Losurdo's Lies

A Persistent Pattern of Dishonesty

In the first part of this essay, the genesis of the concept of “Western Marxism” was explored. Though its origins lay with a handful of Hegelian Marxists in the 1920s, it underwent a significant expansion and popularization with the rise of the New Left. Writers like Perry Anderson and Russell Jacoby—editors of the journals New Left Review and Telos, respectively—attempted to theorize heterodox Marxism in the West as a response to revolutionary defeat. Whereas the former held an ambivalent attitude toward this formation, writing from a Trotskyist perspective, the latter was more straightforwardly appreciative, drawing connections between this intellectual current and council communism. Domenico Losurdo, whose neo-Stalinist approach to philosophy is the focus of the present inquiry, offered his own polemical appraisal of Western Marxist theorists some forty years after Anderson and Jacoby. An English translation of this work, entitled Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it can be Reborn, was released last year by the publishing house attached to Monthly Review, a journal long known for its sympathy with actually-existing socialism and developmentalist regimes on the periphery of capitalism. Losurdo’s main complaint against the odd assortment of figures collected in that book is that they ignored anticolonial struggles.

Once his concrete engagements with individual Western Marxists have been fleshed out, it will be possible to challenge Losurdo’s abstract overarching framework. So as to better organize what follows, however, the various theorists he castigated in Western Marxism will be divided along roughly national lines. Della Volpe, Tronti, Timpanaro, and Negri will be grouped together as dissident Marxists in Italy. Sartre, Althusser, and Badiou will fall under the rubric of French Marxism. (For the purposes of this essay, Žižek will be thrown in here, given his debt to Althusserianism.) Adorno, Horkheimer, Bloch, and Marcuse will of course count as German Marxists. Not all of these figures will be defended with equal vigor; not all are equally defensible. But all of them deserve better than the treatment they receive at the hands of Losurdo. Finally, his gloss on non-Marxists such as Arendt and Foucault will be covered, along with his challenge to Anderson. His slack scholarship will be seen to extend to his work on Nietzsche and Stalin as well. This will then lead in the third part into a broader examination of the historic failure of international revolution and a reassessment of the role of the state that will throw Losurdo’s revisionism vis-à-vis Marx into relief, before hastening to a conclusion.

Dissident Marxism in Italy

Heterodox currents of Marxist theory emerged slowly in postwar Italy, where the PCI promoted a bland variety of textbook Marxism that regarded itself as inheriting the country’s native idealist school, descended from Hegelian philosophers like Francesco de Sanctis, Antonio Labriola, and Benedetto Croce. The “De Sanctis-Labriola-Croce” line was dominant within the party, together with heavily curated selections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Palmiro Togliatti was the unquestioned political and philosophical authority during this period. Of course there were Italian Trotskyists as well, philologists like Timpanaro and sociologists like Maitan, to say nothing of the followers of Amadeo Bordiga or Onorato Damen. Yet they remained an extreme minority within Italian Marxism. It was only after 1956, with the crisis of Stalinism, that more independent-minded Marxists burst onto the scene. Galvano della Volpe, a late convert to Marxism, may have never left the PCI, but his close reading of Marx’s texts ran counter to the party’s default Hegelianism. Lucio Colletti, his most gifted student, pushed this even further, eventually leaving the party altogether. Meanwhile, Mario Tronti founded two periodicals that gave birth to operaismo. While he returned to the PCI in 1967, his comrade Antonio Negri struck out on his own.

Della Volpe is seldom remembered today. His own brand of resolute anti-Hegelianism was overshadowed both by that of Althusser in France and that of his disciple Colletti in Italy. Based on an attentive reinterpretation of the 1843 critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the 1859 introduction to the critique of political economy, della Volpe developed the analytic technique of “determinate abstraction” as the Marxist method par excellence. As far as the objects of his analysis went, he was preoccupied with problems of aesthetics, science, and socialist legality. It was the last of these issues, specifically a dispute with the Turin philosopher Bobbio in 1954, that caught Losurdo’s eye. Bobbio was very impressed by the egalitarianism of Soviet democracy. He suggested that robust civil liberties, such as existed in the United States or Western Europe, were the final ingredient needed to realize an emancipated society. In response, della Volpe argued that substantial freedom, or libertas maior, had superseded formal freedom, or libertas minor, in the socialist countries while at the same time incorporating it on a higher plane.^[1] This aligned with his claim that Marx, Engels, and Lenin had taken over Rousseau’s idea of egalitarian or social liberty against liberal ideas of civil or individual liberty.

Losurdo was upset that della Volpe, unlike Togliatti, did not challenge Bobbio’s naïve celebration of civil liberties in the United States and France, when the former was blatantly violating the rights of racial minorities at home and the latter ran roughshod over the rights of colonized peoples abroad. That is to say, Losurdo faulted della Volpe for not pointing out the hypocrisies of the liberal West, for not making a cheap tu quoque argument on behalf of the socialist East. His failure to do so was apparently indicative of a “scarce attention to the colonial question.”^[2] There is plenty to object to in della Volpe’s full-throated defense of the Soviet legal code (mostly for taking Andrey Vyshinsky, state prosecutor at the Stalinist show trials of the thirties, at his word).^[3] Presumably Losurdo had less of an issue with this, or with della Volpe’s enthusiasm for different “national roads to socialism” (a belief they shared).^[4] Regardless, it was oddly idealist to place such stock in a piece of writing, instead of looking at what life was actually like in the USSR. Mario Montano, an operaista influenced by della Volpe, commented that “it may be ironic that a materialist scholar tries to deduce a society from its [written] constitution, but it is regrettable that he then fails to verify the constitution by comparison with its society.”^[5]

Another dissident Italian Marxist upbraided by Losurdo for his “[d]isinterest in the colonial question” was Tronti,^[6] the chief exponent of operaismo. In his 1966 classic Workers and Capital, he had dared to argue that “[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.”^[7] Perhaps this was hyperbolic, but it spoke to the lofty aspirations workerism held during that decade. Forty-five years later, Tronti still thought this was something to be proud of. “Our operaismo should be given credit for not falling into the trap of Third Worldism, of the countryside against the city, of the long farmers’ marches,” he remembered. “We were never Chinese, and the Cultural Revolution of the East left us cold, estranged, [and] more than a little skeptical.”^[8] Losurdo quoted these lines in full, as if it were self-evident that the sentiment deserved condemnation. But why should the operaisti have pursued the strategy of protracted people’s war in heavily industrialized northern Italy back in the mid-sixties? The workerists looked to cities like Detroit, in the heart of advanced capitalism, for inspiration. Tronti had nothing but contempt for those who saw the periphery as “the epicenter of the revolution.”^[9]

