Revisionism Revisited

The Marxist theory of revolution and the state

The first part of this essay introduced the controversial Italian neo-Stalinist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo, whose ideas have grown influential in the Anglophone world over the course of the last fifteen years. His most recent book to be translated into English, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it can be Reborn, offers a point of entry into his broader body of work. To understand the nature of his polemical intervention, the category of “Western Marxism” first had to be reconstructed. Different theorists, representing a range of currents on the New Left, evaluated heterodox strains of Marxism in the West in various ways, depending on how they oriented themselves toward actually-existing socialism and revolutionary politics in the present. In the second part of the essay, Losurdo’s concrete engagements with the so-called “Western Marxists” were examined in detail to see whether his criticisms of them were fair. By and large, they were found to be either dishonest or misleading. Now in the third and final part, it will be seen just how far his version of Marxism deviates from the path laid down by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

One of Marxism-Leninism’s characteristic claims is that it constitutes an antirevisionist doctrine. “Revisionism” here refers to the attempt at “refashioning the foundations of Marx’s theory.”^[1] Historically it first arose in the 1890s, after an extended period of prosperity, which led some Marxists to believe that capitalism had fundamentally changed. In the realm of politics, this meant that a violent revolution was no longer necessary. Socialism could instead be achieved through gradual reforms. Economically, it meant that capitalism’s crisis-prone tendencies had been overcome and that class antagonisms had been blunted. Philosophically, it meant the abandonment of materialist dialectics in favor of neo-Kantian idealism. Rosa Luxemburg, in her critique of Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism, explained that revisionism aimed to suspend rather than overcome the contradictions of capitalism, writing that “the antagonism between production and exchange is to be attenuated by the cessation of crises and the formation of capitalist employers’ organizations; the antagonism between capital and labor is to be adjusted by bettering the situation of the workers and by conserving the middle classes; and the contradiction between the class state and society is to be lessened through increased control and democracy.”^[2]

Antirevisionism came to mean something else following the death of Stalin. Mao branded Khrushchev a “revisionist” for denouncing his predecessor, and for replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat with the state of the whole people.^[3] Yet the PRC chairman overlooked the way that Stalin had already substantially modified the doctrine of Marx, Engels, and Lenin with his theory of “socialism in one country.” Traditionally, Marxism taught that the revolution must be international in scale, and must be principally carried out by the proletariat of the most advanced capitalist countries. Losurdo went one step further in his revisionism, though, denying that the state would wither away with the arrival of a classless society, as Marx, Engels, and Lenin had thought. Capitalism had either changed or had never been quite as they had imagined it, and so the theory must be altered. In this, it must be said, the Italian Stalinist was not alone in his heresy. Paul Sweezy, the cofounder of Monthly Review, whose publishing house commissioned the translation of Losurdo’s Western Marxism, likewise felt that Marx had erred in his belief that workers in the core of capitalism would overthrow this system.^[4] Similarly, he held the withering away of the state to be an impossible goal that had in any case lost all relevance.^[5]

Here it becomes worthwhile to go back and reexamine the logic that led classical Marxists to stress the need for socialist revolution to take place in the leading capitalist countries, and their belief that political power would disappear with the arrival of communism. This section of the essay will of necessity appear more “Marxological” than the two that preceded it. It will be found that neither of these positions is inessential to Marxism, and that to dispense with either of them is tantamount to revisionism. By upholding these pillars of Marxist orthodoxy and by quoting chapter and verse, of course, one is opened up to the charge of dogmatism, of treating the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as religious texts. Perhaps it is best at this point to quote Losurdo’s compatriot, however, the great Italian Marxist Amadeo Bordiga: “Damn those who talk about dogmas. There has yet to be a renegade who did not use this word. Mao compared it with ‘cow shit.’ Well, bon appétit!”^[6]

Losurdo’s Revision of Marx, Engels, and Lenin

Beyond his criticisms of various Western Marxists, Losurdo did not hesitate to revise Marx, Engels, and Lenin whenever their theories did not conform to the faits accomplis of actually-existing socialism. Given the continued centrality of the state in countries like China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, the Italian Stalinist felt he had to spell out “the theoretical limits of Marx—a Western philosopher little interested in the problem of the limitation of power… At times he was prone to the messianic expectation of the extinction of the state and power as such.”^[7] Marx himself would thus seem to have been a Western Marxist, if defending the doctrine of the withering away of the state qualifies one as such. The founder of the materialist conception of history also contended that proletarian revolution would have to spread rapidly throughout the advanced capitalist core in order to succeed. For Losurdo, this argument was far too close to Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution for comfort: “Having prevailed in one country, [Marx argued that] the struggle of the revolutionary class crosses state and national borders… It might be said that the ‘anachronistic and unnatural Napoleonism’ for which Gramsci reproached Trotsky can already be glimpsed in Marx.”^[8] Losurdo felt that Marx was clearly mistaken here.

