Guerrilla History - Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

In this fantastic episode of Guerrilla History, bring on Gabriel Rockhill to discuss the landmark new English translation of the legendary Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, freshly out from Monthly Review Press.  This critical work acts as a trenchant critique of the Western left intelligentsia, showing how it is rooted in the political economy of imperialism.  The conversation we have surrounding this is deep, generative, and thought provoking, so be sure to listen closely!   In addition to reading Western Marxism, Gabriel also recommended the book Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, which is also available from Monthly Review Press.  Check it out! Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and activist who has published numerous books. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. Be sure to follow him on twitter @GabrielRockhill. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to Gorilla Hitzinger. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims

to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hakimaki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's really wonderful to be with you, looking forward to this conversation we have today.

Yeah, absolutely. As always, a pleasure seeing you, second time this week. but I can never get enough of it. We are joined by a terrific guest, and I have to say quite overdue. We've done about 200 episodes of the show at this point, and it's really a shock that we haven't had him on the show at this point, but we are rectifying that now, and he will certainly be on the show again in the future

and hopefully the relatively near future. But before I introduce him and the terrific work that we're going to be talking about today, I would like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash gorilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that the show is doing collectively as well as what Adnan and I are doing individually by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Pod. So as I said, we have a really terrific guest, somebody who, frankly, we should have had on the show,

a long time ago, but now that he's on the show once, we're going to have him back on again as long as he agrees to. We have Professor Gabriel Rocker, who's a philosopher, an activist, a writer of numerous books, founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop, and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. Hello, Gabriel. It's nice to finally have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me on. It's absolutely a pleasure, and we are going to be talking about a terrific new book that you edited just came out through monthly review press, Western Marxism, how it was born, how it died, how it can be reborn, which was written originally in Italian by Domenico Lesordeaux, somebody who is near and dearer to my heart,

as well as I know he is to yours, Gabriel. The first question that I have for you is, can you talk a little bit about the origin of this project? So as I mentioned, this book originally came out in Italian and hasn't been translated into English previously until now, thanks to you and your comrades that worked on it together. How did you go about getting this project started? You know, maybe even how did you find out about this book and find out about LaSerto more generally, perhaps even? And then what made you decide that this was a project that needed to be brought into the English language and how did that process go in terms of the translation and editing and then publishing it through monthly review.

So I encountered Lesotho's work originally in English years ago. I think the first book I read was liberalism, a counter history. And then through a summer school that I run in Paris through the critical theory workshop that you mentioned, I invited him to have a conversation with him because I was blown away by just the utter quality of his work, the rigorous nature of his historical scholarship, and perhaps most importantly, the way in which he frames the history of the relationship between capitalism and socialism while always centering the colonial question and the issue of the struggle for liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism.

And in meeting him, given that he was not only such a lovely and charming and warm person, but also such an insightful intellectual, I then continue to read. and continue to discover more of his work. And the book in question Western Marxism, because I believe there's only about 10 of his 50 books that are available in English, the book Western Marxism I read in Spanish a few years ago, and there's a lot more available in Spanish,

in Portuguese, and in French. And so I've kind of read around in any of the languages that I can read in in order to read as much as I could of the rest of his corpus. And when I read Western Marxism, It immediately resonated with me because I had been working myself on a project that I just finished entitled Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism that explores the political economy driving Western Marxism as a kind of weapon of cultural warfare against anti-imperialist Marxism or what we could call Eastern Marxism, or he refers to in the book kind of as Eastern Marxism, at least insofar as it's in the East that the principal socialist state building projects have emerged. although, of course, there are ones elsewhere, like Cuba, Nicaragua, etc. And in discovering this book, then, I thought, well, this has to be brought to an English-speaking audience,

but it was a long time to be able to do that, in part because I originally brought the project to a small activist press that was very difficult to work with for some political reasons and other, you know, financial reasons and things like this. And so the book was actually translated. We had it ready to go. And then we had to change publishing houses. And the publishing house we started with made it very, very difficult for us to do that because they had a kind of proprietary relationship to it, even though they were quite obviously

not supportive of the project. And I'm thrilled that monthly review press did everything in their power in order to both support the project, invest in it to make sure that the switch happened. And then we got a second translator on board in order to then, you know, finalize the translation. Lesorto doesn't, in this particular book, provide extremely detailed references for everything that he integrates into his work. And so then we also had to do a fair amount of editorial legwork in order to try to track down some of the sources that he was referencing. And lo and behold, here we are. I think it probably took maybe two and a half or three years to, I can't remember exactly, but to finally get this project out.

And I'm thrilled to see it come to completion. And it was also supplemented, I should note, by Christina Peterson and Roland Bohr shared with me a translation that they had done of a lecture that's never been published by Lesorto in German, because he was so fluent in German that he did quite a bit of work in Germany and in German. And so I'm very pleased that that's included as well, because it provides a kind of succinct overview of the project as a whole from a slightly different vantage point. So it's a great read as a supplement to the book. Yeah. And so I think that's probably an appendix to the book. Is that correct? Exactly. So that's wonderful. Yeah. And it also, of course, has a great introduction by you and a colleague.

And so you're getting not only a great translation of the book, but also some accompanying materials in which to situate it and to try and understand the content. which is what I want to ask you about. One of the things I've really appreciated so much about this work is how historicist it is in trying to situate kind of traditions of political, of thought, and, you know, the whole Marxist, you know, philosophical tradition to actually put it in much more focused, a historical context, to really think of Western Marxism as something that evolved as a result of 1917 departures between it and other socialist and communist

projects globally, but to really to think about the ideas and the features that are characteristic and that unfold in his analysis of what Western Marxism is and its tendencies towards its presumptions and so on, as not first doing a full anatomy abstractly of these ideas that this is what Western Marxism is, but saying, okay, here's what started to happen as a result of positions, groups of intellectuals and Marxist thinkers started taking in response to material conditions, political changes, geopolitical contexts that help us understand why trajectories between what he identifies, between these two different wings of the Marxist inheritance start to diverge. And so I wanted to ask a little bit more about that non-ideational

sort of approach to thinking about Marxism and it's unfolding. And in particular, what are some of the kind of key historical circumstances that Lassurdo really emphasizes that you think we should be paying attention to and understanding, you know, what Western Marxism is and why it develops the way it does. That's such an important framing that you've given in Adnan, because you really go to the heart of one of the methodological aspects of the book that distinguishes it from a lot of the scholarship within the Western Marxist tradition, because there's a tendency within Western Marxism to give a privilege to the cultural and superstructural over and against political economy. And Lesotho is not a political economist, but the way in which he frames,

this history, and for that matter, history in general, is from a dialectical and historical materialist vantage point that recognizes that it's not ideas that make history. It is the class struggle between the, you know, principal capitalist forces and the anti-capitalists and more specifically socialist forces that are driving history. And so if we really want to understand where ideas come from, what fundamental material forces are. driving them, then we have to mine down into the broader socioeconomic base. And in many ways, that's what you have at the opening of this book, is that Western Marxism wasn't invented because somebody was sitting in a room and decided to think in a

particular way. It was the consequence of a very specific historical conjuncture of inter-imperialist rivalry in the early 20th century, and hence a consequence of what Lenin had diagnosed as imperialism, this highest phase of capitalism. And one of the things that happened within the kind of history of imperialism is that, as Engels had already diagnosed prior to Lenin, there was a labor aristocracy that arose within the European capitalist core. And that term is used just to refer to the layer of the global working class that has better conditions than the global working class and therefore has some material interest in maintaining. the imperial world system. In that regard, the ideology of Western Marxism that aligns on and actually ultimately supports in various ways, capitalism and its colonial endeavors is a consequence

of the socioeconomic base that's driving them. And more specifically, what Lissorto diagnoses, drawing again on Lenin, is the split in the global socialist movement where the leading political parties in Europe during World War I, I'm sorry, the, you know, socialist and social democratic parties of the time, instead of rejecting the call to support their national bourgeoisies in the interior imperialist rivalry, they accepted the orientation of the dominant national bourgeoisies supporting the war effort and thereby throwing under the butts the international orientation of those who are on the left wing of the social democratic debates at that point in time, Lenin, Luxembourg, and others, who claim that there

should be no war but class war. And so the other side of the split, the Leninist side of that, argued that what we were faced with was an inter-imperialist rivalry, and what we needed to do was to exit the war and support the struggle for anti-colonial anti-imperialist liberation. So it's really this world historical confrontation between imperialism on the one hand and the anti-colonial struggle on the other that sets the deep stage for the ideological and intellectual emergence of Western Marxism. And in many ways, although this history has been quite complex, where you continue to live out the consequences of that, meaning that the best way of understanding Western Marxism today is not as a geographic category in a very strict or limited sense, but instead to recognize that it's the form of Marxism that has emerged and been dominant within the imperial core that's been also projected around the world through cultural imperialism and presented as basically the vanguard. of Marxist thought, and that that is juxtaposed to a form of Marxism that is oriented first and foremost toward the liberation of the most exploited and oppressed members of the global working class who are across the global South. And that dividing line then continues

to frame basically what we could refer to as imperial Marxism on the one hand, meaning the Marxism that's a product of the imperial core, but then also tends to be complicit at certain levels with imperialism versus the anti-imperialist Marxism of those who recognize that the fundamental way in which class struggle has manifested itself thus far has been a struggle between nations and a struggle for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist liberation. Yeah, I'll step in here for a second. For listeners of the show who have listened to the roughly 200 episodes that we've done, thinking about history and thinking about politics without thinking about imperialism and colonialism seems to be an impossible thing if you call yourself a Marxist.

