This is the final part of a four-part series on Domenico Losurdo’s and Gabriel Rockhill’s critiques of Western Marxism. The first part showed that Losurdo and Rockhill’s arguments relied on an unsustainable misrepresentation of many Marxists. Part Two claimed that Losurdo and Rockhill’s misjudgements find their source in dubious methodologies and a resistance to any historical materialist account of Stalinism. The third part proposed that Western Marxism is best understood as Stalinism’s self-critique, as it was forced to deal with the events of 1956 and surveyed Lenin’s often unexamined critique and battle against Stalinism.

This final part outlines the fate of Lenin’s analysis of Stalinism, as it was retained by the Trotskyist current, whose own record is as ambivalent as the Stalinist one. It concludes by reflecting on Losurdo and Rockhill’s inadequate Third Worldism and the need to commit to a Leninist strategy of “all-round” struggle in the imperial core.

Western Marxism emerged in 1956, when Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the Hungarian revolt forced the international communist movement to confront the record of Stalinism. Western Marxism is, in this account, best understood as Stalinism’s own self-critique: an attempt to explain bureaucratisation, repression, alienation, the abandonment of internationalism, and the failure of socialist democracy. Its achievements and limitations flowed from this origin. It helped drive a reconsideration of socialist strategy in the “West,” and offered important analyses of state, culture, ideology, and more. It also tended to retreat to the academy and into high theory, sometimes owing as much to bourgeois philosophy as to the Marxist classics.  Western Marxists pursued these directions, usually without knowledge of Lenin’s battle against Stalinism. 

As we examined in Part Three of this series, Lenin analysed Stalinism as an emerging bureaucracy, imbued with a “miserable” Tsarist-Bourgeois cultural outlook, embodied in a state apparatus inherited from Tsarism. This bureaucracy had begun to adopt anti-Bolshevik attitudes. Lenin had already, in 1922, allied himself with Leon Trotsky over the question of the “monopoly of foreign trade.” Stalin, having sensed this growing political convergence of former opponents, had cursed Lenin’s partner, Nadezda Krupskaya, for passing information on to Lenin. In response, Lenin threatened to break off all relations with Stalin: he sensed in Stalin’s behaviour a growing bureaucratic culture of top-down order and abuse.¹ On 5 March 1923, Lenin asked Trotsky to represent his opposition to Stalin’s autonomisation plan for nationalities in the leadership bodies, “It is my earnest request that you should undertake the defence of the Georgian case in the Party C.C. This case is now under ‘persecution’ by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Quite to the contrary. I would feel at ease if you agreed to undertake its defence.”² Robert C. Tucker summarises the events, which can be corroborated in Moshe Lewin and elsewhere, writing that Trotsky asked Lenin’s secretary, Fotieva, if he could show the documents to Kamenev: “After conferring with Lenin, Fotieva returned with a negative answer: ‘Vladimir Ilyich says: “Kamenev will immediately show everything to Stalin, and Stalin will make a rotten compromise and then deceive us!”’ When Trotsky inquired whether this meant that in Lenin’s view it was no longer possible to compromise with Stalin, even on the right line,’ Fotieva replied: ‘Yes, he does not trust Stalin, and wants to come out against him openly, before the entire party. He is preparing a bomb.’³ Trotsky, in an example of the difference between the men, made just such a compromise. 

Theories of Stalinism After Lenin: Rakovsky, Serge, Trotsky, Deutscher, Mandel

After Lenin’s death, Lenin’s ideas were adopted by the Joint/United Opposition of 1926, formed by the core of the “Old Bolsheviks,” including Lenin’s widow, Nadezda Krupskaya.⁴ It was developed by Christian Rakovsky (see “The Professional Dangers of Power”), Victor Serge (Memoirs of a Revolutionary, From Lenin to Stalin, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev), and systematised by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed. Later, Isaac Deutscher would write his own version in his biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Deutscher’s analyses, particularly in his essays, remain crucial touchstones for understanding Stalinism’s development after the Second World War. Ernest Mandel made contributions over several decades, including his 1992 analysis of bureaucracy, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy. This current produced the most coherent and sustained, if still internally diverse, Marxist account of Stalinism.⁵ 