In the opinion of Losurdo, Tronti’s main error was his “search for a pure state of class struggle,” his “binary reading of social conflict, which sees only one contradiction (between workers and capital).”^[10] Elsewhere Losurdo had argued at length against this reduction to a single antagonism of capital versus wage-labor, instead affirming a plurality of demands for recognition,^[11] so it is hardly surprising that he would take issue with Tronti on this score. But it was the latter’s laser focus on the fundamental opposition in capitalist society that made Workers and Capital such a thrilling read, Tronti’s ingenious application of the central categories of the Marxian critique to the problems of his day. He was able to again arrive at the Lukácsian standpoint of the proletariat through a rigorous reconstruction of Marx’s critical engagement with Hegel and Ricardo, with utopian socialism, and with revolutionary history from June 1848 through the Paris Commune of 1871.^[12] Along the way, Tronti hit upon some key insights: namely, that the self-activity of the working class is what propels the dynamic of capitalism forward, that it is the proletariat’s essence as commodified labor-power that makes it the crucial fulcrum of the society of exchange, and that planning in and of itself is not necessarily opposed to capital.^[13]

This is not to say that there is no room to criticize Tronti. His figure of the factory as a synecdochal stand-in for society is too all-encompassing, and the inversion of strategy and tactics is untenable. Moreover, the aspersions he cast upon the concept of bourgeois revolution are wrongheaded, even if proletarian revolution cannot be conceived by analogy with it.^[14] In retrospect, Tronti was much too optimistic about the chances that European capitalism might be overthrown starting from Italy.^[15] Such dashed hopes all too easily gave way to despair later in life.^[16] Others have made the point that Tronti’s partisanship for the working-class viewpoint ended up ratifying whatever it is the workers happened to be doing, reading agency and intentionality into inaction as “organized passivity” and “polemical standoffishness.” For Raffaele Sbardella, who had worked alongside Tronti in the 1960s, this amounted to a sort of “hypostatized subjectivity” that led him to think the workers could make “revolutionary use” of their historic party (the PCI).^[17] Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba, reflecting on this period, echoed many of these same criticisms.^[18] All this is worlds away from Losurdo’s shallow polemic.

Negri never gave up the optimism of classical operaismo, even after spending years either behind bars or in exile. Whereas Tronti charted the political defeat of the proletariat over the course of the twentieth century—its defeat by democracy^[19]—Negri transposed his earlier revolutionary expectations onto a new social subject. In a bestselling trilogy written jointly with the American theorist Michael Hardt, he now embraced the multitude, a rhizomatic but inherently democratic alternative to the working class.^[20] Given that it was supposed to contain within itself a multiplicity of irreducible struggles, one may be forgiven for thinking that Losurdo would be amenable to such a frame. But he objected emphatically to their seeming acceptance of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States was not an imperialist power.^[21] Indeed, John Bellamy Foster has taken a similar tack to Losurdo, seeing Hardt and Negri as denying the existence of imperialism in their assertion of a frictionless, globalized age of “Empire.”^[22] They were also wary of state-building in newly independent polities. “From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam,” they contended, “the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation.”^[23] Such a disdainful attitude, Losurdo thought, could only result from a neglect of the colonial question.^[24]

Far more so than with Tronti, there is much to disagree with in Negri’s writings. In the sixties, his essays on topics like Keynesian economics were often brilliant,^[25] and in the first part of the following decade his use of the Grundrisse could be quite innovative.^[26] As Steve Wright has shown, however, Negri’s theorizations became increasingly self-referential and detethered from reality as time wore on.^[27] Starting in the late seventies, he began to steadily drift away from Marxism toward poststructuralism.^[28] By the early nineties, and certainly by the time he began working with Hardt, Negri was done with the dialectic.^[29] Chasing after updated forms of historic agency, moreover, he started seeing it in “every little twitch of the social body.”^[30] The passage from the operaio massa to the operaio sociale to the multitude was far too smooth, and the notion of “immaterial labor” was always nonsensical. Losurdo and Foster discounted too quickly, however, the argument that the conditions described by Lenin in his famous pamphlet on imperialism no longer obtain.^[31] Hardt and Negri may have been right on that score. But whereas they believed the world has progressed beyond imperialism, history appears in fact to have regressed beneath it. Imperialism for Lenin was only an antechamber to the revolution.^[32]

Timpanaro can be dealt with very briefly. His study On Materialism mounts a spirited defense of Engels and natural science against the depredations of so-called Western Marxism—Frankfurt School critical theory, Althusserian structuralism, and Colletti’s anti-Hegelianism. Losurdo lauded Timpanaro for his vocal commitment to anticolonial struggles, but took him to task for the alleged “mismatch” between his theoretical positions and the practical requirements of national independence.^[33] In this case, however, Losurdo was guilty of flagrant misrepresentation. For example, he claimed that Timpanaro defended “the Marxist thesis of the withering away of the state and further radicalize[d] it with explicit reference to the anarchism of Bakunin.” A thorough scan of Timpanaro’s book reveals that no such reference was ever made on the page cited, or indeed anywhere in the text.^[34] Even those quotations that do accurately correspond to the original—where Timpanaro sought to dispel the “mystifying ideologies” of race, nation, and religion—find their meanings gravely distorted, quite often the opposite intended. One suspects that what Losurdo really took exception to was his Trotskyism. Similar charges are leveled at Sartre in Western Marxism, of course, but for this one must turn to France.

