Ross Wolfe Contra Domenico Losurdo

5 snips

Nov 24, 2025

Ross Wolfe, a writer and researcher focused on Marxist intellectual history, delves into the recent popularity of Domenico Losurdo and the implications for contemporary Marxism. He explores how renewed faith in Dengism and shifts in leftist publishing have influenced Marxist discourse. Wolfe critiques Losurdo's distortions of key theorists, debates the nature of the state in Marxist thought, and examines the dangers of modern third-worldism. The conversation culminates in discussing China's contradictions and the complexities of achieving communism in a national context.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Early Left Forum Encounter With Losurdo

C. Derick Varn recalls first encountering Losurdo through an early 2012 interview at Left Forum that Ross Wolfe also referenced.
That meeting framed how Losurdo's liberalism book initially reached a broad left audience.

INSIGHT

Publishing Shaped Dengist Appeal

Ross Wolfe links Domenico Losurdo's rise to Verso and Monthly Review publishing choices and a revived left fascination with China's statecraft.
He argues those publishing politics helped normalize a Dengist common sense on parts of the contemporary left.

INSIGHT

Monthly Review's Political Shift Matters

Wolfe traces Monthly Review's shifting stance: historically pro‑USSR then pro‑China, which helps explain its current promotion of Losurdo and Dengist views.
Publishing choices reflect broader ideological realignments on the left toward sympathetic views of the PRC.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

What if the renewed fascination with Domenico Losurdo says more about our appetite for stability than about Marxism’s future? We sit down with Ross Wolfe to unpack how a Verso‑to‑Monthly Review pipeline, a revived faith in China’s statecraft, and the polemical stretching of “Western Marxism” built a Dengist common sense on the contemporary left. The story runs through publishing politics, bad categories, and a philosophical move that recodes the twentieth century’s defeats as proof that the state must be forever.

We press on the scholarship: where Losurdo distorts Perry Anderson, ignores Russell Jacoby’s tighter frame, and sidelines entire currents like British Marxism, the Situationists, and Johnson–Forest. We reopen the Italian debates—Operaismo, Tronti, Althusser—and ask whether Sartre’s and workerist priorities were really blind to anti‑colonial struggle or simply refused to romanticize models that never fit advanced capitalism. From there, we tackle the hinge: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Does it license a permanent state, or did Marx and Lenin get it right that the state’s existence tracks class antagonism and should wither as class society is abolished?

The conversation widens to strategy. We examine the labor‑aristocracy thesis, the quiet third‑worldism that relieves organizers of responsibility at home, and the way China’s present contradictions—major trade with Israel, BRICS diplomacy, GDP slowdown, regional rivalries—undercut claims that socialism can be national. If history “could only go this way,” what is left to change? We make the case for rebuilding class independence and international coordination in the core and periphery alike, not lowering horizons to match yesterday’s outcomes.

Subscribe, share, and leave a review to keep these long‑form dives alive. Then tell us: should the left reclaim the withering of the state—or retire it?

Send us a text

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Support the show

Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic