The Broken Clock

On Losurdo’s Western Marxism

Joshua Nicholas Pineda

May 20, 2025

Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn

by Domenico Losurdo

Monthly Review

2024

In 2024, Monthly Review Press released the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn.¹ Touting the book as a “fresh and challenging perspective on purportedly radical thinkers who have been promoted in the imperial core” with “wide-reaching implications for trend-setting discourses,” the publishers argue that Western Marxism raises “the stakes for what it means to produce critical theory.”² Unfortunately, readers will find that the book contains very little that challenges the standard operating procedures of the Western theory industry. Rather than a grounded intervention into the stagnant field of Western theory, Losurdo’s is simply another iteration of the overextended analysis of philosophical texts and concepts characteristic of the worst of the Western Marxist tradition.

This missed opportunity would be merely disappointing if Western Marxism simply failed to articulate a radical vision of socialist politics. However, Losurdo’s book offers a statist conception of authoritarian socialism that fails to meet the ambition for emancipatory politics that many Western Marxists—theoretical shortcomings notwithstanding—at least aspire to.

The following review essay will make good on the preceding claims by outlining Losurdo’s argument in Western Marxism within the context of his surrounding work.³ Given that I have very few stakes in defending the Western Marxist tradition, I will eschew nitpicking Losurdo’s interpretation of any of the specific figures examined in the book, or a reclamation project of the tradition as a whole.⁴ Rather, I will move internally through Losurdo’s argument to show the interlocking dependencies among his conceptions of Western Marxism, socialist revolution, and class struggle. In the first section, I argue that Losurdo’s taxonomy of Western Marxism lacks coherence. Only the “rejection of anticolonial struggle” unifies the disparate thinkers—both Marxist and non-Marxist—treated in Western Marxism. As I show in the second section, Losurdo’s identifies anticolonial struggle with a conception of socialist politics as the increase of the economic forces of production by the anticolonial state. This conception of socialist politics and the understanding of history it entails are, at best, contested. In the third section of this essay, I argue that Losurdo justifies this conception of socialist politics and the anticolonial historical conjuncture through his reconceptualization of the concept of class struggle. Losurdo’s rearticulation of class struggle extends the concept to include other antioppression struggles without any subsequent theoretical reconstruction. Rather, Losurdo simply empties the concept of its traditional empirical and theoretical content. Consequently, Losurdo renders the concept of class struggle capacious enough to include antiracist and feminist struggle only insofar as it becomes indeterminate enough to include almost any political content— including content with relatively counterintuitive and antisolidaristic “socialist” conclusions. The theoretical shortcomings of Losurdo’s argument have been obscured by the placid acceptance of Losurdo’s “method,” which—despite his calls for concrete historical and material analysis—tends to focus on decontextualized and unsystematic citation of philosophical texts.

To begin, however, I want to pose a simpler question: what is the book’s argument and what would have to be the case for this argument to be true?

On the Very Idea of Western Marxism

Western Marxism is framed as a response to Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. Anderson notoriously characterizes Western Marxism as an evolution in Marxist theory that abandons its traditional concerns with “economic and political” structures and reorients itself towards philosophical analysis.⁵ This shift, he argues, resulted from the formative experience of this generation of intellectuals in the two World Wars, the vicissitudes of Bolshevik Russia, and, most crucially, the “structural divorce of this Marxism from political practice.”⁶ Anderson notes that these developments have produced the most sophisticated and conceptually advanced versions of Marxist theory hitherto.

Given Anderson’s stature at the New Left Review and Verso publishing, Considerations is an apposite choice for Losurdo’s stalking horse. As his proponents frequently note, Losurdo’s criticism takes issue with a wide swath of contemporary theory they understand as “radical theory.”⁷ Western Marxism leans into this critique and maintains the Consideration’s argument while inverting Anderson’s “positive” evaluation.⁸ Whereas Anderson characterizes this theoretical shift as a turn to philosophy, Losurdo identifies the move as one towards religious messianism and empty moralism. For Losurdo then, the distinction between Eastern and Western Marxism is that the former accepts the reality of socialist struggle, while the latter denies it. Given his attempt to unsettle the Western theory industry evinced by his positioning of himself contra Anderson, this distinction is the core argument of the book.