Postwar French Marxism

Meanwhile in France, the PCF occupied a position not unlike that of the PCI in Italy after the Second World War. Both parties enjoyed immense public prestige thanks to their role in the resistance to fascism. There was no interwar intellectual equivalent to Gramsci, to be sure. Georges Politzer, shot by the Nazis in 1942, had left some substantial works, but neither his nor Lefebvre’s studies from the thirties approached the reputation of the Prison Notebooks. Jean-Paul Sartre, who had already become known as a great novelist and leading philosopher prior to 1945, nevertheless found himself attracted to Marxism and began to feel the pull of the Party. Following the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising, however, he took his distance from it, despite still looking to reconcile the existentialist theme of individual freedom with Marxian principles of collective action. Louis Althusser was by contrast a card-carrying Party member and never strayed, even if his structuralist reading of Marx did not always sit well with its official spokesmen. One of Althusser’s Maoist students, who was also deeply influenced by Sartre, was Alain Badiou. He kept the faith through the dark decades of the eighties and nineties, writing in relative obscurity. Together with Slavoj Žižek, though, he would be important to the revival of “communism” in the late aughts.

Compared with his treatment of other Western Marxists, Losurdo actually discussed some of the central categories of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Scarcity, the fused group, and the practico-inert all show up in the subsection devoted to the existentialist philosopher.^[35] But this knotted skein of concepts was at cross-purposes with his anticolonialism, according to Losurdo, just as Timpanaro’s conceptual framework had been. The stress laid on scarcity, for example, might undermine the sympathy Sartre expressed for victims of oppression, since everyone—oppressor and oppressed alike—is caught up in a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources. No one could blame the former for oppressing the latter if it promised an escape from privation. Whatever the flaws of Sartre’s notion of scarcity, which he held to be universal,^[36] this is a clear misreading of its intent. He certainly did not have in mind some sort of Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. Losurdo also thought that the emphasis on the fused group as the practical ensemble most conducive to mass participation in history, rather than the organization or the institution,^[37] placed unrealistic demands on postcolonial countries. Enthusiasm cannot be sustained forever, the Italian Stalinist had argued in his book Class Struggle.^[38]

Sartre’s two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason was a monumental project, even if he ultimately abandoned it. Adorno applauded its identification of the bureaucratic deformations of actually-existing socialism.^[39] Despite the focus on groups, however, in the flight from seriality, Sartre never entertained the possibility of a truly social subject. These groups were mere aggregates of individual subjects, as Lucien Goldmann pointed out.^[40] Moreover, Sartre did not ground his nominalism in an account of the modern form of society that gave rise to the individual; he did not try to historicize the fundamental unit of critique.^[41] Echoes of the young Marx and young Lukács nevertheless abound in the work, especially with all its talk of alienation and reification. It was probably this humanistic quality that led the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to write his famous attack on Sartre’s treatise in 1962, arguing that he had merely “sociologized” the Cartesian Cogito of his earlier existentialism.^[42] Quite clearly, this was the line of attack that Althusser’s structuralist Marxism would subsequently follow. Both Lévi-Strauss and Althusser objected more to the fact Sartre held onto subjectivity at all than that he had started out from individual (rather than class) subjects. While contentious, Althusserianism would become hugely influential.

Indeed, its reach extended well into Italy. Though he later disowned it, the first essay Losurdo ever published bore the imprint of Althusserian thought.^[43] Even after moving away from it, he continued to appreciate that “[t]he French philosopher [Althusser] referred repeatedly and positively to Mao Zedong.” What Losurdo found objectionable in Western Marxism was the stance of “theoretical antihumanism,” which he felt was an ill-timed formulation in light of the struggle by colonized peoples for the recognition of their humanity.^[44] But 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. 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. Class dictatorship was replaced by the more anodyne idea of a people’s state guided by humanist principles.^[45] Regardless of what one thinks of his interpretation of Marx’s theoretical development, Althusser was probably correct in this particular instance. To Losurdo, however, this was proof of a Eurocentric bias on the part of the great structuralist. Furthermore, Althusser had attributed the insights of Marxism too heavily to the unique genius of Marx.^[46]

Needless to say, there are any number of legitimate criticisms one might make of Althusser’s reading of Capital and other works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Unfortunately, one would have to look to sources besides Losurdo to find them. Simon Clarke wrote an incredibly wide-ranging takedown already by the mid-seventies, challenging virtually every article of the Althusserian creed.^[47] EP Thompson, the celebrated historian of the English working class, likewise issued a blistering polemic against Althusser just two years later.^[48] Perhaps the most balanced assessment of structuralist Marxism was also the earliest, having come out in 1971. Adorno’s student Alfred Schmidt wrote an outstanding critique of Althusserianism from the vantage point of critical theory, demonstrating how Hegelian logic had remained indispensable to Marx even in the writings of his maturity.^[49] Losurdo’s criticisms of both Althusser and Sartre operate at a much lower level, faulting the former for adopting a theoretical maxim at odds with the practical agitation of anticolonial movements and the latter for not adopting his own two-phase schematism of decolonization. His vision of class conflict as a battle for recognition and the successive military and economic phases of anticolonial struggle is spelled out elsewhere.^[50]

Badiou famously started off as a Sartrean in the fifties before converting to Althusserianism during the sixties. Over the course of his career he has sought to navigate these opposing influences, espousing the aleatory materialism of the later Althusser while retaining subjectivity. In Western Marxism, Losurdo barely touched on the core tenets of Badiou’s philosophy. Losurdo nevertheless chanced upon a glaring weakness in the way the French Maoist presented liberty and justice as dichotomous, believing that if push came to shove the latter should be preserved, even at the expense of the former. Were the Jacobins, whom Badiou considers the ancestors of his own communism, really indifferent to questions of freedom? Sadly, Losurdo chose not to develop this point any further, opting instead to go on a tangent about Isaiah Berlin’s conception of negative and positive freedoms. Never mind that Badiou does not discuss Berlin even once in his voluminous writings. Undeterred, Losurdo asserted that the two “share the thesis that liberals are the… guardians of ‘negative freedom’; both erase the frightful clauses of exclusion that characterize liberal discourse.” ^[51] The logic is isomorphic to the section on della Volpe, reprising in miniature the argument of Losurdo’s book Liberalism about its sham universality.^[52]

Writing in socialist Slovenia near the end of the Cold War, Žižek made waves with the release of his blockbuster 1989 debut, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Along with the other members of the emerging Ljubljana School, he was deeply impressed by Althusser’s theory of ideology and Jacques Lacan’s contemporaneous renovation of psychoanalysis in France. Žižek’s celebrity since this time has earned him the moniker of “the Elvis of cultural theory,” allowing him to traverse the globe giving talks and various press junkets. In the early aughts, he helped Badiou to get discovered in the Anglophone world, and together they headlined a series of conferences on “communism.” The popularity of books by Hardt, Negri, Žižek, and Badiou was widely seen to grant Marxist theory a new lease on life in the West. For Losurdo, though, “the success that Žižek especially has enjoyed brings to mind, rather than a revival, the last gasp of Western Marxism.” Why might his fame somehow augur Western Marxism’s demise? 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.^[53] Losurdo saw nothing wrong with this picture.

