to praxis; simply because it was blocked to us.... To put it bluntly: I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts, because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra. If that really is your reaction, then you should not only protest against the horror of napalm bombs but also against the unspeakable Chinese-style tortures that the Vietcong carry out permanently.^[84]

So it’s clear in fact that when he talks about “torture as a permanent institution” he is primarily mentioning it in condemnation of the Vietnamese freedom fighters. Besides, there’s more to the theoretical and political bankruptcy of Adorno than simply his uninspired off-handed comments on Vietnam. Wolfe does not even mention, for instance, his shallow “critique” of Hegel, or his appeal to Kant’s universalism in order to say just the opposite of what Kant himself was saying,^[85] of course twisting it in a pro-imperialist direction, or his use of dialectical sophistry to justify his complete political inaction.^[86] His actions in connection with the student protests of 1968 are also illustrative.^[87]

Again, not willing to concede a single inch of territory to Losurdo, Wolfe even takes issue with the former’s portrayal of the critical theorists’ attitudes towards Israel. “Horkheimer and Adorno,” we are told, “were less distressed about the fate of Israel than what could possibly happen to ‘the Jews who found refuge there’” (LL). But this is just textbook liberal Zionism. That they cloaked it in a concern for “the Jews who found refuge” in Israel doesn’t change the fact of their identification with Zionism. Horkheimer, we are informed, “saw the state of Israel as a ‘betrayal’ of Judaism,” and he “mourned the abandonment of any messianic perspective, and the concomitant shrinking of Jewry’s spiritual horizons” (LL). The Palestinian people are noticeably absent from his “mourning.” Undeterred, Wolfe opts for a “cheap tu quoque” (AL) against Monthly Review, pointing out that it’s co-founder Leo Huberman also held Zionist sympathies, in order to excuse Marcuse’s inconsistent anti-imperialism (LL). This doesn’t help his case, however, since in general Huberman’s Zionism is an exception to Monthly Review’s general anti-imperialist tendency, as opposed to the social chauvinism (even social imperialism) of “critical theory,” which is far more characteristic.

The second prong of Wolfe’s defense of what Losurdo called “the August 4th of critical theory” (in reference to the critical theorists’ siding with Israel during the June 1967 war)^[87] is directed at the Soviet Union, specifically its support for the creation of Israel in 1947-1948. The USSR’s enabling of the creation of Israel (and their sophistical justifications for it on the grounds of “self-determination”) is, of course, entirely indefensible. This could indeed justifiably be characterized as “a fairly ignominious episode within the annals of actually-existing socialism” (LL). However, the comparison is illogical on multiple levels. Not only is Wolfe comparing the statements of individuals to the actions of states, he’s also doing yet another thing he criticizes Losurdo for—mixing disparate time periods and ignoring context (which, generally speaking, Losurdo does not do; Losurdo’s comparisons and juxtapositions take place within one context, such as in the above-mentioned contrasts between Bloch and Mao or Ho Chi Minh, or between Della Volpe and Togliatti). Obviously, the Israel of 1967 was not what the Soviet leadership had in mind when they supported its establishment 20 years prior. But equally obviously, it does not excuse their actions, which were glaringly inconsistent with the longstanding opposition to Zionism on the part of the communist movement. He also completely ignores the USSR’s longstanding support for the liberation struggles of the Arab peoples against Israel and Western imperialism more generally, including during the 1948 war.^[88] He claims that Losurdo only ever mentioned the USSR’s initial support for Israel “in order to absolve him [Stalin] of the charge of antisemitism” (LL). “Nowhere,” according to Wofle, did Losurdo “dare to so much as hint that this support was a mistake on Stalin’s part,” Supposedly he “remained more or less silent about the whole affair” (LL). At this point, it should not surprise the reader that this claim is yet again blatantly false. Here it seems he has “simply outed himself as a poor reader” (LL) of Losurdo. At the end of the section cited by Wolfe, Losurdo says:

What sense then does it make to speak of “anti-Semitism” with regards to Stalin? The support he gave to the foundation and consolidation of the Jewish State is at the same time the contribution he made to the Nakba, that is, to the national “catastrophe” of the Palestinian People, who have for decades continued to languish in refugee camps and in territories subjected to a ruthless military occupation and a galloping process of colonization. If, for the sake of absurdity, “anti-Semitism” were to be attributed to Stalin, it would be anti-Arab “anti-Semitism.” It should, however, be pointed out in this regard that the Soviet Union’s preferred option was that of “an independent, multinational state that would respect the interests of both Jews and Arabs.”^[89]

And we are dealing with a man who, let us remember, has no qualms about accusing Losurdo of “careless, and at times even unscrupulous, scholarship” (AL) that is “sloppy” (LL), “shoddy” and “so transparently motivated as to render it worthless” (RR)!

Some non-Marxist thinkers are also mentioned and similarly criticized in Losurdo’s Western Marxism. Wolfe takes issue with their inclusion, but was it justified? What of Hannah Arendt? Losurdo points out that she is cited in Hardt and Negri’s Empire,^[90] and beyond that, her work The Origins of Totalitarianism is a clear example of one of the central themes of Losurdo’s work as a whole, namely that the “totalitarian” equivocation and the erasure of colonialism from history are two sides of the same ideological coin.^[91] In addition, although being a staunch anti-communist, some of Arendt’s statements on the USSR as well as on the French Revolution are almost indistinguishable from those of Adorno and Horkheimer, which aptly illustrates the anti-communist essence of “Western Marxism.” It is similar with regards to Foucault, whose influence on “left-wing” thinkers was also significant in his time. Everything Losurdo says about him^[92] is unambiguously true, and should be uncontroversial for any “leftist”—let alone any Marxist—to point out. Once again, Wolfe believes he has dealt a great blow against Losurdo by mentioning the fact that Foucault supported the anti-colonial revolution in Iran in 1979. Wolfe claims that Losurdo chose not to bring this up because he “himself felt obliged to back the Islamic Republic due to its geopolitical opposition to Israel and the US” (LL). This isn’t quite the great victory Wolfe thinks it is, however. It’s actually quite characteristic of Foucault that the only anti-colonial revolution to which he deigned to give his attention was among the most politically reactionary of them all. In addition, Losurdo’s statements on Iran should not be in any way controversial. The targets of his article are those who would have uncritically supported a “color revolution” in the country.^[93] Regardless of what one thinks of the present Iranian regime, a pro-imperialist coup d’état would not do the Iranian masses nor anyone else in the world any good, apart from, of course, the imperialists themselves.^[94] And what of Giorgio Agamben? As Losurdo points out, that he is “sometimes juxtaposed [by Žižek] with Horkheimer and Adorno or Alain Badiou,” and that “[h]e is a co-author of collectively written books with some of the most prestigious exponents of Western Marxism,” including Badiou, Žižek, Jacques Rancière and others.^[95] In general beyond that, it is much the same.

