hinese scholars who have engaged with Fredric Jameson often observe-sometimes with admiration and sometimes with a degree of irony-that he appears 'more Marxist than any Marxist in China'.Jameson's Marxism, and, by extension, that of Althusser, Badiou, iek, and other Western leftist theorists, serves as a powerful reminder of the impossibility of any cultural essentialism upon which claims of Chinese exceptionalism might be founded (Liu 2018: 338).The observation points to a deeper tension.During a recent visit of mine to China, a young scholar told me that efforts to analyse the country's contemporary contradictions through the conceptual repertoire of Western Marxism can feel like wearing a garment tailored for another body: however elegant its original design, it sits awkwardly in the present context.The symbolic architecture of public memory Mannequin.Source: nSeika, Flickr.com(CC). OP-EDSin Beijing reveals a telling incongruity.Across Tiananmen Square, Mao's portrait still dominates the Gate of Heavenly Peace.At the same time, within the National Museum of China, exhibitions often feature figures such as Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary, translator, and cultural intermediary, highlighting that encounters with the outside world have long shaped China's modernity.During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe regarded China with fascination, as an inscrutable, self-enclosed order that cast a persistent shadow over Enlightenment reason.That spectral presence returns today, albeit in a different form.Contemporary China is simultaneously the outcome of a Marxist revolution and a formation that eludes the inherited categories of Marxist theory.It confronts theory itself with a problem that cannot be reduced to the familiar dichotomies of East and West, socialism and capitalism, or modernity and tradition.In this respect, Marxism may be uniquely suited to the task, not as a doctrinal framework to be applied but as a dialectical method capable of both the historical enabling of global capitalism and the resistance to its universalising tendencies.China thus emerges not simply as the object of Marxist critique but also as the site where Marxism must reconfigure its own conceptual apparatus or risk forfeiting its critical relevance.

Lukács pioneered the Western Marxist intellectual movement, holding significant research value. This study employs a totality approach. To analyze the historical context from three aspects: the Theoretical Dilemma of the Second International, the German Sociological Tradition and the Debates within the Communist International. Analyze the Totality, Class Consciousness and Practice-Oriented of the theory to clarify the fundamental tenets of Lukács' Historical Epistemology, and examine the contemporary relevance of Lukács' Historical Epistemology from the perspectives of criticism of mechanical materialism, communist debate and its influence on contemporary international socialist movement.. This research and analysis method is helpful for us to deepen our understanding of Lukács' Historical Epistemology and Western Marxism. It argues that Lukács' theory represents an innovative response to the crisis of Marxism during the proletarian revolutionary era, while also offering impetus for the global socialist movement in the 21st century.

ABSTRACT In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo identifies the antithetical and sometimes hostile positions expressed on anti-colonial struggles as the salient feature of the “Western Marxist” tradition of radical European theory. As Losurdo shows, the formation of such positions, which dispense with an essential component of the Marxist theory of class struggles, is a result of a prevalence of theoretical concepts and tendencies within the Western Marxist canon, absent in leading spokespeople from countries in which Marxist governments held power after October 1917. As the article develops in part 1, the positions at issue include messianism, anti-statism, utopianism, anti-scientism, anti-technologism, anti-modernism, anti-labourism, antinomianism, romanticism, and idealism. In part 2, responding to critics who have challenged the value of Losurdo’s characterisation of a “Western Marxism” spanning into post-structuralist thinkers, the article shows how discerning Losurdo’s analysis is by focusing on popular “radical” Italian theorist, Giorgio Agamben. In the conclusion, the article is situated within the critical responses to Western Marxism, and calls attention to a perceived tension in Losurdo’s treatment of Ernst Bloch, and more widely, in the Marxian stance towards bourgeois rights and liberties.

ABSTRACT To date, nearly all the scholarship on Domenico Losurdo focuses on his critical attitudes towards nineteenth century classical German philosophy, towards Western Marxism, or towards the liberal tradition. Much of this scholarship fails to acknowledge the significance of two related traditions, which constitute the foundations of Losurdo’s anti-imperialist thought: the twentieth century anticolonial tradition (including Maoism) and the nineteenth century abolitionist tradition. This article will focus on the latter tradition, as it is a dimension of Losurdo entirely unexplored. This article, written from the standpoint of a historian of abolitionism, will reveal the rather deep knowledge of abolitionism which lay at the heart of Losurdo’s entire philosophical project. Abolitionism, this article argues, shaped Losurdo’s methodology, shaped his critique of Western critical theory and liberalism, and finally, shaped his historical-materialist understanding of the place of anti-imperialism within the global class struggle. By showing Losurdo’s debt to abolitionist thinkers (whom he read with unusual thoroughness), this article will reveal Losurdo’s very close alignments with an array of anticolonial thinkers, such as Du Bois, Eric Williams, and Kwame Nkrumah (among others), who all took deep inspiration from abolitionism.