However, Western Marxists somehow managed to do this. And that's something that you've talked about in various venues, you've written about in various venues, and is really the subject of this book, which is that these Western Marxists, adapt Marxism, and the listeners cannot see the air quotes that I'm putting up, but, you know, they're there. They're adapting Marxism without fully appreciating the role of imperialism and colonialism within the structures of the capitalist world system and the ways in which socialist projects unfold across the world, which is why we have various analyses by Western Marxists that become anti-actual existing socialist because, they are not taking a historical materialist lens by which they are analyzing the ways that these socialist projects are unfolding. They're not thinking about the pressures that are being put onto these countries. They're not thinking about the historical vestiges of imperialism and or

colonialism depending on the given context. They're not thinking about the pressures that are continued to be put on these countries by imperialism, by neocolonialism in many cases, and how that then will either impede construction of socialist projects or will alter the way in which socialist projects are able to try to constitute themselves. So I know if there's no question here yet, I am getting there. The reason that I bring this up is that Lucerto is very, very clear, and he calls out many of these Western Marxist scholars by name, as you do in your introduction as well.

You know, there's a couple that I'm going to name also later in this conversation. but he calls them out by name, including many individuals associated with the Frankfurt School. And in particular, with regard to, in a very heavy focus, which is also why I appreciate Lacerdo, as you do, the unending focus on the colonial question and on the focus on imperialism. And so he talks and he writes about through part two and part three of the book, how we have these Western Marxists who end up supporting things like, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Now, listeners, that may be shocking for you.

There's a big pause here for a reason. I want you to ruminate on that for a moment. We have Western Marxist scholars and analysts who supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. But as you said, there are a lot of continuities between the debates that were happening in the time of Lenin up through that period of the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. So can you sketch out a little bit those continuities that began in, I mean, began before the time of Lenin, but the debates were happening in the time of Lenin up through the development and and popularization of the Frankfurt School.

And then these individuals who are associated with the Frankfurt School coming out in support of the Vietnam War, amongst other things. Yeah. The Frankfurt School is a useful touchstone insofar as it is often. taken to be foundational in the history of Western Marxism, and the leading luminaries of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, who directed the Institute for Social Research, and Theodore Adorno, who many people refer to as its leading theorists, were very explicitly supportive of specific imperial projects. For instance, it's Horkheimer, who was a supporter of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He claimed that when the United States goes to the war, it does it to defend the Constitution and the Rights of Man. That's a paraphrase and almost an exact quote. Both of them

supported the imperialist intervention undertaken by the Israelis, the French, and the Brits against Egypt. And they claimed because they were very avid supporters of the settler colonial project in West Asia, that that was necessary because the quote Arab robber states were going to genocideally eliminate Israel, inverting, of course, the relationship between the perpetrators and the victims of violence very much in line with the dominant imperialist propaganda lines. Herbert Marcusa himself had a reputation for being somewhat of a radical due to his radicalization from about 1965 forward, but he continued to support Israel. So he nonetheless defended settler colonial imperialist project in West Asia. And

And the other thing that I'll just note about the early Frankfurt School before getting on to the rest of your question is that it's important to know that seven associates of the Institute for Social Research during World War II and in the immediate wake of World War II were not working as researchers for the Institute for Social Research. They were not working as professors. They were working for the U.S. National Security State for a combined total of more than 50 years. This included work for the Office of Strategic Services, which is the predecessor organization to the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. State Department, the Office of War Information, which was a propaganda outlet, and Voice of America. Some of them stayed for years after that, and all of them have connections that then bolstered their reputations in the academy, and some of them are directly dependent upon their national security state connections for their academic jobs. Herbert Marcusa went to Colombia and to Harvard, and he was brought directly there by people in the OSS as the leading State Department expert on communism, meaning anti-communism, and these two institutions, the Russian Institute and the Russian Center at Harvard, were, as has been demonstrated through archival research, central intelligence agency cutouts. So that's another very important part of this history is it's not that surprising that people like this would support imperialism,

because, in fact, in many ways, they were working for imperialists. And so that's one aspect of that history. But you're absolutely right that as that history plays itself out in the contemporary world, if it be in what's called the second generation of the Frankfurt School, which is Yergen-Hawrmas, or the third and fourth generation today, people like Shayla Ben-Hibbe, Brainer Force, Nancy Frazier, et cetera, these traditions, you see very, very similar patterns. And, of course, you have to go through each individual

and be careful about your claims, but Shayla Ben-Hibbib, who just received the Theodore Adorno-Prized, did an interview in German in September, in which she doubled down on the position that she's taken on the imperialist project in West Asia by saying that it is reductive to interpret Israel only within the paradigm of settler colonialism and added, for good measure, that it is Hamas, that is holding the Palestinians hostage, right? It's not Israel. It's Hamas that's doing this. And so this is in many ways in continuity, although there are certain differences, with this deeper project. And there are many other examples one could point to. One of the ones that comes to mind is Slavo-Ijizek's position on Ukraine because he has been such a sycophantic supporter of U.S.-driven

imperialism that he should be banned from using the term Marx, Marxism, or Marxist, to refer to what it is that he's doing because he's a rabid pro-imperialist and is slandering that term. Why do you think he gets brought on to explain Marxism to people in debates? You know, when they say, what is Marxism? We have to have a debate, a Marxist versus an anti-Marxist. Why do you think that it's Slavois-Zegg, that they turn to to provide the Marxist side of that equation, somebody who, well, anyway, you can explain why.

You don't need me to. Well, it's an important point, right? because it's like the left and the right as these terms are used in the United States. Of course, the left, as it's referred to, the Democratic Party isn't left. There's nothing left about it. But they're trying to do, and they have historically tried to do the exact same thing with Marxism, where the U.S. national security state and the capitalist ruling class has very explicitly, because I've been through the archival record on this front, funded and supported a form of what they call compatible leftism,

or we could call by extension compatible Marxism because it's a Marxism that's compatible with capitalism and ultimately with imperialism and that's what they want the face of Marxism to be just as they want in the United States

the face of the left to be Kamala Harris or Biden or something like that because if the playing field is defined in this manner then you've already won because every young person or anybody who comes across the debate between

Peterson and Shijek will think, well, this represents the Marxist position without knowing, of course, that what they get is a kind of right-wing perversion and a sycophantic imperialist perversion of what Marxism actually is. And one of the key elements in this, Lassardo doesn't touch on this because as far as I know he wasn't familiar with this aspect of the archival record, but the Rockefeller Foundation for decades ran what they called a Marxism-Leninism project. And that project was aimed very explicitly at shoring up paying not only, you know, professors directly, but institutions and international knowledge networks to promote Western Marxism, publish Western Marxist books, in fact, also publish books from Eastern Marxists, but edited by Western Marxist, indexed by Western Marxist to make sure that the entire narrative was controlled. And it's that packaged, commodified version of Marxism that is then rammed down the throats of everyone as being the most cutting edge form of Marxism available in the world today. It's what I was exposed to in the university and it's what most people around the world encounter if they go through a kind of formal education in their approach to Marxism. Just another quick mention before I let Adnan ask the question. You know, you mentioned about Eastern Marxists being edited by Western Marxists.

since we're talking about Gijek, it's just too funny to not have this mention. There is a major radical publisher whom I will not name, but their name means the left-hand page of a book. You know, as you have a book open, the left-hand page in Latin. That word is the name of the publisher. Yes, opposite of recto. They have a book of Lenin's earlier writings pre-1917. that was edited and introduced by Slavo Zijsijek.

And it has a very, very funky cover. You'll be able to find it in their, in their catalog. It's still available, still in print. And also reminds me of another radical publisher. This one is just a series of letters. I'm not going to, again, say the name, but they have a series of Jijsiech writings where they have him portrayed as Mao on the cover of the book,

which, again, is just beyond parody. But nevertheless, I just wanted to have those kind of flip-in comments. We were mentioning Xijek, and you did mention having these Western Marxists editing Eastern Marxists. I mean, we have Zijek editing and introducing pieces by Lenin. There's really not a better example than to do it. As well as on practice and on contradiction, right? Absolutely.

