Upstream - [TEASER] Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. Western Marxism. What is it? Where did it arise from? And what is it in opposition to? Not simply a geographic indicator, although much of what it depicts exists in what we understand to be the West more broadly, Western Marxism is a term deployed, in particular, by the great Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo, to describe a form of Marxism that, in a nutshell, does not concern itself with anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, but, instead, rejects much of the actually-existing socialism that exists in the very real, material world—a world which Western Marxism, over the years, has become more and more alienated and estranged from. Western Marxism stands in opposition to what Domenico Losurdo calls Eastern Marxism, which, again, is not necessarily delineated by a specific geography, but is a form of Marxism that has cut its teeth in real struggles for power, in real anti-colonial revolution. In his penultimate book—which shares the title of this episode—Domenico Losurdo presents a scathing but honest, passionate, and deeply sincere critique of Western Marxism. Far from just a diatribe, Losurdo’s text spells out exactly why the West abandoned so much of Marxism that was central to Marx, Engels, and Lenin’s understandings of Marxist theory and, most importantly, practice.  The vast majority of Losurdo’s fifty or so books have not been translated into English, and he died in 2018, but this book, Western Marxism, was just recently translated into English for the first time, and we’ve brought on the edition’s editor, the terrific Gabriel Rockhill, to discuss it.  Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist teaching Philosophy and Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. He runs an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop and is the editor of Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, by the Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo, published by Monthly Review Press.  In this Patreon episode, we discuss Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism—tracing their histories and outlining their differences. We explore how the CIA and other anti-communist forces infiltrated the left and spread the influence of Western Marxism through academia, media, and other avenues in order to purge the Western left of its communist tendencies and to poison our perception of actually-existing socialism in places like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam—among others. We explore how the left in the West can unlearn this propaganda and reintroduce a robust anti-imperialist, pro-communist analysis into our movements, and why it is so crucial to understand that the left must start with anti-imperialism. Further resources: Gabriel Rockhill Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, by Domenico Losurdo Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism, Gus Hall Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Volume I of The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry, by Gabriel Rockhill (forthcoming in 2025 by Monthly Review Press) Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, by Frances Stonor Saunders Related episodes: What is To Be Done? w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante The Liberal Virus Will the Revolution Be Funded? w/ Nairuti Shastry and Zac Chapman Walter Rodney, Marxism, and Underdevelopment with D. Musa Springer & Charisse Burden-Stelly Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison The Missing Revolution w/ Vincent Bevins The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class with Catherine Liu Palestine Pt. 11: Israel and the U.S. Empire w/ Max Ajl Palestine Pt. 13: Al-Aqsa Flood and the Resistance Axis w/ Matteo Capasso Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. 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A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation. It's important, I think, for your listeners to understand that Western Marxism, and this isn't really in Lesordo's work, but I've been doing this research for three decades now, and drawing extensively on Lesordo and other figures, I think it's very clear that Western Marxism isn't just an organic development

on the part of the intellectual class and the imperial core, it is also a weapon of theoretical class warfare on the part of the capitalist ruling class and the bourgeois states that have recognized that it's very useful to have a version of Marxism that convinces people that they're Marxists when they're actually opposed to Marxism having any effect on real politics in the actual practical world. And this has been, unfortunately, a large part of the legacy of Western Marxism is hostility

to Marxism in practice in the name of Marxism in theory. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan.

And I'm Robert Raymond. Western Marxism. What is it? Where did it arise from? And what is it in opposition to? Not simply a geographic indicator, although much of what it depicts exists in what we understand to be the West more broadly, Western Marxism is a term deployed in particular by the great Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo to describe a form of Marxism that in a nutshell does not concern itself with anti-imperialism

and anti-colonialism but instead rejects much of the actually existing socialism that exists in the very real material world, a world which Western Marxism over the years has become more and more alienated and estranged from. Western Marxism stands in opposition to what Domenico Lacerdo calls Eastern Marxism, which again is not necessarily delineated by a specific geography, but is a form of Marxism that has cut its teeth in real struggles for power, in real anti-colonial revolution. In his penultimate book, which shares the title of this episode, Domenico Lisserto presents

a scathing but honest, passionate and deeply sincere critique of Western Marxism. Far from just a diatribe, Lacerdo's text spells out exactly why the West has abandoned so much of Marxism that was central to Marx, Engels, and Lenin's understandings of Marxist theory and, most importantly, practice. The vast majority of Lacerdo's 50 or so books have not been translated into English, and he died in 2018. But this book, Western Marxism, was just recently translated into English for the first time, and we've brought on the edition's editor, the terrific Gabriel Rockhill, to discuss it.