Nor were these shortcomings exclusive to Marx, according to Losurdo. Even his best followers succumbed to such utopianism. Just before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin in State and Revolution eloquently defended the thesis that politics would eventually be transcended. He further speculated that money would cease to exist, and precious metals would be put to quite different use. “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world,” Lenin wrote in 1921.^[9] As things came to pass, however, the various social forms and institutions that he and his fellow revolutionaries thought destined to vanish—money, religion, the nation, the family, and the state—seemed to persist indefinitely. Losurdo liked to compare the gulf between their expectations and reality to that of a certain Genoese explorer:

The experience of Christopher Columbus, who set out in search of the Indies but discovered America, might serve as a metaphor for understanding the objective dialectic of revolutionary processes. It was precisely Marx and Engels who underscored this point. In analyzing the French or English revolutions, they do not start with the subjective consciousness of their dramatis personae, or the ideologues who called and prepared the way for them, but with an examination of the objective contradictions that provoked them and the real characteristics of the politico-social continent exposed or revealed by the ensuing upheavals. The two theoreticians of historical materialism thus highlighted the discrepancy between subjective project and objective result, and ultimately explained the reasons for the creation—the inevitable creation—of such a discrepancy. Why should we proceed any differently when it comes to the October Revolution?… There are no grounds for exempting the revolution inspired by Marx and Engels from the materialist methodology developed by them. Such is the context in which we must situate expectations of the withering away of the state, religion, the market, and any form of division of labor. This utopia… has not withstood the test of reality.^[10]

In Losurdo’s interpretation, the October Revolution was only a failure from the point of view of what its protagonists originally hoped to achieve. Although their objectives were not met, this does not mean their efforts were wholly unsuccessful. Losurdo wanted to shift the goal posts, analogizing:

Did the October Revolution fail? Without doubt, the aims pursued and proclaimed by it were not achieved. Let one simply think of Lenin and the leaders of the Communist International, for whom the worldwide Soviet republic seemed already looming on the horizon, with the final disappearance of classes, states, nations, the market, and religions. At no time has this goal been approximated; there has not even been any success in heading in that direction. Are we therefore faced with a total failure? In reality, the gap between programs and results is characteristic of every revolution. The French Jacobins did not restore the ancient polis; the North American revolutionaries did not establish a society of small farmers and small producers without the polarization of wealth and poverty, without a standing army, and without a strong central authority; the English Puritans did not bring to life again the Biblical society mythically redesigned by them.^[11]

Contrary to their own stated ambitions, the Russian Bolsheviks were never able to get rid of nations, money, the family, or the state.^[12] Losurdo thought they fell prey to what he dubbed “the idealism of practice,” believing all institutions were essentially mutable and could thus be practically overcome. He detected here the residue of Fichteanism. “We are led to think of Fichte,” wrote Losurdo, “for whom the French Revolution found its theoretical expression in [his own] philosophy, which liberated the subject ‘from the constraints of things-in-themselves, from external influences,’ and… in the final analysis from material objectivity.”^[13] The revolutionaries underestimated the recalcitrance of these “noumenal” institutions, denying them any independent existence. Borrowing from the later Lukács’ ontology of social being, Losurdo argued that this attitude robbed historically congealed forms of their objective, independent status.^[14] National feeling, the money economy, and state power proved remarkably resilient in the wake of the October Revolution.^[15] “Just as it does not betoken the end of the state,” Losurdo concluded, “so socialism does not entail either the disappearance of the market… or the fusion of all the countries engaged in constructing a new social order into a community free of tensions and conflicts.”^[16]

Losurdo styled himself a hard-nosed realist purging Marxism of any lingering utopian content. One result of his approach, though, is to confer an air of retroactive inevitability on everything that transpired in the course of historical struggles. If revolution did not succeed in spreading to the advanced capitalist core, becoming the center of a global Soviet government, that was because it was never in the cards. Revolution could only occur in the underdeveloped periphery, where socialism had to be built one country at a time. If the state did not wither away in the USSR, that meant there was no chance it was ever going to. State oversight would be part of any society, no matter the mode of production. Likewise with nations, religion, the market, and the family. This is the quintessence of Stalinism: the adaptation to diminished horizons, making a virtue of necessity. Among other reasons, this is why other Marxists called Stalin “the organizer of defeat” (Trotsky) and “the gravedigger of the revolution” (Bordiga). Passages by Marx, Engels, and even Lenin that contradict the official wisdom of actually-existing socialism are deemed by Stalinists credulous or naïve, as if the bureaucrats of current-day China know better. Hence Losurdo’s revision of revolutionary theory to serve the needs of the present.

That Losurdo was willing to alter Marxist doctrine to justify all the twists and turns of socialist states over time can be demonstrated through a handful of examples. His contention that national tensions and conflicts would remain beyond capitalism was supposed to explain why Yugoslavia and the USSR became estranged after 1948, why the Red Army was sent to crush uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, why bloody clashes broke out along the Sino-Soviet border in 1969, and why China went to war with Vietnam in 1979 following the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia.^[17] Marx, Engels, and Lenin would doubtless have been shocked to learn that such nationalistic strife would postdate a proletarian revolution in these countries, but this was because Losurdo felt they did not appreciate the full gravity of nationalism. In their naïveté, they thought differences between nations would quickly fade. Losurdo quoted Castro to say that “socialists made a mistake in underestimating the strength of nationalism and religion.”^[18] Such mention of religion was doubtless meant to rationalize the Soviet state’s famous rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War, after years of militant atheism. Religion is part of national identity, said Losurdo.

Still another place Losurdo believed Marxist theory should be revised was in Marx’s own positive evaluation of the United States in the 1840s as “the land of complete political emancipation.”^[19] To Losurdo, Marx here was almost Tocquevillean in his high regard for the achievements of the young American republic.^[20] But the Italian Stalinist’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.^[21] This was also why Losurdo felt it was necessary to criticize Engels for publishing an article in where he saluted the US annexation of Texas in the 1840s as a “fact of world-historic significance,” excited at the prospect that the “energetic Yankees” would export “civilization” to the territories of the Southwest—i.e., modern agricultural practices and world intercourse. In Losurdo’s opinion, Marx and Engels had somehow bracketed the fact that the United States was responsible for racialized chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples over the first half of the nineteenth century.^[22] Neither of them was unaware of this, however; they simply saw the spread of industrial democracy as a sine qua non for socialism. Losurdo was further troubled by the fascination America held for Lenin.^[23]

Against the rigid doctrines of classical Marxism, Losurdo proposed to reconceptualize the history of the communist movement as an open-ended “learning process” of ad hoc experimentation. This, he thought, was a better way of understanding it than to see it as beset on all sides by failure and betrayal.^[24] 1848, 1871, 1917, and 1949—along with a host of other dates in between—represented milestones within “a long and complex learning process marked by conflict and contradiction.”^[25] Losurdo thought that this process of learning was accelerated whenever revolutionaries assumed power,^[26] proceeding by trial and error. But this is a vulgar empiricist conception of historical consciousness that has nothing to do with Marxist theory. Marx and Engels’ claim that proletarian revolution would have to occur in the most advanced capitalist countries in order to succeed, like their claim that the state would automatically die off with the advent of a classless society, was not an empirical but a logical postulate. They deduced this postulate by analyzing the totality of capitalist social relations, and its consequent division into classes. If anything, the experience of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century confirms that it is impossible to fabricate an island of socialism amidst a sea of capitalism.

Of course, this is not to say there is nothing to be learned from history, or that no lessons can be drawn from the experience of past revolutionary sequences. But these lessons are more negative than positive. It is true that Losurdo from time to time would go over what he considered to be errors committed by the communist movement: for example, the effort to immediately smash the state, or the attempt to collectivize agriculture on a compressed timescale. Usually this was in service of highlighting what he believed was the correct path, however, namely the path followed by China of strengthening the state, building up the productive forces, allowing market reforms to last a long period. For Losurdo, these formed the tried and tested way forward. His manner of approaching the history of revolution was quite different from that of earlier generations of Marxists. Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the context of cataclysmic defeat during World War I, underscored the need for the workers’ movement to learn from this:

“The [revolutionary petty bourgeoisie,]” says Marx, “emerges from the most shameful downfall as spotlessly as he went innocently into it. With the strengthened confidence that he must win, he is more than ever certain that he and his party need no new principles, that events and conditions must conform to them.” The modern proletariat emerges differently from its historical experience. Its problems are as gigantic as its mistakes. No preestablished schema, no ritual that holds good at all times, shows it the path that it must travel. Historical experience is its only teacher; its Via Dolorosa to self-liberation is covered not only with immeasurable suffering, but with countless mistakes. The goal of its journey, its final liberation, depends on the proletariat, on whether it understands that it must learn from its own mistakes. Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of things is life and light for the proletarian movement. The catastrophe of the socialist proletariat in the present World War is an unexampled misfortune for humanity. But socialism is lost only if the international proletariat is unable to measure the depths of the catastrophe and refuses to learn from it.^[27]

Even the lessons of October, which members of the Russian party and the Comintern more broadly failed to assimilate,^[28] did not form a set of instructions that could then be mechanically applied. The main takeaway from 1917, according to Trotsky, was that objectively propitious conditions for revolution did not by themselves guarantee the presence of a subjective consciousness equipped to take advantage of them. In fact, they would more likely trigger a crisis within any revolutionary party trying to make sense of and react to fast-changing circumstances, so as to then actively shape them. By any measure, the sequence of events the Bolsheviks hoped to set in motion, which aimed at overthrowing global capitalism, cannot be considered successful. Yet it is not as the greatest success of the historical workers’ movement, but precisely as its greatest failure, that the abortive world revolution of 1917 to 1923 still exercises such a grip over the imagination. Against Losurdo, one must now reconstruct Marx’s original argument.