Jizek, as capitalism's court jester, sells books. Mm-hmm. And as someone who's been very involved in radical publishing for decades, I'm very familiar with the ways in which these radical publishers want to promote certain forms of work. And Jijek is a very hot commodity, even though he has a very good and well-deserved reputation for being one of the sloppiest pseudo-intellectuals out there, who will make things up, not cite things correctly, and just, kind of do mashups. In fact, he's been regularly accused of plagiarism for plagiarizing his own work and just constantly republishing stuff that is knockoff of what he's already published. So he does a real disservice across the board to the left. Yeah. Well, I think we came very quickly to and covered rather skipped over an important kind of discussion that I think we should still have.

A lot of our listeners, of course, are completely in agreement with all of us that you cannot ignore the colonial question, you know, without an anti-imperialist orientation. It's not a meaningful left formation. But I think this book does a very good job of really explaining how and why the colonial question got marginalized or sidelined in some of the thinking of Western Marxists who had. a penchant more for kind of ideological purity trying to privilege class struggle in rather interesting and perhaps puritanical ways over other forms of political struggle in a kind of colonially dominated world. And fundamentally it seems to me that so much of Western Marxism and how we can explain and understand why it takes on certain features that we should explore, you know, a little further with La Sordo and you is because, one, there's a kind of cultural inheritance of religious Christian culture and its structures. So even when secularized, some of the motifs, you might say, of Christian theology or of the thought world and structures

of Christianity make themselves as, you know, intellectual habits that are recognizable and easy to adopt. A second kind of component and dimension of it, of course, is orientalism and anti-Semitism. And these are so fundamental in the cultural frameworks around Eastern Marxism, or Marxism that emerges successfully as projects in actual societies that capture power, that there is such an overprivileging, on the other hand, to kind of ideological purity, ideological orientation, and not what we might say, the material conditions in which power is being worked out and contested. And so I'm just wondering if maybe you can elucidate what you think are some of the most important kind of intrinsic, you might say, historical circumstances for why Western Marxism takes on some of these features of ignoring the colonial question or dealing with it in peculiar ways in subordinating national liberation struggles. you know, the irony for me is that, you know, Marxism only develops after basically the nation state in Europe has managed to fundamentally consolidate itself. And it's not that every one of, you know, there is unfinished work still yet to be done, which is why there's still the Jewish question and so many other kinds of issues. But fundamentally, you know, France and, and, you know, England, you know, Britain, they've created nation states. And the Dutch, you know, and they've gone and colonized the world as, you know, colonizing nation states.

That's important. I think sometimes we use the word empire when, in fact, we're not talking about empire in the classic sense. We're talking about nation states that colonize and impose themselves upon others. Maybe a fine distinction for this conversation. But the point is, is that, you know, nationalism is okay when it's part of the formation and it can be then transcended, when it's already been part of the historical process by which nation states in Europe have been founded and adapted themselves or been products of, you know, capitalism and others, you know, parts of the world that haven't followed the exact same pathways, you know, through political and economic and social formation, they are not then allowed to have a national liberation struggle because we're supposed to be internationalist and only have, you know, class struggle. And so I guess my point is, is that there's so much Eurocentrism in Western Marxism that pervades, even in their so-called internationalist orientation in privileging internationalism over national struggles for liberation.

It's basically a Eurocentric, you know, it's a byproduct of a European history of development, that they are not, for some reason, by universalizing a Eurocentric experience of history, you know, not capable of engaging with the genuine, material conditions of the rest of the world. And this accludes, turns them towards this, you know, very unrealistic utopianism or nostalgia for, you know, and so I'm just wondering if you had other thoughts about these peculiarities of why the colonial question was so difficult for Western Marxists to really take on board in productive ways. I think one element that is important is that Western Marxism, as we were discussing a moment ago, is an outgrowth of the Imperial Corps and more specifically of the kind of superstructures that have emerged within the Imperial Corps.

And most of the Western Marxists, as opposed to being militants, activists, people actually engaged in material struggles tend to be academics. And they are working in systems of knowledge production. that have a very specific logic of punishments and rewards and the way to advance and climb the social ladder within that intellectual apparatus as it's kind of situated in the broader imperial superstructure is to give to the system what it wants. So if you want to be famous or go to a prestigious university or publish with the leading presses, you have to give to them what they demand. And in that regard, the forces driving a lot of the ideological orientation of the Western Marxists, I think really need to be understood less at a purely subjective level,

as if these are just perversions in the minds of individuals like Xijek that we were just talking about. He's just doing this because he's a wacky, crazy guy. No, he's a wacky crazy guy, but he's working within an objective system that conditions his own training, his orientation, and then also gives him rewards for doing certain types of things. And there is powerful, how to put it, preeminence of the objective in relationship to the subjective and a dialectical relationship between the two, right, that subjects are called to give to the objective system what it wants, and in return they'll get the necessary rewards for that. And one of the key things that the system wants is ignorance regarding imperialism, so that the

intelligentsia is training the broader masses of the public to be blind to the imperial and colonial question. In fact, one of the projects that I've worked on in some of my archival research looks at what the U.S. National Security State calls doctrinal warfare. And they're very clear about the fact that the people that they're targeting are the intellectuals, not just academics, also the journalists, the pundits, the influencers, etc. Because if they get all of those people to think in the same way and send out the same message, then they can establish a kind of intellectual hegemony that governs the broad masses of the population, right? Henry, did you want to jump in on this point? Yeah, yeah, just very briefly. So, you know, when you said that

there's one particular hegemonic viewpoint that they put out, you know, it's important that we consider that there's not one hegemonic viewpoint. They put forth a hegemonic viewpoint within each ideological realm. And so, of course, if we look at what the hegemonic ideology within the academy is, it is not Marxist in any sense. We're talking about neoliberal capitalist centrist with a couple of people to the left, a couple of people to the right here or there. But within that realm of the Marxist left, and again, air quotes here for the listeners, there is another hegemony that has been fostered, and that is the hegemony of Trotskyism and anarchism. I'm just going to leave it there. Oh, no, 100%. It depends on the level of analysis, right? And if you're talking about the

overall hegemonic orientation, it is certainly not compatible Marxism or imperial Marxism. That is very marginalized, which is an important, just kind of side note, because it's fascinating that the imperial ruling class and their state managers have not been able to defeat Marxism. Hence, their tactical class concession in that regard has been to support and promote a commodified, perverted version of Marxism as a weapon of war against dialectical and historical materialism because they cannot defeat it, right? And that I think is very important for everyone to understand. it is a concession. They would be, they would much prefer not to have Trotskyists in the academy, right? Even Trotskyists or social democrats or anarchists for that matter. They prefer to get rid of them. But in that regard,

you know, it's one aspect of many other aspects of class struggles going on even within the imperial superstructure. But I did want to get to the core of Adnan's question and helpful comments. and that is this kind of obsession with ideological purity. one of the interesting things that Los Ordo does in this book, and he doesn't come out and say it explicitly, but I take it that it's implicit, is he gives us a material history of ideologies that demonstrates that the ideologies that emerge and are fostered under capitalism in many ways are grafted upon extant ideologies that come out of earlier socioeconomic systems. Right. So ideology isn't just born from a socioeconomic system in and of itself. It grafts itself on to earlier ideologies. And the clearest one, as you were saying, is the kind of broad Christian tradition in the West as the dominant ideology under feudalism that then is integrated in various ways, adapted, modified into the various modern forms. And taking Henry's point, of course, the predominant forms of this are things like, you know, Christian fundamentalism and religious zealotry that supports imperialism. But within the small, you know, niche that we're talking about of Western Marxism, you also see very clearly the effects of a kind of messianic,

idealist worldview. And one of the clearest manifestations of that is visible in the distinction that Engels had already made between you. utopian and scientific socialism. A lot of the Western left intelligentsia and Western Marxism more specifically, if they do support any form of socialism or communism, it is almost always, with a few exceptions we could point to, socialism in theory, not socialism in practice. And in fact, some of them who have branded themselves as the most radical communists who have ever existed, people like Gijs, Badu, Hart, Negri,

AT&Balibar sometimes traffics in this discourse and others of their ilk, they claim that there's an idea of communism that surpasses the world historical conflict between capitalism and socialism. But it doesn't exist anywhere in the world, or if it does, it's in these kind of fleeting instances that disappear and that have to be reconjured by our minds, et cetera. And so you see within this overall framework a kind of Christian light motif. where communism is going to save us, but not as a practice, rather as an idea. And they're very explicit about this. I mean, they published a three-volume work by the publisher that you were referencing earlier called the idea of communism.