This current understood the inherently two-sided nature of the USSR, as a society in process, torn by contradictions. Stalinism itself, as a bureaucratic caste (analogous to a reformist trade union bureaucracy) was consequently itself contradictory – playing alternately progressive and reactionary roles, both domestically and internationally. To the extent the bureaucratic caste defended the socialised property relations and developed them, it played a progressive role; to the extent it exercised bureaucratic control over both economic base and political/cultural superstructure, and entrenched their own privileges, it played a reactionary role. To the extent it led struggles internationally (sending arms and fighters to the Spanish Republic, even as it appropriated its gold in exchange), and aided Global South liberation (materially supporting Cuba, for example), Stalinism played a progressive role; to the extent it rehabilitated alternately opportunist (the Popular Front) or ultraleft strategies (The Third Period), and oversaw historic defeats (China 1927, Germany 1933, Spain 1936-9, Chile 1973), it played a conservative role.⁶ 

Since this anti-Stalinist current came to be associated with Trotsky – though as we have seen it included most “Old Bolsheviks” to begin with – it was de facto cut off from Western Marxist thinking when they abandoned Leninism. Trotskyism had long been Stalinism’s shadow: the repository for everything the official movement could not acknowledge about itself. For decades, it had been made invisible through the rewriting of history, airbrushing of photographs, and absurd accusations it acted as agents of imperialism and Nazism, through mass deportations to Siberia and shootings in the basement of the Lubyanka so relentless that one story describes automobiles left running all day around it in a bid to conceal the gunshots. On this, capitalist states and Stalinism agreed: Trotsky and his followers were a threat to the privileged and powerful on both sides of the Iron Curtain. No one was more hounded by both bourgeois states and counterrevolution than Trotsky and his little band of acolytes during the 1920s and 1930s.⁷ For Western Marxists to have reclaimed this theory of Stalinism would have required recognition that it represented a relatively orthodox Marxist – not “Trotskyist” but Marxist – analysis.⁸ It would have required an acknowledgement that, whatever his other manifold errors, in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky produced precisely the kind of historical materialist analysis that is absent from Losurdo or Rockhill. 

All this clarifies Losurdo and Rockhill’s otherwise confusing denunciation of Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism – which we examined in Part One of this series. As we saw, Anderson supported Global South struggles. At the time he wrote Considerations, he promoted the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries. He argued not for Western Marxism but for Leninism. He cannot, by Losurdo and Rockhill’s definition, be a Western Marxist. Initially, the consequence for the reader is confusion – how has this mistake occurred? The answer is that Losurdo and Rockhill are actually engaged in the kind of misdirection a stage magician would be proud of. Their real objection to Anderson’s book is not found in his attitude to anti-imperialist struggles or socialist regimes; it is found in his critique of Stalinism. This is their actual objection to many of the figures they include in the category “Western Marxism.” To make sense of their books, a quick replacement of “Western Marxism” with “Anti-Stalinism” clears up any misunderstandings – the rabbit was never in the hat to begin with. Indeed, their entire argumentative structure is moulded by their equation of a critique of Stalinism with hostility to anti-imperialist struggles and “actually existing socialism.” The knowledgeable reader spends their time arguing, if they care, over whether figure X or Y supported the struggles of the Global South against imperialism – as we did in Part One of this series. Less knowledgeable readers are repelled by figure X or Y’s putative “Eurocentrism” and supposed “arrogance” toward struggles of the Global South – “best to avoid them.” Thus, Stalinism is resuscitated in the dark. 

If Losurdo and Rockhill attack Western Marxism for its anti-Stalinism, Trotsky and Trotskyism are their bête-noirs. After all, Trotskyists insist on an analysis of class relations and class struggles within socialist societies, since there they find the material source of surface-level political actions and events. From such an analysis, one obviously distinguishes between differing workers’ states, and this may lead to a rejection of a particular regime’s practice and support for another. In the former case, the result might be, in the words of Lenin, that one ends up siding with the working class against its own state and to protect the state for the workers (which means, also, support for that state against imperialist aggression). Trotskyists do not make support for all “actually existing socialist” regimes, beyond defending them against imperialist aggression, a condition of “Marxism,” since each case requires a concrete analysis, and this would produce as diverse a set of attitudes as there are socialist countries – in all this logic, they are simply following Lenin and Leninism. 

