This is the first in a three-part series on Domenico Losurdo’s and Gabriel Rockhill’s critiques of Western Marxism and their counterposition of a “new Stalinism.” This first part introduces Losurdo and Rockhill’s arguments and examines their unsustainable critique of former New Left Review editor Perry Anderson, which is based on miscomprehension and misrepresentation. Part Two will show that Losurdo and Rockhill’s misjudgements find their source in dubious methodologies and a resistance to any historical materialist account of the contradictory nature of Stalinism in the Twentieth Century. Part Three will examine the nature of Western Marxism as Stalinism’s self-critique and consider what this means for any future Leninism.

PART ONE: THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND THE NEW STALINISM

Introduction: A World of Oddities and Curiosities

A quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, Marxism finds itself in one of the most precarious positions of its history. The causes of this precarity are multiple, but central among them was the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989-90. The historical scale of the defeat was immediately apparent, for the Russian Revolution in 1917 was arguably the most significant historical event of the Twentieth Century. The collapse of the Soviet Union signalled the defeat of the Russian Revolution. The collapse was not only of the states but also of a global ecosystem comprising the “official communist” parties, which relied on the Eastern Bloc’s existence. Capitalism paraded itself as triumphant, with Fukuyama’s “end of history.”

If the scale of the Left’s defeat was obvious, what was not clear at the time would be its duration. Some Marxists could convince themselves that there would be a positive side to this erasure of Stalinism – it had played a contradictory role historically, in the dubious example of undemocratic states defined by repression and surveillance, alongside achievements in education, health, employment, culture, and so on. Secondly, it had played a contradictory role internationally, overseeing defeats and elsewhere providing support for progressive processes. In this new open field, some of us hoped for a revival of a revolutionary Marxism closer to that of Lenin and the Third International – yet this proved to be a disappointed hope.

Resistance since 1990 has been, for the most part, intermittent or absent. The most encouraging developments came with the “Pink Tide” in Latin America, most clearly Venezuela under Chávez. In the imperialist nations, the anti-war, anti-globalisation movements, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Palestine solidarity campaign failed to gain purchase, to extend beyond their initial horizons, or to give birth to new political formations. None of these seeds sprouted into the hoped-for new wave of radicalisation. Meanwhile, the Chinese Revolution seemed to move to the Right after 1990, with capitalist market mechanisms providing extraordinary leaps in productivity and living standards, though in other respects with more ambiguous outcomes. 

In this context, we witnessed the disappearance of mass communist parties – although with some large parties still operating in certain Global South nations (India, Philippines, etc) and a mass party active in Cuba, and parties operating in China and Vietnam. In the imperialist countries, Marxism is now defended and elaborated principally in journals and by publishers – Historical Materialism, Verso, Jacobin, New Left Review, Iskra Books, Haymarket – and by small but active parties such as the PSL in the USA and PTB in Belgium. At the same time, a large online culture has cropped up. The triumphalism of the “The End of History” thesis is long past. Recent political developments – the genocide in Gaza, increasing social polarisation, US interventions in Latin America, wars in Ukraine and Iran – have provoked a simmering radicalisation re-emerging in the West. One feature has been the reemergence of a Marxist literature in the imperialist countries marked by a lack of depth, lack of historical scrupulousness and rigour, and lack of engagement with the history of the socialist movement – a new generation of academic Marxism.

I have written elsewhere about the unexpected rebirth of Kautskyism.¹ Accompanying it is a reborn Stalinism (self-defined often as Marxism-Leninism but most often departing from many of Lenin’s own strategic principles in favour of the dominant strategies and tactics of the “official communist movement”) that, just like the New Kautskyism, lacks sufficient engagement with the historical record of the twentieth century and is notably unlearned in the breadth of classic Marxist works. This helps us to situate the work of Domenico Losurdo and Gabriel Rockhill. Losurdo had been a relatively marginal figure of Italian Communism, an intellectual rather than a leader, of less note than figures like Il Manifesto luminaries Lucio Magri and Rosana Rossanda. Yet in the last decade of his life, and since his 2018 death, he emerged as a figure of significance. Rockhill is of a younger generation. From the world of French critical theory, he converted to Marxism in recent years, although idiosyncratically, as something of an acolyte of the late Italian.