And the idea is something that exists in the metaphysical realm above and that we as subjects need to be faithful to and express our adherence to, even in the face of great adversity. while not having a material project by which we could make that idea into a very concrete reality like a socialist state building project. And so it's not just that there's the messianic idea and utopian socialism. It's also that then our relationship to it is as the followers and the faithful. Bejou and Jijek in particular, I mean, Bejou is a metaphysical thinker, and much of Jijek's work he borrows from Badu and Lacan and other figures like this. And just to juxtapose that very clearly to what Lesotho is doing and the anti-imperialist Marxist tradition that he's drawing on, one of the things that's very powerful in Lesardo's work is, and this is scientific socialism,

he always says that socialism is a process of learning. It's not a blueprint, it's not a perfect theory, it's not an idea that's going to fall from the sky. It's a process of learning that's collective, that's practically oriented, and that has a history that is of a dialectical nature. So we don't jump magically from capitalism to socialism and overnight we have immediate internationalism and we abolish work and we abolish money and there's no markets and everybody's free and we live in this kind of utopian, euphoric land that Herbert Marcusa described as just a kind of state of constant, you know, ecstasy where it would be free love everywhere and this kind of anarchist utopian idea that you get in a lot of the, a lot of Marcusa's work. Instead, you have a process

of learning that moves through different stages and where the socialist state building projects learn from earlier experiments and adapt to practical material circumstances. In that regard, he's, of course, a very big supporter of not only China, but very specifically China under the reform and opening up, where he says, look, all the Western Marxists see in the reform and opening up that China's just gone down the capitalist path and given up on socialism. And as opposed to this, he says, we need a dialectical materialist analysis. of the specifics of what's going on in China, not grand hand-waving about it's all this or it's all that.

And what you see when you actually look at that state-building project is them learning from the wins and the mistakes of the Soviet Union with revisionism, with the conflict due to the permanent arms race that was imposed by the United States, due to the inability largely also because of the massive successes of industrialization to transfer to a new model of development in the kind of 1970s. And so the Chinese study this very, very closely and in their process of learning, decided to reorient themselves in relationship to the dominant world system, which is imperialist.

And so that is very important, right, that socialism isn't this perfect idea or something you know to get from a book, you know, just reading one book. It is a practical process of learning that takes on different. forms because it's always related to the extant play of forces. And if we remain instead attached to purity or a moral idea of what socialism or communism is or should be, then we lose the political strategic thinking that is really the beating heart of the global socialist movement. And that's what Lesotho brings to the fore. I know Adnan and I both have a bunch of follow-up questions off of that terrific answer. I'm going to open with us a small one. We'll try to be brief with

that because it is somewhat tangential and actually not related to Western Marxism, but something from another Lesotho book. And I'm going to try to quote you, not directly, but paraphrase you, Gabriel. And please correct me if you're unhappy with how I phrase this. One of the things that you said towards the beginning of that answer is that many of these ideological currents that we see are born out of previous ideologies or graphed themselves onto previous ideologies. Are you happy with how I phrased that? Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting, all of the Also, I just re-read Lesotho's War and Revolution for an upcoming article that the Escoboard is co-writing, and I'm also taking part on, which you'll be seeing soon.

But in any case, in war and revolution, one of the things that Lucerto talks about quite frequently is how many of these anti-communist scholars, academics, and including those who are, you know, nominally on the left, like, you know, Hannah Arend. many people who are not Marxists would consider her to be like a left-wing thinker, but those of us who are, you know, Marxists are generally quite unhappy with her analysis. But in any case, people like that will often try to draw a throughline ideologically from the terror of the French Revolution to Bolshevism. And Lesotho throughout war and revolution, I mean, it's one of the main points of the book

is that all of these various analysts, some conservative anti-communists, some liberal anti-communists, but all of these anti-communist analysts that he highlights within this book try to draw an ideological through line from the terror. And again, I'm putting this in quotations, the terror of the French revolution and thereby condemning the French Revolution as terror in itself and a flawed project inherently to then Bolshevism and the terror, and again, listeners, air quotes, the terror that comes out of the Bolshevik revolution, 1917, and trying to show that the terror is inherent to the system and to the ideological project and not as a result of material factors that are at play within this. So, you know, I don't know if there's anything you want to respond to that.

it's not really a question, but just, you know, it is a parallel talking about ideology, grafting itself out of ideology. These anti-communist thinkers essentially try to do this to then draw negative light onto the Bolshevik project using the French Revolution as this terrible example of something that is just pure terror and that that terror then led into communism more broadly. Yeah, you know, one of the light motifs, and Arendt is very clear on this, is that you should not use politics to change the social order. Because if you do, then it's just bloodshed and horror and totalitarianism, et cetera. And that's such a interesting idea when you see it clearly for what it is,

because then ultimately what are you supposed to do with the social order is not change it or assume it has its own internal logic that you don't intervene in politically. it basically handcuffs people. But one of the themes in Morning Revolution that really resonated with me is the difference that Lysorto makes between two forms of despecification. And despecification is just a term

that he uses for how a political community will kick out certain members or will reject people from another political community. And that what he sees in the Bolshevik undertaking is a form of despecation that was political. So if you were an anti, you know, communist counter-revolutionary, then you could be held accountable for that on political grounds. But that that's very, very

different than natural despecification. And natural despecification is what the Nazis were doing, right? The goal in invading the Soviet Union was it was a war of annihilation. It was to, and that's why they had all the Ainsuit group and all of the death squads that they ran. They were going to genocidally eliminate at least major swaths of the population. This is not political despecification. In fact, Stalin was very clear the war is not against Germans and Germany. The war is against the Nazis and the Germans, and particularly the German workers, these are people like us, right? So you see these two different logics of despecification. One is humane and based on people's political decisions and orientation. The other is inhumane and based on usually a

racializing form of trying to naturalize what are political boundaries in order to then use that to genocideally eliminate the population. And of course, the broad history of imperialism up to the present is full of examples of racializing people as subhumans or as what were referred to as subhuman animals in order to eliminate them. And that is not the Bolshevik project. That is not the socialist project. So I just wanted to highlight that. Yes. And I just want to also recommend that listeners, check out war and revolution because those quotations by Stalin that you just mentioned in terms of not

dehumanizing German people when we're talking about fascism and Nazism as a project. Those are included in that book. And he puts those immediately next to quotes from people like Churchill and Eisenhower who do do this dehumanization of their adversaries, but then even beyond what Lucerne was looking at in the book, you know, you can think about how various groups of people are dehumanized within political discourse today. Anytime that a group is an adversary of the Western Imperial Corps, I live in one of those countries that is being dehumanized right now by the Western Imperial Corps. And believe me, I see all of those things, as do the people here. We see that

dehumanization. I can tell you that that is backfiring here in terms of what you're trying to foster in terms of the feelings of the populace. But it is strong. striking those quotations by Stalin during World War II, the fight against the Nazis, the way that he was portraying the German people, compared to Eisenhower and Churchill in the way that we see political discourse today regarding the dehumanization of people. But Adnan, I'm sorry, I keep jumping in. You can take the floor with as many follow-ups as well. You know, it's a good conversation. That's what good conversations do. And maybe some of the remarks that I wanted to make are questions I want to pose are somewhat or obsolete by such a good discussion, but I did, it did remind me a little bit this whole point that there, I thought that there was a pretty interesting central theme that was at stake in a lot of this analysis in Loserdo's book and in the conversation we've been mentioning, which is the status of humanism and Marxism, you know, like there are, there is this kind of debate and discussion about, you know, must you have this kind of humanistic orientation,

sometimes it's thought of as early Marx versus Capital, which is much more the scientific kind of analysis of the workings of political economy and the critique of it and so on. And you just, you know, in the, well, L'Sordu in this book and in your edited translation, that does have a kind of critique of Althouser here, you know, in this respect. And I thought this was interesting because since the colonial question, is one that seems to be so de-emphasized by these scholars is that what it does is it really puts limitations on the boundaries of the human, like who's actually part of the human, whether that's conscious or not in the way in which they formulate their political analysis. And it seems

that what LaSerto is saying here is that that was one of the first considerations of anti-colonial Marxist thinkers in the East was we want to be human. We want to be recognized as human. And so we need to be liberated from colonial bigotry violence and the underpinnings of the kind of prejudice and dehumanization that enables it and makes it possible. And of course, connected to that are these continuing themes of Orientalism, always characterizing it as the east so they can draw on these cultural resources of, you know, Greeks against the Persians even and forward. And anti-Semitism, you know, where, you know, the connected, and it just struck me, I'm somebody who's very interested in the medieval roots of the shared medieval roots of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, that you have to kind of look at Orientalism and anti-Semitic, you know, anti-Jewish kind of sentiment together. And it's quite interesting the way in which anti-communist or Western Marxist anti-communism really relies upon a lot of these motifs.