The reverse logic applies to Losurdo and Rockhill: since they wish to declare their blanket support for all “actually existing socialisms,” they cannot afford to make a habit of engaging in historical materialist accounts of them – this would naturally begin to erode their unconditionality and lead them to a similarly diverse set of attitudes. Indeed, Losurdo and Rockhill dub the historical materialist approach as “messianic” since it holds socialist societies to certain measures or standards set by the imperatives of Marxist analysis and strategy. Against this, they counterpose the term “realist,” which is used to justify effectively all that occurs as rational. Trotskyism here represents everything that Losurdo and Rockhill are trying to avoid. Like an undisciplined schoolchild being reminded that they need to do their homework before bed, their rage is more at the naming of their avoidance mechanism than at the significance of the homework itself. No one likes their avoidance pointed out.

Their response to this challenge is predictable: confirmation bias kicks into gear, and logical fallacies are deployed. Losurdo repeatedly misrepresents Trotsky’s position, such as when he writes that Trotsky dissolves the context for the tragedies of Stalinism into “simple and edifying fables of a monster who by his mere touch turns gold into blood and slime.”⁹ In fact, Trotsky treats Stalin not as an individual but as the representative of a social group, a bureaucracy, which had selected him. Trotsky not only follows Lenin’s analysis, but as a Marxist is not interested in individualising social processes. Losurdo claims that Trotsky equates Stalinism and Nazism as both forms of “totalitarianism.” But Trotsky pointedly argues that the social relations of each meant that any such comparison could not be an equation – something obvious to anyone who bothers to consider that Trotsky insisted on unconditional defence of the USSR from capitalist aggression (defence of the state for the workers).¹⁰ Losurdo implies that Trotsky is a Western Marxist who fails to support the anti-imperialist struggle, when even a casual survey of his work suggests this is simply not true.¹¹ Anti-imperialism and pro-Stalinism are not coterminous. As we have seen, using the example of the Spanish Revolution, a critique of Stalinism is the condition of consistent anti-imperialism.

Rockhill repeats baseless accusations about “Trotsky’s willingness to collaborate with the U.S. government (such as with the anti-communist Dies Committee)” and that “some scholars talk – with plenty of evidence to support this claim – of a Trotskyism-to-CIA pipeline…One of the objectives of the U.S. national security state was to wage a highly sophisticated intellectual world war on Marxism, driving a wedge between its supposedly authentic and respectable Western forms, on the one hand, and its purported perversions in the East, where it became a material reality instead of a pristine system of ideas. The Frankfurt School, like the dominant forms of Trotskyism in the imperial core, played an important role in this war.”¹² 

Let us briefly set these last matters straight: Trotsky’s decision to speak at the Dies Committee was analogous to the Bolsheviks’ decision to participate in undemocratic Tsarist Dumas, or from Lenin’s choice to accept German help in reaching Russia on the “sealed train.”¹³ His goal was to spread his understanding of Marxism using those platforms available to him. He specifically refused to take part in Right-wing attacks on communists, and his conditions caused the committee to ultimately decide he would not serve their purpose. Rockhill’s imputations are relatively analogous to the opportunists and counterrevolutionaries who condemned Lenin as a German spy. As Greene and Fluss have pointed out: “While Rockhill reproaches Trotsky for an appearance that never took place, he ignores the fact that prominent Marxist-Leninists such as Earl Browder and William Z. Foster willingly testified before the same committee and denounced Trotsky as a fascist. The obvious question for Rockhill is, why is Trotsky singled out for condemnation while others receive a free pass? Is this not a striking instance of double standards?”¹⁴ As for the Trotskyism-to-CIA pipeline, there are plenty of ex-Marxists from all currents who later became counterrevolutionaries and worked for the State. There is no credible evidence that there is any special affinity for Trotskyists with this capitulation. Indeed, one of the best early essays on the issue is by Deutscher – “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience”¹⁵ – who, like Trotskyists Ernest Mandel, Daniel Bensaid, James Cannon, and many others, remained a committed Marxist to the end.¹⁶ 