At first blush, much of this argument seems intuitive. The overt recourse to abstract theory characteristic of both Western Marxism and “radical theory” has long been grist for the mills of critics from both within and outside the tradition.⁹ Unfortunately, Losurdo’s critique relies on a rough characterization of Western Marxism as an attitude towards his specific conception of socialist struggle, rather than on a distinct theoretical perspective or set of premises shared by the “Western Marxists.” Given the heterogeneity of the thinkers included in the book, it is questionable whether Western Marxism, as defined in Western Marxism, exists in any meaningful sense.¹⁰

Losurdo presents the development of Western Marxism in a loose chronological fashion. Again mirroring Anderson, he begins with the experiences of the First and Second World War amongst Western socialists. Losurdo contrasts this to the experience of Eastern Marxists located in the periphery and colonized world. The divergent experiences of Eastern and Western Marxists led to a split between their understandings of anticapitalist struggle.¹¹ On one side, a Western version focuses on the conflict between proletarians against capitalists. On the other, an Eastern version focuses on that between the colonized against colonizing nations. This bifurcation widened in the face of the dilemma (referred to as Danielson’s dilemma) between redressing the inequality between classes within a state and that of addressing inequality between nations.¹² For Losurdo, following both paths is difficult because rapid modernization exacerbates existing inequalities within a state, whereas a more equitable socialist model slows down development.

Losurdo’s characterization of Western Marxism as the rejection of power springs from this dynamic. Western Marxists ultimately refuse to accept this dilemma, whereas Eastern Marxists—motivated by the exigencies of maintaining power and building actually existing socialism—turn to rapid modernization. For Losurdo, the Western Marxists’ rejection of rapid industrialization and all that follows amounts to a rejection of anticolonial struggle. Losurdo contends that eliminating the inequalities between states is a necessary step to ensure the fledgling socialist nations avoid military annihilation and colonial dependence on their capitalist rivals.

Given Losurdo’s heterodox reconceptualization of [Western Marxism], we might ask whether his reformulation has any internal consistency. Is there a target—a body of texts, a set of shared premises, a definable set of authors—that Losurdo’s category tracks?

Losurdo rarely provides an explanation for this divergence beyond Western Marxist dismissals of the colonial struggle. Frequently, he seems to root it in the social chauvinism of the West and their inability to recognize the different experience of the colonized, which Losurdo characterizes as the misrecognition of the anticolonial struggle.¹³ Only a broad commitment to “rejecting” power unifies the object of Losurdo’s criticism. Thus, eschewing philosophical argumentation, Western Marxism ultimately provides a sociological explanation for the deficiencies of Western Marxism without an explicitly articulated sociological theory to constrain his interpretation.¹⁴

Losurdo’s broad conception of “evidence” of anticolonial sentiment exacerbates the unconstrained and slipshod nature of his argument. Losurdo identifies a set of themes within the Marxist tradition: a rejection of technology and science, a jejeune antistatist politics, and a concern with Judeo-Christian messianism. These concerns effectively become a set of argumentative tropes or leitmotifs that Losurdo construes as placeholders for actual imperialist sentiment. His critique proceeds through a series of decontextualized citations without outlining an underlying conceptual logic or substantive set of arguments held by thinkers he surveys.¹⁵ Thus, the mere appearance of these themes becomes evidence for a procolonial orientation irrespective of the rest of their theoretical or political record. For example, Sartre’s reservations about institutionalized forms of power in The Critique of Dialectical Reason become evidence for the counterintuitive conclusion that Sartre rejected anticolonial struggle despite his consistent support for causes like Algeria and Vietnam.

Losurdo’s Western Marxism is an attempt to reorient critical theory by reevaluating Anderson’s view of Western Marxism. Given Losurdo’s heterodox reconceptualization of this category, we might ask whether his reformulation has any internal consistency. Is there a target—a body of texts, a set of shared premises, a definable set of authors—that Losurdo’s category tracks? This question is especially pressing considering the scope of Losurdo’s critical net. Captured within its ambit include figures both outside the Marxist tradition and some explicitly opposed to it, including Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt. The loose and inconsistent connection between their positions places most of his argument’s weight on his identification of Western Marxism with the rejection of the complications of power accompanying anticolonial struggle. But, in order for the distinction to bear that weight, Losurdo’s specific conception of anticolonial struggle as socialist revolution must furnish a recognizably socialist conception of politics. Put simply, Losurdo’s critique of Western Marxism cannot be separated from his conception of socialist revolution insofar as his very idea of Western Marxism is premised on it. Crucially, this touches on the one feature most broadly shared by the authors reviewed in the text: the issue of the state and its role in the socialist revolution.

Progress, but for the East: On the State and Modernization

The most widely shared characteristic held by the disparate authors that Losurdo groups as Western Marxists is the rejection of the state. Losurdo identifies this characteristic, and its divergence from Eastern Marxism, in terms of the different experiences of the state by Western Marxists within the imperial core and those Eastern Marxists engaged in anticolonial struggle. Western Marxists experienced the state primarily as a source of repression aligned with the capitalist class. By contrast, many Eastern Marxists had successfully captured state power. Identifying state and nation, Losurdo points out that anticolonial militants such as Ho Chi Minh identified their battles as fights for their fatherland and against the imperial capitalist powers.¹⁶ Given that he distinguishes Western and Eastern Marxism on the basis of the former’s rejection of political power, this difference of orientation is the fundamental issue of the book.