that are comfortable for Western thinkers because there's such a long history of Orientalism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and that they can just look at the East and Eastern projects for self-determination as cases of Oriental despotism just emerging under the false, you know, lineages of claiming a Marxist, you know, heritage. And so that question of humanism and its limits is an interesting one for me in thinking about what was at stake here. And it seems like it's very much an unfinished, you know, when we think of, you know, Gallant saying, you know, these are human animals in Gaza and we're going to, you know, put them under siege, deny them water, food, electricity, any kind of means of life of subsistence. It's, you know, it's recalling

these other kinds of anti-human dehumanizations. that are still so powerful and relevant now. And we see so many similar arguments being made by supposed figures on the left critiquing the, you know, Palestinian resistance in much the same terms that they delegitimized Eastern Marxism. So this fundamental question of, are you really going to regard everyone as human and thus recognize that the colonial question is central, the imperial question. is central to liberation. It just seems that there is a partable way in which liberation can just

be the oligarchic concerns of the privileged few in the West. We can worry about equalizing, you know, the space in which we're, you know, living. But this is predicated on political domination of, you know, and subordination of others, you know, through colonialism, through imperial racism. I'm wondering if you had any sort of thoughts on this theme of humanism. No, absolutely. And thank you for bringing it up because it is a through line in Lesordeaux's work that really merits to be put into relief because in my exposure to the debates on humanism in the history of the Marxist tradition, there are usually the two dominant positions that you touched on. One is the Altusarian anti-humanism that juxtaposes the early Marx who purportedly,

think this is incorrect, but purportedly suffered from bourgeois humanism and then the later scientific Marx. Or you get a defense of so-called humanist Marxism, which is how many Trotskyists refer to themselves over and against. And what the subtext for this is, is that the totalitarian Marxists are somehow anti-humanist. And I think it's unbelievably important and something that many of us on the progressive left should pick up on, that what Lassardo is doing is he's defending not just ideologically on his own terms, humanist Marxism, but he is simultaneously, and this is partially in this book, Western Marxism, but also in a number of his other works, he is saying that, no, the beating heart of the Marxist tradition is a humanist project that is not only focused

on overcoming exploitation through class struggle, but is simultaneously the best elements of the Marxist tradition have always been simultaneously dedicated to a project of recognition of the full human dignity of everyone, colonized subjects, racialized subjects, women, and you can go on down the list. In that regard, then, his version of Marxism is a fully humanist Marxism that rejects the Altusarian orientation as, you know, for a lot of reasons that we don't have to go into, but then also takes the mantle of humanism back from the Trotskyist, which is so fundamentally important because if you are true humanist, then you are standing up for and fighting for the most oppressed, marginalized, degraded, and super exploited members of the human family

are the human race, and those are the people in the global south or across the historical third world, and that really needs to be centered because humanism and anti-colonial Marxism go hand in hand, as well because his version of Marxism isn't just a theoretical Marxism, right? It's a Marxism of practical struggle that is changing material relations, so the way that you go about recognizing the full human dignity is not by tokenism, petty bourgeois symbolism, representation within the PMC class in the imperial core, the way you go about doing it is you change material social relations

because that is ultimately what is degrading and subjecting human beings to an inferior status. In relationship to that kind of overall humanist framework, then I think that you're 100% right that so much of the Western left and particularly the Western Marxists traffic in really what are racist depictions and Orientalist depictions of the East. There are so many of these authors that I've read

who talk about Oriental despotism, authoritarian capitalism, when talking about, if it'd be the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Korea, or anywhere else, where they basically just, you know, bring out the same old, stereotypical racist depictions with no materialist analysis whatsoever. And it's as if there's just a general consensus

that, well, people in the East are kind of more authoritarian, and they like strong rulers and there's this, you know, tradition unlike in the West where we're importantly like democracy and freedom and, you know, human rights and these things like this, which of course is laughable to the extreme. The other thing that I wanted to touch on, maybe the last thing, is that the anti-Semitism is a really important point, because you raised it before, but I didn't have an opportunity to pick up on it. And one element of this that I think is really important to understand is the extent to which, particularly in the early 20th century, because this terminology is not as prevalent today, there was a conflation

of the Jewish people and the Bolsheviks in the conceptual term the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. The idea was that what was threatening Western civilization wasn't the capitalist ruling class. It was the slovenly people from the east who have a religion and ideology and orientation that is a threat to Western civilization, meaning it's a threat to imperialism, it's a threat to capitalism. And there's an attempt, though, to correlate a political project of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist orientation to a cultural orientation or to an ethnic group, right? So you've already see the ideological orientation here where you take something that's political and you transfer it and you make it culturalist. So it's a

culturalist interpretation thereof. And the reason for that is I don't remember the exact number, but I've seen between like maybe 50 and 70 percent of Jews historically lived in the East and many members of the Bolshevik party were Jewish. So there was some affiliation, right? But the idea that they were the same thing, of course, is doesn't hold up to material scrutiny. But if you could affiliate the Bolsheviks with the Jews and then run a culturalist and ethnic project against the Jews as cover for what was ultimately an anti-communist project, as the Nazis did, then that can gain a lot of traction within the kind of broader culturalist ideologies that are very prominent within imperialism. And those types of and ways of thinking are still very, very

prevalent, right? Because I used the vocabulary earlier of modern ideologies grafting themselves on to pre-modern ideologies. But another way of saying that is ideologies have a kind of material inertia to them, where if there are institutions that are set up, social relations that are coordinated, languages that use them, ideologies tend to carry forth because they have a material existence in the world that bears them forth, even if there aren't other forces that are driving them. And so elements of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy are still absolutely prevalent within the contemporary world as well, even though the terminology might be slightly different in certain cases. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in terms of

new ideological formations piggybacking on what's already there, it very much reminds me of the medieval association of Jews as an internal kind of religious enemy undermining Christian society as allies or fifth column with the, you know, Saracen East, you know, the Islamic world that was a kind of major geopolitical and civilizational, you might say rival. And they were a lot of anxieties during the era of the Crusades that every single crusade that was ever really mobilized for and launched ended up with suppression of Jews, massacre of Jews, and so on, because they associated them with the enemy outside. And so this kind of, is a kind of association that's available and present and then can be applied to orientalizing, you know, Soviet, you know,

Soviet communism or Chinese communism and then characterizing it as this, you know, dangerous betrayal by a population. And they never sort of, you know, seem to ask the question, why is it that so many Jewish people might be attracted to liberationist ideologies, you know, about equality and, you know, material, you know, prosperity being shared, you know, I mean, they never, you know, obviously they understand that on some level. but that's how right-wing thought tries to kind of manufacture, you know, kind of culturalist orientation, as you mentioned. Just one last thing I wanted to mention about that your comments and responses reminded me of a quotation that Los Urdu has on page 220 of this translated edition where he was talking about, you know, well, you mentioned an African-American declaring in a challenging tone, quote, if fighting for our rights means being Bolsheviks, then we are Bolsheviks, and the people should have their souls at peace.

Now, what I was thinking about when I read that is something connected to what you were saying in some sense is that the kind of liberational struggle and, you know, recognizing that the colonized are the most suppressed, oppressed, exploited, super exploited population is, Something a friend of mine once said that really struck me, which was that we're not Marxist because we read Marx, which is probably how all these Western Marxists would kind of think of defining what it means to be a Marxist. We would have to invent Marxism, you know, if he hadn't written this, because there has to be the struggle for justice, for equality, for liberation out of the material conditions of, you know, this exploitation. So these Eastern Marxists, they're, they find. in Marxist projects and in Marxist analysis a way of combating colonialism, you know, inequality and finding liberation. It's not that they arrive to this because they're converted to Marxism. And so this is exactly the point that we started with, which is that the theory and the understanding and the concepts come out of the material conditions, the material practices, rather than being just ideational, you know, concepts. And that seems to be another kind of key, key point here in the difference methodologically and in terms of the different trajectories of Eastern Marxism

versus Western Marxism is that Eastern Marxism are not Marxists because they read Marx. They read marks because they were looking for, you know, analysis and methods and, you know, approaches to liberating themselves from oppression, from colonial bigotry and so on. That's such an important point. You know, there's the great example of Ho Chi Minh being in France and I believe it was the Congress in Tours where he then entered into arguments with some of the leaders to the French Communist Party because he wanted to know first and foremost where they stood on the colonial question and what Marxism had to contribute to the colonial question. And then of course it was through Ho Chi Minh's reading of Lenin that he realized that, oh, here we have a version of Marxism that really centers the colonial question and takes as a fact. fundamental principle, the self-determination of nations, the freedom of nations to self-determine and not be subjected to imperialism. And another example actually that comes to mind, which is a, it's a book that was just re-edited and just reissued by Domitila Barrios de Chungara, who was a Bolivian minor's wife, who was involved in organizing, and it's a testimonial

