Anyone taking Kruschev’s Secret Speech particularly seriously is just not themselves a very serious person, even if they’ve had a blog since 2008. This piece is lacking in basic rigor, failing to substantiate or even articulate material criticisms for the first entire third, instead sticking almost exclusively to namecalling and innuendo after providing unnecessary introductions complete with citations to give the impression that he would get an A+ from any high school English teacher.

You may note that the author rarely dsigns to cite their depictions of Losurdo’s work, the one he is criticizing, beginning with the most obvious oversight: despite spending the first third declaring what Western Marxism might have meant at different times to different people, he does not quote Losurdo’s definition or even really attempt to understand why someone like Hannah Arendt might be included. It is simply mentioned as an absurdity that must mean Losurdo is wrong, plus some editorialization. The author tries to claim the common thread is just a lack of consideration for the global south, colonialism, and so on, so this is all it means, implicitly. Of course, Losurdo is not this indirect, or one might say misleading as the author of this blog: the preface to the book itself is titled, “What is Western Marxism?”, and he explains what he means clearly. In his consideration, which is really a reference to another work, Western Marxism is defined through a rejection of “Eastern Marxism”, i.e. the products of successful revolutions. Those in the West who declared the Marxism of the USSR or China to be a separate thing from thst of the West, which by that point was basically all talk. Losurdo’s book intends to describe the origins and tendencies that define this term using the entire text - and a person like Arendt actually fits perfectly into this “intellectual” movement. Of course, the blog author mentions Anderson et al, but neglects to directly address Losurdo’s meaning, sticking to suggested absurdity and not direct critique. In many ways, this is thr author earning the label of “Western Marxist” i.e. the faux-academic chauvinist that relies on obscuring rather than illumination.

Keeping Arendt as an example, we can ask a simple question: does Losurdo call Arendt a Western Marxist? No. Does Losurdo imply she represents, herself, Western Marxism? Still no. Losurdo cites Arendt as a popularizer of pro-imperial apologetics, particularly for the United States and the erasure of its colonial and semi-colonial history, and how she became a major influence for Western Marxists in this regard - specifucally Hardt and Negri, who wrote Empire. These are important figures for Losurdo’s depiction of Western Marxism, of those who declare an alternative interpretation of Marx against “Eastern Marxism”, and end up in the territory of self-soothing navel-gazing.

This long critique of just this one point exemplifies the larger issues in this essay. Laziness, inaccurate depictions, a fear of quoting the text in question, but plenty of dust thrown up as distraction. Look at how many books the author may have read! One must wonder why it takes only 3 minutes of reading the relevant portions of the book-to-be-critiqued to see the obvious errors when so much effort has gone into lining up the right citations for The New Left Review.

The middle third of this article is just a narrative about western Marxist publishing houses and rivalries and stipulating why they did this, that, or the other thing. No engagement about Losurdo or the work allegedly under critique.

The last third revisits Arendt et al and suggests that perhaps they were addressed as influences of Western Marxists rather than Marxists themselves. As if Losurdo hadn’t literally written this himself! This is converted into a critique of Losurdo spending so much time on these non-Marxists, though the notion that anti-Marxists being strong influences of Western Marxists is a relevant thing to expound on never seems to cross the author’s mind. Their criticism here is, in actuality, just their own selective capacity for curiosity and basic fair readings. The author then stipulates that easily understood juxtapositions are non sequiturs (selective curiosity again!) before contradicting themselves to say that actually they do know what point was meant: that those using a political dialectic have more correct ideas of world evolution when embedded in contemporary fact (e.g. stacks of newspapers) and that Western Marxists have a strong tendency to ignore this fact - of contemporary material facts in contradiction of their proclamations, like the obviously wrong Negri et al implying a Pax Americana after the fall of the USSR. Them being objectively wrong is none of the concern of this article’s author: clearly Losurdo is just being silly and saying that no Western Marxists read newspapers.

To be honest I am just getting bored at this point. I could go through the rest but don’t see a point to it. This article is… pitiful. Up its own ass to an extraordinary degree.