In keeping with the “campist” view, he saw the world as split into diametrically opposed camps. Countries either belong to the imperialist camp or the anti-imperialist camp. (The Italian Stalinist specifically rejected David Harvey’s characterization of the present epoch as one of continued interimperialist rivalry.) ^[54] In Losurdo’s opinion, 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. Given this Manichaean outlook, Losurdo did not appreciate Žižek sniping at China and Vietnam for their marketizing measures since the eighties, or him attacking Chavez’s Venezuela and post-Castro Cuba for their prodigious privatization. Such objections were insensitive to the tremendous difficulties faced in building socialism surrounded by predatory imperialist powers. Beyond these standard campist bromides, Losurdo seized on a stray line Žižek wrote “demonizing” Mao.^[55] 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.^[56]

Losurdo’s scattershot criticisms of Badiou and Žižek occasionally hit the mark, but even when they do they no more than graze their target. As mentioned before, Western Marxism did happen to identify Badiou’s faulty prioritization of justice over freedom. But this felt almost random, and in any case Losurdo failed to push the insight deeper. If one wanted to actually take on the philosophy of Badiou, one might bring up his lack of a critique of political economy. This is something that Žižek, of all people, has pointed out time and again.^[57] One could also take issue with the French Maoist’s rejection of the party and the state as potential vehicles for social transformation, or with his version of revolutionary history conceived more broadly. His Marxism is particularly dubious.^[58] Žižek’s Lacanian rendition of Hegelian motifs, his most serious philosophical effort, has likewise been intelligently interrogated.^[59] There is no need to impugn him as “capitalism’s court jester,”^[60] a title he would likely adopt as his own without too much fuss. Formulaic as they were, the books Žižek published in the nineties and aughts provided entertaining relief from a stifling theoretical atmosphere dominated by Derrida and Deleuze, something sympathetic reviewers were quick to highlight.^[61] Today they come off a bit dated.

German Marxism & Critical Theory

In Germany, the situation was quite different from either Italy or France following the end of World War II. There was nothing remotely like the PCI or PCF. After some modest initial success, the reorganized KPD’s numbers dwindled, before being outlawed in 1956 amidst Cold War tensions. Unorthodox strains of Marxism had appeared during the interwar period, when the deliberately nondenominational Institut für Sozialforschung was formed in Frankfurt. Its members hailed from a variety of Marxist parties—Marcuse had participated in the Spartacist revolt in 1919, Max Horkheimer was peripherally involved in the Munich Soviet Republic that same year, while Neumann and Löwenthal both belonged to the USPD—but they all had to serve as go-betweens for the estranged communist and socialist movements. Marx and Engels’ archive was held by SPD, so the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow relied on the neutrality of the Frankfurt School to coordinate handoffs. Fleeing fascism in Europe, however, they would each attempt to theorize the historic defeat they had just witnessed. As Alfred Sohn-Rethel later put it:

[T]he new development of Marxist thought these people [Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, and Herbert Marcuse] represent evolved as the theoretical and ideological superstructure of a revolution that never happened. In it reecho the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of the Spartacus rising in the following winter.^[62]

Significantly, these 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. This meant that they registered the crisis of Marxism earlier. Althusser authored an article with that title in 1977, Coletti alluded to it in an interview around the same time, and Badiou spoke about it openly a few years later.^[63] Of course, figures like Tomáš Masaryk had proclaimed a “crisis of Marxism” since at least the days of the revisionist controversy in the 1890s, and denunciations of the concept are roughly coeval.^[64] But the split which occurred in the international workers’ movement during the First World War actualized the crisis that had up to then only existed in potentia. Karl Korsch referred back to it in passing in Marxism and Philosophy and devoted a whole article to the topic in 1931.^[65] Horkheimer was also planning a volume on The Crisis of Marxism in the thirties, but it never materialized.^[66] What these thinkers were trying to come to grips with already in the twenties was the fact that the opportunity to change the world appeared to have passed.

Ernst Bloch is reproached at several points in Western Marxism. One of the things Losurdo took him to task for, along with Benjamin and Lukács, was his hostility to the state. Perhaps this was understandable given the state’s role in World War I, but the Italian Stalinist feared that such an attitude would give way to anarchism.^[67] Was it not Bloch, however, who maintained that “it is necessary to confront power in terms of power, as a categorical imperative with revolver in hand”?^[68] He defended the Bolshevik seizure of power, and when World War II was over, he chose to live in East (rather than West) Germany. Another thing Losurdo gave Bloch grief about was his romantic scorn for the money economy.^[69] This negative view was shared by many Russian communists, though—including Lenin—as Losurdo lamented in other works. Supposedly they became more measured after being forced to oversee messy economic realities.^[70] In his book on Stalin, Losurdo acknowledged that Bloch altered those parts of The Spirit of Utopia that talked about money for subsequent editions.^[71] Losurdo’s other major objection to Bloch, this time aimed at his 1961 work Natural Law and Human Dignity, was that he praised the Lockean rights guaranteed by the US Constitution while overlooking the denial of these rights to slaves.^[72]

Next Losurdo set his sights on an essay by Horkheimer, director of the exiled Institut. In “The Authoritarian State,” the critical theorist hoped to preserve the memory of socialism in the face of historical regression. He sought to account for the evident possibility that revolution might degenerate, remarking that “[i]nstead of dissolving in the end into the democracy of the councils, the party can maintain itself as a leadership even when the abolition of the state is written on its banner.”^[73] Sincere revolutionary endeavors could easily go astray, entrenching themselves in bureaucracies bent on self-preservation. Considering Losurdo’s antipathy to the Marxist doctrine of the withering away of the state, already noted, it should come as no surprise that he would take issue with the barbs directed against “integral statism,” Horkheimer’s terme d’art for the Soviet Union. Beyond this general objection, though, Losurdo took issue with the timing of this sentiment. “While these lines were being written, the Nazi army, having subjugated the better part of Europe, was at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad,” claimed Losurdo, before asking rhetorically: “Under these circumstances, what sense could the evocation of the ‘democracy of the councils’ or still less the utopian idea of the abolition of the state have?”^[74]