The influence of the Bolshevik revolution on Lenin’s thought becomes the central example of this transformed orientation to the state afforded by successful anticolonial struggle. For Losurdo, Lenin’s earlier pronouncements of the withering away of the state are immature holdovers from his time as a militant struggling against the Tsarist state. The exigencies of creating socialism once in power—the vicious civil war against White reactionaries and the demands of industrializing the backward Russian economy—led Lenin to view the success of the Bolshevik project as contingent on building up a state.¹⁷

For Losurdo, Lenin exemplifies both the different experiences and material circumstances of the Eastern and Western Marxists. Emerging from their plunder by the imperialist powers, the fledgling socialists societies found themselves faced with immediate military and economic pressure: military pressure to compete with the technologically advanced and well-funded armies of their former colonizers, and economic pressure to alleviate the impoverished conditions of their masses without falling into economic domination. For Losurdo, industrial modernization via the state resolves these problems. That is, the use of state power is necessary for the rapid modernization and industrialization of underdeveloped economies, itself an existential necessity for anticolonial states. As Western Marxism’s editor Gabriel Rockhill argues, these pressures constituted existential threats that forced the development of what Rockhill, following Parenti, refers to as “siege socialism.”¹⁸

For Losurdo, rapid industrial modernization is thus the fundamental task of anticolonial struggle once the state has been captured. As Losurdo argues the present geopolitical configuration makes this task the preeminent goal of socialist politics more generally.¹⁹

While Losurdo and Rockhill are right to draw attention to the effects of capitalist encirclement on the socialist projects of the twentieth century, economic modernization is not identical to socialist revolution. This is doubly true for state-backed economic modernization. As I argue in this section, state-backed industrialization is perfectly compatible with the increased proletarianization of the working class—that is, with the deepening of capitalist social relations. As many commentors have noted, such industrialization is indistinguishable from the accumulation of capital. Thus, the identification of socialist revolution with economic modernization depends on a robust and empirically determinate theory of class struggle. As I will show in the third section, Losurdo’s reflections on class struggle fall far short of this mark.

Losurdo’s premise that emergent socialist countries rely on the state apparatus to modernize is relatively uncontroversial, as state-backed industrialization is well documented in both the USSR and China.²⁰ Moreover, civil war and imperialist conflict did place enormous pressure on Soviet and Chinese society. Given that these pressures have been traditionally underemphasized in standard accounts, his aspiration to redress the prevailing historical narrative on this matter is a positive development toward recovering a more accurate account of twentieth century socialism. Losurdo’s contention that the representation of both Mao and the Bolsheviks by the Western culture industry is ideologically driven is undoubtedly true.²¹

Losurdo’s primary concern is a defense of the People’s Republic of China as socialist.²² However, it is questionable whether the use of the state to industrialize either was or is leading to socialism. Many commentators have characterized the “increase of the productive forces” through the planned economies of the Chinese republic as the accumulation of capital through the appropriation of surplus from the country’s agricultural sector into the industrial sector.²³ As these interpreters have argued, this accumulation has become the bedrock for China’s rapid economic growth and the motor for its transition into a capitalist economy in the 1970s.²⁴ As Eli Friedman has argued, this transition has come at the cost of the increased proletarianization of the Chinese working class in response to pressures of international competition.²⁵

While a full-fledged intervention into the taxonomic debates surrounding the People’s Republic of China—is it capitalist? was it ever socialist? was there a transition? if so, when?—lie far beyond the scope of this review essay, the crucial point is that Losurdo’s argument in Western Marxism and his conception of socialist politics leaves no grounds for assessing the validity of any answers to these questions. As Isabella Weber notes, once the function and tasks of the state are characterized in terms of furthering economic development anything the state does can be construed as the realization of that function.²⁶

This is deeply problematic. As critics such as Friedman (and Ruckus, and Hung) argue, the “increase of the productive forces” can frequently look like the accumulation and valorization of capital. As noted in the previous section, Losurdo views such antiauthoritiarian skepticism as evidence of anticolonial chauvinism. Given that the nature of the Chinese social formation (and of state socialism more broadly) loom large in many contemporary debates about anti-imperialist politics, Losurdo leaves contemporary thinkers with little theoretical guidance to navigate these problems.

The problem with Losurdo’s account is that increasing proletarianization is a relative nonissue when revolution is identified with industrial revolution.

Anticipating this range of objections, Losurdo makes several arguments meant to specifically respond to accusations that actually existing socialism in China has become capitalist.