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist teaching philosophy and global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University. He runs an educational non-profit called the Critical Theory Workshop and is the editor of Western Marxism, How It Was Born, How It Died, How it Can Be Reborn by the Italian Marxist Domenico Lacerdo published by Monthly Review Press. In this Patreon episode, we discuss Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism, tracing their histories and outlining their differences. We explore how the CIA and other anti-communist forces

infiltrated the left and spread the influence of Western Marxism through academia, media, and other avenues in order to purge the Western left of its communist tendencies and to poison our perception of actually existing socialism in places like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, among others. We explore how the left in the West can unlearn this propaganda and reintroduce a robust anti-imperialist pro-communist analysis into our movements and why it is so crucial to understand that the left must

start with anti-imperialism. And now here's Robert in conversation with Gabriel Rockhill. Gabriel, it is great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. Absolutely. And I would love it if we could just start with an introduction, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and yeah, maybe just tell us a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to do it.

So I'm a philosopher, cultural critic and activist. I teach philosophy and global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University. I run an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop that has a summer school and other activities. And I also have a research association and a university in Paris. I came to do the work

that I do through a kind of long trajectory of engaging with French theory and Western kind of critical theory broadly construed and I'm currently completing actually a trilogy for Monthly Review Press called The Intellectual World War, Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry that overlaps quite significantly with the work of Lesorto and Western Marxism. In fact, the title of the first book in that series is called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism and it provides a kind of political economy that examines the material forces that have been driving the kind of anti-communist left intelligentsia. That sounds really, really fascinating. We'll definitely have to have you back on for that.

And cool, yeah, thank you for sharing a little bit about that. And so today, like you mentioned, we will be discussing Domenico Lissurdo's classic text, Western Marxism, whose first ever English translation you edited for Monthly Review Press, and which was just published last month. So very exciting, and I'm so grateful I had a chance to come across this text and to read it and to be speaking with you about it. And I'd love to start by asking you to maybe,

we don't have to get into depth, but just a little bit of context for people, a little bit of biography on Lesurdo. Who was he? What context was he writing in? When was he writing? And what is the significance of this text? So Domenico Lesurdo is an Italian philosopher. He was born in 1941, died in 2018, and he studied early on in Germany and is a specialist in German philosophy, and that is one of the focal points of his research. So he's written on Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Marx, obviously Engels, etc. But he also has a kind of expansive body of work that engages with the history of political liberalism and capitalism, as well as the history of Marxism in theory, but also in practice, so the history of actually existing socialism and communism.

He's actually written some 50 books and there are very few of them available in English. Western Marxism is his penultimate book and, well, we'll get into a little bit more detail about that, but I think that one thing that's important to understand about Lesorto and his work is that he was an intellectual but he was also a militant and an activist who was very engaged in Communist Party organizing in Italy and that part of his theoretical project was providing a counter history of the kind of dominant ideologies within the West. That's what he did in his excellent book, Liberalism, a Counter History is actually its subtitle. But with

Western Marxism, what we have is a kind of counter history of the Western left intelligentsia and Western Marxism more specifically. CB. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that. And yeah, let's get into the text. And of course, we're going to dive in super duper deep as we go through the conversation, but just sort of a nut graph to get us started here before we get more deep into things. Can you start by explaining what Lesurdo refers to as Western Marxism and sort of what is it and how did it come to be born? Lesurdo's inspiration for this is largely a number of debates within the Marxist intelligentsia and the activist world in the kind of 1970s where Western Marxism was understood

as a kind of distinct trajectory within the history of Marxism from Eastern Marxism, which was the Marxism that supported actually existing socialism in the East insofar as of course socialism in its state form began in 1917 with the Soviet Union but then expanded in the East with China, Vietnam, Korea, etc. So Eastern Marxism is an easy term for referring to those who support actually existing socialism and it's not necessarily a geographic term and the same is true for Western Marxism to some extent. But another aspect of the way in which this project is framed by Lesorto is that he really draws heavily on Lenin's analysis of the split in the global socialist movement around World War I.

