Contemporary Conversations: Ross Wolfe on Domenico Losurdo's Neo-Stalinist Revival and the Future of Marxism

Is the legacy of 20th century Marxism one of victory or defeat? On a certain reading, the defeat of the international proletarian revolution has been the distinctive preoccupation of a variegated tradition of thought that has come to be known as Western Marxism. For critics, Western Marxism represents a turn away from historical materialism’s proper focus on forces of production, class struggle, and the unity of theory and practice towards the superstructure of capitalist civilization: ideology, philosophy, aesthetics, and culture. At its best, however, Western Marxism offers the most theoretically advanced and intellectually honest reckoning with the historical defeat of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe and the United States. In this episode, we are fortunate to host Ross Wolfe, author of a recent, timely piece on the legacy of Western Marxism in New International entitled “Neo-Stalinism & Philosophy: Domenico Losurdo’s New School of Falsification.” Wolfe’s three-part series offers a devastating critique of the Neo-Stalinist revival that has lately become popular among the online left and whose standard bearer is Italian Stalinist Domenico Losurdo. Focusing on Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, translated into English earlier this year, this episode attempts to salvage the enduring insights of the Western Marxist tradition from Losurdo’s distortions and outright falsifications, with the aim of exposing the hollowness of Neo-Stalinist scholarship and politics. In doing so, we try to lay the groundwork for what a clear-eyed reckoning with the successes and failures of historical Marxism might look like today and what possibilities for revolutionary anti-capitalist politics are still available to us, here at the end of history. 

Read Ross's tripartite piece here:

Part 1: https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/

Part 2: https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/

Part 3: https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/

Follow Ross on Twitter(X): @rosswolfe

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