ABSTRACT Primary and secondary education in the imperial core serves to reproduce the ideas of the ruling capitalist class. Revolutionary educators such as Paulo Freire have articulated ways that education may subvert this reproduction—a pedagogy of the oppressed that occurs both inside and outside the classroom. However, a group of left anticommunist recuperators surrounded Freire in his later years, twisting his words and tempering his radicalism. Domenico Losurdo’s anti-imperialist framework of analysis helps discern Western Marxist ideology in the works of Freire’s followers and critical pedagogy theorists, allowing us to interrogate the sanitization process Freire’s followers have enacted while also reasserting Freire’s anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist orientation. This article engages in a close reading of two works from Henry Giroux, one of the best-known theorists of Paulo Freire and critical pedagogy. Applying Losurdo’s analysis, the article locates numerous Western Marxist distortions of Freire in Giroux’s writing, particularly regarding the role of power for educators. Because education is an important part of the ideological superstructure of capitalist societies, a comprehensive approach to ending imperialism must include a critical examination of how educators may disrupt ideological reproduction and help build the subjective conditions for revolution. Only by ending US imperialism can we have true multinational liberation.

ABSTRACT A thorough study of Domenico Losurdo’s discursive projects reveals a distinct, yet implicit, set of methods for analyzing the material conditions of the world around us and for the development of his dialectical lens of “critical communism.” In this article, the authors set about to make concrete Losurdo’s methodology by outlining the potential, value, and implications of his method to contemporary political movements, and its use in constructions of historiographical narratives, while still maintaining the integrity of historical materialism. To illustrate this, the authors will be engaging with several of Losurdo’s works—including his texts on liberalism, his critique of Western Marxism, and his broader understanding of class conflict through the “struggle for recognition”—as well as their own analysis of recent Herrenvolk movements within Marxism in the West. This discursive analysis is in service of concretely outlining how Losurdo’s theoretical and methodological contributions to historical materialism can be applied in scholarship and political practice.

ABSTRACT Losurdo’s commitment to emancipation overcomes dogmatism and bestows a pioneering character upon his theoretical endeavour. One must remember that Losurdo’s environment was not dissimilar to that of Western Marxists, whom he unapologetically criticised and distanced himself from. Instead of being seduced by neoliberal promises commingled with the so-called “End of History,” Losurdo’s work demonstrates a commitment not only to theoretical but also to practical emancipatory struggles. This article examines three elements that make Losurdo’s work significant and highly topical: a counter-history, a counter-philosophy, and a counter-politics. Losurdo’s counter-history demolishes Western intelligentsia’s rewriting of history and is, therefore, vital to regaining and repositioning class consciousness in today’s capitalism. His counter-philosophy does not investigate “concepts” and “categories” in themselves, in isolation, as transcendental entities. Instead, he brings philosophical categories and social institutions together, examining how they have been apprehended historically, thus superseding simplistic views that reduce philosophy to hagiography. Finally, unlike most intelligentsia of the capitalist core—who systematically overlooks Western imperialism, (neo)colonialism, and the remaining consequences of centuries-long imperialist exploitation and violence—Losurdo’s counter-politics pays heed to various liberation struggles and contextualises them not from a moral standpoint but rather dialectically in relation to dominant powers from which people liberate themselves.

This study analyzes the evolution of interpretations of Karl Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts in the Russian philosophical tradition from their introduction to the present day. The relevance of addressing this issue is determined by the need to deconstruct the ideological layers that hinder an adequate understanding of Marx's early philosophical legacy, as well as the need to understand the mechanisms of philosophical knowledge production under political control. The goal of the study is to identify specific modes of reading economic and philosophical manuscripts shaped by the ideological and institutional framework of Soviet philosophy and to trace their transformation in the post-Soviet period. Key objectives include reconstructing the mechanisms of canonization of Marxist texts reminiscent of religious practices of sacralization, analyzing alternative interpretive traditions marginalized during the Soviet era, and comparing Soviet approaches with the Western Marxist tradition, which has found in humanistic issues a basis for critiquing contemporary capitalism. The methodological framework is built on a synthesis of historical and philosophical analysis, critical hermeneutics, and a comparative approach, allowing us to reconstruct the contextual determinacy of interpretations and identify hidden continuities between different periods of Russian philosophical thought. The work draws on conceptual developments by contemporary scholars of Soviet intellectual history, demonstrating the mechanisms of ideological control and the formation of scholarly discourses in the context of the pervasive politicization of philosophy. The research findings suggest that the path from the sacralization of Marxist texts, through dogmatic reproduction, to critical reflection, reflects the general logic of the development of Russian philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. It is revealed that gaps in the understanding of the humanistic issues of early Marx were determined primarily by external factors that set the boundaries of what was permissible in scholarly communication, rather than by the internal logic of philosophical development.

