Javier's Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eastern Marxism is:

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

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

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

The key point at which the rupture exploded is clear:

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

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

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

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

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

Haiti was, therefore,

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

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

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

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

Finally:

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

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

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

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

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

tl;dr summary:

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

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