The basic argument can be put in this way: these anti-communist ideologists (Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, etc.) along with the so-called “Western Marxists” proper, have certain common themes in their work, mainly an “inattention to anticolonial struggles,” as well as the uncritical adoption of absurd and nonsensical ideological categories such as “totalitarianism,” and hagiographic attitudes towards so-called “Western civilization” and liberalism. (Adorno and Horkheimer’s condemnations of “Western civilization” ring hollow because of their unrepentant commitment to its ideology of anti-communism.) While Arendt and others might be identified as explicit partisans of this “dominant ideology,” as Losurdo calls it, the influence of this ideology on Western Marxism is apparent in their repetition of similar themes, situating them in the same ideological milieu. The fundamental problem with “Western Marxism” is that, for all its apparent “criticality,” “radicalism,” etc., in its essence it is firmly enmeshed in what we may term the univers concentrationnaire of the bourgeois culture and theory industries, viz., within the superstructure of the imperialist capitalism of the USA and its vassal states. Wolfe “raise[s] the question of why Losurdo bothered to include figures like Agamben or Levinas in his survey of Western Marxism,” since they were explicit anti-Marxists who “equated Hitlerism with Stalinism” (LL). But he has more or less answered his own question here. Many of the other representatives of “Western Marxism” likewise “equated Hitlerism with Stalinism.” We could point to Adorno, who paints both fascism and communism with the same “totalitarian” brush^[96], and Horkheimer—from whom we get the truly profound and “critical” insight, which could just as easily have come from Friedrich von Hayek or even Ronald Reagan, that the communism of “the East” was akin to “slavery.”^[97] Žižek, in his typical fashion, goes even further to the right.^[98] And in another vein, Foucault also associated Marxism (as represented by the USSR) with “state racism,” which is a claim so imbecilic that it hardly even merits a response.^[99] Thus, far from unjustified, Losurdo’s inclusion of these thinkers in his Western Marxism serves the overall argument that he is making in that book.

We can now turn to Perry Anderson, whose well-known book Considerations on Western Marxism—to which Losurdo’s Western Marxism is, at least in part, responding throughout— lurks in the background to this whole debate. Wolfe considers Losurdo’s portrayal of Anderson to be inaccurate. While it is true that Anderson’s assessment of “Western Marxism” was not quite as celebratory as Losurdo makes it out to be, is it true that Anderson “considered Western Marxism equally a dead end” (LL) with its eastern counterpart? Wolfe himself states that Anderson “praised its [Western Marxism’s] theoretical ingenuity” (AL), while on the other side Anderson himself claimed (without a shred of evidence) that “[a]ll serious theoretical work ceased in the Soviet Union after collectivization.”^[100] So clearly, Losurdo was not entirely unjustified in describing Anderson as having “celebrated the absolute superiority of Western Marxism over the Eastern version.”^[101] And if “Western Marxism” really is superior to that of the “east,” it is so for the most part only from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, for whom it has rendered great service.

Beyond “Western Marxism”: How Marxism in the West Can Be Reborn

It should now be abundantly clear that the only “criticisms” that “were found,” “by and large,” “to be either dishonest or misleading” (RR), were Wolfe’s criticisms of Losurdo. It’s baffling how someone so apparently erudite could so viciously abuse a book with his innumerable misrepresentations and sheer paucity of understanding (or of a willingness to understand). Looking back at the vicissitudes of its historical development, it is clear that what really “ought to be buried along with the twentieth century” (RR) is this heterogeneous conglomeration of idealist deviationists known as “Western Marxism.” It is the lessons of that history which are “more negative than positive,” and it is Wolfe who seems to have “draw[n] all the wrong lessons from the past hundred years” (RR). Rockhill’s assertion that these theoreticians from “the radical fringe of the intellectual labor aristocracy” who function as “radical recuperators who reintegrate potentially insurgent forces within the anticommunist—and ultimately pro-capitalist—camp” and “police the left border of critique, excluding communism as beyond the pale” is strikingly accurate.^[102] Anderson was certainly correct in his proposition that “when the masses themselves speak, theoreticians—of the sort the West has produced for fifty [now close to one hundred] years—will necessarily be silent.”^[103] “Western Marxism” was, and remains, the “left” wing of bourgeois ideology. That “the social forces [Marx] saw capable of solving [the problems of capitalism] are politically in abeyance” is in no small part a product of the ceaseless agitation that these “Western Marxists” (and also Trotskyists) perform gratis for the imperialist bourgeoisie. (Although the “Western Marxists” were also quite often paid by the bourgeoisie for their labors.) Whatever may be worth assimilating from their theorizing should be approached with the same ruthlessly critical eye with which Marxists should approach other strands of bourgeois thought.