The article examines the heterogeneous space of the intensively developing early Soviet Marxist discourse. The author proves that its development in the early years of Soviet philosophical culture was determined not only by political and ideological reasons, but also by internal factors, conditioned by the claim of Marxism as a research strategy to the status of a comprehensive and consis­tent theoretical program. The article demonstrates that the study of the variety of archival materials deposited in the funds of numerous cultural and bureaucratic institutions of that time, as well as the rapidly developing Soviet intellectual pe­riodicals, allows us to conclude that the real picture of the development of Rus­sian philosophy in the early Soviet period was more complex, diverse and in­tense than it is often considered. The author identifies several key “points of tension” (later developed in Western Marxism) characteristic of early Soviet Marxist discourse, which coexisted and competed relatively freely in the cultural space of Soviet Russia: the controversy surrounding R. Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation of capital; the discussions that accompanied the formation and the first stages of the development of so-called neo-Marxism (Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch) and the related controversy about the philosophical legacy of Vladimir Lenin; disputes about the philosophical and methodological founda­tions of political economy and, accordingly, about its subject and the limits of the application of Marxist theoretical tools to Marxism itself; historical and philosophical discussions about the genesis of classical Marxism.

This article reconsiders the Gramsci-Mao debate on antifascism through the lens of India’s Emergency (1975–1977), arguing that Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution and Subaltern Studies unique reformulation of passive revolution inadequately theorize fascism as implicated in structures of imperialism. In contrast, Mao’s theory of fascism, and how the Naxalite Movement seized upon it foregrounds the centrality of mass mobilization, anti-imperialism, and Third World revolutionary praxis, offering a vital corrective to Western Marxist limitations. This analysis examines how Indian intellectual movements inspired by Gramsci and by Mao alternately navigated the Emergency, revealing the importance of theories of fascism that see fascism and imperialism as inextricable. By centering anti-imperialist and Global South perspectives, the article advances a critical framework for antifascist praxis that links local struggles to global hierarchies of power, reclaiming antifascist theory for the revolutionary Global South.

Against the backdrop of accelerating global multipolarity and the structural failure of traditional governance models, Marxism has regained significant theoretical attention and practical relevance as a critical system of thought. Taking the divergence between Chinese and Western Marxist traditions as a point of departure, this article systematically analyzes the fundamental distinction between the “practical rationality” orientation of Chinese Marxism and the “subjectivity critique” tradition of Western Marxism. It further reveals their complementarity in terms of historical context, methodological approach, and political value orientation. The paper focuses on the concept of a “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind,” arguing that it represents a Chinese Marxist response to global crises through institutional innovation and ideological advancement. This concept demonstrates theoretical potential to transcend the capitalist hegemonic order and contribute to a fairer and more rational global governance framework. Finally, the paper explores how China, under the transformation of global intellectual structures, is reconstructing Marxist discourse through theoretical innovation, institutional contributions, and discursive strategies, thereby providing Chinese perspectives and practices for building a “World Marxism” community.

The review examines the book “Marxism and the Classics: From Lenin to Ilyenkov”, written by the philosopher R.R. Vakhitov (Ufa). The book presents the concept that the philosophy of Marx and his followers such as V.I. Lenin, G. Lukacs, M.A. Lifshitz, E.V. Il’enkov represent the legacy of philosophical classics as a teaching on the unity of Truth, Beauty and Good. Debating vulgar materialists and positivists, Vakhitov substantiates that various forms of relativism lead humanity only to alienation and hostility of all against all. On the contrary, the idea that there are eternal truths and universal values ​​brings humanity closer to the ideal of communism, according to which people will sooner or later get rid of the shackles of necessity and become truly free, living ac­cording to the principles of equality and brotherhood. In this context, the attempts to synthesize Marxism and the philosophy of all-unity discussed in the book are noteworthy, as well as Vakhi­tov’s position itself, which can be described as sympathetic to Marxist conservatism. In the opi­nion of the author of this review, Vakhitov’s point of view deserves attention in the context of the evolution of Western Marxism, which has become culturally radical but economically con­servative. This has only led to the cementing of neoliberalism and alienation caused by cultural wars. Economic radicalism and cultural conservatism may be a more promising combination in the struggle for a communist future.

