Why Losurdo's Western Marxism Matters (feat. Gabriel Rockhill)

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  • Опубликовано: 25 ноя 2024

Комментарии • 138

  • @ZhTra
    @ZhTra Месяц назад +24

    Amazing discussion! Very useful in helping to find words for so many things that I don’t like about the western left. “The Western Marxism criticises socialism in its infancy for not being an adult form of socialism” (in regard to Soviet/Asian socialist experience).

    • @wokeisweak
      @wokeisweak Месяц назад

      Maybe a more apt analogy is that so-called western marxism is criticizing the child abuse committed by Stalinism and Maoism who positioned themselves as metaphorical parents against the developing 'child' of masses striving for socialism. The abuse of power by those in the Stalinist / M-L bureaucratic tradition stunted the development toward socialism and traumatized the world.

    • @CharlieBabbitt1988
      @CharlieBabbitt1988 Месяц назад

      Can’t take criticism? Politics isn’t for you i guess.

  • @billyfudd818
    @billyfudd818 6 часов назад

    thanks guys!

  • @lovmovement8477
    @lovmovement8477 Месяц назад +8

    Was previously skeptical of what I’d seen from Rockhill in his critique of Zizek, but this was an enlightening convo. Very informative from Rockhill & great interview from Daniel. Thank you guys

  • @apolloforabetterfuture4814
    @apolloforabetterfuture4814 26 дней назад

    Great book! I'm so glad i discovered Rockhill

  • @m00py1
    @m00py1 Месяц назад +16

    Great talk! Any chance for a Rockhill and Cutrone discussion, especially since he advocates learning everything possible from a wide variety of lenses? Thanks!

  • @chrisoleson9570
    @chrisoleson9570 Месяц назад +11

    Greatly enlightening conversation, gentlemen.

  • @saleonar
    @saleonar Месяц назад +17

    Is there really a new political economy theory about state capitalism articulated in the Frankfurt School, or is there simply a theoretical response to the total liquidation of European socialism? Or, perhaps that's not a worthy object of reflection? Of course, Horkheimer thinks that the age of state capitalism is a continuation of the capitalist epoch, which is why he illustrates it initially with reference to one of the most widely circulated texts of Classical Marxism, Engels's "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." He therefore thinks the project is the overthrow of capitalism in its core, a project utterly abandoned by the likes of Losurdo.
    As for Lenin's so-called political economic "analysis" in "Imperialism," you are both missing the point of that work, which is not to do economics but to do dialectics, specifically a dialectical critique of theories of imperialism (Hobson and Hilferding, above all). Nevermind the fact that there's little indication in this discussion of what Lenin means by "imperialism," which is by no means equivalent to overseas domination, whether direct (colonial) or indirect (neocolonial). Lenin doesn't think that the German kaiserreich becomes imperialist when it acquires some territories in Africa or that Louis Napoleon's regime is imperialist because of Algeria.
    Finally, the notion that "anti-imperialism" understood as "a struggle between nations" is completely anti-Marxist and conservative, not least for the people in formerly colonized countries where it can only mean subordination of the working class to nationalist political forces, a Stalinist strategy that led to catastrophe over and over again in the 20th century, from China in the 20s through India in the 30s and 40s, to Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, etc., etc. in subsequent decades. Are we really meant to consign this disgraceful history to the memory hole just because some academics discovered what was always plainly manifest, namely that the likes of Foucault and Deleuze aren't really leftists? These guys are victims of the theory industry they decry, and embracing a history they are not familiar with isn't going to help them out.

  • @ludviglidstrom6924
    @ludviglidstrom6924 27 дней назад

    Great discussion!

  • @lasseade
    @lasseade Месяц назад +4

    Great book! What Gabriel Rockhill makes from the book is also great.

  • @seanmoon7095
    @seanmoon7095 Месяц назад +5

    Thank you for such an excellent conversation.

  • @MookiePhronesis
    @MookiePhronesis Месяц назад +1

    Interesting discussion. But how would you respond to Foucault's interest and support of the Iranian Revolution? At least initially?

  • @danielfunari1992
    @danielfunari1992 Месяц назад +7

    Great interview

  • @kerithj6919
    @kerithj6919 Месяц назад +8

    Give the man credit. He walks it like he talks it. Included the Haitian Revolution in his discussion

    • @Joeyjojoshabbadoo
      @Joeyjojoshabbadoo Месяц назад +1

      I don't know about that. I think he lives a pretty comfortable, soft life as a professional academic. Let's see this guy scrubbing toilets five days a week, and still find the time to fight the power, and dismantle the the phony intellectual left or whatever his critique is, and then I'll be ready to prop him.

    • @hotcakesism
      @hotcakesism Месяц назад +2

      ​@@Joeyjojoshabbadooas someone who has spent years of my life literally scrubbing toilets for a living, I'm glad we have Rockhill's years of study and interpretation to draw upon.