The resurgence of Marxism in the core capitalist countries (and the world as a whole) is long overdue. This resurgence will never happen until those who think of themselves as Marxists once and for all free themselves from the ideological death grip that the bourgeoisie holds over their view of world history. For “[w]hen those in authority can redefine the meanings of words they make subversion literally unthinkable.”^[104] As Losurdo has said:

Every concrete action of this or that Communist Party (and this means every party that calls itself Communist) must be examined in a concrete way, without preconceptions. And this analysis must not be uncritically derived from those interests and methods that are spread by the dominant ideology. An approach that is free from preconceptions must be extended to everything, and have the aim of retrieving independent judgment and historical understanding. Communists are called upon to liberate themselves once and for all from that limited sovereignty that the victors of the Cold War (that is to say the “Third World War”) would gladly make permanent.^[105]

The fact that Losurdo’s work has continually become more popular in recent years is proof of a significant turn in the popular consciousness of left-leaning people in the English-speaking world, who seem to finally be taking the first steps towards liberating themselves from that “limited sovereignty” imposed on their thinking by their ruling classes. Those who, like Wolfe, seek to deliberately prevent this re-examination of the history of the communist movement “in a concrete way, without preconceptions,” to keep those looking towards Marxism for potential answers to the problems of the present trapped in the ideological shackles of the class which oppresses and exploits them (and the many billions of others all over the world), are acting (regardless of their subjective intentions) as liquidators who are only perpetuating the political ineptitude that has characterized “Western Marxism.” And this is someone who is able—at least in form if not in content—to stress the importance of “class independence” (RR) for the workers’ movement to have any prospects for success in the future. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that this independence is impossible without a complete break with the kind of ideological strangleholds over the consciousness of certain “Marxists” which he defends in his essay, which includes doing away with facile and servile attitudes towards the historical experience of the communist movement (including but not limited to so-called “Stalinism”) and other movements that have been connected to it historically. It is a starkly tragic irony that this “careless, at times even unscrupulous” (AL) hit piece has come out from an outlet calling itself a New International, when it is precisely social-chauvinist liquidators, of such kind as we have been dealing with here, who represent a significant obstacle to the creation of a new International. As a final word, we once again quote Losurdo:

The anticolonial revolution and the destruction of the world colonialist-slavery system, which must still be brought to an end, put into a new and unexpected framework the problem of the construction of a post-capitalist society. To consider extraneous to the Marxist project of political and social emancipation the history that developed from the October Revolution and that saw at its epicenter the East means assuming the attitude Marx mocked from his youth. It is from “real struggles,” he observed, that revolutionary “criticism” starts: “then we shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle: ‘Here is the truth, bow down before it!’ We develop new principles for the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the world: ‘Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of struggle at you.’ We only show the world what it is fighting for.” This approach toward every doctrinaire attitude is the precondition for the rebirth of Marxism in the West.^[106]

Editor's note: this article was drafted in January before the current war in Iran and references to events in the Middle East have not been updated to reflect this.

1. “The waning of U.S. hegemony has been coupled with the attempt of the United States/NATO since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to create a unipolar world order dominated by Washington. In this extreme polarized context many on the left now deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by the core imperialist countries. Moreover, this has been accompanied more recently by sharp attacks on the anti-imperialist left.” John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024).

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2. Ross Wolfe, “Against Losurdo,” New International (1 September 2025); Wolfe, “Losurdo’s Lies,” New International (4 September 2025); Wolfe, “Revisionism Revisited,” New International (7 September 2025).

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3. Pam C. Nogales and Ross Wolfe, “Liberalism and Marx: An interview with Domenico Losurdo,” Platypus Review 46 (May 2012).

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4. His snide dismissal of Rockhill (who’s work is certainly deserving of criticism, but not the childish treatment he receives at Wolfe’s hands) does not merit any kind of response, so we will not dwell on it here.