where she orally told the history of her life. And as you follow the trajectory, of her life, from her early to her later life, one thing that becomes very clear is she wasn't educated at the university, you know, she wasn't exposed to Marx. She was involved in class struggle as a minor's wife within, in Bolivia, under the jack boot of imperialism, and had a very refined existential understanding of what it means to be a woman in these specific material relations. And as you're following her trajectory through, one of the things that becomes increasingly apparent, and she's very self-critical and self-reflective herself, as her political consciousness rises to higher and higher levels, she starts to see the system, she starts to piece that system together, and it moves from a struggle in the household in the immediate kind of minors relationships to ultimately a struggle against imperialism and a struggle against bourgeois feminism as an ultimately to crush the forms of liberation that she was involved in. And at one point in time, she's in prison and somebody brings her some books by Marx or on Marx or paraphrasing Marx. I don't

remember the exact details. And it's exactly what you said, Anand. It's that that systematic understanding that has been developed by the Marxist intelligence here within the broader Marxist world resonated with her not because she was looking for a theory, but because she was involved in a material set of struggles, and those theories provided a systematic framework within which to orient herself and better struggle and win. And in that regard, in fact, just this relationship between the history of intellectual production within anti-imperialist Marxism on the one hand and material struggles on the ground reminds me, and this would be my last statement on this, of Lenin's very important point, and that is that intellectuals are necessary

in the struggle. because the majority of workers and the oppressed of the world, they're simply deprived in the material conditions necessary to educate themselves. Many of them are kept illiterate, not allowed to go to school. They're thrown into minds. And so how could you possibly see the system? You can have a much better existential understanding of what imperialism is and its ravages. But to actually see the system, understand how it works, and map out the overall kind

of extant set of forces, you need to be able to conceptually abstract and intellectually grasp the whole system. And that's one of the quintessential roles that militant intellectuals have played historically, people like Lenin, people like Lissorto, and others for that matter. Yeah, that's terrific. Is that book by about the Bolivian miners' wife? Is that available in English? Yes. It came out just in a re-edition via monthly review press. And it's called Let Me Speak, testimony of Domitila, a woman of the Bolivian minds. I saw that in their email list. I haven't read it yet, though. It's a must read. Jennifer Ponce de Leon, who's the co-author of the introduction to Lesordeaux that I wrote for Western Marxism, turned me on to this book and it blew me away.

Drop everything, read that book, maybe even before Western Marxism, by now I should be plugging our book. but it is an incredibly important book because it overlaps with all of the themes that we've been talking about. But the perspective is, you know, from the left and from below. Whereas Lesorto, you know, he was an academic working in Italy who identified with and did the intellectual network necessary to support the anti-colonial struggle. Yeah, fascinating. And I just wanted to also say related to two other things that you mentioned. One, I guess this is my words now. I'm not putting the words in your mouth, but, and also Adnan, because it's reflecting on something that Adnan had said, you know, Marx is not the end-all be-all of thinking

about collectivism and communism. These ideas existed long before Marx in indigenous epistemologies through various communalist African epistemologies, etc., etc. These were ideas that existed long before Marx, and these were ideas that were developed independently of Marx in various parts of the world. But as you mentioned, Gabriel, the intellectuals, these radical and militant intellectuals, do have an important role regarding structuring and popularizing many of these analyses of the systems that are present in the world today. So analyzing capitalism, thinking about how capitalism is structured, how it functions, how it perpetuates itself, the various forms in which it takes in order to perpetuate itself, analyses of imperialism,

colonialism. That's not to say that there are not analyses of these things in indigenous epistemologies, in African communalist epistemologies. They certainly have existed long before these later analyses that we're talking about existed. But, you know, I just wanted to put that out there to say that those did exist, but there also is, to your point, a need for educating the working masses so that they are able to read these sorts of analyses and then also to put these analyses together in coherent and relatively easy to understand ways for people to then read and think about themselves.

So that was one thing that I had been thinking about while you were talking. But another thing, going back a little bit further to this discussion of humanist and humanism and how various tendencies on the left pick up the banner of humanism and then we'll use this to beat quote unquote tankies or anti-imperialist Marxists that they will slander using a variety of names. It's interesting that we have people that will take up banners. They will either call themselves humanists or they will take up various other ideological banners that align themselves with humanism and then take dramatically unhumanist, dehumanist lines, whereas those that are on the anti-imperialist Marxist edge of things do not foster

those. So somebody who I am going to criticize by name, because it comes up pretty extensively in your introduction to the book, he comes up fairly frequently in your introduction. And then also, Lucerto does mention him several times throughout the book. He's in part two, part four, and part five of the book, Perry Anderson. Perry Anderson is somebody who, you know, I don't know if he's explicitly called himself a humanist that points, but he does go in those ideological tendencies that would align themselves with this humanist narrative and then also criticizes anti-imperialist Marxists for being anti-humanist. But at the same time, for those of you who have had the displeasure of reading

Perry Anderson through the years, you'll find numerous instances where he will take national liberation struggles, both Marxist and not Marxist, and will completely dehumanize them. So one needs not look further than the way that Perry Anderson has characterized anti-Zionist resistance groups in the Middle East, not just since October 7th, because he's not writing as much these days, but going back for decades, the dehumanizing nature regarding anti-Zionist liberation fighters is nothing short of racist. Let's just be frank about that. But in addition, you know, you also mentioned that these sorts of individuals will then also dehumanize the people that lived under socialist projects as they love authoritarianism. They have this predilection

towards totalitarianism inherit within their people. We have these sorts of analysts like Perry Anderson. who will say that, you know, these Eastern people are more likely to fall into, you know, they maybe believe in the ideals of socialism, but they're more likely to fall into the trappings of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and also then going and slandering in very racist ways, anti-Zionist liberation struggles. So I find it very interesting and ironic that these people that will slander anti-imperialist Marxists as unhumanist or dehumanist, will then take up these extremely dehumanizing arguments against actually existing socialist struggles, as well as national

liberation struggles, which goes back to one of the things that Adnan had mentioned earlier regarding how some of these individuals think of national liberation struggles versus like internationalism. But I'm going to leave it there. If there's anything you want to say on Perry Anderson. I know that, like I said, you mentioned him numerous times throughout your introduction, and then Lucerto also does hit him a couple of times throughout the book as well. Yeah, I mean, Anderson does play an important role in the background to Lesorto's book because he published two books himself on Western Marxism, where he gives the Trotskyist assessment. And those books were very widely circulated and widely read in 80s and 90s,

and probably still to today. And that's one of the reasons it was important to address because you get a very different version of Western Marxism in his work. But the one thing I want to focus on, because it's really important what you said, Henry, is that this version of Trotskyist humanist Marxism is better understood as a form of bourgeois humanism, meaning they want to portray themselves as being humanist on the right side of history, etc. Well, in fact, what they're doing is throwing under the bus the most fundamental project of human liberation and extra human for that matter, which is that of anti-colonial struggles. And so they have a faux-humanism that you also see in the fact that then they denigrate those who are truly struggling for the liberation of all human beings as being somehow anti-humanist. It's a clear case of ideological inversion, right?

The humanists are actually the anti-humanists. But I also wanted to circle back to the first statement that you made, which was equally important, because there is within the Western Marxist tradition. And in fact, you see this clearly spelled out in the Rockefeller's Marxism-Leninism project that I mentioned a moment ago that Herbert Marcuse was the main intellectual figure. And he worked for years, including after he left the State Department, on this project. with one of his biggest academic supporters, a man by the name of Philip Mosley, who is an academic and a U.S. National Security State operative, who was one of the top CIA consultants for years and a close personal friend who would actually often spend family dinners at the Marcuz. And one aspect of this project was laying claim to authentic Marxism.