Terry Eagleton’s Disappearances represents a significant innovation in modern dramatic narration. By structuring its narrative around a dialectical (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) framework infused with ideology, the play creates a subversive movement between surface and deep narrative layers. Through this narrative practice, Eagleton not only enriches theatrical form by opening a nuanced space for ideological discourse but also offers a profound Western Marxist critique of the paths to individual emancipation.

This research work endeavours to conduct a symptomatic reading of the 2011 animated film Rango through the theoretical praxes of Marx and Engels’ critique of political economy and the broader corpus of Western Marxism. Deploying an interdisciplinary critical methodology spanning semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, and ideology critique, the analysis will excavate how Rango operates as a multi-layered dialectic between capitalist reification and the proletariat impulse towards revolutionary class consciousness. At the paradigmatic level, the text will be deconstructed as an anthropomorphized allegory for the structural violence and systemic immiseration inflicted upon the working masses under capitalist commodity fetishism. The homologic narrative trajectory of the protagonist reptilian’s imaginary misrecognition and subsequent ideological interpellation will be parsed to allegorize the materialist dialectic of history and Marxist humanism’s emancipatory teleology. Specifically, close hermeneutic analysis will exhume how the film’s antagonistic water capitalists reify hydric means of production into fictive exchange-value commodities. Their dissemination of false socially constructed scarcity mythos and inequitable distribution mechanisms will be framed as replicating capitalism’s core strategies of surplus extraction via manufactured deprivation and the proletarian Spaltung [1] (fragmentation). This semiology of the filmic text will illuminate how its surreal aesthetics of the Real unmask capitalist interpellative ideologies as Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses reifying false consciousnesses. Rango’s metaphorical overcoming of this mystification represents the apotheosis of a materialist praxis oriented towards the permanent revolutionary reconstitution of new socio-economic relations emancipated from the fetters of capital.

The critical reflection on the problem of reification has been the main thread of the century-long journey of Western Marxism. In the process of comprehensively elaborating and innovatively developing the critique of reification, Western Marxism has constructed and deduced logical coordinates based on the changing circumstances of the times, analyzed the new forms of alienation in human existence, and proposed some new paradigms of theoretical thinking, attempting to demonstrate the powerful vitality of the critical approach of Marxism. However, on the whole, the Western Marxist interpretation of the critique of reification and the direction of de-reification has three major shortcomings: weakening or neglecting the foundational position of political economy critique, the increasing disconnection between "theoretical weapons" and political practice, and the gradual inward contraction of practical solutions. With the outbreak of the new round of digital and artificial intelligence revolution, the theory of reification critique can only effectively explore the true path of the organic unity of technological rationality and humanistic rationality, materiality and humanity by broadening its perspective, updating its paradigms, and facing up to the reification attributes of things themselves and the de-reification forms of materiality.

ABSTRACT Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel, Ecotopia, was among the first and most influential self-consciously environmentalist utopian novels. Drawing on Callenbach’s writing as a film critic in the 1960s and 1970s, this article situates the novel in relation to two particular political backdrops explicitly invoked within it, backdrops that served as acute influences on the novel’s Ecotopian imaginary. First, situated as he was in Berkeley, California, Callenbach presents a reading of the New Left milieus emerging and folding around him. This reading reflects and interprets both the promise of the era’s radical movements and these movements’ limits, problems, and internal struggles. Second, central to Callenbach’s Ecotopian imaginary was a coordination of resource extraction, production, and distribution through a regulated market mediating exchange between worker-led cooperatives, a basic model of political economy informed in particular by Yugoslav socialist ideals. The novel thus mirrors the oft-obscured influences on Western Marxists of the internal critiques within socialist Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s. Having laid out these political backdrops, the article delves in its final section into a reading of Ecotopia’s racial pessimism and its surprising resonance with the eventual collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Performing a critical reading that triangulates the novel in relation to the Northern California New Left and socialist Yugoslavia allows for a new way of situating Callenbach and early imaginaries of Ecotopia in periodizations of environmentalism, seeing the novel as a vexed and idiosyncratic swan song of 1960s radicalism.