Defeat and Betrayal of the World Revolution

Since its inception, capitalism has been global in concept, even if its emergence could be empirically localized to a particular time and place. In other words, from the outset it possessed a totalizing logic that would lead it to eventually span the entire globe. Through the mechanism of the world market, the bourgeoisie revolutionized production in every country where its characteristic relations took hold. Unlike the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which occurred bit by bit as the result of the unconscious spread of capital, the transition from capitalism to communism can only take place through the conscious and coordinated action of the working class on an international scale. “One of the fundamental differences between bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution,” observed Lenin, “is that for the bourgeois revolution, which arises out of feudalism, new economic organizations are gradually created in the womb of the old order, gradually changing all the aspects of feudal society.”^[29] Bourgeois civil society across existing state borders generalized the commodity form of labor with the proletariat.

Marx and Engels gathered all this simply by analyzing the nature of capitalist society. Already in 1846, they claimed that “communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously.”^[30] Just a year later, Engels categorically denied that socialism could be built in one country: “The communist revolution will… be no merely national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilized countries.” When he was writing, that meant it would occur “at least in England, America, France, and Germany.” Today it might include such countries as Japan, Russia, or China. Engels insisted that “[i]t is a worldwide revolution, and will therefore be worldwide in scope.”^[31] Both young revolutionaries reaffirmed this following the experience of the 1848 revolutions. “[I]t is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent,” they told the Communist League at a famous March 1850 address in London, “until more or less all the possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance [and] the proletariat has conquered state power… not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world.”^[32] The dictatorship of the proletariat would not result from the takeover of any single existing bourgeois national state, but multiple.

Nor was this stance confined to Marx and Engels’ intemperate revolutionary youths. When they formed the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, Marx recognized in its rules that “the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries.”^[33] After the Commune was crushed in May 1871 by a coalition of bourgeois powers, Marx was more convinced than ever that the working class had to organize itself across the industrial core of the world economy to defend against the threat of capitalist encirclement. “European governments testify, before Paris, to the international character of class rule,” he wrote, and thus called for “the international counter-organization of labor against the cosmopolitan conspiracy of capital.”^[34] Later on, having studied the development of capitalism in tsarist Russia, along the periphery of Europe, Marx and Engels hoped that “the Russian revolution [would serve as] the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other.”^[35] The country they now looked to, which would be the industrial base for world socialism, was Germany.^[36]

It was generally accepted as a given by the generation of Marxists that followed Marx and Engels that revolution would have to spread across the most advanced countries for it to succeed. Lenin never abandoned this central tenet of Marxism. From the moment he departed Switzerland in 1917, he stressed that revolution in Russia would be the spark for the rest of the world:

[T]he Russian proletariat cannot bring the socialist revolution to a victorious conclusion. But it can give the Russian revolution a mighty sweep that would create the most favorable conditions for a socialist revolution, and would, in a sense, start it. It can facilitate the rise of a situation in which its chief, its most trustworthy and most reliable partner, the European and American socialist proletariat, could join the decisive battles.^[37]

Just as the Bolsheviks were poised to seize power a few months later, Lenin was convinced that “if we come out now, we shall have on our side all proletarian Europe.”^[38] He was careful not to issue any exact predictions, but he was still optimistic. “[A]lthough the European proletarian revolution has been maturing very rapidly lately,” he wrote in 1918, “it may not, after all, flare up within the next few weeks. We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on a definite and early date.” Until it did arrive, however, “[w]e are…, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.”^[39] Lenin was extremely confident at this time that the Bolsheviks would soon be relieved by revolutionary uprisings in the leading imperialist countries. In a speech on the international situation from November 1918, he expressed his belief that “the world revolution is not far off,” though he made sure to add that “it cannot develop according to a special timetable.”^[40] Only a revolution in the advanced capitalist countries of Europe could deliver them from certain doom.

As Lenin emphasized, the Bolsheviks were not alone in anticipating such a situation. “[T]he expectation of a revolutionary situation in Europe was not an infatuation of the Bolsheviks, but the general opinion of all Marxists,” he reminded Karl Kautsky, chief theorist of Second International. “[I]t is obligatory for a Marxist to count on a European revolution if a revolutionary situation exists.”^[41] Lenin expected that this would strengthen the Bolsheviks’ hand in Russia.^[42] Much as it had been for Marx and Engels, Germany was the linchpin of the broader movement: “From the standpoint of the world revolution, Germany is the main link in [the imperialist] chain, since the German revolution is already ripe, and the success of the world revolution most of all depends on it.”^[43] So advantageous would a German revolution prove for world socialism that Lenin even welcomed the Treaty of Versailles, the unfair terms of which he hoped would impel workers to rise up across Germany.^[44] Though the anticipated conflagration did not come to pass, Lenin insisted even into 1921 that a revolution was lurking around the corner. “Assistance is on its way from the West-European countries but it is not coming quickly enough,” he admitted. “Still it is coming and growing.”^[45] He would never waver on this score.