And authentic Marxism was Marxism truly understood through the Western interpreters, not Marx perverted by these people like Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and others. And there was also an attempt to then sometimes recolonize certain of those figures, so Lenin to some extent, or Mao today, clearly with the Zhijek introduction that we were talking about a moment ago, but then to reclaim them for the Western Marxist project by making. them into purely theoretical figures disconnected from class struggle and particularly anti-imperialist struggle. And from our vantage point, I think it's really important, and Lesotho is a great aid in that regard, to recognize that dialectical and historical materialism is a collective, scientific project of liberation. And many people have made contributions to that. As you mentioned, there are elements that predate Marx and Engels. Marks and Engels made absolutely foundational contributions. There's no doubt. So did Len and Mao and many other people. But this is an ongoing collective,

practically oriented science of liberation. So we shouldn't fetishize particular authors, just go down the path of endless Marxological analysis which the Trotskyists love. We should contribute to this ongoing collective science by marshaling everything that we can from these traditions in order to learn from them. But most importantly, and this is what most of Western Marxists never do. You have to learn all of that, and then you have to apply it to the material world. Otherwise, you just remain within the realm of idealism, the realm of ideas. And so if it be, you know, Zhijek or Hart or Negri or other figures like that, when you compare their claims about the extant world to real materialists, no, no, it's like a child doing

finger painting compared to, you know, Van Gogh or someone who actually has some talent in being able to depict something. And so they're laughable at the level of their materialist analysis. And that's one of the things that we have to do is carry forth this tradition, not through fetishization, not through an attachment to something that's somehow authentic, but rather something that we can learn from and move forward. Because at the end of the day, marks and angles were human beings of their time. They weren't right about everything. How could anybody be right? about anything, and they knew it themselves because they understood that they were people who were part of an objective social system that conditioned the way in which they thought

and the way in which they were oriented towards the world. In fact, Marx on the colonial question is fascinating, right? The early Marx up to about 1850 is oriented more towards a kind of cosmopolitan version of development in which the non-capitalist world is more or less assumed to follow to some extent the model of the capitalist world. But as of 18 through the course of the 1850s, he opens himself up extensively to the broader colonial question and then begins championing anti-colonial resistance movements in Ireland and India and elsewhere as extremely important for pushing things in the right direction. And you see the same thing in Lenin. You see all these figures. They're learning as they go and they're self-criticizing because that's part of the whole

project is it's about practically fighting and winning, not about being theoretically correct for all time, which is impossible anyway. Well, and it's also about being pushed because, you know, on that question of Ireland and the colonial question, like, that's not something that Marx came to on his own. All accounts that I have seen show that Marx was pushed very heavily by his daughter into that direction over the course of several years before he fully took up championing that cause and, you know, fully analyzing it for what it was. So it's not just that like our analysis can change, it's also that we need to be challenged on our analyses and that there has to be development within ourselves and then also within our traditions

over time. As you mentioned, Gabriel, and it's something that I've mentioned before when you're talking about this fetishization of specific authors and down to specific quotations, I call this practice through quotation or practice through citation, which is what many of these tendencies tend to do, which is they uphold a specific citation and then they will just do practice through arguing about a specific citation by an author who died 120 years ago rather than trying to analyze this quotation for what it was at that period of time and analyze how that is relevant to today or if we need to adapt it because material conditions change throughout time.

That's why two of my absolute favorite analysts, Fanon and Walter Rodney, they don't just cite and quote marks or Lenin throughout their words. works, they use this as an analytical framework in which to develop their own analyses, which were developments over what had been previously done, taking use of this analytical framework to analyze the specific historical conditions that they were looking at, and also taking into account developments that had taken place over the previous hundred years since some of those texts had been written that they had utilized when they were studying themselves. And then, of course, time has moved on and developments have happened since

Rodney and Fanon. Rodney and Fanon are two of my absolute favorites. But again, to just resort to quoting them and using this and then arguing about specific quotations that they may have had, somebody is not falling in line with some quotation that they had. That is not practice. Practice is utilizing analysis that was done, developing analysis over time, thinking about how changing material conditions change certain analyses, and then actually doing real practice with this analysis, not just sitting there on your phone arguing about a quotation of somebody that died 130 years ago. That is not useful.

None. I know this is something you've talked about as well. So I'll turn it over to you now. And I know that you have a lot of other questions as well. Oh, well, you know, I just thought maybe we, I mean, I would enjoy talking about a lot of these other theorists and figures who are critiqued. very capably and interestingly in this book. I mean, I'm very interested in his critique of Harvey, who's somebody who's, you know, becomes David Harvey, who's become so important as an interpreter

of Marx to this kind of revived interest in Marx that's been taking place. And Lacerdo has interesting things to say about whether this is this era with Zijak, Harvey, you know, Hart and Negri, and so on, whether this is a revival, you know, of Western Marxism, or if it's, you know, its last gas. And so we could talk about that. I mean, I would be very interested to hear, you know, what you have to say about, I just recall, you know, that there was a very interesting dialogue between Vijay Prussia and David Harvey at, I think, the People's Forum or in some occasion in New York. And Vijay spared no, he didn't curb his, or try to be diplomatic. He was like, this is a big problem, is that you don't talk about imperialism and that you deny

imperialism. And this is the key critique that I have, that you can't really do these analyses of late capitalism as if it's divorced from, you know, continuing effects of imperialism. So that's the kind of important and interesting point. But one aspect of that that Los Ordo discusses is the importance of war in Western Marxism. And it reminds me because in a way, that's also what early beginning point for thinking about the October Revolution and the stance vis-a-vis the World War, you know, the First World War and the consequences of that and the different positions and receptions of the October Revolution, East and West, and even criticisms of withdrawal from the war, that reminds me also that this later period during the global

war on terrorism, the invasions in Iraq, and so on, that were very, very important. also in highlighting the significance and the importance of imperialism continuing to wage kind of quasi-colonial or neo-colonial types of warfare around the globe. So maybe that's a jumping off point before we start talking about, you know, how can it be reborn is like, well, how exactly did it die, you know, in that period. Yeah, I do think it's important that I, you know, this marked, my generation, I think, very clearly when September 11th, 2001 happened and in the wake of that with the plan for the new American century and the onset of the Forever Wars, there was the

emergence of a kind of new niche in the publishing industry, which was in a nutshell. You know, this didn't happen overnight and it was a bit of a transition and, you know, there wasn't an epical divide. But there was a sense that postmodernism had kind of run out of steam a little bit, and these discourses that just consisted in questioning absolutes wasn't sufficient. And the new game in town was that everybody's political now, and that there's a more radical form of politics that's identified with Hart, Negri, Badieu, Jizek became very prominent, Jacques Ronsier, others like this. And so over the last, you know, 23, 24 years or so, this has become a really dominant niche within the radical theory industry more broadly. Harby's is of a slightly different sort, right? Because he

also is someone who is known in part as an interpreter of Marx. And his scholarship, when compared to someone like Jizek, is obviously of a higher quality. There's no doubt about it. And we should be clear as well. We didn't state this at the outset, but I think it's always important to say that these criticisms of Western Marxism are criticisms that need to be mediated by a kind of dialectical hermeneutics. And what I mean by that is you always have to identify the specificities of what it is that you're criticizing and recognize that there are differences and various dimensions to some of the work that we're talking about. And even within the Western Marxist camp, someone like Harvey, I think, has made a much more significant contribution to kind of

Marxological interpretation in various ways, popularizing Marxist. in more helpful ways than some of these other figures. That said, you know, Harvey is also someone who's very responsible for having claimed in his book on neoliberalism that China is capitalist and really pushing that line very strongly. And in a very important piece that I'd recommend everybody to read that's coming out in monthly review in the November issue, John Bellamy Foster has an account of the anti-imperialist Marxists, right? Notice the negation of the negation here is actually a very simple. ones. So you get rid of the anti-imperialists and what are you left with? Well, these are the imperialist Marxists. And he sharts out some of Parvey's positions on imperialism and he is clearly in the anti-anti-imperialist camp, just like in many ways some of the other figures that I mentioned.

I think that there's also, and this is just recently with the new translation of Marx that came out with the introduction by Wendy Brown. And, you know, there's a, there's a Marx seminar that's going on at Columbia that is bringing together a lot of people in the kind of Western Marxist or Radlib tradition. And so there is clearly a kind of ongoing fattish version of Western Marxism that, again, we have to analyze dialectically and see what positive, if there are some positive aspects that are contributing, but then also situated within this broader tradition that we're talking about and recognize that a lot of what was going on earlier is continuing and still definitely has legs under it in various ways. And it's one of the reasons that Lesorto's intervention in this

book is actually, you know, even though it was published at the end of his life and he died in 2018, it's still very, very germane to the contemporary context because there's a lot of people interested in Marx because they're interested in solving a lot of the world's problems that are not going away. And one of the roles that we need to play in that regard is to clearly demarcate forms of Marxism that are driving in the humane project of human and extra human and environmental liberation that we've been talking about from a form of Marxism that very, very easily gets in bed with imperialist projects. And that dividing line is incredibly important. I couldn't insist on it more insofar as we're engaged in class struggle in theory, and the attempts to recuperate Marxism

for a capitalist accommodation or even a capitalist apologist orientation is part of the ongoing class struggle, particularly within the imperial core. But this has effects around the world given cultural imperialism, right? So we have to fight it in the belly of the beast, so to speak, but we also have to fight it all around the world because it has a very burnicious effect across the global south as well. Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned that we have to be very dialectical and specific about how we're analyzing each of these figures and our critiques. And this is a work of critique and provocation.

