On Saturday 5 July 2025, Friends of Socialist China hosted—along with the Morning Star, the International Manifesto Group, Critical Theory Workshop and Iskra books—a discussion of Domenico Losurdo’s crucial book, Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, in which the legendary Italian philosopher charts the long and complex history of Marxism’s bifurcation into ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’—a division based primarily on the national question and the relative prioritisation of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles.
The meeting was held in-person at Marx Memorial Library in London (and online via Zoom and YouTube), and the packed room was addressed by Gabriel Rockhill (Editor of the English edition), Jennifer Ponce de León (Co-author of the introduction to the English edition), Alex Gordon (Chair, Marx Memorial Library) and Carlos Martinez (Co-editor, Friends of Socialist China), and was chaired by Francisco Domínguez (National secretary, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign).
Embedded below is the video of the event, followed by the text of Carlos’s speech. Carlos describes the journey Marxism has taken since its inception around the world—“a journey to the East and South”, transforming it “from being a liberatory framework for the industrial proletariat in Western Europe and North America, to being a liberatory framework for the working and oppressed peoples around the world”.
He goes on to define academic Western Marxism on the basis of its rejection of this globalisation of class struggle, and explores the material and ideological reasons for this trend’s refusal to support the socialist states and to prioritise the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.
The speech concludes with a plan of action:
Reject dogmatism and purism, reject Eurocentrism and chauvinism, and get back to playing our part in a global united front composed of the socialist countries, the oppressed nations, and the working classes and progressive forces in the imperialist countries. That’s what will get us on the path to a socialist future.
I’ve been involved in the Marxist movement in the West in some way or another since I was a teenager, but thankfully have never got particularly close to Western Marxism.
The political tradition I grew up in emphasised the importance of supporting the socialist states, and always prioritised the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and racism. To support China, to support the DPRK, to support Cuba, to support the national liberation struggles of the Irish, Palestinian, Zimbabwean, Vietnamese and other peoples were very much part of that tradition.
So despite being a Marxist in the West, I haven’t had all that much exposure to the Western Marxist academics described by Losurdo, and haven’t had to go through that extremely difficult “unlearning” process that many others have. I’ve read a lot of Lenin; I’ve read very little Adorno, Zizek and Perry Anderson.
Nevertheless, Losurdo’s book was really clarifying for me, and helped me understand the ideological roots of some of the objectively reactionary positions that you come up against all the time. Because although Western Marxism exists mainly in an academic ivory tower, it seeps into the wider movement for revolutionary change, which it seems to find quite fertile soil.
Marxism moves East and South
Marxism is, obviously, Western by birth. The first line of the Communist Manifesto is after all:
A spectre is haunting Europe–the spectre of communism.
The nascent communist movement was geographically limited to Europe and North America, and focused almost exclusively on the industrial working class.
But from the beginning, it’s been on a journey to the East and South, including in Marx’s own lifetime.
First, the phenomenon of imperialism, which was studied systematically by Lenin but which Marx and Engels started to take note of in the 1860s and 1870s, expanded capital’s geographical sphere of operation. Capitalism was becoming a global system, and with that came the creation of a proletariat—a class of propertyless workers—from Mexico City to St Petersburg to Shanghai.
Second, Marx and Engels, as their own thinking developed, came to understand the inextricable link between the struggle of the working class in the capitalist countries and that of the oppressed nations against their colonial oppressors.
For Marx and Engels, this intellectual journey starts with the Irish question. Of course Ireland is not in the South or the East! But it was England’s first colony, and had suffered for hundreds of years under a system of brutal colonial oppression.
Marx had originally considered that socialist revolution in Britain would bring national liberation to Ireland. In 1869, however, 21 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, he wrote that “deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.”
He went on: “A nation that oppresses another forges its own chains” and called on his followers to “put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with the Irish”. He pointed out that “the national emancipation of Ireland is no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of the English working class’s own social emancipation.”
So over 150 years ago, the founders of scientific socialism were already pointing to the indispensability of the struggle against colonial and national oppression.
Importantly, that understanding also extended to the struggle against national oppression within the capitalist heartlands. Hence that memorable sentence in Volume 1 of Capital: Labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as labour in the black skin is branded.
The development of imperialism gained pace towards the end of the 19th century.
Lenin noted that concentration of capital had reached a point where monopolies were increasingly driven abroad in pursuit of profit. As a result, more and more of the world was brought into the capitalist system, but not on equal terms. Rather, this was “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”.
Lenin notes:
Imperialism is leading to annexation, to increased national oppression, and, consequently, also to increasing resistance.
The strategic implication of this is that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries must unite with the broad masses of the oppressed around the world against their common enemy: the imperialist ruling classes.
Hence at the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, the slogan “Workers of the world unite” was updated to “Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite”.
And again, to go back to Marx’s point that this is “no question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment”: while imperialism is strong, the ruling class is powerful and the possibilities for socialist advance are extremely limited. National independence and sovereignty for the oppressed nations means the ruling class becomes weaker, and the relative position of the working class becomes stronger.
That’s why Lenin said in 1921 that “the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe… It is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so … there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured”.
So we can say that by a hundred years ago, Marxism had developed a clear global applicability, had transformed from being a liberatory framework for the industrial proletariat in Western Europe and North America, to being a liberatory framework for the working and oppressed peoples around the world.
And with Marxism’s global applicability came its global application: the success of socialist and national liberation revolutions in Russia, in Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Angola and elsewhere. All these practical experiences have contributed to the broadening and deepening of Marxism.
Western Marxism resists
The Western Marxism described by Losurdo essentially rejects this whole process of globalisation of class struggle.