And what Lenin diagnosed is that the labor aristocracy, meaning the working class in the imperial core that was situated at the very top of global pyramids of labor or value creation, was oriented in such a way that they ended up supporting the bourgeoisie in the imperialist war effort and turning their backs on the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist orientation of Lenin, Luxembourg, and others who were on the kind of left edge of the various social democratic parties, because that's what they all referred to themselves at the time. And so what Lesorto's interested in drawing on Lenin is the way in which that original split in the global socialist movement has then played itself out over the long 20th century, insofar as a lot of what developed in the West after this split

was a form of Marxism that was more oriented towards theoretical problems, academic issues, and became increasingly divorced from political praxis, as well as from certain key aspects of Marxism, historically, notably political economy and the Marxist engagement with ontology and with science. So the dialectics of nature and a big part of the Marxist project was kind of cut off. So maybe the last thing that I would say though is that Western Marxism, ultimately in Lesorto's take on it, is not just Marxism per se. What he's diagnosing is the orientation of the Western left intelligentsia.

Many of the individuals that he engages with in the book are actually not self-declared Marxists. Some of them are self-declared anti-Marxists and anti-communists. And so I think the term was just a kind of useful term to index the radical wing of the intelligentsia within the imperial core. And again, this is not geographic, but it's more about a political orientation, but a political orientation that grows more or less organically, at least to some extent, out of the imperial forces that are undergirding it, hence the Leninist framing for the entire project. And so what about Eastern Marxism? So maybe, you know, you mentioned earlier the term actually existing socialism.

I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about Losurdo's conception of what he calls Eastern Marxism. And you touched on this already a little bit, you know, the bifurcation that developed the contrasts between Western and Eastern Marxism. But I guess, yeah, just to continue setting the stage a Minh to Che to Fidel Castro to and these of course are just figures who are important but important insofar as they manifest and embody an enormous mobilization of millions of people in the cause of fighting imperialism. And so the key aspect of Eastern Marxism is an orientation towards Marxism in practice, not just Marxism in theory, and recognizing that the primacy of practice means that, and in my opinion, there's no better source on this than Lesorto, it means that Marxists have had to learn from material reality

and adjust their assumptions, their ideas, their projections to that material reality, and that Eastern Marxism has done that much more successfully than Western Marxism that tends to suffer from a primacy of theory over and against the primacy of practice. And you see this in many different ways within Eastern Marxism, but just to reference one example, and I'm sure we could talk about others if you want, is that for Lesordo, the moment when Lenin introduced a new economic policy in the Soviet Union

was very important because Lenin explicitly opened up the Soviet Union to capitalist investment. And Lesordo recounts the story of how many Bolsheviks tore up their party cards at that point in time and said, this isn't what I signed up for. This is supposed to be communism and this joker is reintroducing capitalist investment. That's not acceptable. And this is an important moment because it would later play itself out with, for instance, Ding Xiaoping's reform and opening up in China.

It was a very parallel moment historically, although there are many differences as well, because what it was was Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership recognizing that in order to make socialism in the real world, they had to undertake a kind of dialectical process by which they made compromises to the extant capitalist world. They needed to develop the productive forces in order to avoid being crushed by the imperialist powers. The only way of doing that was through capitalist investment. They had disempowered the capitalist class and so they needed investment. And so Eastern Marxism is much more kind of pragmatic in the positive sense of that term than a lot of the Western Marxists who tend to be obsessed with the purity of a Marxist

doctrine or what Marx said or how it was tend to be obsessed with the purity of a Marxist doctrine, or what Marx said, or how it was supposed to be, the states are supposed to disappear right away, and we're supposed to arrive at this kind of utopian communist world. And so that's a big part of it. Another important aspect of Eastern Marxism is that it's oriented towards knowledge that has real use value for the struggles of working people around the world, whereas Western Marxism is very invested in exchange value. There are trendy discourses, sophisticated rhetoric, references, usually endless references to the bourgeois canon, and there's a kind of diluted, almost commodified version of Marxism that you get in the West that's very different than this anti-revisionist

Marxism that's dedicated to use value because the primacy of practice is really the beating heart of the Marxist project. Now there are some other aspects that I'm skirting over quite quickly because he also foregrounds their major cultural differences between the West and the East. The fact that one of the dominant ideologies in the West has been based on biblical traditions and what people refer to as the kind of Judeo-Christian tradition versus the religious traditions in the East have also made for significant differences because as history evolves, it's not as if past eras just ideologically disappear.

It's that new ideologies come about that are grafted onto extant ideology. So he's also very interested in the ways in which the Judeo-Christian tradition has fostered a kind of messianism that's very prevalent within the West, whereas Confucianism or other religious traditions in the East have also helped orient Marxism towards a more pragmatic, disciplined orientation. And so that's another big part of the kind of polarization, if you will, between Eastern and Western Marxism. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Gabriel Rockhill. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber.

As a Patreon subscriber, you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to select episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe to. You'll also be helping keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project Find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast or at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Thank you.