The two propound the same theoretical stance, a form of Stalinism, which here I take to denote, in the first place, the political regime and doctrine that emerged in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, characterised by the rise of a bureaucratic caste within the USSR, the suppression of socialist democracy, and the strategic substitution of international revolution with the doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Its correlate international wing, in the form of the mainstream communist parties, tended in the first place to subordinate their own political activity to the interests and directions of this bureaucratic caste – which sometimes aligned to the interests of international revolution and at other times undermined it. In both cases – the ruling caste in the USSR and mainstream movement elsewhere – we have a profoundly contradictory movement, at once progressive and reactionary. 

Kautskyism and Stalinism – thirty years ago, only some kind of Nostradamus Marxist could have predicted that these would be notable contributions to twenty-first-century socialism. As with Kautskyism, so I will suggest that this Stalinism is a paper tiger, a theory pretending to have radical edge, but which proves to be flimsy, its teeth all for show – the worst one will get here is a paper cut. This stance is apparent in Losurdo and Rockhill’s books on Western Marxism – Western Marxism: How it Was born, How it Died, and How it can Be Reborn, and Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? – which we will examine here.²

With Good Intentions: A Worthy Stance Comes Awry

For both of our new Stalinists, the distinction between Western and Eastern Marxism is summarised in Rockhill’s introduction to Losurdo’s book: “The Eastern Marxists, as [Losurdo] explained, were identified as those who actually exercised power, as in the USSR, Vietnam, Korea, China, Cuba, and so forth. The Western Marxists, by contrast, were intellectuals who opposed these efforts to construct socialism, rejecting the quest for power in favor of diverse forms of critical theory, while sometimes presenting their distance from power as an epistemological advantage for discovering so-called authentic Marxism.”³ In this account, the division between “two Marxisms” occurred during the First World War. With this bifurcation, the conception of what socialism means diverged. Western Marxism tended to be Messianic and utopian; Eastern Marxism grasped the necessity of state building and development and was realist. Taken in the most generous way, Losurdo’s reflections on this could be considerations on the way colonial nations have national-democratic tasks to carry out, whereas in the imperial core, these are substantially accomplished, and what remains are subordinate to the directly anti-capitalist struggle. Losurdo’s argument could, with a large dose of intellectual charity, be considered as emerging from Lenin’s 1916 argument in “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism.” The years spanning roughly 1912-1916 could be considered the phase when Lenin developed his “mature theory.” For if Leninist arguments about consciousness and spontaneity, party and class, emerged a decade earlier, World War One drove him to construct his conceptions of imperialism, labour aristocracy, and the opposition of bourgeois workers’ party/revolutionary party. This moment was a Rubicon for socialism, for it severed Communism from Social Democracy for good. If, by “Western Marxism,” we mean the opportunism typically embraced by the labour aristocracy – this is an argument with some force.

Thus, the strong side of the argument proposed by Losurdo and Rockhill (who writes the introduction to the English translation of Losurdo’s Western Marxism) is in its emphasis on opposing imperialism and criticising the social chauvinism that it produces within the imperial core. The desire to expose those in the socialist movement in the West today, tainted as many are by sectarianism toward movements of the Global South, is laudable. The desire to expose the pretence in academia and middle management that the latest radical, trendy theory, perhaps by Žižek or Badiou or Judith Butler or Critical Race theory, is the very cutting edge of contemporary thought, can only be applauded. We should emphasise this positive side here and keep it in mind for what follows.

The problem is that Western Marxism is not for Losurdo and Rockhill homologous to Lenin’s category of “opportunism.” Their definition of Western Marxism applies first and foremost to those who are dismissive or critical of the struggles of the Global South and the regimes of “actually existing socialism.” In their view, the anti-imperialist struggle of the exploited world against the imperialist world is the primary contradiction of global capitalism, and hence they downplay the class struggles within various nations. This fixed focus on the anti-imperialist struggle is, we should note, a break from Lenin’s logic. For Lenin, following Marx, socialism was ultimately an international project. In Lenin’s view, the Russian Revolution was an act which would hopefully prove a catalyst for revolution in the West, which would then come to the aid of the Soviet Union. Once the Bolsheviks’ hope in a German revolution was dashed, Lenin defined the task as to “hold on” and develop toward socialism while they waited. In Lenin’s conception, there is an interplay between anti-imperialist struggles (between nations) and class struggles (within them). On some occasions, the survival of the Soviet Union took precedence in his calculations. On others, Lenin considered sacrificing the interests of the Russian Revolution for a greater good of international revolution. It all posed a disquieting question, taken up by both Trotsky at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern and Gramsci later in prison: why had the experience of the Russian Revolution proved so hard to reproduce?

Neither Losurdo nor Rockhill follows Lenin’s logic on this, and their Marxism threatens hereby to be reduced to a simplistic anti-imperialism, a binary opposition, a black and white world. Their primary division is between those who support specific governments and those who critique them in any way. There is no time here, so their argument goes, for idealistic notions of democracy or freedom, since victorious revolutionary regimes must modernise fast. As Losurdo wrote: “In the East, and in practically all of the countries where communists had taken power, the principal problem of political leadership was not the ‘withering away of the state apparatus’ but how to avoid the danger of colonial or neocolonial subjection and how, therefore, to make up for backwardness in relation to the more industrially advanced countries.”⁴ Questions about the nature of the socialist state and the role and vision of socialist leadership within those regimes is effectively evaporated.

Extending the definition of Western Marxism to include any thinker who critiques “actually existing socialism” (USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc) leads also to a diffusion of its utility as a term. Losurdo and Rockhill take an obvious definitional step, which is to include non-Marxist thinkers into the category, since they too function to undermine “actually existing socialism.” Rockhill writes approvingly that Losurdo is “diagnosing a historical phenomenon that extends well beyond the work of self-declared Marxists. He focuses on philosophical currents coming out of the Frankfurt School and French theory, as well as some of the work that is in dialogue with them.” Rockhill continues: “What the Western Marxists examined in [Losurdo’s] book shares in common, then, is not their dedication to Marxism per se. Rather, it is their promotion by the U.S.-driven theory industry as the most radical theory on offer.”⁵ Losurdo discusses multiple non-Marxists, some of whom were “soon to be” Marxists (Bloch and Lukács), others who “once were” Marxists (Toni Negri and Michael Hardt), some who are non-Marxists (Gorgio Agamben ), and others who are “anti-Marxists” (Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault). Rockhill’s book continues the argument that Western Marxism is part of an imperial theory industry, dedicated to ideological dissemination of “social chauvinist” positions with the aim of developing a Left “compatible” with capitalism. He uses the example of the Frankfurt School, who he documents as working for elements of the US State. Losurdo has framed the argument, which Rockhill has done much to both distribute and develop.

Testing a Paradigmatic Figure: The Case of Perry Anderson

Unfortunately, Losurdo and Rockhill’s conception of “Western Marxism” cannot survive serious scrutiny. By setting up the category of either/or, for or against, they have set up a situation where there is no space for complexity and ambiguity, or ambivalence. They end up forcing various thinkers into the Western Marxist category when they don’t belong. That is, we have a problem of straw-personing (“straw-manning” as it once would have been called), of attacking various thinkers for things they didn’t write, think, or believe. Losurdo opens his book with an attack on Perry Anderson, a key force behind New Left Review and Verso books, a one-time revolutionary Marxist close to the Trotskyist current in the UK and Europe. Rockhill doubles down on this attack, developing it at length in his introduction to Losurdo’s book. Both target Anderson’s 1976 work, Considerations on Western Marxism, against which their books are overtly counterposed. They contest Anderson’s claim that Western Marxism represented any kind of radical novelty, whose originality stems from the historical experience of Europe, which Anderson argues is in “certain critical respects the most advanced in the world.” Losurdo asserts that “Anderson proclaimed the excellence of Western Marxism, finally liberated from the suffocating embrace of Eastern Marxism. A bright new life seemed to be on the horizon for the former; in fact, its premise was suicidal.”⁶ Rockhill complains that there is no reference to “Ho Chi Minh thought” in Anderson’s book and berates him for not recognising that the period between the Second World War and the mid-1970s was a period of massive advance for the socialist project. And on it goes, with Rockhill suggesting that:

Anderson’s book is, in fact, a repository for many of [Western Marxism’s] major themes: idealism and the primacy of theory, Eurocentric social chauvinism in the sense of an attitude of patronizing cultural superiority, the dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism, a politics of defeat based on historical misrepresentations, a wilful dilution of Marxism with bourgeois theory and petty-bourgeois theoretical practices, a celebration of marketable novelty at the expense of practical relevance, and self-promotional opportunism that perpetuates cultural imperialism and disdain for Marxism in the Global South.⁷

The simple problem here is one repeated throughout Losurdo’s book in reference to other thinkers: this is an inaccurate summary of Anderson’s general position in 1975-6 and his specific argument in Considerations. Several other fallacies must be recruited to keep the whole thing from disintegrating. To straw-personing, we can add “selective abstraction” (taking a quote or statement or event out of context and suggesting it represents the entirety of the issue, or the whole of a person’s thought), such as Losurdo and Rockhill’s fixation on Anderson’s claim that Western Marxism was profoundly original and sophisticated, which they turn into proof that he is advocating for it, rather than attempting to grasp the overall arc of his argument. De-contextualisation is often combined with selective abstraction, as it is here. The thinkers Losurdo and Rockhill engage with are rarely sufficiently placed within their historical and material contexts. Rare is any serious distinction between a thinker’s phases, no consideration of the political problems they were facing, which inspired the themes of their work at the time, nor is any account made of the political projects these thinkers were involved in. In Losurdo, this results in what Ross Wolfe has called the “jarring juxtapositions” of fundamentally different Marxists, since one passage from one can be contrasted to a passage from another without the above constraints.⁸ As a method to discredit an opposing thinker, this can work, but it relies upon some substantial ignorance of the reader. Let’s continue to use Perry Anderson as a paradigmatic example of Losurdo and Rockhill’s approach.

First, Anderson does indeed represent Western Marxism as typified by “originality” and “novelty,” and at the same time – and this is what Losurdo and Rockhill are blind to – he warns that “Western Marxism was less than Marxism to the extent that it was Western.”⁹ That is, Anderson attempted to retain a dialectical sense of Western Marxism’s originality and its congenital problems. His was a profoundly ambivalent assessment of Western Marxism. When he wrote Considerations, Anderson was a committed Leninist, and so it’s no surprise that for him Western Marxism would be an inadequate form of Marxism. But where Anderson mounts overwhelmingly a criticism, Losurdo and Rockhill see a valorisation. Somehow, they conclude that Anderson is trying to free himself from the shackles of Eastern Marxism when in truth he’s arguing instead for a return to it – if we understand “Eastern Marxism” for the moment to be represented by Leninism.¹⁰

What of the claim that Anderson holds to a “dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism”? Again, this rebuke cannot withstand the test of facts. For in his claim that there is no “socialism” extant in the world, Anderson is simply being orthodox: according to Marx, socialism would require the cooperation of multiple post-capitalist nations, a position that Lenin held until the end of his life; he repeatedly argued that the Russian Revolution could only survive and ultimately achieve socialism through the extension of revolution to the advanced capitalist countries. One famous formulation often cited from The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution is translated in some editions (though not all) as: “Without a more or less simultaneous revolution in a number of advanced countries, the victory of socialism is impossible.”¹¹ This was one of the foundations of Marxism’s internationalism, so widespread that in his 1924 Foundations of Leninism, Stalin himself wrote: “[For] the final victory of socialism… the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed.”¹² That is to say: according to Marx and Lenin and 1924 Stalin, Anderson is correct. Rockhill either doesn’t recognise this theoretical and historical issue, chooses not to mention it, or isn’t familiar enough with the historical debates. At the time he wrote Considerations, Anderson believed there were many “workers’ states” and Global South movements worthy of support. His argument was not against internationalism or support for Global South revolutions; it was a comment on the inability to complete the socialist project in embattled and isolated nations, regardless of whether they are Global South nations or advanced capitalist ones. It is not Anderson who here has broken with Marx and Lenin but rather Losurdo and Rockhill who have [Aside: the term “socialism” is often used in a non-technical way, as a general catch-all term for post-capitalist or revolutionary states attempting to move toward socialism, as we will see in a moment].