First, Losurdo distinguishes between the political and economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Socialist governments have historically expropriated the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s political power by seizing the levers of the state. This political expropriation ensured the socialist content of their political programs. Losurdo’s aim here is to disqualify the out-of-hand characterization of “socialist” economic measures that adopt elements of capitalist property relations—like the USSR’s NEP and the opening of the Chinese markets in the 1970s—as straightforwardly capitalist. For Losurdo, socialist states can use capitalist economic policies to pursue socialist revolution.²⁷

Losurdo’s argument, at this point, is not wholly untoward. The revolutionary transformation towards a socialist society is undoubtedly a long and difficult process, and any seizure of the political apparatus of capitalist states cannot erase preexisting capitalist social relations by instantaneous decree. Additionally, the need for economic growth and the danger of neocolonialism that Losurdo identifies are undoubtedly real. Given the reality of these pressures, the temptation of utilizing the economic levers of capitalism, and the tendency of those in power to accrue wealth to themselves, the relapse into capitalist (or, minimally, classist) relations of exploitation must be considered a real possibility after the seizure of power. To take the example of an “Eastern” anticolonial Marxist only briefly mentioned in Western Marxism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched Earth spends a significant portion of its middle chapters analyzing precisely these dangers.²⁸

Given the dangers of the reemergence of class relations within postrevolutionary societies, it is imperative Losurdo (or, really, anyone assessing the viability of actually existing socialism) provide the grounds for considering the actual class content of its economic policies. In the case of China, its economic development has coincided with rapidly increasing rate of inequality. It is reasonable to suspect that the coexistence of rapid industrial growth, the adoption of capitalist economic policies, and massive inequality are indicative of the increasing proletarianization of the Chinese people (as Friedman contends), rather than the emergence of socialism with Chinese characteristics.²⁹ The problem with Losurdo’s account is that increasing proletarianization is a relative nonissue when revolution is identified with industrial revolution.

In Class Struggle, Losurdo contends that the continued existence of inequality is a necessary feature of the CCP’s choice of rapid development. However, for Losurdo, this economic transformation is compatible with the enrichment of the Chinese people and the furthering of the anticolonial struggle as a whole. Losurdo encourages us to think of Chinese development in terms of two trains, one marked “development” (representative of the rapidly increasing wealth of urban populations profiting from China’s entry to the world market) and “underdevelopment” (the countryside). The former train is moving at a much faster rate than the latter. Although the distance between the trains is growing, both trains are moving forward towards prosperity.³⁰ Crucially, in contrast to the serious scholarship dedicated to this question, Losurdo leaves his argument on the level of this train metaphor. That is, in place of an argument, Losurdo provides us with a homily.³¹

Despite Losurdo’s assertions, there is a raging debate regarding these two incommensurate visions of China’s role in twentieth century history. On the one hand, Losurdo gives us a vision of the People’s Republic of China as the leading force in anticolonial struggle; on the other hand, other commentators view China’s economic ascendance as the deepening of capitalist social relations. For Losurdo, China’s rapid economic advancement and increasing willingness to defend its national interests represent the leading challenge to the “Columbian” geopolitical order founded on Western dominance.³² China’s opening to the capitalist pressures of the global market and the attendant costs to Chinese workers result from the postrevolutionary dilemma between remaining in poverty or opening up to the Western economy. Chinese workers recognize that the real aggressors are not the Chinese state, but rather Western imperial powers. In fact, they have a vested interest in the acquisition of Western technology and overall growth of the industries that employ them.³³ By contrast, for researchers like Friedman, Ruckus, and Hung, China is either a challenger or subordinate partner in the international capitalist order, whose opening to the market led to the increased proletarianization of its workforce (itself, assaulted by the increasing demands for productivity and the erosion of a previously guaranteed social safety net). In this view, rather than problematically assume workers’ flat acquiescence, we can appreciate why China has become the global leader in wildcat strikes for the last three decades.³⁴

Losurdo’s entire political vision in Western Marxism is premised on the first understanding of China’s economic expansion. Deciding between these two perspectives depends on a robust notion of socialist politics—that is, class struggle—from which we could assess the outcomes of actually existing socialist countries. Unfortunately, as I argue in the next section, Losurdo ultimately empties the notion of class struggle such that his accounting becomes reduced to performative polemics. Consequently, Losurdo’s conceptual apparatus lacks the internal resources necessary to weigh in on these pressing questions.

Class Struggle without Class Struggle: Socialism, but for the Bosses

As I’ve argued in the previous section, Losurdo’s identification of state socialism with socialist revolution rests on his specific notion of anticolonial politics as class struggle. Consequently, Class Struggle is invaluable context for assessing Western Marxism.³⁵ His aim in both books is to justify his conception of anticolonial struggle as the primary locus of worldwide socialist revolution: Class Struggle provides his theoretical rearticulation of socialist struggle as anticolonial struggle, while Western Marxism applies those insights into a broad critique of the theory industry.