“We have… always said that we are only a single link in the chain of the world revolution,” said Lenin in 1921, “and have never set ourselves the aim of achieving victory by our own means. The world revolution has not yet come about, but then we have not yet been overcome.”^[46] He never tired of repeating this basic point.^[47] “Bolshevism aims at world revolution,” Lenin clarified. “We have never made a secret of the fact that our revolution is only the beginning, that its victorious end will come only when we have lit up the whole world with these same fires of revolution.”^[48] It was up to the Bolsheviks “to hold out until the victory of the international revolution,”^[49] but without this victory, limited to a single backwards country, there could be no thought of building socialism. Lenin explained that “[w]hile our Soviet Republic remains the isolated borderland of the capitalist world, it would be absolutely ridiculous, fantastic, and utopian to hope that we can achieve complete economic independence or that all dangers will vanish.”^[50] Years later, he reflected on the course of the revolution:

When we started the international revolution, …[i]t was clear to us that without the support of the international world revolution the victory of the proletarian revolution was impossible. Before the revolution, and even after it, we thought: either revolution breaks out… in the capitalistically more developed countries immediately, or at least very quickly, or we must perish. In spite of this conviction, we did all we possibly could to preserve the Soviet system under all circumstances, come what may, because we knew that we were not only working for ourselves, but also for the international revolution.^[51]

Dozens more quotes could be adduced to show that Lenin retained this belief in the necessity of international revolution from the start of his revolutionary career up through the end of his life. In one of his last published pieces, he wrote that “we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism.”^[52] A handful of excerpts from his works might seem to suggest he thought socialism could be built in one country, but only if ripped from their context. Trotsky addressed all of these passages in his 1928 classic, The Third International After Lenin.^[53]

Luxemburg had some reservations about the course of the revolution in Russia. But she was quick to point out that any shortcomings of the Bolsheviks were attributable to the lack of a working-class revolt in Germany. In her critique of The Russian Revolution, written in prison and voluntarily withheld upon her release, she placed the responsibility squarely on her compatriots. “Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat,” asserted Luxemburg. “It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat, and a flourishing socialist economy.”^[54] She tried to rectify this state of affairs in 1919, but was murdered along with Karl Liebknecht. Theodor Adorno later commented: “[A]lready in the twenties, as a consequence of the events of 1919, the decision had fallen against that political potential that, had things gone otherwise, with great probability would have influenced developments in Russia and prevented Stalinism.”^[55] The defeat of the German Revolution had been fatal.

This belief in the twin necessity and likelihood of international revolution was more or less universal among Russian Marxists. Preobrazhensky authored a work of speculative science fiction in 1922 set fifty years hence, in the form of a lecture looking backward at the revolutionary sequence that erupted after World War I. The October Revolution had opened up a breach in the capitalist front, but the Bolsheviks stood in need of reinforcements.^[56] “If the revolution in the West had delayed too long,” Preobrazhensky’s narrator whimsically recalled, “this situation could have led to an aggressive socialist war by Russia, supported by the European proletariat, against the capitalist West. This did not happen because the proletarian revolution was by this time already knocking at the door owing to its own inner development.”^[57] Revolution broke out in Germany, followed by Poland and France, creating a Soviet Europe:

New Soviet Europe opened a fresh page in economic development. The industrial technique of Germany was united with Russian agriculture, and on the territory of Europe there began rapidly to develop and become consolidated a new economic organism, revealing enormous possibilities and a mighty breakthrough to the expansion of the productive forces. And along with this, Soviet Russia, which previously had outstripped Europe politically, now modestly took its place as an economically backward country behind the advanced industrial countries of the proletarian dictatorship.^[58]

Such was the scenario envisioned by the Bolshevik leadership group. Following the failure of the so-called “German October” in 1923, though, there was widespread soul-searching and recrimination. Over the next few years, this failure was rationalized—i.e., granted an affirmative rather than a negative character—under the revisionist mantra of “socialism in one country.” Historians have shown that this slogan emerged as if by accident, one of Stalin’s few genuine theoretical innovations, before being subsequently elaborated by Bukharin in 1925.^[59] Trotsky was sidelined within the Politburo by the troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Later he would comment on the attitude adopted by the Stalinist clique toward revolutionary setbacks in Europe: “Instead of a Marxian analysis of the defeats, irresponsible bureaucratic bluster triumphing all along the line.”^[60] Eventually Trotsky would be exiled from the USSR to Turkey, Finland, and then Mexico, where he was ultimately assassinated in 1940. World revolution had in the meantime become an afterthought to the more pressing priority of industrialization.

For Losurdo the notion that revolution could be exported was presumptuous. Stalin had framed the brutal civil war as a national struggle against foreign capital, and afterward proposed peaceful coexistence between a territorially-delimited capitalism and socialism, something that would have been unthinkable to Marx, Engels, and their immediate successors.^[61] Marcuse spelled out the ways this line of thinking departed from the classical Marxist doctrine.^[62] To what extent does it make sense to accuse Stalinism of betraying Marxism, however? Losurdo viewed Stalin as saving it from the pursuit of dangerous apocalyptic fantasies. Regardless of how one sees his actions, does it even make sense to suggest that he could have acted differently than he did? Historical materialism has often been caricatured as a strictly determinist doctrine, such that things could not have been otherwise. And, perhaps more importantly, that people could not have done otherwise. It has even been speculated that if the man Stalin had not existed, someone equivalent would have taken his place and did as he did, given the USSR’s situation. But it is precisely because Marxism aspires to historical agency, to be able to make history, that its partisans can be said to have betrayed or remained faithful to its precepts.