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5. “The Marxism of Domenico Losurdo – A Critical Discussion (feat. Ross Wolfe)”; “The Rise of Neo-Stalinism (Ft. Ross Wolfe).”

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6. Although Wolfe is not currently a member of the “Platypus Affiliated Society,” that group’s residual influence is evident in his usage of this hollow category.

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7. Karl Marx, Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 473.

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8. For more on Marx and the national question see Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, tr. Domenico Losurdo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 12–15.

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9. V. I. Lenin, “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East,” Collected Works, vol. 30 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 159.

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10. Losurdo points out some of the ways in which “recent historiography [has] liquidated the credibility of the so-called Secret Report” in “Primitive Thinking and Stalin as Scapegoat,” ed. Roderic Day, tr. David Fernbach, RedSails.org (September 2023).

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11. David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 202–203.

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12. Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, tr. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2015), 305.

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13. Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, tr. Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Olympia, WA: Iskra Books, 2023), 130.

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14. “Russia has a long history of famines, from its earliest history in the tenth century through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In virtually all cases these famines resulted from natural disasters that caused crop failures, shortages, and deaths from starvation and famine-related diseases. In addition to the environmental factors, grain traders, nobles and others often exploited crop failures to take advantage of high prices, and thereby frequently worsened conditions for poor and vulnerable groups.” Mark Tauger, “Famine in Russian History,” in Joseph Wiescynski et al. (eds.), Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, vol. 10 (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 2011), 79.

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15. Tauger, “Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization,” in Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just (eds.), Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109.

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16. Tauger, “Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization,” 112.

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17. Losurdo dismantles several myths surrounding so-called “anti-Americanism,” a “favorite hobbyhorse” of radical recuperators as well as reactionaries in general, in “Preemptive War, Americanism and Anti-Americanism,” tr. Jon Morris and Marella Morris, Metaphilosophy 35, no. 3 (April 2004), 365–385.

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18. Nogales and Wolfe, “Liberalism and Marx: An interview with Domenico Losurdo.”

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19. Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, tr. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2011), 301–305.

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20. Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1863-63, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 31 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 349.

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21. Wolfe’s defense of the thesis of the withering away of the state in the third article is less egregious than his treatment of “Western Marxism.” It is, however, duplicitous, since on the one hand he defends a generally correct Marxist position (albeit in an excessively doctrinaire manner), but on the other hand he simultaneously defends the incorrect Trotskyist theory of the so-called “permanent revolution,” while also projecting Trotskyism backwards onto Marx and Lenin.

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22. Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it can be Reborn, ed. Gabriel Rockhill, tr. Steven Colatrella with George de Stefano (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024), 137–139.

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23. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 163.

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24. Losurdo, Il marxismo occidentale. Come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere (Bari: Gius, Laterza & Figli, 2017), IV, §6.

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25. Louis Althusser e Étienne Balibar, Leggere Il Capitale, tr. it. di Raffaele Rinaldi e Vanghelis Oskian (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1965).

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26. Herbert Marcuse, La fine dell’utopia, tr. it. di Saverio Vertone (Bari: Laterza, 1968). The quote can also be found in the German edition. See Marcuse, Das Ende der Utopie: Vorträge und Diskussionen in Berlin 1967 (Berlin: Maikowski, 1967; Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1980).

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27. There are a number of other minor errors throughout the English edition. A quote from Ernst Bloch on page 109 (note 40) does not appear to be from any edition of Geist der Utopie, but rather from Bloch, Kampf, nicht Krieg. Politische Schriften 1917–1919 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M., 1985). In the original Losurdo cites both after the one quotation. In the section on David Harvey, the words “prima metà del Novecento” are translated as “from the mid-twentieth century on” (Losurdo, Western Marxism, 193), but this must be incorrect since in the passage Losurdo cites from Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 46, the latter is discussing the period from 1885 to 1945. In addition, on page 206 of the English edition, in the line from the Italian: “Ben diversi erano gli sviluppi a Ovest,” “Ovest” is translated as “East” when it should be “West.”