Firstly, it near-comprehensively rejects the experiences of actually existing socialism. The Western Marxist trend has consistently distanced itself from the process of building socialism in reality: in the Soviet Union, in China, in Korea and elsewhere.
Where these academics and groups do support a socialist process, the support is highly conditional. For example, there was reasonably broad support for the first “pink tide” in Latin America at the beginning of this century, in large part because it was a form of socialism being built within the limits of bourgeois democracy.
However, once the U.S. stepped up its destabilisation and propaganda campaign, and once countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua were forced to use the repressive machinery of the state in defence of their revolutionary processes, Western Marxism became disillusioned and withdrew support.
Some Western Marxist thinkers were for a time inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, with its extreme emphasis on class struggle. But when the Communist Party de-emphasised domestic class struggle and found a place for capital within its development process, Western Marxism wrote China off as having restored capitalism.
So with Western Marxism we always find what Losurdo called “the dogmatic rejection of actually existing socialism”. If a socialist project doesn’t look like what people imagine socialist projects should look like, it’s rejected.
And that’s combined with, and closely related to, a downplaying of the role of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles; a rejection of the notion that the primary contradiction in today’s world is that between imperialism and the oppressed nations; a rejection of the ideas of national liberation Marxism, in a historical context where the vast majority of socialist experiments thus far have had a major national liberation component. In Cuba, China, Korea, Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, Mozambique, Nicaragua, the struggle for socialism has been very closely bound up with the struggle against imperialism, the struggle for sovereignty.
Why is Western Marxism like this?
Western Marxism has lots of different trends and contradictions, but its essence is these two rejections: of actually existing socialism and of national liberation. Both are a function of Eurocentrism and dogmatism.
But it’s also important to bear in mind that there’s a clear material basis for a Western left that minimises the national question. In their introduction, Gabriel and Jennifer mention how the academic mainstream encourages a dogmatic, Eurocentric and essentially inert Marxism, creating a situation whereby success in academia more or less relies on taking positions that don’t fundamentally threaten the interests of imperialism.
I’d add that this is a microcosm of a trend Lenin recognised over a century ago, whereby the “high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries” opens up “the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat”, creating a privileged layer of the working class that benefits from imperialism and that therefore has a material interest in its success.
So I’d argue that the distortions of Western Marxism really represent the extension of this trend of opportunism and social chauvinism into the realms of academia.
Where do we go from here?
Now, it’s important to recognise that the Western Marxist trend has produced some extremely valuable insights, and in many cases has expanded Marxism into a range of academic fields, from gender studies to cultural studies and a good deal more. Since it’s based in the advanced capitalist countries, it generally addresses itself to the problems faced by people in those countries, and on that basis has played a valuable role in moving human understanding forward.
But there are some things we have to absolutely insist on if our movement is going to make any real progress.
First is the primacy of anti-imperialist struggle, of solidarity with peoples fighting our ruling classes, of playing our part in a global united front against imperialism. Since today is the 50th anniversary of Cabo Verde’s independence, it seems apt to cite Amilcar Cabral:
If imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all the advanced countries and smother the national liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting.
Second is the leadership of socialist countries. It should be obvious that it’s the socialist world that’s in the vanguard of the project of developing Marxism; that it’s the states, movements and parties engaged in the process of building socialism that are doing the most to build humanity’s collective understanding of how to carry out the task that history has placed before for us: completing the transition to world socialism.
As Mao Zedong famously put it in his essay ‘On Practice’,
if you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.
And obviously I would say this, but it is absolutely crucial to understand, support and learn from China—the largest and most advanced socialist country, that’s at the core of an emerging multipolarity. Indeed as China develops, increasingly we should be showcasing China as an example of what can be achieved under socialism.
China simply cannot be understood through a lens of Western Marxism, through a lens of purism and dogmatism. In the course of over a century of fierce and constant struggle, the Chinese leadership have developed a socialist path that’s suited to the traditions of the Chinese people and adapts to the ever-changing material reality they face.
Outside an academic ivory tower, the questions of whether people have food on the table, whether they have access to healthcare, whether they have a roof over their heads, whether their children get a good education are more important issues than whether China has billionaires, or whether there are branches of Starbucks and KFC in Shanghai. Deng Xiaoping’s insistence that “development is the only hard truth” and that “poverty is not socialism” may be dismissed as revisionist or capitulationist by well-fed intellectuals, but they reflected the actual needs of the Chinese people.
Domenico Losurdo of course understood all this.
On the question of inequality in China, Losurdo pointed out that China’s rise constitutes a most extraordinary contribution to the fight against global-scale inequality—the inequality between developed and developing countries. He also pointed to the existence of an “absolute inequality that exists between life and death” which Chinese socialism has addressed with extraordinary success,
eliminating once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.
That’s what a Marxist, dialectical analysis of inequality in China looks like.
On the question of China’s role in the world, China’s support for sovereignty and development in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific is more important than whether people think China should do more aid and less trade, or China should pursue a more militant foreign policy.
Suffice to say that the slogan ‘Neither Washington Nor Beijing’ is not often heard in Palestine, in Iran, in Venezuela, in Cuba, in Eritrea, in Zimbabwe.
And again, Losurdo understood this very well, describing China as “the country that more than any other is challenging the international division of labour imposed by colonialism and imperialism, and furthering the end of the Columbian epoch–a fact of enormous, progressive historical significance.”
Any Marxist that refuses to understand this enormous, progressive historical significance is, frankly, not actually a Marxist.
So we have a plan of action. Reject dogmatism and purism, reject Eurocentrism and chauvinism, and get back to playing our part in a global united front composed of the socialist countries, the oppressed nations, and the working classes and progressive forces in the imperialist countries. That’s what will get us on the path to a socialist future.