The above reading of Anderson’s actual position is supported by the evidence of his political activity during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time Anderson wrote Considerations, the New Left Review editorial collective was close to the International Marxist Group (the UK section of the Fourth International), and both journal and organisation were deeply involved in supporting the struggles of the Global South – Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere. New Left Review, of which Anderson was the editor at the time of Vietnamese victory in 1975, published a piece in issue 91 in May-June 1975 by “the Editors,” titled “Victory in Indochina.” This editorial – likely drafted by Anderson in the very same year that he wrote Considerations– stated that:

The ultimate victory of the Indochinese revolution has profound significance for the global order that emerged from the Second World War. After so much heroism and sacrifice, the Vietnamese revolutionary movement has at last achieved the goal of which it was deprived by the way that war was concluded. The Vietnamese have sustained an unprecedented epic of three decades of struggle against the most terrible onslaughts ever unleashed by imperialism. They have inflicted a massive military, political and moral defeat upon US imperialism and all its minions from Saigon to Downing Street. Their victory is a blow to illusions in harmonious collaboration among the major powers and an inspiration to the new revolutionary forces that the Vietnamese liberation struggle has helped to bring into existence throughout the capitalist world … But the example of a socialist revolution succeeding against such formidable opposition, and after so many cruel disappointments, will stimulate the struggles of the exploited and oppressed everywhere. It will have a special resonance in those many lands where the hopes aroused by the defeat of fascism in the Second World War were to be subsequently frustrated or repressed: in Madrid and Barcelona, Lisbon and Luanda, Milan and Athens, Manila and Seoul. In 1968 the Tet offensive helped to detonate the May events in France.¹³

New Left Review rarely published editorial commentary during the 1970s; it was a measure of their appreciation of the Vietnamese victory that they did so here (Anderson’s long-time fellow traveller, Tariq Ali, was probably the most well-known of the leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the UK during the Sixties). Here we have the Vietnamese victory described as a socialist revolution, which is not to say that they have achieved socialism, rather that this was the direction that it was taking. Where do we find evidence of Eurocentric social chauvinism? Or a dogmatic rejection of “actually existing socialism,” or a politics of defeat, or complicity with imperialism? It’s hard to say this more clearly: Losurdo and Rockhill end up attacking Anderson for something he didn’t write and didn’t believe in 1975-6. Anderson, ironically (at least until 1983), turns out to be something of an “Eastern Marxist” by Losurdo and Rockhill’s own criteria. 

To give more context: Anderson and New Left Review had already passed through their own Guevarist and Maoist phase in the late 1960s, when they held political positions not unlike those of Losurdo and Rockhill.¹⁴ In the late 1960s, however, the Review began to reconsider the limitations of Third-Worldism. It was their self-criticism that led them to develop a more Leninist perspective.¹⁵ Key figures from NLR (though not Anderson, whose position as editor of New Left Review would have complicated such a step) were members of or joined the “Mandelite” International Marxist Group (IMG) in the UK: Robin Blackburn (Anderson’s closest colleague), Quinten Hoare (editor of Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks), and Tariq Ali (who only joined NLR later but was often identified with it). Yet others aligned with Anderson’s “open and critical revolutionary Marxism,” as an unpublished editorial report (NLR, 1975-1980).¹⁶ This was the high point of the activist phase of New Left Review, which lasted around a decade, in which they were often fellow travellers, politically if not organisationally aligned, to the initiatives of the IMG. They were leaders or supporters of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, who organised the mass resistance to the Vietnam War in the UK. 

Eventually, the Review and the IMG ran up against the limits that all revolutionary currents of the 1970s did – an inability to break out from relatively circumscribed limits, to implant themselves in a broad social constituency beyond that of radical students, white collar professionals, and inner-city political subcultures. As the “long Sixties” radicalism ran aground, the revolutionary project seemed to offer little hope. During the 1980s, Anderson and his New Left Review colleagues effectively abandoned the revolutionary project. Key figures, including Anderson, settled eventually on a kind-of “Marxism in analysis and radical reformism in practice.” Where in the 1960s and 1970s NLR was recognisably Marxist, during the 1980s and after, it became broader and more inclusive. A critique of this transition might be worth mounting. But any critique would need to understand it as a break from the earlier revolutionary (Third-Worldist and then Leninist/Trotskyist) phases. In any case, despite this rightward turn that ended their Trotskyist decade, the NLR group remained focused on politics in the Global South, consistently campaigning against US imperial interventions, for the rights of Palestinians, against the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, and so on (Tariq Ali was perhaps the group’s most vocal public intellectual on these issues). That is, failure to support Global South struggles is simply not something that NLR or Anderson can be accurately accused of. Not during their Third-Worldist phase, not during their Trotskyist one, not during their post-revolutionary one. Losurdo and Rockhill have created a straw-man bête-noir onto whom they project their accusations. Nor does their claim that the Anderson of Considerations was disconnected from political practice hold water, since he was a part of a current, more ambivalent in commitment perhaps than those who joined the IMG, but a part nonetheless, whose activity revolved around the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, New Left Review, and the IMG. 