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28. Mario Tronti, “A New Type of Political Experiment: Lenin in England,” Workers and Capital, tr. David Broder (London: Verso, 2019), 71.

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29. It was ultimately Lenin (and the “Stalinists”) who was really correct on this point, as against Tronti and Losurdo, in emphasizing the indissoluble connection between the struggle for socialism and that against colonialism. As Stalin wrote “Leninism … recognises the existence of revolutionary capacities in the national liberation movement of the oppressed countries, and the possibility of using these for overthrowing the common enemy, for overthrowing imperialism” (Foundations of Leninism, Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 146). The point is that this position is not an “either/or” but a “both/and”; not socialism or anti-colonialism, but both socialism and anti-colonialism. Such is the actually internationalist position.

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30. We emphasize “the direct sense” because the generally correct concept of the aristocracy of labor has often been abused by Third-Worldists to make the claim that the entire working class of the core capitalist countries is an aristocracy of labor. In the typical fashion of ultra-“left” arguments the substance of this position is the liberal idea that capitalism actually benefits everyone and that thus the workers have no objective interest in the socialist transformation of society. Despite its cloaking in “left-wing” phraseology the absurdity of such a position should be self-evident, so we need not dwell on it here.

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31. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 227–231.

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32. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 30.

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33. On this see, for example, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993), 176–180.

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34. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 27–34.

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35. For a brief survey of state repression of the left in the USA in the 20th century, see, for example, Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union: Including Comparisons with the U.S.A. (London: Zed Books, 1984), 167–195.

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36. Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left.”

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37. To which may add the renewed attempts by the U.S. to turn Honduras, and especially Venezuela and Iran into neo-colonies in December 2025 and January 2026.

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38. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 138–139. He explicitly refers to the “dream” of overcoming distribution by means of the market as “a messianic and anarchist vision of post-capitalist society.”

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39. Losurdo, Stalin, 121.

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40. J. V. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 90-99.

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41. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 138.

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42. Timpanaro, Sul Materialismo (Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, 1997), xvii.

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43. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 139.

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44. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 431–432, 476–477.

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45. Timpanaro, Sul Materialismo, xvii.

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46. Losurdo, Class Struggle, 228.

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47. Timpanaro, Sul Materialismo , xvii.

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48. Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, tr. Peter Palmer (London: Verso, 2021), 4.

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49. Losurdo, Class Struggle, 194.

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50. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 135–136.

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51. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 69.

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52. Althusser, “Marxism and Humanism,” For Marx, tr. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005), 236–241.

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53. Some might be inclined to interject here: didn’t Stalin also talk about the ending of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR? In fact he did, but while the form might seem similar the content is completely different. In 1925 he said: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is not an end in itself. The dictatorship is a means, a way of achieving socialism. But what is socialism? Socialism is the transition from a society with the dictatorship of the proletariat to a stateless society. To effect this transition, however, preparations must be made for altering the state apparatus in such a way as to ensure in fact that the society with the dictatorship is transformed into communist society” (Questions and Answers, Works, vol. 7 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 161). The meaning here—which ought to be clear—is the same as that expressed by Lenin in 1917, in relation to “the withering away of democracy”: “We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination” (The State and Revolution, 461).

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54. Quoted in Radical Philosophy, “Doctor Althusser, Swansea and Belgrade, RPG Reports,” Radical Philosophy 12 (Winter 1975), 44.

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55. Althusser, Marxism and Humanism, 236–237.

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56. See for example Losurdo, Liberalism, 297–301.