    • @Joeyjojoshabbadoo
      @Joeyjojoshabbadoo 28 дней назад

      @@hotcakesism Well alright then, I bet you he'd feel validated by that. I still think he should be cleaning toilets. He can join you, for better pay and benefits of course. I might even join you. Somebody's gotta clean 'em. Maybe this Losurdo academic person cleaned a few toilets in his day too, thus emboldening him to become an eminent marxist scholar.

  • @N0tEnuffMana
    @N0tEnuffMana Месяц назад +15

    Dear Dr. Rockhill. How do you read so many books and stay so fit? Thank you.

  • @Charlesjkd
    @Charlesjkd 28 дней назад +3

    Losurdo is the antidote to the despair of Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism"

    • @StalinsWeakestWarrior
      @StalinsWeakestWarrior 27 дней назад

      I'm stuck on capitalist realism. Fisher's incoherent pathetic ramblings about "Market Stalinism" made me FUME, and the two next chapters just made me unfathomably sad.

  • @nikolademitri731
    @nikolademitri731 Месяц назад +2

    I really enjoyed this, though something tells me there will be a C. Derick Varn postmortem, and some pushback on the CIA stuff being too overemphasized and not entirely fair in the case of multiple FS thinkers? (Forgive me if you read this comment and it pisses you off CDV.)

  • @eightiefiv3
    @eightiefiv3 Месяц назад +5

    Epic!! ❤

  • @AmiriAbuJamal
    @AmiriAbuJamal Месяц назад +6

    Excellent

  • @jamesayres6697
    @jamesayres6697 Месяц назад

    What you are saying is so information and intellectually rich, a whole new vein of thought, brilliant

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад +3

    lol its good that you two are meeting y'all.

  • @AsifKhan-bv3iu
    @AsifKhan-bv3iu 13 дней назад

    Beautiful conversation.

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад +2

    i like how you both have libraries behind you. have me in this I also have a library behind me too

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад +4

    i might have to get on the losurdo train but I'm reading so much shit right now lol

  • @Charlesjkd
    @Charlesjkd 28 дней назад +2

    I am primordially anti-Foucault

  • @GChagelishvili
    @GChagelishvili Месяц назад +6

    Referring to Lenin while taking Neo-Kautskyan stance is a funny thing. We are having two capitalist/imperialist camps confronting, one is old as it was British Empire during ww1, another is new, as it was German camp. Lenin stood for international struggle of working class, against social-chauvinistic move in support of one or another.

    • @curiousfella4076
      @curiousfella4076 Месяц назад +2

      Given the LGBTQ+ movement is its own form of social chauvinism it's important to keep in mind that merely taking an antagonistic stance there does not inherently put you in a position of social chauvinism. But yes it should be avoided to pick camps based on social chauvinistic tendencies even as you more or less have to play to people's sensibilities.

    • @comradehogan7636
      @comradehogan7636 Месяц назад

      ​@@curiousfella4076Fuckin weirdo

    • @curiousfella4076
      @curiousfella4076 Месяц назад +4

      @@danielseagate6340 Representation for its own sake is precisely social chauvinism.

    • @curiousfella4076
      @curiousfella4076 Месяц назад +2

      @@danielseagate6340 And remember what is the emotional component to the cover story for going to sanction (or worse) half the world?

    • @curiousfella4076
      @curiousfella4076 Месяц назад +1

      @@danielseagate6340 Not saying all social chauvinism is equally constructed or has the same significance btw. Some aspects are better some may be worse.

  • @jamesayres6697
    @jamesayres6697 Месяц назад

    Hit nail on head

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад +2

    rip david graeber and Losurdo and Bernard Stiegler

  • @jamesayres6697
    @jamesayres6697 Месяц назад

    There is no perfect ideological ground, therefore it is the whole social framework of knowledge that must be considered

  • @syourke3
    @syourke3 Месяц назад

    This is all very interesting but I’d like to know what these deep thinkers recommend in terms of practical action. All theory and no praxis makes a dull revolutionary!

  • @jankan4027
    @jankan4027 Месяц назад +6

    Žižek actually commented on Gabriel Rockhill (its funny, cuz he was so frustrated about it) in one of the episode on theory underground (here on youtube)... btw. This realization that philosophical marxist like Žižek don't have a clue about macro econimics or political economy is so so obvious...

  • @阳明子
    @阳明子 Месяц назад +9

    28:25 Dr. Rockhill perfectly describes the cutrone/leonard tendency here

    • @saleonar
      @saleonar Месяц назад +6

      This is laughably off. Cutrone and I represent an anti-partyist attitude? We're perhaps most responsible in this generation for posing the party question. Rockhill just joins a sect of a few hundred (if that) and believes he's solved the problem.