Self-Destruction of the State

According to Marxism, the modern state is at once an organ of class rule and an expression of society’s immanent self-contradiction. Premodern states were essentially identical with the ruling orders which composed them, whether theocratic or aristocratic or some combination thereof. They were the preserve of a small number of clergymen or noblemen, with a monarch typically at their head, and were for the most part unconcerned with the approval of “the people” or “the masses.” With the birth of bourgeois society—or society proper, in the emphatic sense of a “kind of intertwinement which leaves nothing out”^[63]—the form of the state transitioned from the hierarchical Ständestaat of qualitatively different estates, each with its own particular privileges, to the constitutional Rechtsstaat of equality before the law, based on universal rights. Enlightenment political philosophers thought that with the demise of the old regime, the state would be subordinated to the general will of society and play a mere oversight role. But as class divisions within the citizenry became clearer during the nineteenth century, the state detached itself from society and assumed a distinctly Bonapartist shape. In other words, it began to play a more repressive role managing the standoff between classes.

Thankfully, there is already an abundance of literature on Marxism and its theory of the state, although of variable quality. Lenin’s Marxological reconstruction of this theory in State and Revolution is an undisputed masterpiece, while also being historically important. Worthwhile elaborations have also appeared more recently.^[64] Regardless, however, Marx’s attitude toward the state was remarkably consistent over the course of his career, although he and Engels modified some of the finer points in light of the Paris Commune.^[65] From the critique he wrote of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843 to his ethnographic notebooks from 1881, Marx articulated the idea that the modern state was the manifestation of unresolved antagonisms within civil society, and that the former would cease to exist as soon as these antagonisms were resolved. In his view, the proletariat would take power and make temporary use of the state to suppress its class enemies and rearrange the social edifice until the realization of a classless future. After Engels’ death, as socialist parties started to win elections and pass legislation, aspects of the Marxian doctrine of the state were forgotten. It fell to Lenin to recover its revolutionary core in 1917, but with the defeat of the world revolution the bureaucracy dug in its heels.

In Marx’s early estimation, Hegel had naturalized what was in fact a recent historical development in positing the separation of civil society and the political state.^[66] Regardless, the state was for Marx a sign of humanity’s alienation from its social essence, which would be overcome along with capitalism. “The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human life,” he argued in his Paris manuscripts, “is the positive transcendence of all estrangement—that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence.”^[67] Communism necessarily involved “the abolition of the state.”^[68] Marx outlined the plan for a work on the modern state, which he thought originated with the French Revolution, though it was never realized.^[69] He and Engels discussed the relation of the modern state to the ascendence of the Third Estate in their unpublished critique of The German Ideology,^[70] and in the Manifesto they famously declared that “[t]he executive of the modern state is… but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”^[71] Following the 1848 revolutions, they wrote that “[t]he abolition of the state has meaning with the communists… only as the necessary consequence of the abolition of classes, with which the need for the organized might of one class to keep the others down automatically disappears.”^[72]

Yet it was in Marx’s political writings that his descriptions of the state acquired their highest degree of concreteness. He sketched the history of the modern state from absolutism through the Second Empire, calling it an “appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of… society like a net and chokes all its pores” with soldiers, police officers, and petty bureaucrats. “Only under [Louis] Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent,” observed Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire. “As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position.”^[73] Bonapartism negatively expressed, in strict dialectical fashion, the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx saw as the necessary culmination of class struggle and vehicle by which a classless society would be achieved.^[74] With the defeat of the June insurrection, the bourgeoisie had repelled workers’ power by creating an elaborate and elephantine state machinery. In his first draft of The Civil War in France, Marx reprised his account of the modern state’s origin and subsequent development:

The centralized state machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical, and judiciary organs, entoils living civil society like a boa constrictor, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent modern society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism… This parasitical [growth upon] civil society, pretending to be its ideal counterpart, grew to its full development under the sway of the first Bonaparte… In their struggle against the Revolution of 1848, the parliamentary republic of France and the governments of all continental Europe, were forced to strengthen, with their measures of repression against the popular movement, the means of action and the centralization of that governmental power. All revolutions thus only perfected the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadening incubus.^[75]

Marx held the Commune to be “[t]he true antithesis to the Empire itself…, its definite negation and, therefore, the initiation of the social revolution.”^[76] Engels later identified it as the dictatorship of the proletariat.^[77] “The Commune [represented]… the reabsorption of state power by society, as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it,” contended Marx.^[78] He referred to it as “the political form of social emancipation, the liberation of labor from the usurpation of the… monopolists of the means of labor.”^[79] For Marx, the Commune was undoubtedly still a state, but a state in the process of becoming a non-state—the republic of labor, against the empire of capital.^[80] It would not signal the end of class struggle, but would instead be the “rational medium” through which the logic of class struggle plays itself out.^[81] To be sure, the state is not a neutral instrument to be wielded by the working class in perpetuity; its very existence is a badge of society’s continued unfreedom. But its use would be necessary to both enact revolutionary measures and counteract counterrevolutionary elements. Once a classless society has been accomplished the state would be rendered superfluous.

The proposition that state power would eventually disappear was one that Marx and Engels maintained throughout their storied careers. As early as 1847, the former wrote that this would be an unavoidable consequence of the new form of voluntary association due to replace bourgeois civil society. In The Poverty of Philosophy, his critique of Proudhon, Marx asked rhetorically:

Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No… The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be any political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.^[82]

However, there was a terminological shift that took place as fissures began to appear in the First International between the Marxists and the Bakuninists. Whereas before Marx and Engels spoke openly of “abolishing” the state, they now preferred to speak of it gradually dying out. Engels recalled in a letter to their Italian follower Carlo Cafiero (who would later defect Bakunin’s side) that “the ‘abolition [abolizione] of the state’ is an old German philosophical phrase, of which [Marx and I] made much use when we were both tender youths. But to put all these things into our program would mean alienating an enormous number of our members, and dividing rather than uniting the European proletariat.”^[83] Marx and Engels clarified their position in a circular on “Fictitious Splits in the International,” where they accused the anarchists of putting the cart before the horse, hoping to abolish the state par décret rather than create the social conditions by which the state would cease to exist.^[84] In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx explained that “between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other… Corresponding to this is… a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”^[85] The dictatorship of the proletariat is precisely the form of state that will then wither away.

Despite their disagreements with the anarchists over the timeline by which the state would vanish, Marx and Engels at no point rescinded their earlier stance that politics would come to a close in an emancipated society.^[86] Historicizing the phenomenon, Marx claimed toward the end of his life that “the supreme independent existence of the State is itself only seeming. It is in all its forms an excrescence of society; just as its appearance arises only at a certain stage of social development, it disappears again as soon as society has reached a stage not yet attained.”^[87] Engels put it more poetically, glossing this passage in his book on the state’s origins:

The state… has not existed from eternity. There have been societies that managed without it, that had no idea of the state and state authority. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split… [Classes] will fall just as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.^[88]

In other popular pamphlets, the precise mechanics of this operation were spelled out. “The proletariat sublates itself as proletariat, sublates all class distinctions and all class antagonisms, sublates also the state as state,” Engels elucidated. He further qualified this by writing that “[t]he state is not ‘abolished’ [‚abgeschafft‘]. It dies out [er stirbt ab].”^[89] Lenin made much of this passage, quoting it at length in State and Revolution and translating stirbt into Russian as отмирает (an accurate translation, fatefully rendered into English as “withering away”). As the Bolshevik leader remarked, “[t]he expression ‘the state withers away’ is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process.” Formal legislation would be supplanted by informal habituation, as social norms no longer require some external entity to enforce them but are rather internalized: “Only habit can… have such an effect, for we see… how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation.”^[90] With the end of the commodity form of labor, and the contradictions arising thereof, society would shed its reliance on state repression.

Some scholars have wondered why, in the midst of a catastrophic world war and the crisis of the Socialist International, Lenin spent so much time writing a book report on Marx and Engels’ doctrine of the state.^[91] It was of a piece with his study of imperialism, however, a stage of capitalism that witnessed the monstrous extension of government departments, bureaus, and ministries. He sought to systematize the various statements Marx and Engels had made about the state, but wrote with extraordinary insight and a sense of urgency conferred by the revolutionary situation that presented itself to him. Lenin repeated the Marxist criticism of the anarchists, emphasizing that the proletariat would have to make provisional use of the state,^[92] but directed the bulk of his ire against the opportunists who believed the state would exist forever.^[93] “The proletariat needs the state only temporarily,” argued Lenin. “We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes.”^[94] Once this is accomplished, the state dies off.

However, as the world revolution stalled out and the Soviet Union was left stranded, workers’ power experienced any number of involuntary involutions. Not long before his first stroke, Lenin highlighted the vital need to “[combat] the bureaucratic distortions, mistakes, and flaws in [the proletarian] state.”^[95] The hypertrophy of the state apparatus in the USSR, already by the early twenties, greatly alarmed the Bolshevik leader. “[I]f we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom?” he asked at the Eleventh Congress of the Russian party. “I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.”^[96] Following Lenin’s death, it was principally Trotsky who took over this line of criticism vis-à-vis the Soviet state. He raised the issue of the persistence of state structures in an early chapter of The Revolution Betrayed, pointing out all the ways that the liquidation of the state had been deferred in order to justify the USSR’s bloated bureaucratism.^[97] Trotsky understood Stalinism to be a world historical phenomenon, just as Marx had understood Bonapartism to be; indeed, Stalinism was proletarian Bonapartism. “Stalinism is not something isolated,” he wrote. “[A]s a parasitic growth, it has wound itself around the trunk of the October Revolution.”^[98]