Yet here once again Losurdo’s scholarship was sloppy. Horkheimer’s essay was written in 1940, not 1942, as part of a memorial issue dedicated to Benjamin, who had committed suicide along the Spanish border to avoid capture at the hands of the Nazis. It was to be published together with Benjamin’s renowned theses “On the Concept of History,” to which the piece was clearly indebted. Given its incendiary conclusions, however, publication was delayed for two years. Ultimately, Horkheimer decided to circulate a limited mimeographed edition among his inner circle.^[75] This is not an insignificant detail, either. It means that “The Authoritarian State” was composed not against the backdrop of Operation Barbarossa, but rather in the shadow of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, shortly after the repartition of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the joint military parade of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in Brest-Litovsk. Of course, this is a fairly ignominious episode within the annals of actually-existing socialism. Losurdo in Western Marxism looked instead to extol the heroism of Russian and Chinese communists defeating German and Japanese fascists during this stretch.^[76] So even if he had been aware of when Horkheimer actually wrote it, Losurdo would have likely downplayed it.^[77]

Had he been paying attention, the Italian Stalinist might have noticed that in this text Horkheimer speculated that rival imperial blocs might someday sustain themselves “at the expense of colonial and semicolonial populations.”^[78] This was consonant with other things the director of the Institut would write at the time connecting the then incipient horrors of the Holocaust to the historical precedent of European colonial administrations:

Studying the way some modern nations behaved when the use they made of power was not checked by opposite (or their own) material interests or by stronger military forces, we find that Nazi barbarism has a long and uninterrupted prehistory. From Cortés’ rule of conquered Mexico to Léopold II’s administration of the Congo, the native’s experiences with the invader might not have been so very different from that of the inhabitants of occupied countries with their German oppressors. Even the advocates of concentration camps for interning fellow countrymen could find some support in institutions such as French Guyana.^[79]

Indeed, in Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Theodor Adorno compared the plight of Jews among the Aryans to “the indigenous population of colonies, who lack the organization and weapons of their conquerors.”^[80] Similarly, they pointed out, “modern colonial peoples [were] counted as inferior.”^[81] Losurdo thus had to concede that Horkheimer and Adorno recognized “the nexus between Nazism and colonialism” in that work. The claim in Western Marxism is therefore that they turned their backs on this fundamental intuition, succumbing to chauvinism in their later writings. Adorno’s passing comment on the Vietnam War in particular comes in for harsh rebuke.^[82] “In the security of America an emigrant could endure the news of Auschwitz,” he remarked, adding that “[i]t would be difficult to believe that Vietnam is robbing anyone of sleep, especially since every opponent of colonial wars must know that the Vietcong for their part use Chinese methods of torture.”^[83] To Losurdo, lines like these again demonstrated the moral and political bankruptcy of Western Marxist theory.

But here Losurdo simply outed himself as a poor reader of critical theory. In pointing out that Jewish refugees in America could stand to hear about Auschwitz, as he himself had, Adorno was certainly not thereby affirming this sad state of affairs. Auschwitz for him signified a fundamental rupture, calling forth a new categorical imperative,^[84] so the prospect that life could go on as before disturbed him deeply. Neither was he pleased that US citizens could rest easy despite the atrocities committed in Vietnam, reassured that the other side was guilty of the same. In a 1965 lecture on metaphysics, Adorno referred to “the world of torture which has continued to exist after Auschwitz and of which we are receiving the most horrifying reports from Vietnam.”^[85] He did not mean atrocities committed by the Vietnamese, either. What he was looking to underscore in the passage quoted by Losurdo 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. It was intended precisely as a critique—i.e., a simultaneous explanation and indictment of the prevailing reality. For Adorno, the American war in Vietnam was of a piece with Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima, constituting a “hellish unity” of senseless violence.^[86]

Of course, one must distinguish Adorno’s views in the sixties from those of his longtime collaborator Horkheimer. By then the latter had given up on Marxism, dismissing Marx as a Jewish antisemite.^[87] Losurdo might have exaggerated in convicting him of “philo-colonialism” during this period, but only a bit.^[88] Vietnam was a subject of intense disagreement between Horkheimer and his Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse, who supported the antiwar movement in Germany.^[89] In Western Marxism, Losurdo credited the “father of the New Left” with rediscovering anti-imperialism in demanding the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia.^[90] Nevertheless, the Italian Stalinist argued that Marcuse’s otherwise commendable anti-imperialist worldview suffered from a major blindspot on the issue of Israel. The same argument would hold for Sartre.^[91] While neither of them harbored any illusions about Israel’s status as a proxy of US imperialism, and both wanted to extend the right of return to Palestinians, Marcuse and Sartre had each defended the existence of Israel in 1967. As for the other critical theorists, Losurdo insinuated that “Horkheimer and Adorno identified so completely with Israel that they did not even worry about defending it from the accusation of [its] colonialism.”^[92]

For Losurdo, despite the Frankfurt Schoolers’ longstanding opposition to the SPD, the Six-Day War represented “the August 4th of critical theory,” the point at which the overwhelmingly Jewish Frankfurt School sided with “their own” nationalism. Were Horkheimer and Adorno really secret Zionists, though? It is true that Adorno expressed concern about the conflict at the start of a lecture in July 1967.^[93] Ten years before, he and Horkheimer wrote a letter to a Der Spiegel journalist amidst the Suez crisis where they worried what a regional war might mean. Rockhill has made much of this epistle. But Horkheimer and Adorno were less distressed about the fate of Israel than what could possibly happen to “the Jews who found refuge there.”^[94] Moreover, apart from these two instances, the record suggests that Adorno and Horkheimer had rather little patience for Zionism. In 1944, the former warned the latter against “fanatical Zionists” setting “a nationalist Jewish trap.”^[95] Years later, in solidarity with Horkheimer, Adorno refused to speak at pro-Israel events. Nicola Emery has shown that even in his old age, the director of the Institut saw the state of Israel as a “betrayal [Verrat]” of Judaism.^[96] Horkheimer mourned the abandonment of any messianic perspective,^[97] and the concomitant shrinking of Jewry’s spiritual horizons.^[98]