English-born philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose (1947-1995) and French Trotskyist activist and philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010) were born a mere year apart. While their work departs from the respective strands of Western Marxism and its focus on aesthetics and philosophy versus a Trotskyist preoccupation with economics and politics, they both were interested in Walter Benjamin and his ideas of messianism, melancholy, and Judaism in the early nineties. This article argues that Rose and Bensaïd’s heterodox Jewish identities in their respective memoirs parallel their Jewish-inflected dialectical containers for Benjamin’s melancholy. It effectively stages imagined fictive meeting between the two thinkers in which they discuss their disagreements about Benjamin as melancholically politically disengaged (Rose) or revitalizing Marxism through a melancholy messianic wager (Bensaïd).

The world of Chinese Marxism is little known to Western Marxist scholars, let alone the general Anglophone reading public. This book is therefore of double importance. First, it serves as an introduction to Chinese economic thinking, for anyone wanting to study, with an open mind, China’s economic successes and the principles that underlie it. Second, it will introduce Western Marxists to Chinese Marxist thinking.Marxist economic analysis is integral to the policies underlying China’s success. This may not be apparent to readers whose contact with Chinese economics is confined to University departments where the neoclassical canon prevails. However, Western ‘standard economics’ is by no means the basis of Chinese political decision-making. Marxist thinking plays a major role in Chinese policy and debates initiated by Marxists are at the forefront of the choices facing policy-makers, as this fascinating book shows.For this very reason, the book is highly practical. In order to confront the complexity and uniqueness of China’s economic miracle, the authors have developed Marxism in exciting and innovative ways.The book thus provides an unparalleled introduction to the dynamism and breadth of the issues facing Chinese Marxists and Chinese economists in general. It extends the boundaries of Marxist political economy in creative and productive directions which are of world-wide importance, not in China alone.

This is the second of two volumes comprising The Creation of Value by Living Labour: A Normative and Empirical Study. The first opened with a review of the literature on labor’s role in production, laying the ground, as the work’s title suggests, for a detailed empirical study of creative, scientific, and management labour in China, conceived of as an economy with mixed forms of property.Its central concern was how best to maximize the social and economic benefits of these highly productive forms of labour, extending these benefits to the whole of society by preventing their monopolization and misuse by property-owners.The present volume underpins that analysis with a detailed discussion of the Marxist literature on the relation between labor, value and price. This may come as a surprise to both neoclassical scholars and to Marxist and other heterodox scholars. Why do Chinese economists consider a Victorian ‘minor post-Ricardian’, as Samuelson (1957, 911) derisively labelled Marx, relevant to the economy of the modern powerhouse that is China? And why should Westerners pay any attention to Chinese discussions of obscure sixty-year-old debates, riddled with mathematical subtleties and apparently confined to the ivory towers?To answer this question, it is necessary to turn it upside down. It has come to the attention of the world that China’s economic successes, for a long time overlooked or dismissed by Western writers, are without precedent. No country has sustained a growth rate so large for so long, or raised so many people out of extreme poverty in a mere thirty years. No nation of any size except South Korea has achieved Chinese levels of development since the epoch of high imperialism. Even were China’s growth to stop tomorrow, its economic achievements to date would be unparalleled in the history of capitalism.

Ernst Bloch, as a pivotal figure in early Western Marxism, constructed his philosophy of hope centered on the ontology of not-yet-being (noch-nicht-sein), offering a groundbreaking perspective for traditional philosophical systems. This study traces the conceptual history of his system, analyzes Bloch's original texts, and compares his thought with other Marxist scholars to reveal the uniqueness of his ontology: beyond the binary opposition of being and non-being, Bloch introduces not-yet-being' as a dynamic, processual concept, redefining existence as a perpetually unfolding and incomplete state. This ontology synthesizes the Left Aristotelian theory of potentiality, the openness of Hegelian dialectics, and Marxs historical materialism, forming a generative logic of nothingness-not-yet-all. Blochs system not only deconstructs ontological closure but also, through the concept of an open cosmos, interprets cultural phenomena as unfinished processes imbued with utopian impulses, endowing them with dual significance for both understanding and transforming the world. This paper argues that Blochs open system responds to the 20th-century crisis of spirit while providing methodological insights for contemporary systems research. By emphasizing indeterminacy and possibility, his philosophy pioneers a path for constructing autonomous knowledge systems beyond Euro-centrism, offering critical inspiration for transcending metaphysical constraints and engaging with multicultural realities.