Losurdo’s objectives make him an appealing figure to many segments of today’s left. The prominent role of internationalism in Palestinian solidarity organizing has made economic reductionist interpretations of Marxism increasingly unsatisfying to many of those mobilized over the last two years. Consequently, debates about imperialism, national struggle, and settler colonialism are increasingly important in strategic and theoretical debates on the left.³⁶

Unfortunately, the argumentation in Class Struggle dashes these hopes. Losurdo attempts to undermine a narrowly economistic conception of class struggle by extending the concept to include those aspects of social struggle that have generally been excluded from its ambit. Losurdo contends that Marx and Engels intended their theory of class struggle to provide a general theory of social conflict—that is, their intention is to subsume all social conflict under the rubric of class struggle.³⁷ Unfortunately, this overextension of the concept leaves it without any determinate content to orient theoretical or strategic analysis. That is, as I argue in this section, in reconstructing class struggle as a generalized concept that refers to everything, it ultimately ends up saying nothing about anything specific.

Losurdo attempts to counter class reductionism through a broad engagement with Hegel on two fronts. First, Losurdo points to the importance of noneconomic objectives in instances of social conflict. These demands for collective self-determination are characterized as a Marxist refiguring of the Hegelian struggle for recognition.³⁸ Second, Losurdo conceptualizes these struggles against the backdrop of a Hegelian tripartite division of family, civil society, and state.³⁹ The class struggle, for Losurdo, is thus waged on the level of a struggle to reorganize the division of labor organized according to domestic slavery, wage slavery, and colonial depredation. Losurdo’s working definition of class struggle is thus an expansive struggle for recognition and equality that pertain to the division of labor.

Losurdo’s redefinition of class struggle avoids the pitfall of sidelining antioppression struggles. However, it does so at a tremendous cost. Despite its vexed history within the history of Marxism, the concept of class struggle has the virtue of denoting a specific relationship of exploitation. That is, classes are constituted by the extraction of surplus value by one group from another. Losurdo’s refiguring of the class relationship under the broader heading of “struggles for recognition” obscures the notion of “class” won by more traditional Marxist analysis. Indeed, this indeterminacy is precisely a feature of his hollowing out of the concept “class struggle,” as he aims to make it incorporate antioppression struggles.⁴⁰ Losurdo is therefore overgeneralizing the concept of class struggle. Such struggles can (and, for any Marxist indeed should be) class struggles. However, Losurdo’s overextension of the concept—his attempt to simply subsume antioppression struggles under a broader, more indeterminate concept—limits its analytical viability.

…Losurdo, like the Western Marxists he criticizes, withdraws from a textured analysis of the historical reality of class struggle in favor of a conceptual analysis of philosophical writings.

Defining class struggle in terms of the struggle for recognition pertaining to the division of labor makes it very difficult to use the concept to judge which side of the struggle is the oppressed side. Take the example of the increasing proletarianization of the Chinese working class raised in the previous section: is the PRC restructuring the economy to redress international inequity, or is it expropriating the surplus labor of its workers to meet the demands of the capitalist world system? Losurdo, quite rightly, contends that complicated social situations like this demand attention to concrete historical specificities. However, the choice of a specific theory of class struggle recommends certain sorts of empirical attention rather than others.

Regardless of its limitations, a more traditional Marxist conception of class struggle, leads to a range of empirical questions about the rate of exploitation in different countries and transfer of value between different national segments of global capital. By contrast, Losurdo’s redefinition of class struggle as a more general demand for recognition leaves very little guidance as to the forms of inquiry relevant for assessing the question. Tellingly, Losurdo’s analysis of the nature of class struggle in China veers away from the empirical analysis found in other commentators and, for the most part, focuses on characterizing the ideology and intentions of theorists.⁴¹ More crucially, the vast majority of the sources Losurdo cites in his defense of the socialist project in China in Western Marxism, Class Struggle, and “Has China become Capitalist,” are from Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

The second problem lies in assessing moments in which the different aspects of class struggle might conflict. Persons that appear as oppressor when viewed in the context of a certain dominant aspect of class struggle (such as, for example, a cis white capitalist woman), might appear in subordinate positions relative to others (such as, for example, her husband). In many cases, the relationships may be contradictory, or overdetermined (such as, say, sexual or racial harassment by one’s employee). Losurdo’s concept of class struggle unhelpfully amalgamates these distinct forms of conflict without specifying their differences. Consequently, it offers no guidance for situations in which pointing to the divergences between distinct forms of oppression might be both analytically helpful and politically necessary.