Perhaps it is fitting to turn Losurdo’s trademark method—“comparatistics” [la comparatistica], a fancy word for whataboutism^[99]—back on Western Marxism here. A number of pointed comparisons can be made at this juncture. For which is worse, a private letter by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1957 and a couple brief comments at public lectures by Adorno and Marcuse in 1967 where they equivocally voiced their apprehension over violence in the Middle East? Or the USSR’s crucial material and ideological backing of Israel in 1948, without which it would have never survived its war of independence nor had its statehood internationally recognized? Soviet foreign minister and UN representative Andrei Gromyko introduced the proposal to establish the state of Israel already in May 1947,^[100] justifying the partition of Palestine on grounds of national self-determination.^[101] Viacheslav Molotov recalled decades later the decisive role played by the USSR: “Everyone objected [to the formation of the state of Israel] but us—me and Stalin. Some asked me why we favored… a separate Israeli state… [T]o refuse a people the right to statehood would mean oppressing them. Israel has turned out badly. But Lord Almighty, that’s American imperialism for you!”^[102] His regret comes as little consolation, however.

Soviet commitment to the state of Israel during the forties was not merely verbal, either. Driven out by bombing campaigns perpetrated by Irgun and the Stern gang, the British imposed a stiff embargo prohibiting arms sales to the Israeli military. Feeling pressure from its closest ally, the US vacillated. Stalin picked up the slack, however, selling future Knesset member Ehud Avriel surplus firearms and munitions through Czechoslovakia: 10,000 Mauser P-18 rifles, 4,500 ZB-37 heavy machine guns, and over three million rounds of 7.92 mm. bullets. Pilots received training at airfields in České Budějovice and Hradec Králové, where they flew nine retrofitted Messerschmitt-109s left over from the Luftwaffe. Units comprised of Czechoslovak volunteers went to serve alongside the Haganah in Palestine, allegedly inspired by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.^[103] In his controversial study of Stalin, Losurdo only mentioned the Soviet premier’s early support for Israel in order to absolve him of the charge of antisemitism.^[104] Nowhere did the Italian historian of ideas dare to so much as hint that this support was a mistake on Stalin’s part. Losurdo remained more or less silent about the whole affair.

Marcuse in all likelihood remained wedded to a vision of liberal Zionism in the sixties and seventies that should by now be well and truly buried. He was not alone in this belief at the time, though. Even on Monthly Review’s staunchly anti-imperialist editorial board, there were those who entertained such false hopes. Leo Huberman, the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of the journal, went much further in his 1957 “Report from Israel” than Horkheimer and Adorno in their private letter that same year. Denouncing the Egyptian fedayeen as “terrorists,” Huberman wrote that “Israel showed by its Sinai action it is no longer willing to wait with its hands folded in the anteroom of the slaughterhouse while the slaughterer sharpens his knife.”^[105] Ten years later, after the Six-Day War, he authored an article where he asserted that “the main enemy of the Arab masses is not Israel but their own feudal, reactionary, bureaucratic governments, which exploit them, and Western imperialism, which robs them of their wealth.”^[106] Just as Marcuse said that “I feel solidarity… and I identify with Israel for very personal… reasons,”^[107] Huberman wrote that “my own views on the Arab-Israeli conflict are influenced by the fact I am a Jew.”^[108]

Miscellaneous Figures

This covers pretty much all the theorists criticized in Western Marxism who can reasonably be described as Marxists. What of the non-Marxists puzzlingly included in Losurdo’s narrative, then? Some space may be set aside to see what he had to say about Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, before proceeding to question his overall framework. It is still appropriate to question the rationale given for their inclusion. For example, Losurdo asserted that despite not being a Marxist herself, “Arendt continues to greatly influence Western Marxism.” Aside from the claim that Hardt and Negri took up some of her postulates, though, he never really substantiated this assertion. On the same page, Losurdo wrote that “[i]n the 1960s, Althusser credited [Foucault] with being the most prestigious Marxist philosopher of the times.”^[109] Yet no such accreditation can be found in Reading Capital, although this is the work cited in the endnotes. Certainly, Foucault’s authority as an historian of madness is invoked several times in that treatise.^[110] But Althusser nowhere referred to him as a Marxist philosopher, let alone the “most prestigious” of his day. Regarding Agamben, Losurdo declared that he “enters the ranks of the noted philosophers of Western Marxism” simply because he was mentioned a couple times by Žižek.^[111]

It is unfortunate that some of Losurdo’s better textual analysis is dedicated to a non-Marxist like Arendt. Over the span of four sections in the fourth part of Western Marxism, he traced the development of her thought about Nazi totalitarianism, from a boomerang effect of Western colonialism to an equal and opposite reaction to Soviet totalitarianism.^[112] There is a nuanced examination of the three volumes of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, largely drawn from a critique he wrote of the category back in 2002.^[113] (Incidentally, his musings on totalitarianism were not so dissimilar from those of Žižek around the same time.)^[114] Losurdo may have appreciated the first two volumes of her magnum opus more than that of many of the Western Marxists he looked at. Without question, this was because Arendt stressed the link between the racial policies of European colonial empires and Nazism. She quoted Luxemburg and Lenin approvingly on numerous pages, which clearly impressed Losurdo. However, he pointed out the heterogeneous character of the third volume, which equated Stalin with Hitler. Eventually this led Arendt to denigrate not just the legacy of 1917, but of 1789 as well, in her 1963 text On Revolution, as Losurdo indicated on several occasions.^[115] This was a step backward, in his opinion.

Foucault’s “microphysics of power,” which views power as diffuse and omnipresent, receives severe censure in Western Marxism for its pseudoradicalism. Losurdo further criticized it for its anti-Hegelianism, for rejecting even a determinate negation that would allow for the revolutionary seizure of power.^[116] This line of criticism could have frankly been pushed much further, spelling out the way it valorizes resistance at the expense of revolution. He instead defaulted to his usual complaint that in Foucault, “attention to colonial domination is scarce or nonexistent.” In the writings of the French theorist, Losurdo contended, there is a tacit “erasure” of the historical experience of the colonized, their effective “removal” from history. Moreover, racist lynchings in the United States well into the twentieth century seem to contravene Foucault’s thesis that the spectacle of violence had receded in favor of disciplinary regimes like the workshop, asylum, and classroom during this time.^[117] Turning to the topic of “state racism,” Losurdo also admonished Foucault for his claim that it originated in the thirties with the Third Reich, neglecting significant precursors such as the racial state in the US South under Jim Crow.^[118] Similar objections are raised with respect to biopolitics, which Losurdo felt went back further.^[119]

Yet there was at least one notorious instance where Foucault spoke out enthusiastically on behalf of an anticolonial revolt: Iran in 1979. Foucault was captivated by the revolution above all because it defied the stereotypical course that Marxists projected onto it from the outside. Religion was not treated as an opium of the masses dulling their senses, but rather as the motive force behind the ousting of the American-backed Shah. Of course, there were also plenty of Iranian communists—members of the Soviet-aligned Tudeh party, as well as assorted Maoists and Trotskyists—but they were not at the forefront of the struggle. In fact, they often fatally ended up supporting the same fundamentalists who would later massacre them. Foucault was more impressed by the Islamists, something many French Marxists criticized him for at the time.^[120] This episode is curiously omitted from Western Marxism. Losurdo did not bring up Foucault’s infamous stance, likely because like him the Italian Stalinist himself felt obliged to back the Islamic Republic due to its geopolitical opposition to Israel and the US.^[121] Here is a development Losurdo failed to address in his narrative. While he was right that many past anticolonial movements were led by communists,^[122] the so-called “axis of resistance” today is largely comprised of reactionary forces.

Agamben’s only text looked at by Losurdo is a short introduction he wrote to Emmanuel Levinas’ 1934 “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” in which the French ethicist found historical materialism culpable for Nazi race science. Marx’s dictum that “being determines consciousness” allegedly paved the way for the German fascists’ scientistic fantasies about the fatality of blood.^[123] Nothing Agamben himself wrote is examined by Losurdo at any length. What he took issue with was rather the unqualified endorsement of Levinas’ argument. There is very little to object to in Losurdo’s polemic against Agamben and Levinas, which stresses that Marx had specified it was the “social being” [gesellschaftliches Sein] of men that determined their consciousness, and not their being as such.^[124] However, it does once again raise the question of why Losurdo bothered to include figures like Agamben or Levinas in his survey of Western Marxism, since they not only equated Hitlerism with Stalinism (in the typical fashion of totalitarianism theory) but held Marx and Marxism obliquely responsible for biological racism.

Rather than dwell further on Losurdo’s few pages on Agamben, it is more instructive to take a step back and see whether the picture of Anderson presented in the book is accurate. After all, the whole premise of Western Marxism is that it is looking to correct his 1976 judgment. Losurdo described his Considerations as “the manifesto in which Anderson proclaimed the excellence of Western Marxism, …liberated from the suffocating embrace of Eastern Marxism.”^[125] In this work, supposedly, “Anderson celebrated the absolute superiority of Western Marxism over the Eastern version.”^[126] Such descriptions recur at multiple points throughout Losurdo’s survey.^[127] But is this really what Anderson was up to in his critical balance-sheet? Was he actually celebrating Western Marxism’s superiority, and proclaiming its excellence? Glancing back at his classic work, it is clear that while he thought official Soviet philosophy (DiaMat) was intellectually impoverished, Anderson considered Western Marxism equally a dead end. His hope was that with the reunification of theory and practice in 1968, “the prolonged, winding detour of Western Marxism” could at last be left behind.^[128] Though this did not in the end pan out, with Anderson later admitting his verdict had been overhasty,^[129] one gets no sense of this from Losurdo.

As has been seen, depth is sacrificed for breadth throughout the book. Losurdo was content to issue drive-by criticisms of anyone seen to deviate from his own Marxist-Leninist line. Furthermore, as should by now have likewise been established, he frequently engaged in scholarly malpractice. Quotes from extremely heterogeneous sources are cherry-picked, plucked out of their broader argumentative flow, and presented as proof of Western Marxist chauvinism. Other times they seem to have been invented by Losurdo of whole cloth, existing nowhere in the referenced texts. Either that or he misattributed their origin, or, still more likely, his translators neglected to track down the relevant receipts.^[130] Sometimes the excerpts said just the opposite of what Losurdo imputed to them, when they did in fact exist. His comparative approach, meant to overawe the reader with the appearance of rich contextualization, more often than not drags in a dizzying array of details that are only tangentially related to the matter at hand. While there is a common thread running through his analyses of the different Western Marxists—their missed encounter with the anticolonial revolts of the twentieth century —Losurdo’s specific accusations against them feel haphazard. The only consistent feature throughout is his dishonesty.

Careless Scholarship in Losurdo’s Other Works

Nor is this unique to Western Marxism. Losurdo’s study of Nietzsche is likewise filled to the brim with implausible interpretations. Given its extraordinary length and focus on a single thinker, one might imagine it less susceptible to superficiality, but one would be disappointed. Take, for instance, the conceit that Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy can only be properly understood as a response to the Paris Commune from the previous year.^[131] This assertion is based on a letter where Nietzsche was distraught over the spurious rumor that the communards had burnt down the Louvre, along with countless artworks. Rather meager evidence, it must be said, on which to stake such a bold interpretive claim. Despite his erroneous belief that all these cultural treasures were lost, the German philologist still could not bring himself to blame the supposed arsonists.^[132] When pressed, Losurdo was forced to admit that “the gestation of The Birth of Tragedy started before the Paris Commune”—a comical understatement, seeing as the preparatory notebooks for this work began in 1869 and major portions were already drafted by 1870.^[133] But all this is minimized in order to portray Nietzsche as a philosopher totus politicus. Exactly how an aesthete who never belonged to a party could be “even more radical and immediately political than Marx,”^[134] who helped organize an international workers’ association aiming at the conquest of state power, is left unexplained.