In both the cases we’ve examined here, it seems that Rockhill simply isn’t familiar with the history or the relevant literature. His book relies, it seems, on secondary sources as evidence.¹⁷ This deficiency of historical knowledge, when combined with the black and white thinking he shares with Losurdo, means he consistently depicts Trotskyism as all bad, or in his words, as “rabidly anti-communist.”¹⁸ We might, on this issue at least, sympathise with Russell Jacoby, who writes in one of the more vitriolic critiques of Rockhill that he “fails to deliver a fair criticism of his subjects. Rather, he resorts to innuendo and guilt by association in a bid to demolish their reputations. He might be viewed as a Marxist-Leninist in the school of Donald Trump: use any means to defame your foe.”¹⁹ So while there are many criticisms we might make of Trotsky’s Marxism, we would gain no insight into these from Losurdo or Rockhill.

Moreover, Trotskyism was only rarely a movement with which one could attempt rapprochement. Built in isolation and catastrophic defeat, blighted by sectarianism, forever condemned to its position as a minor satellite orbiting Stalinism – these were not the conditions from which a healthy current would easily spring. Trotskyism turned out to be just as contradictory as its parent planet: where Stalinism tended toward opportunism, Trotskyism tended toward ultra-leftism; where Stalinism had mass parties, Trotskyism was marginal; where Stalinism was pragmatic, Trotskyism was obsessed with program and line. Both could be sectarian and anti-democratic; both could destroy a movement as well as lead one. If the Trotskyist movement had a characteristic weakness, it was in its propensity to stand at the side of a struggle (often indeed from the imperialist core) and lecture those leading about the “true” revolutionary line, which the Trotskyists of course “understand” – if they were leading the struggle, they would obviously lead it easily to victory. They have, you see, the (Transitional) “program” and the “theory of permanent revolution” (which Losurdo and Rockhill rightfully reject).²⁰ The idealism of this approach – in the beginning was the (written) word – is evident. This idealism simplifies what are typically profoundly difficult and novel conditions facing all socialists leading struggles. Naturally, these practical leaders and their supporters have found this galling. It is no surprise that, of the significant writers associated with the tradition, both Serge and Deutscher opposed the founding of the Trotskyist Fourth International and considered the socialist future to lie elsewhere.

Certainly at its zenith, during the 1960s and 1970s, Trotskyism possessed a certain ultra-left vitality – its international turn to organise support of the Vietnamese Revolution made it a central part of the leadership in the UK (as we’ve seen), the USA, and elsewhere.²¹ The movement today is less attractive – mostly it has dissolved into broad left parties, shrunk to sectarian rumps, or, like the Cliffite tradition, is not accurately Trotskyist in the first place, but instead Left Communist/Luxemburgist.²² To recuperate those valuable elements from Trotsky, or those Marxists who described themselves as Trotskyists, is not the same as advocating the movement itself.²³ The task is neither to revive Trotskyism nor to rehabilitate Stalinism. It is to recover those components of the Marxist tradition capable of understanding both. In this spirit, I have used concepts and applied approaches learned from several traditions in this very series, complementing a relatively orthodox Marxism and Leninism with valuable elements taken from both Trotskyism and Western Marxism.

For a Non-Denominational Marxism and Lenin’s All-Round Struggle

History supports the idea of a non-denominational Marxism. Healthy parties have periodically emerged from both Stalinist and Trotskyist currents. Such was the case of the Vietnamese Communist Party under Ho Chi Minh, who held fast to Lenin’s “worker-peasant” alliance, even as the Stalinist movement moved through its popular front period. Such was the case of the United States Socialist Workers Party (US SWP) during its best years (1920s-1970s), in which it played significant roles in struggles, including participation in numerous international solidarity campaigns such as support for the Cuban revolution and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Such, on a more modest scale, was the case with the Australian Democratic Socialist Party, which decisively rejected Trotskyism in the early 1980s, before its self-dissolution two decades later.²⁴ Parties with more ambivalent histories often led vibrant struggles to good effect, with the Italian Communist Party’s partisan struggle against fascism perhaps in the forefront of these. ²⁵ Before the 1960s, the official communist movement often bravely led localised or limited struggles. During the 1960s and 1970s, their Left opponents often took this role. The practical distinction in the post-1956 period was not so much between a univocal Stalinism and a rigid Trotskyism, but rather between those who adhered to a Leninist mass struggle perspective and those who adopted reformism, Broad Left Party short-cuts, “revolution from below” principles (Italian Autonomism for example), Third Worldist urban terrorism (Weather Underground, Baader-Meinhoff group, etc.), or a self-dissolution into the social movements. Once the official communist movement melted into the air after 1990, the Trotskyist movement naturally spun off quickly into the darkness – they were born together, and they effectively died together, whatever zombie forms staggered on. The healing of a riven Leninism, split into two after Lenin’s death, was never achieved. 

Outside of these two competing and imbricated currents, both significantly compromised, other fresh forces emerged. The Cuban July 26 movement’s revolution rearranged the stages of the “Russian model,” with civil war (dual power) and urban organisation developing in parallel. They inspired a new internationalism far more radical than Stalinism’s ersatz version. They were relatively open theoretically, so that during their great economic debate of 1963-5, Ernest Mandel’s work was read and discussed. Mandel was invited to Cuba in 1964, where he spoke with Ché Guevara, whose arguments overlapped significantly with his.²⁶ Decades later, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela produced a distinctive amalgam of Marxism and their indigenous national liberation tradition descending from Simón Bolivar, Ezequiel Zamora, and Simón Rodríguez. Hugo Chavez was known to advocate an eclectic mix of influences, from which he moulded an effective political strategy, which included István Mészáros and Ché Guevara, José Carlos Mariátegui and Marta Harnecker, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky.²⁷ Today, parties descending from, or self-describing as, Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist (in India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Belgium, Argentina, and elsewhere) continue to play central roles. To align with only one tradition is to place a faux, idealist, internationalism ahead of the principle – the principle is internationalism, not the organisational form of an “international.” Internationalism means to support and work with anyone leading or attempting to lead real mass anti-capitalist struggles – regardless of their theoretical background. As it rebuilds its popular appeal, the Marxist movement is likely to be ecumenical – neither Stalinist, nor Trotskyist, nor Maoist, nor Luxemburgist, nor Left Communist, nor New Leftist, nor Western Marxist. Rather, it will likely incorporate lessons from these traditions into a new Leninism, reconstituted for the Twenty-first century. 

Into this landscape comes the work of Losurdo and Rockhill, arguing not for any such openness but rather for the purity and zeal of a new Stalinism. Their argument requires impressive theoretical contortions to hold itself together, and the result is a collection of oddities and curiosities: books marked by unusual methodologies, idiosyncratic focuses and structures, absent contexts and warped histories, misrepresentations and elisions. Strange books. I mean, did we really need a 400-page take-down of the Frankfurt School that doesn’t discuss their actual arguments? Can we really accept the idea that Marxism includes self-professed anti-Marxists? What does this strangeness say about their authors?

Losurdo was a member of various communist parties throughout his life – and part of his drive was his refusal to accept the self-flagellation that former communists in Italy typically engaged in. His fidelity is something to be celebrated. But as a theorist, he was forever caught in his time, like one of those socialist realist posters with strong-jawed workers standing in front of steam engines and looking into the socialist future. However nostalgic we might find these, we also need to know that Lenin argued against “Proletcult” (“Proletarian Culture”). He hoped that Russia could drag herself up to the level of bourgeois culture. Like the world of happy socialist realist woman workers, sporting stylish handkerchiefs on their heads, Losurdo is a mirage. A fantasy. From a world that never was. He’s a pre-1956 Stalinist, revived today, “academicized,” popularised. 

Rockhill has picked up the antiquated script, but his credentials are flimsier. He’s involved in the Critical Theory Workshop and connected with Marxism Today. These are important initiatives – they are not nothing. Rockhill doesn’t seem to be involved in a political organisation – which makes his talk of Lenin attenuated. 