Jacoby distinguished two major Hegelian lineages that informed competing brands of Marxism in the twentieth century: 1) that descended from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which stressed consciousness and the dialectic of subject and object; 2) that descended from the Science of Logic, which stressed being and the overall coherence of the system.^[99] Losurdo’s Hegelianism, however, derived from the Philosophy of Right. The Italian Stalinist read this work, along with accompanying lectures, as championing a strong interventionist state that would curb the excesses of civil society. Hegel had lobbied for the government to provide children with free public education to protect them from whims of their parents,^[100] levy taxes on the rich in order to see to the welfare of its citizens,^[101] and take a strong hand against the rapacious law of the jungle that held sway over bourgeois property relations.^[102] Losurdo generally saw Hegel as standing “against laissez-faire opposition to state intervention in the social sphere,”^[103] and thought Marx agreed. “Marx himself speaks of the despotism in the capitalist factory, which is not exercised by the state, but rather by civil society,” said Losurdo. “And against this despotism, [he] proposed the interference of the state into the private sphere of civil society.”^[104]

Western Marxists fantasized about “the utopia of a world without power and without violence,” according to Losurdo, a horizon they shared with pacifists and advocates of nonviolence.^[105] Drawing on Gramsci, whom he did not count as a Western Marxist, Losurdo reiterated his belief that the state, the market, and the nation would withstand the demise of capitalism.^[106] Gramsci in his view had gone further than Marx, Engels, and Lenin in criticizing the convergence between liberalism and anarchism on questions of the state, and was thus not scared by accusations of “statism” in calling for the permanent political regulation of society.^[107] Losurdo thought that Marx in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” had been far too influenced by anarchist polemics against Lassallean statolatry.^[108] (Mike Macnair, a British Marxist, has gone so far as to suggest that Marx partially plagiarized Bakunin’s critique of the earlier Eisenach program.)^[109] Bourgeois right according to Losurdo can never be fully transcended: “Something must ensure obedience to the laws, and… the ‘withering away’ of the state would mean the ‘withering away’ of rights, of the rule of law.”^[110] In other words, society cannot exist without law enforcement—or “special bodies of armed men” like police, prison wardens, a standing army.

On this score, Losurdo fell beneath the threshold even of Stalin, whose ideas he was otherwise keen to defend. For the Soviet premier never officially let go of the thesis that the state would self-destruct once socialism was realized, maintaining a pseudodialectical formula about the paradox of strengthening the state in order to eventually abolish it.^[111] Stalin further hedged by arguing that international conditions were not conducive to the withering away of the state just yet.^[112] He scolded the various “textualists and Talmudists” who clung to the letter of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Capitalist encirclement meant that the Soviet state would need to endure for the time being.^[113] The endurance of the state was therefore linked to the failure of world revolution dealt with in the last section. Whatever else one might say about Stalin, he felt obliged to uphold the Marxist doctrine that the state would vanish with the realization of socialism. By contrast, Losurdo maintained that this doctrine was foolish from the outset, and that Stalin’s loyalty to it (in word, if not in deed) was a mistake. One of the lessons Losurdo drew from Eastern Marxism in the twentieth century was that a powerful state is needed not just to guard against imperialism and build up productive forces, but would remain a fixture of society.^[114]

Conclusion

Reversing the title of Benedetto Croce’s famous essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel?”, Adorno asked “what the present means in the face of Hegel, whether perhaps the reason one imagines one has attained since Hegel’s absolute reason has not in fact long since regressed behind the latter and accommodated to what merely exists, when Hegelian reason tried to set the burden of existence in motion through the reason that obtains even in what exists.”^[115] Something similar might easily be said for Marxism. Many have claimed that Marxism is no longer adequate to society today, but perhaps the opposite would be more accurate: society today is no longer adequate to Marxism. The problems Marx identified have not gone away, but the social forces he saw capable of solving them are politically in abeyance. It is no use revising Marxist doctrine in order to fit the needs of the present-day China, or any other geopolitical stand-in for the international proletariat. Nothing can replace its independent political organization within the heart of capitalism. Despite its antirevisionist pretensions, Stalinism modified key elements of Marx’s theory to satisfy the ideological exigencies of actually existing “socialist” states; it ought to be buried along with the twentieth century.

Losurdo’s body of work represents an effort to philosophically underwrite this sorry history, seeming to draw all the wrong lessons from the past hundred years. As scholarship it is shoddy, and its reasoning is so transparently motivated as to render it worthless. Its influence in the current online Stalinist revival attests to the extent to which defeat can be repackaged and sold as victory. There is no need to romanticize the world of yesteryear, and one should of course salute the sacrifices of those who helped cast off the chains of colonial domination. But there can be little doubt that the prospects for revolution prior to World War I were much brighter than they seem today, thanks to the organization of the working class throughout the advanced capitalist core at the time. One need not subscribe to this or that school of “Western Marxism,” assuming this even constitutes a coherent category, to recognize that the socialist movement has taken a gigantic step backwards compared with that earlier period. Today it is necessary to go back to basics, not by forgetting everything that came afterwards, but by returning to principles of internationalism and class independence. The difference between Marx’s time and the present is that Marxists now have to contend with the historical ruins of Marxism.

Thanks to Stefan Gužvica for the conversations about proletarian internationalism and Stalin’s views on the withering away of the state.