Domenico Losurdo Research Articles

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Capitalist roaders or socialist reformers? A critical review of Marxist literature on China since 1976

Marx identified a transitional phase between capitalism and communism in which society is transformed under a Revolutionary Dictatorship, but still retains aspects of the capitalist society from which it was born. Socialist construction then, is not only the process of developing the productive forces and transforming the relations of production. It is also a process of continued ideological and class struggle against remaining capitalist elements within society. This is both a struggle against the resurgence of capitalist relations within the economic base, as well as a project of societal transformation. Much of the debate over China's economy rests on the nature of the 1978 Reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Marxists debate whether these Reforms represent a break with the project of socialist construction in China or a development of this process. This paper will critically review the scholarship on the question of socialist construction in China before and after the Reforms, reviewing works by Deng Xiaoping, Domenico Losurdo, Charles Bettelheim , William Hinton, Pao-Yu Ching, Minqi Li, and Zhun Xu.

Cheng Enfu and Domenico Losurdo's Views on Socialist Construction

Cheng Enfu and Domenico Losurdo's Views on Socialist Construction

Librealism's Boundaries in Addressing the Climate Crisis: Insights from Domenico Losurdo and Posthumanism

Librealism's Boundaries in Addressing the Climate Crisis: Insights from Domenico Losurdo and Posthumanism

Domenico Losurdo’s Perspective on Real Socialism

ABSTRACT The seminal contributions of the esteemed Italian Marxist scholar, Domenico Losurdo, have significantly enriched the theoretical and methodological landscape surrounding the study and practical application of historical-dialectical materialism. This article elucidates Losurdo’s principal perspectives on the intricate challenges inherent in the construction of socialist societies. In stark departure from prevalent Western Marxist paradigms, Losurdo’s analyses of revolutionary historical praxes are imbued with a rigorous self-critical lens, eschewing adherence to revisionist or liquidationist doctrines that characterized the prevalent trend of anti-communist pseudo-Marxism fashionable within some academic circles. This discourse systematically unpacks the salient themes of this intellectual inquiry, meticulously assessing Losurdo’s oeuvre as a distinctive and invaluable contribution to the nuanced exploration of the complexities and prospects entailed in the development of authentic socialist experiences.

Charles W. Mills

Here I both celebrate and critique the legacy of Charles W. Mills. I begin by offering some reflections on the trajectory of Mills’s career and intellectual development, focusing on his move from Marxist philosophy to the philosophy of race. I then attempt to undermine an argument in Mills’s final book, for why those interested in emancipation should choose liberalism over Marxism. By contrasting Mills with the late Italian Marxist philosopher of history Domenico Losurdo, with whom Mills shared a blistering critique of ‘racial’ liberalism but whom I claim Mills misread, I seek to weaken key premises in Mills’s argument.

Domenico Losurdo in Cina: uno sguardo sulla situazione della formazione marxista e del PCC

This study draws on an experience of leading a seminar series in China on the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher, Domenico Losurdo. Through this seminar series and the extensive engagements with the seminar participants – all members of the CPC and teachers of Marxism – I have been able to gain a unique insight into the state of Marxist education and indeed of theoretical knowledge in the CPC itself. The emphases were on Losurdo’s two books translated into Chinese, one on liberalism and other on Hegel. We focused on issues of relevance to China today. In regard to liberalism, the topics were: the paradox of liberalism in terms of its constitutive unfreedom; class consciousness; and how liberalism attempts to manage its internal contradiction. As for Hegel, these concerned: the state; material rights; and revolution. While the topics themselves and the way they are presented reflect discussions in the seminars and indicate distinct Chinese concerns, the conclusion assesses the current status of Marxism in education and the CPC. Losurdo; Marxism in China; Liberalism; Hegel.

Note su lotte di classe, nazione e internazionalismo in Engels e Marx. A partire da un libro di Domenico Losurdo

The aim of this article is to reflect on the complexity of the relationship between class struggles and the “national question”; To this end, the texts of Marx and Engels are compared with those of some of their contemporary counterparts. This partial reconstruction of a much broader and articulated debate is rooted in Domenico Losurdo’s work on the concept of “class struggles”. Class struggle; National question.