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57. “In 1954, debating with Norberto Bobbio, Togliatti counter-posed the universalistic charge of the communist movement to the persistent exclusion clauses of the bourgeois universe: ‘[w]hen, and how far, have the liberal principles on which the nineteenth-century British state claimed to be based—the model, I think, of a perfect liberal regime for those who argue like Bobbio—been applied to colonial peoples?’. The truth was that ‘liberal doctrine ... is based on barbaric discrimination between human creatures’.” Losurdo, Class Struggle, 278.

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58. Losurdo, Class Struggle, 79–83.

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59. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 108.

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60. Wolfe also discusses Badiou’s conception of justice in another article in which he proves that he is in fact capable of making sensible arguments when he’s not doing battle with “Stalinist” windmills. See Wolfe, “Marxism Contra Justice – A Critique of Egalitarian Ideology,” Datacide (1 January 2020).

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61. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 188.

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62. Ibid.

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63. Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” in Mao Zedong, On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 5.

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64. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), xvii.

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65. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 188–189.

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66. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 210.

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67. See Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch (2 January 2023).

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68. Žižek, “Should Ukraine have nuclear weapons? Philosopher Slavoj Žižek speaks out,” Euromaidan Press, 28 November 2024.

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69. This information is publicly available on their website.

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70. Žižek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” 28.

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71. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), 143–176.

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72. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 48–49.

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73. Losurdo, War and Revolution, 164–168.

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74. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 49.

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75. Losurdo, Democracy or Bonapartism: Two Centuries of War on Democracy, tr. David Broder (London: Verso, 2024), 320–321.

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76. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 109.

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77. He similarly brings up Losurdo’s use of statements by Lukács from before his “conversion” to Marxism. But the influence of Lukàcs’ early idealism—not only Hegelian, but also Kantian—on the work that brings him closest to “Western Marxism” (though overall he should not be associated with that trend), History and Class Consciousness, is evident, and as the 1967 preface shows, was so to Lukács himself. On the influence of neo-Kantianism see Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (London: Verso, 2017), 258.

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78. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 110–111.

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79. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 112.

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80. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 116.

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81. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, 201–229; Losurdo, Western Marxism, 113–116.

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82. Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 104.

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83. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, tr. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 274.

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84. Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January-February 1999), 127.

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85. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 118-119.

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86. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, 223–224.

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87. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 126.

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88. Discussing the relations between the USSR, Israel and the Arab states in any detail would be beyond the scope of the present article. On Soviet support for the Arab states (specifically Egypt and Syria) during the 1948 war see Rami Ginat, The Soviet Union and Egypt, 1945–1955 (London: Routledge, 1993), 241.

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89. Losurdo, Stalin, 221.

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90. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 144, 151–152.

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91. For more on “totalitarianism” see Losurdo, “Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 2 (April 2004), 25–55.

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92. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 163–177.

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93. Losurdo, “In Iran un tentativo di colpo di Stato filo-imperialista,” Blogspot (27 June 2009).

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94. This has become especially relevant today since, as of January 2026, there seems to be a renewed drive toward a “color revolution” in Iran on the part of the U.S. and Israel, in response to protests originally against the degrading economic conditions largely caused by the illegal U.S. sanctions against Iran.

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95. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 177. The co-authored book in question is Giorgio Agamben et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

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96. Adorno, Critical Models, 94, 268.

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97. Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto?,” New Left Review 65 (September-October 2010), 35.

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98. “Heidegger is wrong when he reduces the Holocaust to the industrial production of corpses: it was not that, Stalinist Communism was that, but not Nazism.” Žižek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” 10.

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99. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 171.

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100. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 19. Even fellow Trotskyist Timpanaro was not quite so crude, if only slightly. He describes Stalin’s discussion of linguistics as being “of theoretical interest,” albeit the “only writing” of Stalin’s to earn his attention (On Materialism, 48, n. 17).

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101. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 87.

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102. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, 145.

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103. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 106.

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104. Cockshott and Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism, 177.

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105. Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement Between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt,” tr. Charles Reitz, Nature, Society and Thought 13, no. 4 (October 2000), 478–479.

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106. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 227.

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