If we had had maybe more time, I would have asked you also, well, what are you think the actual contributions that are beneficial, you know, of Western Marxism? But maybe that's, you know, for another, another day. But because it is a kind of critique and a provocation, it also does have a final section that makes recommendations for how there might be a recovery of the vitality of the tradition of Western Marxism that would be directed towards the real project of liberation after having accomplished this very thorough and interesting critique. And so I'm wondering if there are thoughts you have about what La Sordo recommends, what do you think? are some of the main orientations for, well, I guess I would call it the reorienting. And I guess maybe that is a useful word in and of itself, you know, that may be getting back to some aspects of the East and the East's experience and incorporating and connecting with those, you know, in the Imperial Corps. But what do you say in are some of the most important suggestions?

what has to be done to kind of rescue Western Marxism from being in some senses in service of imperialism and recover it to the project of human liberation? I think that at the ideological level, the most important thing that Lassurdo insists on is the need for Marxism to be oriented in our contemporary conjuncture toward anti-imperialism. because the fundamental structures of the global geopolitical dynamic are based on an imperialist, you know, an imperialist framework. And in order to do that, one of the things that is additionally necessary, and Lysorto has contributed to this in very important ways, is really understanding the actual history of socialism, not the propaganda. history of so-called actually existing socialism. In fact, in much of my own scholarship, I've mined down into the unbelievable number of historians of socialism and communism in the

Imperial Corps who were working directly or indirectly for the propaganda agencies of the U.S., British, French national security states. They are doing imperial propaganda and they know exactly what they're doing because they, uh, this is elucidated internally as a form of academically laundering state propaganda. You produce the propaganda and then you get a big name academic like Robert Conquest to put his stamp of approval on it and then you pump it out around the world. You fund it and you fund its distribution. You fund and support all of the positive reviews. You make it into, you know, bestseller work basically. And, And so, well, and even more disturbing is when you use anthropologists and historians who are technically on the left to promote some of these similar ideas like, you know, somebody whose work is really phenomenal, James Scott, for example, weapons of the week and other things. And, you know, yet it's clear that there are interrelationships here with CIA interest on the whole area studies project, which is, you know, another point that you mentioned a genuine proper history of.

of socialism, but also non-Western histories and non-Eurocentric approaches to actually grasp the conditions of development and underdevelopment, de-development, de-development that have taken place in places that had failed projects. They weren't able to achieve socialism. Well, why was that? You know, there's a lot that's happened in modern history because of colonialism and neo-colonialism that has short-circuited popular movements for sovereignty and for, you know, socialism. And so, you know, if you only take this Eurocentric kind of historical approach, and that's one reason why I absolutely detest how Perry Anderson's work is because he's just a pure orientalist in the assumption. So confident to sort of talk about the rest of the world, you know, he doesn't even bother to do like the genuine work of learning languages and so on that like his elder brother, Benedict Anderson, at least did in Southeast Asia, you know. But so at any rate, I just wanted to mention that as, as, as as well. But please. Yeah, no, absolutely, because you need an analysis of the social totality. And so if you're just dealing with Eurocentric intellectuals who are trained in Eurocentric theoretical

practices, then the final result of that is going to be Eurocentrism. And that obviously is a deep, deep structural problem. The other thing that I was going to mention is that it's, you know, this is the type of intellectual class struggle that cannot. ultimately only be waged via discourse and theory. We need to do this collectively, right? It's not just one book that's going to change everything. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy to be on this podcast. I'm glad that you're doing the work that you're doing. And I'm doing a lot of collective work. We also overlap with some other projects with our friends at Discour Books. We have to develop collective infrastructure for moving the needle. And that is very important.

but we also have to make sure that all of those projects are organically linked to practical struggles on the ground, because ultimately, if you're going to get rid of Western Marxism, given that it is an ideological outgrowth of the imperial superstructure, you're ultimately going to have to get rid of imperialism because otherwise it's going to keep cropping back up. There's going to be plenty of room for it within the overall matrix of the system. of knowledge production. In other words, and this is a somewhat coming full circle to where we started, if we really need to understand Western Marxism as an outgrowth of the imperial superstructure, and hence a consequence of the socioeconomic base, then to really change those

conditions, we have to mine down into that and change the socioeconomic base, meaning we have to overcome imperialism. And in order to do that, and Adon, this segues with, I think, one of the concerns that you just raised, I think it's important to recognize that those living in the Imperial Corps like myself were living in countries that are the rear guard of history, right? These are the countries that are holding back human development and destroying the planet at the same time. Therefore, it's not only that we should avoid being Eurocentric, it's that we have to recognize that the vanguard of history that Perry Anderson thought was in the theoretical production of the Western Marxists is not there. The vanguard of history is

the peoples of this world who through practice and through theoretical understanding and mapping of those practices are actually concretely demonstrating that another world is not only possible, it is actual. And we have to learn as much as we can. We have to increase our humility, get rid of our social chauvinism, and learn from the people who are leading this project, and leading hopefully what will be the world transformation of over- coming imperialism and moving in the direction of a broader socialist world in which there are the most at least heinous forms of exploitation, human degradation, and the destruction of the biosphere that are not only held at bay, but we have to turn that whole ship around

and improve human civilization to such an extent that we can hopefully reverse some of the most heinous and horrific effects of ecological degradation and human social murder. Agree entirely. And honestly, a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. You know, you mentioned the biosphere and ecological degradation. You're going to love the next book that I have coming out, Gabriel. It'll be out this winter. Communism is the highest stage of ecology. It's a translation from French as well. Fantastic. But in way of conclusion, you know, those were terrific words, but you did at the beginning of this conversation, mentioned another project that you had just concluded.

So, can you tell the listeners a little bit of information, just a small amount, a little teaser, of what that project was, how it relates to this Western Marxism book that we have been discussing, and then how the listeners can find you in more of your work? Yeah, I just finished a book called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, that is the first in a trilogy entitled The Intellectual World War, Marxism versus the imperial theory industry. And it provides a kind of Marxist discourse on method is the first half of the book that analyzes how Marxists should understand the history of ideas and intellectual class struggle. And it overlaps with a lot of what I was saying about

the imperial superstructure and how it influences knowledge, production, circulation, and consumption. And the second half of the book examines the role of the capitalist ruling class, capitalist institutions and the bourgeois state in promoting and supporting the work of Western Marxists, and in particular the early Frankfurt School. That book will be out next year with Monthly Review Press. And then the second volume focuses on French theory and the third on contemporary radical theory and some of the things that I was saying about Gijek Hart and Negri segue. With that, obviously there's some overlap with Les Sordo's project, but I push it much more in the direction of a political economy of knowledge production

so that we really bring to the four the socioeconomic forces that are deriving these various ideologies. Last thing I'd say is I did just finish a book that was published in French called Requiem for French Theory with Emory-Mont-Mauville, and it's also going to come out in English next year with Monthly Review Press.

It's a Marxist critique of French theory, but it's not just that. It's also an analysis of cultural imperialism and a defense of dialectical and historical materialism as a scientific project of liberation along the lines that we were just talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And I can assure you that you will be getting invites for coming back on the show when each of those books comes out, as well as probably just for having future conversations, because this was a terrific one.

Gabriel, is there anywhere that you would like to direct the listeners to to find your work? I have a website. I'm on Twitter. I also run the Critical Theory Workshop, and we do a lot of online. activities, and we have a summer school, actually, the summer school that Lsorto spoke in years ago that takes place every year in Paris, but we simultaneously do it online, so you can check out Critical Theory Workshop.com. And this was a delightful conversation. I love the work that you are doing, and it's so wonderful to have such a high-level conversation that's really focused on

ideas, but at the same time rooted very concretely in guerrilla history and in the struggle to really push the envelope at a practical level because it's what we need in our time. So keep up the great work. And of course, I'd be more than happy to collaborate in the future in any way, shape, or form that that takes. Happy to hear that. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast? Well, I just also want to say it was such a pleasure having you on. Gabriel, we've admired your work. So important. And we do want to continue to connect over the projects you're involved with, it's absolutely vital. And I thank you so much for spending a good period of time for a full conversation that I really enjoyed to learn from. And listeners should check out

this book, as well as the other one you recommended. We'll put that in the show notes. I think Henry will make sure. We'll try to remember him. Yes, we'll try to remember that. But in any case, if you want to follow me, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain-H-H-U-S-A-I-N. Check out the Mudgellis podcast that I also host M-A-J-L-I-S about the Middle East Islamic World, Muslim-diasporic culture and experience. Again, thank you so much, Gabriel, for joining us today. Thank you. And as for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-U-C-1-9-5.

I will just briefly plug IskraBooks.org since we've been mentioning Iskra a couple times throughout the conversation, and since I mentioned communism, the highest stage you ecology. That'll be coming out this winter through Iskra Books. And just a reminder, all books through Iskra are available for free as PDFs, as well as in low-cost print editions. So again, iscrabbooks.org. For Gorilla History, you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter, keep up with everything that we're doing collectively, as well as individually by following us at

Guerrilla underscore pod again G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. Thank you.