La concezione neoliberale della storia: la saldatura tra neoliberismo e revisionismo storico in Friedrich von Hayek

While neoliberal policies and their social and political consequences have been widely studied and criticised in the last decades, the historical and theoretical framework of neoliberalism in connection with the liberal tradition as a whole and the more theoretical aspects of its hegemonic construction have received less attention. Even less have been direct, critical discussions of its founders’ texts, and only a small amount of these has been conducted in an actually Marxist perspective. A major exception in this sense, especially in Italy, has been the work of Domenico Losurdo. This article builds on Losurdo’s discussions, which are scattered but numerous in his work, of Friedrich von Hayek’s texts, and tries to employ his method in order to analyse them. The specific aim of this research has been to investigate how Hayek’s neoliberalism and his theory of spontaneous evolution are combined with forms of historical revisionism, such as the re-invention of liberal tradition, the rewriting of the history of modern Europe and of modern political thought, the “idyllic” reconstruction of the early industrial capitalism, the equalization of communism and Nazism and their “orientalisation”, and the obliteration of colonial history. What emerges from this encounter is a full-fledged philosophy of history, a “neoliberal conception of history”, whose elements can still be well recognised in the current public discourse and even in common sense. Losurdo; Hayek; Neoliberalism; Historical Revisionism; Philosophy of History.

Hegel dopo Losurdo: libertà e ontologia dell’essere sociale

Why the scholars concerned in the cultural and philosophical debate between XVIII and 19th century and specifically to Hegel must read Domenico Losurdo? The analysis of Losurdo combines conceptual dimensions that run transversely along different thematic planes: from the theoretical to the political, from the epistemological one to the social one. In the first part of the analytical-reconstructive essay I try to outline the philosophical meaning of the interpretation that Losurdo gives Hegel, with reference to the categories of progress and freedom. In the second part – more properly theoretical – I develop a germinal idea, explicitly contained in a Losurdo’s text on Hegel, Marx and the ontology of social being. Moving from the categories paced by Losurdo at the core of Hegelian philosophy (objective contradiction, dialectics between universal and particular, freedom), an approach to the Science of logic that identifies the nucleus of a possible ontology of social being is possible. Losurdo, Hegel, Social Being, Objective Contradiction, Freedom.

The Crucial Role of Domenico Losurdo in the Historical, Political and Philosophical Understanding of the “Chinese Way”

ABSTRACT Domenico Losurdo traveled to Beijing for the first time in the 1970s, when (Western) Maoism thrilled a large number of Western progressive intellectuals. But when these intellectuals turned away from China—which they accused of having consolidated an “illiberal totalitarian political regime” but also of having “restored capitalism”—by contrast Losurdo remained a friend of China. For him it was from the Chinese experience and its ability to survive the end of the USSR that one could draw inspiration to confront the most important event in the life of an entire generation: the radical crisis of Marxism and the defeat of the communist movement in the West. Western Marxism, born out of the shock of the First World War, is characterized by a utopian messianism prone to anarchism (the thesis of the extinction of the state, for example, or the claim of an immediate cancelation of borders, or hostility towards economy and technology). In China, on the other hand, Marxism has become the basis of national awareness and the consequent liberation struggle. Once political independence is reached, however, the revolution continues today in order to achieve economic independence. Hence the need for a re-elaboration of the same Marxian category of class struggle.

The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres by Christin Pschichholz