Let us leave this cursory overview of Anderson with a summary of where we have arrived: Losurdo and Rockhill misread the chief vector of his argument and ignore his practice. Although he acknowledges Western Marxism’s contributions, Anderson does not, in fact, celebrate it as a “freedom” from Eastern shackles. Instead, he critiques its idealism, its turn toward culture and ideology and away from politics and economics, its divorce from revolutionary practice. His is an overall rejection. He calls for a return to the Classical Marxism of Lenin’s generation, a tradition that for Anderson was to be found in the Trotskyist movement, where he found sympathetic and measured thinkers like Isaac Deutcher and Ernest Mandel. His argument remains anti-imperialist over the entire period under discussion. By the time he wrote Considerations, Anderson had already transcended the purely Third-Worldist position of a Losurdo or Rockhill for a more Leninist model, which sees national and class struggles in constant interaction, which seeks to assess not only conflicts between nation-states, but the social relations, regimes, and leaderships within both imperial core and socialist states. From this perspective, the project of uniting socialist theory with the mass movement, especially in the context of one’s own country, is essential (in the strict philosophical sense of the word) to Marxism. Anderson’s book thus ends with a call: “The final word can rest with Lenin. His famous dictum that ‘without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement’ is often and rightly quoted. But he also wrote, with equal weight: ‘Correct revolutionary theory … assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.’ Every clause here counts.”¹⁷ How did Losurdo and Rockhill end up misreading this as the diametrically opposed position?

Conclusion: What Logics Lie Beneath? 

The example of Anderson and New Left Review is, in any case, only symptomatic of a general problem with Losurdo and Rockhill’s methodology. One might have chosen any number of writers that Losurdo flippantly dismisses as “chauvinistic” and performed a similar operation to the one we’ve carried out for Anderson. In a thoughtful review of Losurdo’s book, David Broder writes that the Italian is “determined to find fault even where candidates for it by no stretch of the imagination match his picture of Western Marxism…”¹⁸ He notes that this pays little attention to the actual oeuvre of many of the thinkers, some of whom weren’t Marxists, others who moved and shifted, so that: “Historically, few if any of the figures lined up for identification… fit the police description.”¹⁹ Ross Wolfe states that, “Losurdo almost habitually misrepresented the theorists he lambasted in Western Marxism, and that this belonged to a broader pattern of bad faith running across his works.”²⁰ As Losurdo’s ardent follower, Rockhill naturally carries on these weaknesses. The two thinkers present a map of Marxism that is significantly disconnected from the documented intellectual-historical landscape. That influential Marxists of today should make such errors of close reading, reveal such gaps in their historical knowledge, and be willing nevertheless to proclaim their positions with such certainty, is unsettling.

The question arises: how Losurdo and Rockhill have devolved into making such fragile and easily challenged claims in a declarative tone of such Olympian confidence? The pattern of cavalier misrepresentations indicates that there is some larger logic at play. From one angle, this occurs in the realm of methodology: one needs a special sort of method to produce an argument so untethered from the historical record – an idealist method. But underneath this, likely the foundation that determines the entire structure of Losurdo and Rockhill’s arguments, lies a fundamental political issue – the problem of Stalinism. Without an adequate account of Stalinism, one cannot, it turns out, understand Western Marxism or the fate of Marxism in general. This is for a very specific historical-materialist reason: Marxism’s fate has always been intertwined with the fate of the political movements that took its name. The revolution of 1917 and the collapse of 1990 are arguably the most decisive historical events of the Twentieth Century. It would be extraordinary to make an account of Marxism’s development without including some interpretation of the undemocratic regime headed by Stalin and the problems it posed. Let it never be said that Losurdo and Rockhill cannot achieve the extraordinary – for this is precisely what they have done, produce a chronicle of Marxism (Eastern and Western) without adequately grappling with this fundamental historical problem. The consequences for their argument are dire. They are forced to contort themselves and the historical record into unnatural shapes with the type of skill that circus performers would admire. These two issues – Losurdo and Rockhill’s idealist methodologies and the question of Stalinism – will be the focus of Part Two in this series.