Losurdo and Rockhill naturally appeal to people in the “West” who support Global South struggles but would rather not challenge capitalism too strongly in the imperial core – Third Worldists not willing to engage in political practice against their own state and capitalist class. From this perspective, one can cheer from the sidelines, run workshops and podcasts, build careers in the academy. Real politics, in this view, happens elsewhere. Underpinning this position can be a suspicion of the Western working class’s revolutionary potential. David Broder captures this fatal consequence when discussing Losurdo’s book: “In side-stepping the issues posed for Marxists by a strategy in the West, in favour of berating them for indifference to the problems of the East, Losurdo also avoids the question of how the Communist Parties in European countries could themselves relate to these problems. In his own terms, the divide between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Marxism was a struggle for recognition between two subjects that each challenged capitalism-imperialism: the working class, or entire nations in battle against colonialism. Their unity was possible, but could never be taken as given. In the twentieth century, how was it to be realized?”²⁸

Instead of wrestling with this challenge, Losurdo and Rockhill promote an emaciated form of anti-imperialism – as international solidarity rather than socialist program.²⁹ For Lenin, this would be a form of opportunism: for how can one fight for the Global South without fighting the power of one’s own capitalist class where it is strongest – in its home base? This means, equally, that developing the anti-imperialist power of the working class and its allies can only be achieved by rejecting the narrowly defined “class struggle” chauvinism / imperialist economism in the West. Luxemburgists and Left Communists invert Third Worldism’s error, diluting anti-imperialism to focus principally on “working-class struggle” in an economist or corporatist sense. In this view, the Global South is secondary to the imperial core, where the struggle will ultimately be decided by societies with a majority working class. Both ignore capitalism’s international dimension.

The Leninist task is to challenge capitalism as a system, which for those in the West requires challenging one’s own capitalist government’s policies as a whole, since their imperialist policies are intimately related to their domestic ones. In What is to Be Done?, Lenin describes this as an “all-round struggle” against all forms of oppression, injustice, and violence, no matter who it affects. In the long run, it requires that socialists propose an alternative political program capable of meeting one’s own nation’s challenges. Such a task can only be achieved on a party-political level, since the party is the organisational form that the capitalist class developed to represent their group interests (or more accurately, to represent different fractions of their class), to allow them to intervene into the national body politic, to construct their hegemony. Only a socialist party, a “modern prince” as Gramsci described it, can challenge and replace this hegemony with a socialist one. 

For all Losurdo and Rockhill mention of Lenin, their outlook is consequently far from his. They break from Lenin on the relationship between international revolution and national struggle (on national struggle viewed as a moment of class struggle), on the question of the state “withering away,” on the definition of opportunism (which for Lenin not only includes the battle against imperialism but also against opportunism in one’s home country as it relates to domestic politics), on Leninist strategy and tactics (as an independent struggle of the working class and its allies, within one’s nation, against all forms of oppression, violence and injustice in order to raise the movement’s consciousness; of the utilisation of bourgeois forums, such as the Dies Committee, as means of attempting this; of the rejection of the Menshevik strategy of subjection of the socialist movement to bourgeois hegemony), on the importance of revolutionary leadership and policy in victorious socialist regimes (which may help or hinder), on the need to struggle against bureaucracy within those regimes, at least in Rockhill’s case, seemingly on the centrality of the socialist party leading this “all-round” struggle in both East and West. For Losurdo and Rockhill, Lenin should properly belong to the “messianic” first wave of the revolution, which needs to be swept aside – or perhaps liquidated – by the following “realists.” Of course, there is nothing wrong per se with breaking from Lenin; you’re allowed to. What you cannot do is to break from him and pretend otherwise; to pretend you’re working in his tradition when you’re rejecting essential components of it. Here, the new Stalinism echoes the old.

A Joyless Conclusion: The Accountability of Practice

It brings me little joy to write such a critical piece of both Losurdo and Rockhill, since they remain on the right side of the political divide in key respects, and many of their general claims are politically vital: Eurocentrism and social chauvinism are widespread or dominant among the organised left; anti-imperialism needs to be foundational to the class struggle inside the imperialist core, and there are socialist projects – Cuba most obviously – that stand as beacons of light for socialists and the Global South in particular. On this basis, Losurdo and Rockhill are our allies. Their work sometimes contains localised arguments, occasional perceptive comments on historical matters that are insightful and useful. Of course, there are seeds of truth to be found there – and arguably this series might have done more to recuperate these. The Frankfurt School, as with many Western Marxists, does represent an abandonment of revolutionary Marxism, and this should come under critique. Moreover, Rockhill’s negative appraisal of the imperial theory industry takes aim at an important target, even if this target (as we saw in Part Two) has less to do with Western Marxism per se and more to do with neoliberal progressivism, infused with anti-Marxist ideology – post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-modernism, identity politics.

Whatever the case, Losurdo and Rockhill are only two stars in a constellation of writers and podcasters sharing similarly inadequate versions of Marxism. Perhaps the worst is Grover Furr, Marxism’s equivalent of a flat-earther, whose wilful disregard for the historical record can only be likened to a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, a truther. Doug Greene has done an admirable analysis of the larger tendency in his book, In Stalin’s Shadow: Leon Trotsky and the Legacy of the Moscow Trials. Greene’s contribution in restoring the historical record of the Moscow Trials is not to be taken for granted. Greene points out that the new Stalinists’ arguments often resemble conspiracy theories, which locate the blame for social, economic, or political problems in the existence of “plotters” [the Trotskyo-fascist conspiracy, the Bukharinite-Zinovievite terrorists] as opposed to “analysing systems, institutions, and structures of power… [This thinking] tends to cast events and conflict in a religious veneer of good versus evil…[They] often start with a grain of truth for their claims, but by tracing all wrongdoing to one vast plot, they play fast and loose with the facts. As a result, when documenting the vast plot, they are forced to cherry-pick data, make leaps of logic in analysing evidence and treat mere allegations as hard facts…conspiracy theories are a form of scapegoating that frames a particular enemy as part of a plot against the common good.”³⁰ The contemporary Stalinist version of this, Greene argues, must dress itself up in scientific credentials much as creationism felt it needed to accumulate the trappings of science to become “creation science.” Losurdo and Rockhill’s methods, which share these features, are unfortunate, since to the extent their position convinces, it confuses.³¹ New acolytes will see enemies where there are friends and friends where there are enemies.

Losurdo and Rockhill’s popularity among the newly radicalising generation are symptoms of the precarious state of Marxism today. The intentions of this new generation are well-meaning: they see capitalism as bad, and so they instinctively orient themselves to the largest historical movement opposing it. You learn a smattering of Lenin, start a podcast, rage against the academy, and relish ideas like the existence of an “imperial theory industry,” and then say yes, mistakes were made, but you don’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. In this frontier zone, any gunslinger can come into town – as long as you speak to this zeitgeist. A certain whiff of machismo has accompanied this, which is somewhat appropriate to that unreconstructed male chauvinist (as Sheila Fitzpatrick has called him) – Stalin. A misplaced arrogance seems to suffuse this culture. The Dunning-Krueger effect, in which people with a lower level of knowledge overestimate their ability and skills, appears to be in full flight. There is nothing quite so dispiriting as listening to Rockhill being interviewed on some putatively “Marxist” podcasts. The interviewers nod sagely and agree on the profundity of what are rather elementary ideas, wrapped up in errors of fact and of interpretation, of methodology and conceptualisation. No one seems capable of challenging Rockhill’s untenable claims or superficial historical knowledge. The lack of Marxist scrutiny has meant that Rockhill is a product of, and contributor to, this theoretical desert.

The lack of historical materialist method among this new current is also a function of not being sufficiently involved in practical struggle. Without having to build a party and a movement, you can avoid any accountability to the “broad masses.” You rarely need to justify yourself in front of significant audiences. Nor need you work through the real difficulties of cohering together a socialist group capable of effective action. The “online Marxist” has similar benefits to the socialist taking a position in the university system: a cloistered environment with low stakes, an “echo-chamber” of like-minded thinkers, an absence of real-world accountability. If this current is to mature politically, they must transcend podcasts and Reddit discussions, move past the writing and discussion of simplistic and denunciatory books like Losurdo’s and Rockhill’s. Marxism’s challenge today is vastly more serious. It’s hard to become a Marxist. It’s even harder to remain one. It requires knowledge of theory and history, developed and applied through praxis, through building the movement and – may Lenin rise from his mausoleum – the construction of Marxist parties. The point, as Marx once wrote, is to change the world.