Much of Losurdo’s argument for his conception of class struggle is motivated by his rejection of the narrowly reductionist view of class struggle. Like his appeal for internationalist Marxists, this rejection of narrow economism constitutes a significant part of his appeal. However, rejecting economic reductionism is not an argument for Losurdo’s impressionistic mix of recognition theory and the division of labor. A comprehensive comparison of Losurdo’s theory with competing models of class struggle analysis lies outside of the scope of this review essay. However, some broad comparisons of his argumentative strategy illustrate that Losurdo, like the Western Marxists he criticizes, withdraws from a textured analysis of the historical reality of class struggle in favor of a conceptual analysis of philosophical writings.

Criticisms of economistic approaches to class struggle exist both inside and outside of the Marxist tradition. Most of these critique the explanatory weakness of traditional Marxist explanations. These criticisms have tended to point to places in which Marxist historical interpretations appear to fit historical evidence within a narrowly economistic version of Marxist theory: these critiques generally denote this “outlying” historical evidence as “the political.”⁴² Losurdo’s Class Struggle is both a response to and extensions of such criticisms. As noted before, Losurdo’s strategy is to incorporate these “political” aspects within a broader struggle of recognition in order to reassert class struggle as a general theory of social conflict; given that determinate content generally serves to specify a range of conditions under which a concept is applicable, Losurdo’s concept of class struggle is more indeterminate than traditional conceptions because he seeks to broaden its scope. Losurdo’s strategy here runs counter to the general strategies within Marxism for addressing these issues. More damningly, his “argument” for this strategy totally fails to consider other attempts to “stretch” reductionist conceptions of class struggle, nor the empirical, explanatory, or conceptual difficulties that they raise.

In the case of racial and patriarchal oppression, Marxists have generally attempted to develop the notion of class struggle to show the interaction between struggles surrounding exploitation and antioppression struggles. To cite a limited range of examples, studies of racial capitalism have attempted to show the way in which capitalism, as a mode of production grounded on exploitation, creates, exacerbates, or divides racial groupings as a form of labor subordination. Along similar lines, debates within Marxist-Feminism have tried to specify the relationship between patriarchal and capitalist oppression: theorists within the tradition have asked whether capitalism and patriarchy are distinct systems, whether patriarchy exists as a system, and interrogated the causal priority of either in explaining social conflict.⁴³ These attempts to refine and specify the relationship between oppression and exploitation raise empirical concerns obviated by Losurdo’s bare stipulation that antioppression struggles simply are class struggles. That is, the stark alternative Losurdo poses between economic reductionism and his general theory of class struggle leaves unexamined a wide swath of excluded middle ground.⁴⁴

Such approaches have two comparative advantages to Losurdo’s. First, these approaches maintain the specificity of both class and other sociohistorical categories (like race, or gender) in a manner that encourages empirical debate and conceptual specification.⁴⁵ That is, rather than simply asserting that the empirical and conceptual difficulties resolve themselves with an analysis of the concrete, they provide paths forward for discussion. Secondly, and more crucially for Losurdo’s politics in Western Marxism, their continued focus on relations of exploitation centers proletarianization in their analysis. As I’ve suggested in the preceding argument, Losurdo’s indeterminate conception of class, unmoored as it is from the guidelines of empirical analysis, facilitates his willful ignorance of these questions.

To return to the closing meditations of the previous section, Losurdo’s broad reconceptualization of class struggle as a universal struggle for recognition might be specified into a more robust, determinate concept of class struggle that furthers the empirical investigation and conceptual specification necessary for theory. However, the general indeterminacy of his concepts, the direction of his argument towards expansive overextension, and his aversion to systematicity render this merely theoretical possibility unlikely. More to the point, it seems obvious that Losurdo is generally uninterested in pursuing such theoretical questions. A cursory review of the footnotes of Western Marxism and Class Struggle reveals little to no engagement with the existing literature on debates regarding racial capitalism, dual- or single-systems theory, or the more recent empirical analyses of growing inequality and imperialism. What’s left is a broad account of class struggle in the vague terms of the struggle against the dehumanization of the oppressed. More crucially, his substitution of a history of the development of the forces of production for a discussion of the concrete reality of exploitation leaves his notion of class struggle so labile that it opens the space for Losurdo to take up positions that seem straightforwardly antiworker and antisolidaristic.