1.  See “Kautskyism and Trotskyism” here: https://red-spark.org/2025/02/12/kautskyism-and-trotskyism-reflections-on-doug-greenes-the-new-reformism-and-the-revival-of-karl-kautsky-part-one/
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2. This is not consequently an analysis of the entire oeuvre of each of these thinkers, but mainly is limited to their books on Western Marxism – it can’t thus be taken as a wholly materialist analysis of their careers in general, which would require a more granular tracing of their work in its contexts over time. In his book on Class Struggle and his book on Gramsci, Losurdo provides useful insights – there are some perceptive comments on Lenin, in particular on his break with Economism and on the multi-faceted nature of political struggle. How this squares with the positions in the Western Marxist books, I leave aside. At least one critic of Losurdo, Ross Wolfe, sees no essential variance in Losurdo’s arguments. By contrast, David Broder points out that in the 1992 colloquium on “Gramsci and Italy,” Losurdo gives a more balanced and thoughtful account of the history of “Eastern Marxism” (see David Broder, “Eastern Light on Western Marxism” for an account of this colloquium: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii107/articles/david-broder-eastern-light-on-western-marxism).  This I leave to others to assess. Rockhill’s earlier work I remain also unfamiliar with, which once again closes off certain angles of inquiry that should ideally be made. The aim here is more modest: to produce a historical materialist analysis of the two books read against the current conjuncture, which they reflect and speak to.
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3. Gabriel Rockhill, “Introduction” in Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it Can Reborn (Monthly Review Press, 2024), p.12.
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4. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 40.
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5. Rockhill, “Introduction” in Losurdo, Western Marxism, 13.
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6. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 41.
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7. Rockhill, “Introduction” in Losurdo, Western Marxism, 16.
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8. Wolfe’s polemic against Losurdo is comprehensive and compelling: https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/ 
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9. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (Verso, 1976), 94.
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10. Gregory Elliot summarises many legitimate criticisms we might make in Gregory Elliot, The Merciless Laboratory of History (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 102-109.
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11. V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution,” Collected Works, vol. 24, 65. For another similar statement, see, “Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers,” where he writes, “Single-handed, the 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 favourable 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 collaborator, the European and American socialist proletariat, could join the decisive battles.” Available here:  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/mar/26b.htm?ref=newintermag.com 
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12. J.V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism (Foreign Languages Press, 1970), 34. Stalin later omitted this section as he constructed his theory of “Socialism in One Country.”
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13. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i91/articles/nlr-editors-victory-in-indochina ↩︎
14. For an account of some of their activities, see the chapter “The Last Year in the Life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara” in Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (Verso, 2024).
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15. There is something of a farcical irony in all this, knowing that Rockhill and other purported “Marxist Leninists” are making the same sorts of claims against Anderson that Anderson himself had levelled at more Trotskyist-oriented figures earlier. Ali recounts Anderson’s dismissal of one of their comrades recounting the destruction of the Bolshevik leadership during the purges as a “moral argument.” See the chapter “The Last Year in the Life of Ché Guevara: 1967” in Street Fighting Years.
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16. Seven members took this revolutionary position: Anderson, Blackburn, Barnett, Halliday, Hoare, Mulhern, and Geras, in 1980 the American Mike Davis. Gregory Elliot, The Merciless Laboratory of History, p.111.
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17. Anderson, Considerations, 105.
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18. Broder, “Eastern Light,” 136.
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19. Broder, “Eastern Light,” 138.
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20. Wolfe, https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/. Wolfe’s second part of this series refutes Losurdo’s portrayal of many of the figures of Western Marxism, https://www.newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/. 
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