Reviews 203 The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres. (Gewaltpolitik und Menschenrechte, vol. 3). Edited by christin pschichholz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 247 pp. €49.90. ISBN 978–3-428–18146–9. This thought-provoking volume is the product of a 2016 conference organized by Christin Pschichholz in conjunction with the University of Potsdam and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam. Its aim is to place the 1915–16 Turkish genocide against the Ottoman Armenians in a broader regional context while also examining the cross-border connectedness of radical population policies during what Ronald Suny, borrowing from Domenico Losurdo and Enzo Traverso, calls the ‘international civil war’ that began in 1914 (p. 13). All of the contributors — with the partial exception of Peter Holquist, who identifies 1905–07 as a significant moment linking Tsarist population policy and revolutionary, classbased violence in Russia in 1917–21 — agree implicitly or explicitly that the First World War was a caesura. Yet by comparing the ‘unprecedented dimensions of demographic engineering’ (p. 7) in the late Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg empires, they also tease out important differences between them. For Ottoman Turkey, as both Hans-Lukas Kieser and Oktay Özel show, the year 1913/14 was critical in terms of setting the political goal of ethnic homogenization of Anatolia as the heartland of a new, regenerated empire following the loss of the Sultan’s last remaining territories in North Africa and Europe (with the exception of Edirne, recovered from Bulgaria in July 1913 after the Second Balkan War). Talk of ‘microbes’ that needed to be ‘removed’ from the empire’s territorial ‘body’ emerged in 1913 and fed directly into the 1915–16 genocide. By then the entire Armenian population — women, children and older men as well as younger males — were identified as an internal enemy or ‘fifth column’ (pp. 89–90). In Tsarist Russia, there was no actual genocide, although Holquist mentions the Imperial army’s suppression of the 1916 Central Asian uprising as getting close to this. There were also the mass deportations of various population groups — Jews, Germans, Baltic peoples and others — from the western borderlands to the interior in 1914/15. What this had in common with policy in the Ottoman empire was the identification of particular ethnic communities as a permanent security threat, thereby legitimizing ‘exceptional’ state action, and — in wartime — the extension of violence to the entire ‘enemy’ civilian population, whether that population was to be found in home or occupied territory. This was as much a ‘western’ as an ‘eastern’ phenomenon, as Mark Levene, Arno Barth and other contributors stress. When British diplomats sought to restrain Russian violence against Jews in 1915, this was not a straightforward public-spirited gesture (as western criticisms of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 perhaps had been) but became entangled with narrative strategies that ‘securitized’ the Jewish question, in other words, turned it into a security Reviews 204 issue not just internally for Russia, but internationally too. New demographic concepts of borderland protection, cultural identity and world order — ‘often [expressed] in the most phobic and paranoid terms’, to quote Levene (p. 41) — meant that Jewish (and German) populations globally could now be seen and spoken of as a potential threat to the unity of the Allied cause. A similar dynamic was at work in the anti-German riots that took place in Moscow, in the UK and in many parts of the British empire, again in 1915. Where does this leave Austria-Hungary? Certainly the behaviour of the empire’s military leadership towards border populations in East Galicia and Bukovina, annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina and occupied Serbia, and on the frontiers with the Kingdom of Italy, especially in 1914–15, evinces a similar pattern of sanctioning ethnic violence under the guise of defending imperial territory. Internment camps such as Thalerhof near Graz, mentioned by Serhiy Choliy in his contribution, are a case in point. However, compared to the Ottoman and Russian spheres, there was no drive towards full-scale national/ cultural homogenization in the Dual Monarchy. True, as Hannes Leidinger argues, there was a ‘systematization of hatred’ against Serb ‘terrorists’, Ukrainian ‘russophiles’ and Italian...

A Historicist Critique of Steven Pinker’s Interpretation of Progress

This article presents an alternative account of the Enlightenment project than the one offered by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now. It also offers some insights into how historic changes concretely occurred. Based on a Marxian reading of history we attempt to complete the portrait of human progress that Pinker provides. The main arguments in support of our alternative explanation of social progress are based on insights taken from important works written by such intellectuals as Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, Antonio Gramsci, Chris Harman, Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Karl Korsch, Domenico Losurdo, Georg Lukács, Rosa Luxemburg and Herbert Marcuse. We believe that our explanation of progress is complementary to Pinker’s and provides a more realistic appreciation of the Enlightenment project.

Domenico Losurdo in China: An Insight into the State of Marxist Education and the CPC

In the northern hemisphere’s autumn of 2019, I was asked to offer a seminar on a leading Western Marxist philosopher. I quickly chose Domenico Losurdo, since he is clearly one of the most insightfu...

Marxism and the National Question: Domenico Losurdo’s Contribution to the Dialectics of the National and International

ABSTRACTIn the works of Marx and Engels, the national question does not assume a central role, although their reflections on the independence of Ireland and Poland are very important. From the Second International onwards the debate increased its relevance, particularly through Rosa Luxembourg’s remarks and Lenin’s formulations of imperialism, self-determination, and national liberation struggles. However, it was during the challenges of national independence and construction in the socialist experiences that the national question became central. Domenico Losurdo, addressing the national-international dialectic, contributed to the theoretical maturation of the national question within Marxism, since his views enable a multiscale approach to class struggle in the context of transformations of capitalism and the international system. This article aims to analyze the controversial debate on the national question from the perspective of the formulations of Domenico Losurdo.

Quo Vadis , Class Struggle: An Exegesis of Domenico Losurdo's Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History . Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016. $139.99 (cloth)

<i>Quo Vadis</i> , Class Struggle: An Exegesis of Domenico Losurdo's <i>Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History</i> . Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016. $139.99 (cloth)

The Non-violence Movement and Its Contradictions in the Context of History—A Review of Non-violence: A History beyond the Myth by Domenico Losurdo

ABSTRACTUntil now, the history of the non-violence movement has been written by commentators who have no intention of hiding their sympathies for the movement. However, Domenico Losurdo’s Non-violence: A History beyond the Myth is one of the first texts to confront this topic with seriousness, using scientific methods and a comparative historiographic approach. Losurdo does not limit himself to a history of the ideas of the movement’s leading figures—from the American Christian abolitionists to Gandhi and Luther King—but instead analyses their theories, political opinions, contradictions, moral dilemmas and concrete behaviours in the context of great historical crises and transformations. Losurdo’s book also dedicates plenty of space to current events, analysing how the West today uses non-violence as a way to discredit its enemies. The delegitimation of the People’s Republic of China and the so-called “colour revolutions” demonstrate that even a noble ideal like non-violence can be easily exploited with a malicious intention. It is preferable, then, according to Losurdo, to fight for a “democratisation of international relations” that will inevitably lead to the strengthening of the front of less developed countries and to battling against the oxymoronic “humanitarian wars” or “wars for peace.”

Historical Revisionism and Delegitimation of the Revolutionary and Anticolonial Tradition—A Review of War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century by Domenico Losurdo

ABSTRACTDomenico Losurdo’s War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century tries to respond to historical revisionism, focusing on authors like Ernst Nolte and works such as The Black Book of Communism. Rereading categories such as totalitarianism and genocide, Losurdo’s essay defends against the demonisation of the French and Russian revolutionary cycles and the anticolonial revolutions they generated. Reinstating or relativising the Nazi-Fascist experience as a defensive “counter-movement” to the Bolshevik offensive, historical revisionism overlooks the violence that characterises the history of the classically liberal countries and Western colonialism. However, Losurdo demonstrates how, far from just representing a response to the Bolshevik advance, the Nazi-Fascist criminal projects followed the Anglo-American model of colonialism. Niall Ferguson also glosses over these genealogies, delegitimating anticolonial revolutions, transfiguring the United States as the legitimate heir of the British Empire, as well as making it the champion of the cause of modernity and democracy. Faced with its own difficulties and the current emergence of China on the global stage, the American Empire is called upon to openly reject the principle of equality between nations and establish a new world order for the good of humanity. The success that this British historian enjoys is especially worrying, Losurdo concludes.

Four books on (neo-)liberalism

(Neo-)liberalism has been at the centre of many debates on economic institutions and policies as well as social issues, and particularly so since the financial crisis of 2008. The Great Recession was initially regarded by many as the end of the belief in the supreme efficiency of the market as well as the return of the state. Yet, only a few years after the subprime crisis and still in the midst of a long-lasting recession, in Europe at least, the influence of the neo-liberal doctrine on economic policies seems stronger than ever, leading many to wonder how such a devalued and contested ideology could still be so prominent.1 In order to understand this apparent puzzle, it is necessary to investigate what neo-liberalism actually is. The books featured in this review contribute to this effort. In order to understand contemporary neo-liberalism, it is necessary to look at its foundations, i.e. liberalism. The association of liberalism with the unconditional promotion of freedom and autonomy is usually taken for granted. Domenico Losurdo's book, Liberalism: A Counter-History, originally published in Italian in 2006, questions this belief with an investigation of liberalism from the 18th Century until 1914. Losurdo not only examines the writings of the most important contributors to liberal thought, but looks at real-existing liberalism and its concrete political realisations. The book aims to unveil the elements of liberalism usually left aside. And the picture he draws is far from the “Golden legend” told by the hagiography of liberalism. The book shows in detail how liberalism considered slavery, the condition of “coloured” or colonised populations, the treatment of the poor and their children as well as the working conditions of the industrial workers.