In criticizing the “anarchy” caused by economic stagnation after the Great Leap Forward, Losurdo cites “a witness and Western scholar,” who reported that

even the last attendant […], if he wants to, can decide to do nothing, stay home for a year or two and still receive his salary at the end of the month.” The “culture of laziness” also infected the expanding private sector of the economy. “The former employees of the State […] arrive late, then they read the newspaper, go to the canteen a half-hour early, leave the office an hour early,” and they were often absent for family reasons, for example, “because my wife is sick.” And the executives and technicians who tried to introduce discipline and efficiency into the workplace were forced to face not only resistance and the moral outrage of the employees (who considered it infamy to impose a fine on an absent worker caring for his wife), but sometimes even threats and violence from below.⁴⁶

While Losurdo is attributing the cause of this anarchy to a general demoralization caused by populist stagnation, it is telling that his quote echoes the disapproval of the workers’ resistance and outrage. When placed in the broad context of China’s overturning of the colonialist world order, such basic resistance to the dehumanizing conditions of industrial labor appears as a regressive reaction against the class struggle—at least, from Losurdo’s perspective.⁴⁷ At this point, Losurdo’s expansive concept of struggle serves a civilizational narrative glorifying the expansion of the forces of production within the People’s Republic of China. The question of whether this happens at the expense of the Chinese working class seems immaterial from this lofty standpoint. In fact, the question of left or popular resistance to China’s economic and political policies rarely enters either Losurdo’s or Rockhill’s accounts.⁴⁸ That is, Losurdo’s notion of class struggle seems devoid of solidarity—or, if not, of solidarity for the Chinese worker as opposed to the Chinese state.

If Losurdo is “dangerous” or “serious” enough to respond to, it’s due to the corrosive effects that the integration of his theoretical constructions makes possible. That is, there is very little difference between the naked political polemicizing he attributes to the Western Marxist tradition and his own unreflective partisanship…

Losurdo’s theoretical imprecision enables him to accept a notion of class struggle that takes the side of the bosses. While it might be argued that this is a necessary corrective given his reorientation of class struggle away from class reductionism towards anticolonial, antiracist, and feminist struggle, the notion of class struggle he espouses has also led to the convergence between his interpreters and the most opportunistic class reductionist Marxists. In a recent interview in Monthly Review, Gabriel Rockhill recently argued that, “finally, I would be remiss not to mention that identity politics, which has its recent ideological roots in the New Left and the social chauvinism V. I. Lenin had earlier diagnosed in the European left, is one of the principal ideological tools of imperialism. The divide-and-conquer strategy has been used to splinter targeted countries by fostering religious, ethnic, national, racial, or gender conflicts.”⁴⁹ Such remarks coming from Western Marxism’s editor and one of the principle proponents of Losurdo’s work seem equally in line with the opportunistic tirades against DEI, Identity Politics, and wokeism proffered by Vivek Chibber in Jacobin’s Confronting Capitalism podcast.⁵⁰ The coexistence of Losurdo’s “anticolonial” line of thought with both a civilizational narrative of technological advancement more characteristic of the most Eurocentric of thinkers and reactionary class reductionism is not a necessary consequence of Losurdo’s indeterminate conception of class struggle; rather, they are an indication that, in theorizing everything, Losurdo’s theory of class struggle says almost nothing, allowing him and his proponents to infer almost anything from their basic premises.⁵¹

Footnote: The Poverty of Polemics

In the preceding, I’ve argued that Western Marxism is a theoretical assault directed at an unclear target, supporting an empirically tendentious view of world history, and justified by a politically labile and conceptually underdetermined theory of class struggle. As I’ve noted throughout this review essay, Losurdo’s argumentation tends to the unsystematic synthesis of theories that overemphasizes reading the history of ideas rather than reading history. If that’s the case, it seems like Western Marxism (and Losurdo’s oeuvre as a whole) represents less a groundbreaking shift in critical theory and more a reiteration of the “radical theory” that Losurdo himself criticizes.

Given my extremely negative conclusions, one could interpret this review as simply another instance of internecine sectarian sniping characteristic of the left. Notably, while I’ve tried to focus on characterizations of Losurdo from those sympathetic to him, my research on the political and economic status of China has drawn on Eli Friedman (the coauthor, amongst authors, of China in Global Capitalism alongside Spectre’s publication manager Ashley Smith), and a range of authors including Ho-Fung Hung and Ralf Ruckus who have appeared in Spectre.

From this perspective, this review essay could appear as a simple broadside in what Gabriel Rockhill has referred to as the “Intellectual World War.” While I have represented Losurdo’s Western Marxism as a quintessentially polemical text, the preceding review undoubtedly carries polemical elements (particularly if one peruses the footnotes). Undoubtedly, if this review is read at all, online discourse will present it as another instance of WMPF (Western Marxist Purity Fetishism) that Losurdo’s critics purportedly engage in.

At a certain point, there’s very little one could do in response to such an interpretation. However, to clarify the stakes of this engagement, I view the broad acceptance of Losurdo and Rockhill’s voices within contemporary Marxist discourse as more problematic due to its corrosive effects on theory, rather than as an episode of a “world war in theory.”