For Losurdo, indeed, the internal coherence of Nietzsche’s intellectual evolution was vouchsafed by his “constant eye on social conflict and the threat of socialism.”^[135] It is true that the fallout from the 1789 French Revolution, namely its egalitarian legacy, greatly preoccupied him throughout his life. Yet the socialist theory he knew was that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Eugen Dühring, and Mikhail Bakunin; he never read a word of Marx. Already in 1896, the great Marxist theorist Franz Mehring remarked that it was clear Nietzsche was unfamiliar with scientific socialism from the fact he considered “justice” the animating principle of socialists everywhere.^[136] “Justice,” while of crucial importance for Proudhon and Dühring, was for Marx nothing more than an ideological obfuscation mirroring material processes.^[137] (Losurdo, aware of Mehring’s comments, nevertheless insisted that moral indignation had a place in Marx.)^[138] Undeterred by their mutual ignorance of each other’s work, the Italian Stalinist looked to stage a speculative debate between Marx and Nietzsche, using Dühring as a stand-in for the former and the eighteenth-century conservative Linguet as a surrogate for the latter.^[139] However, this is a peculiar way of ventriloquizing, considering Marx’s well-known antipathy toward Dühring and Nietzsche’s lack of any knowledge whatsoever about Linguet.

Scholars whose opinions of Nietzsche vary widely have expressed their reservations about Losurdo’s thick tome. Giuliano Campioni, a former pupil of Mazzino Montinari,^[140] was unimpressed by the accusations leveled at the German critical edition of Nietzsche’s complete works as well as the Italian translation. In an appendix, Losurdo implied that Montinari, a lifelong Marxist and member of the PCI, had along with coeditor Giorgio Colli tried to whitewash the reactionary features of Nietzschean philosophy. This was allegedly accomplished through an elaborate “hermeneutics of innocence” that omitted incriminating phrases, softened the translation of key terms, and blamed Elisabeth Förster for various distortions.^[141] Campioni effortlessly found a passage Losurdo claimed had been left out, and wondered how anyone could write such a lengthy polemic without knowing how to use the critical apparatus.^[142] Even scholars highly critical of Nietzsche have been frustrated by Losurdo’s study. Robert Holub, for example, has questioned the decision to compare the German philologist some three dozen times to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose works he barely read. Losurdo also likened him over and over to the English empiricist John Locke, whom he detested, and the French eugenicist Georges Lapouge, of whom he was entirely ignorant.^[143]

In The Aristocratic Rebel, Losurdo set out to demonstrate that “there is no shortage of unsettling and horrific passages in Nietzsche’s writings.”^[144] One such passage is Dawn §206, on “The Impossible Class,” where he talked about the Lassallean social-democratic workers’ movement of his day. Much like Marx, Nietzsche saw “factory servitude” as akin to slavery, and lamented the squandering of human creative potential. He saw the demand for higher wages as a way of asking for nothing more than golden chains. Compared with this, a return to pre-bourgeois values of war and adventure appeared to him preferable, so he encouraged workers to seek their fortunes abroad.^[145] Read literally, as Losurdo was always wont to do, this constitutes a brazen call for colonialism, to be supplemented by the mass importation of Chinese into Europe to serve as “diligent ants.”^[146] Nietzsche was of course being fanciful when he suggested that a quarter of Europe’s working population be shipped overseas, though many did end up making the journey to the New World. And his suggestion near the end that Asian and European blood and culture intermix would seem to fly in the face of the rightwing racial purity fetish, with its omnipresent fear of miscegenation.

Of course, this is in no way meant to imply that Marx and Nietzsche were the same, or even that their thought is “compatible.” It also does not imply that Marxism needs to be “supplemented” by Nietzsche’s thought, any more than by that of Freud or others. Nietzsche and Freud can be read profitably by Marxists as symptoms of bourgeois society—or better, of bourgeois society in decay. Each was capable of great insight relative to his time, and their concepts still have some refracted purchase on the present. The point is not “to save Nietzsche by shaping him on a Marxian lathe,”^[147] as some of his French and Italian interpreters have admittedly attempted, but to see him as expressing the discontents of industrial capitalism. He was himself no revolutionary, but some of his more extravagant formulations could have revolutionary consequences. For instance, setting Nietzsche’s aristocratism aside, Trotsky mused that the Übermensch would only appear following a successful socialist revolution. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings,” wrote the former head of the Red Army, “to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher sociobiologic type, or, if you please, a superman [сверхчеловека].”^[148]

Losurdo’s book on Stalin is similarly riddled with embarrassing inaccuracies and questionable inferences. For example, he referred to Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the short-lived Russian Provisional Government, as a “Menshevik leader” no fewer than four times in that work (suggesting genuine confusion, not a one-off mistake).^[149] Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the history of Russia in 1917 knows that although Kerensky was close with the right wing of the populist Socialist Revolutionary party, he had no relationship whatsoever with the Menshevik faction of the Marxist RSDLP. The Italian Stalinist also uncritically reproduced the findings of the infamous Moscow trials, based on confessions extracted either by direct torture or indirect threats of violence to the defendants’ families. Trotsky’s guilt is established in absentia by a series of insinuations from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the idiosyncratic Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte.^[150] Jean-Jacques Marie, a French Trotskyist, raised these points in a critical review,^[151] only to be nonsensically dismissed as a “Trotskyismologist.”^[152] Regardless, it is a perverse irony that Losurdo accused historians of staging “a truly grotesque trial against Stalin,”^[153] especially in light of the literal trials held in Moscow against Stalin’s enemies, with their many grotesqueries.

Any error Stalin may have committed, according to Losurdo, was attributable to “the permanent state of exception caused by imperialist intervention and encirclement.”^[154] Stalin’s proposal to forge ahead with building socialism in one country through state-led industrialization was more realistic, in his view, than the quixotic internationalism of the Trotskyists or the communist left. Things had not played out the way Marx, Engels, or Lenin had envisioned, and so adjustments needed to be made. Losurdo maintained that “the path from Marx to Stalin and the Gulag is problematic, bumpy, and in any case mediated by completely unpredictable events such as the world wars and the permanent state of exception.”^[155] The world wars and the dangers of isolation were hardly unforeseeable exogenous shocks, however. Engels famously predicted the First World War as early as 1887,^[156] and the Marxists of the Second International prepared for its eventuality. Obviously the revolution failed to spread to the most advanced capitalist countries, and the sole surviving workers’ state became encrusted with bureaucracy, but neither of these facts invalidates orthodox Marxism. In the third and final installment of this essay, Losurdo’s own revisionism will be exposed.

Thanks are due to Steve Wright for all the chats about Italian workerism and to Spencer Leonard for his insights into Nietzsche’s corpus, especially Dawn §206.