1. V.I Lenin. Collected Works Vol 45, 607-608. ↩︎
2.  V.I. Lenin Collected Works Vol 45 p.607. ↩︎
3. Robert C Tucker, “Conflict with Lenin” in Stalin as Revolutionary. See also, Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 1968). For another account, see the final chapter, “Lenin’s Last Struggle,” on Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy. ↩︎
4. The Platform of the Joint Opposition can be read here. ↩︎
5. Some of the key pieces can be found in Tariq Ali (ed), The Stalinist Legacy. Douglas Greene argues in his book Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn that Serge and Deutscher’s positions are different enough from Trotsky’s to reject for those keen to investigate the finer details. The “Trotskyist” theory has also seemed to be influential in revisionist historian J Arch Getty’s understanding of Stalinism. See the important J Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks (Yale University, 2010). ↩︎
6. One of the best summaries of Trotsky’s theory is by Perry Anderson himself, in Tariq Ali (ed), The Stalinist Legacy. ↩︎
7. A fascinating chronicle can be found in Josh Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky. Others include the excellent Bertrand M. Paternaude’s Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, and, of course, Deutscher’s The Prophet Outcast, probably the most thought-provoking of his trilogy, which improves with each book. Taken as a whole, Deutscher’s trilogy, its title notwithstanding (however ironic the Machiavelli quote that inspired it may be), remains the greatest political biography in the English language. See here for some reflections on it. ↩︎
8. E.P Thompson is one of the rare thinkers to acknowledge the value of Trotsky’s account. See here. ↩︎
9. Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, p. 90. ↩︎
10. Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, p.10. For a randomly selected example of this position in Trotsky, see here. For Trotsky’s last arguments for unconditional defence of the Soviet Union, see his book In Defence of Marxism, available here. ↩︎
11. See, for example, Trotsky’s “Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto,” where he writes that “‘The Communists,’ declares the Manifesto, ‘everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.’ The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin.” See here. ↩︎
12. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, p. 261. ↩︎
13. Trotsky’s own explanation for his decision can be read online here. ↩︎
14. Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss: here. ↩︎
15. See Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades. ↩︎
16. For an assessment of Daniel Bensaid, see my article, “Go Forward to Meet the New: Daniel Bensaid’s An Impatient Life, available here. ↩︎
17.  Anecdotally: Communist party members that I knew when I was very young (having grown up around them in Australia and a little in Italy and France), all typically knew the falsity of such claims. They were simply not Leninists, so there was little at stake for them in the first place.
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18. Millennials are Killing Capitalism interview here. Rockhill also claims that Ernest Mandel “celebrated” the collapse of the Soviet Union when, in fact, he viewed it as a historic defeat. ↩︎
19. Russel Jacoby, “No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot,” available here. ↩︎
20. For a critique of permanent revolution, see here. ↩︎
21. For an account of this international turn, see here. particularly from minute 35. Fred Halstead’s book Out Now! provides a classic account of the anti-war movement in the US. It is discussed by Eric Blanc here. ↩︎
22. For my assessment of Trotskyism, see the series, “Kautskyism and Trotskyism,” available here. ↩︎
23. For my critique of Trotskyism, see here. ↩︎
24. See here. PDF available here: ↩︎
25. Here, I leave aside Maoism and the Chinese Communist Party, since I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to make an accurate assessment. When this is the case, the best policy is not to comment. ↩︎
26. See Jan Willem Stutje, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred. London: Verso, 2009. ↩︎
27. For one of his references to Trotsky, see here. ↩︎
28. Broder, “Eastern Light on Western Marxism,” p.141. ↩︎
29. In Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, Losurdo rhetorically affirms the multiplicity of forms of class struggle, practically dissolving the struggle between workers and capitalists that was the central focus of The Communist Manifesto (and with this the need for the Third International). Yet he then frequently reduces this multiplicity, in practice, to the antagonism between imperialist and oppressed nations (especially after the Second World War). ↩︎
30. Doug Greene, “VII The Moscow Trials as Conspiracy Theory,” in Kindle edition 2025. ↩︎
31. Shortly before publication of this final part, Patrick Iber made similar observations about both the conspiratorialism of Rockhill and his inversion of far-Right narratives. Iber also notes that “Rockhill’s infelicitous interpretation of evidence is systemic, driven by his inability to imagine that someone might have principled objections to Soviet communism.” See here. Meanwhile, Scott Patrick at Cosmonaut argues much the same, including noting the empiricism of Rockhill rather than his Marxism. See here. ↩︎