While I agree with Rockhill’s reservations about the “theory industry” and his call for a materialist analysis of intellectual production, I actually doubt that debates within left publications have a direct or great enough impact on class organization to constitute anything like a “world war.” Such hyperbolic characterizations—typical of Rockhill who equates Western Marxism’s “defeatism” with Nazi apologism—exaggerate the importance of theory in a manner typical of the very theory industry Rockhill is criticizing.⁵² Such views overinflate the role of ideological struggle. More problematically, they metonymically substitute the specific subsection of ideological struggle, exemplified by both the Academy and publishers like Verso, for ideological struggle as a whole.⁵³

If Losurdo is “dangerous” or “serious” enough to respond to, it’s due to the corrosive effects that the integration of his theoretical constructions makes possible. That is, there is very little difference between the naked political polemicizing he attributes to the Western Marxist tradition and his own unreflective partisanship for the People’s Republic of China. There is no feature of Losurdo’s historical analysis more systematic than the hodgepodge of historical assertions Arendt draws together in The Origins of Totalitarianism. If Arendt unreflectively draws on Jefferson as her primary source in her characterization of the American Revolution, then Losurdo does the same for Mao and Deng Xiaoping in his analysis of the Great Leap Forward and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Minimally, this review essay argues for critical self-reflexivity of the kind that Eli Friedman urges in asking us to view the People’s Republic of China’s government’s self-characterization with the same amount of skepticism that we view the United States government’s.⁵⁴

Given the politically labile nature and theoretical imprecision of Losurdo’s conceptual edifice, texts like Western Marxism and Class Struggle simply sketch a vision of history and demand its readers to choose their side. That is, as I’ve indicated above, Losurdo’s project should be understood as an exercise in polemics more than anything else. If the preceding criticisms hold, then the reception of Losurdo as a serious thinker by a significant minority in the intellectual and radical left deforms the public spaces in which theoretical research can be practiced. Despite my disagreements with thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, he at least pays attention to empirical and historical debates regarding the nature of imperialism that Losurdo ignores.⁵⁵ Their willingness to countenance Losurdo as a serious intervention in these questions is an immense disservice to the issues under consideration.

In a recent issue of Spectre, Sean Larson argues that one of the important functions of a theoretical education is that it empowers the working class.⁵⁶ By helping exploited and oppressed people acquire the intellectual tools necessary to cognitively map the contradictory political space of Western capitalist imperialism, theory helps workers emancipate themselves or, at the very least, decide on their own direction of emancipation. That is, emancipatory theory must be mediated, insofar as theorists cannot directly determine their interlocutors’ attitudes towards their claims. At best, theory provides an explanation of the world and a set of inferential cues—that is, a chain of argumentation—that its audience can follow. Moreover, the empirical premises of a theoretical argument are usually indexed to various sources that an audience can reference (usually provided in the footnotes). Hyperbolic polemicization of the sort proffered by Losurdo and Rockhill shortcircuits this project and undercuts the possibility of critical reflection and verification by characterizing theory-choice as a battle in the grand conflict between anticolonial and colonial struggle.

Moreover, the emancipatory and pedagogical aspects of theory assaulted by Losurdo and Rockhill’s polemics are what make theory’s epistemic gains possible. At its best, theoretical practice is self-reflective, collective, dynamic, and cumulative. As Wilfrid Sellars argues, the cognitive gains of science solely come from the fact that it’s a self-correcting practice. Accepting Losurdo’s polemical and unsystematic approach to theory simply because he agrees with one’s positions on China or internationalism corrode that self-reflective and critical orientation to the point that it undercuts the possibility for a collective investigation as such. It is not just that Losurdo’s polemical style avoids serious inquiry. Worse, the questions that would prompt so many necessary investigations are themselves unaskable given his commitments.

To put it in other words, accepting Losurdo’s impressionistic associationism prevents any of his readers from concluding anything on the basis of his premises, no matter how correct they seem. As noted before, I agree with the fundamental premise that the Western academy is replete with cultural chauvinism and systemic racism; such a premise seems intuitive to me.⁵⁷ Moreover, I fundamentally agree that any Marxism that does not embrace internationalism and anticolonial struggle is not worth the name. However, I am unable to follow Losurdo’s reasoning from any of these premises to his pro-state politics or civilizational vision of history. The inferential and argumentative paths leading from these premises to his conclusions are either too indeterminate or too inattentive to other possibilities. Like a broken clock, Western Marxism is right, but only twice a day.

China, Class struggle, Critical Theory, Losurdo, Marxist Theory, Western Marxism

Joshua Nicholas Pineda

Joshua Nicholas Pineda was born in Toronto. He received his MA and PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is a member of Spectre‘s editorial board.

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