    • @阳明子
      @阳明子 Месяц назад +5

      @@saleonar >We're perhaps most responsible in this generation for posing the party question
      lol

    • @saleonar
      @saleonar Месяц назад +4

      @@阳明子 -- What would be truly "lol" (if it weren't so miserably right-wing) is the idea that actual communism shouldn't be spoken of as anything but something reserved for "the very, very distant future."

    • @danyalghaznavi6818
      @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад

      @阳明子 Run of the mill boring idiot ultralefts with delusions of grandeur. They're also not very well read outside of the tendencies that push them towards their utopian useful idiotism for World Imperialism. The CIA really loves free cultural worker- rabble like them (although to what extent careerist uplift is itself structural and unconscious to themselves, kinda like for the "oppressed' petite bourgeois hustlers in the academy of the more recent type, the types who talk of degrowth and privilege, etc, is an interesting question).

    • @ramboz494
      @ramboz494 Месяц назад +1

      "Dr. Rockhill perfectly describes the cutrone/leonard tendency here"
      whine

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад

    wow it took me a day but I remembered my quip about engles; before we say the family isn't holy, who is to say we were ever really secular?
    : and its my perhaps my response to for my idea of loserdo's hegel too perhaps; just wait until I find how it folds in on itself.

  • @ccutrone
    @ccutrone Месяц назад +14

    This was a petit bourgeois radical self-criticism session.
    Losurdo and Rockhill are schlock. Trivial.
    It's Stalinism, plain and simple - nothing more, nothing less.
    Rockhill: “The so-called American Revolution . . . this was not a revolution.”
    Lenin 1918: “The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars.” 1912: “Freedom in the U.S.A. is most complete.”
    Adorno to Marcuse 1969: “because of what is occurring in Vietnam or Biafra. If that really is your reaction, then you should not only protest against the horror of napalm bombs but also against the unspeakable Chinese-style tortures that the Vietcong carry out permanently. If you do not take that on board too, then the protest against the Americans takes on an ideological character.”

    • @jankan4027
      @jankan4027 Месяц назад

      it sounds like you are an American born into a paranoid atmosphere of anti-Russian sentiment from the last century; while your country is rotting away, completely uneducated; where education is for the elite; where education is propaganda; there you find the enemy in Stalinism. You didn't get the point of the conversation.

    • @wokeisweak
      @wokeisweak Месяц назад +2

      30:14 the irony of rockhill's analysis of the petite bourgeois category as equal to PMC with an emphasis on professors while Tutt conspicuously sports the Gaza poster which champions a movement has next to zero overt communist content. 32:33 Tutt with his Gaza poster over shoulder mentions the PB radicals' inadequate confrontation with the bourgeoisie. Cant help but wonder if has any public criticism of Hamas. 35:50 hypocritically defines imperialism as the principle contradiction of capitalism bc of political economy underdevelopment of the colonial world. In fact imperialism has a track record of exporting capital to develop production in sites outside the 'imperialist core' and escape those expensive labor aristocrats at home. Capital dragged African slaves to US and then pulled blacks into factories where for about 30 years the black worker was the vanguard of the global proletariat until neoliberal globalization shipped those jobs to the periphery. How does that jive with Rockhill's simplistic schematic of 'imperialism'?

    • @Jessupz
      @Jessupz Месяц назад

      Hey Chris can you explain to me how the Palestinians are supposed to form labor unions with Zionists to stop themselves from being genocided? Or maybe you could explain to us how they are "not like us" because they lack the oh so important bourgeois subjectively?

    • @danyalghaznavi6818
      @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад

      @ccutrone Still better than the strategies of petite bourgeois cunning of chauvinist reason cope.
      That was kinda the point, autistic dogmatic non dialectical imperialists in the imperialist bloc.

    • @danyalghaznavi6818
      @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад +2

      @ccutrone It's also hilarious you post the worst explicit statements of Adorno(in his letters to Marcuse where he rightfully chastises him over Vietnam) in his favor- truly an infantile disorder, to quote Lenin, since your fixations with quotes and decontextualized , non dialectical autistic quotations to satisfy some father worship superego prevails.
      The forerunners of useful idiot "both sides" moronic monsters, though thye have the delusions to think they're highbrow.
      No wonder the monstrous commentary on 21st century holocausts.
      Self indulgent utopian useful idiotism for imperialism, or poetry after Gaza, is barbarism too, mate.

  • @阳明子
    @阳明子 Месяц назад +2

    Dr. Rockhill advocates for a variegated hermeneutic but in his analysis of the American Revolution seems to dismiss this method. Rockhill follows the Garveyite analysis of Gerald Horne on the American Revolution (which contains intellectual fraud with Horne woefully misrepresenting some of the sources cited) and dismisses the analysis of people like Lenin and Ho Chi Minh.

    • @hotcakesism
      @hotcakesism Месяц назад

      Hey, I appreciate your interesting and challenging comment. Respectfully, I want to ask, where has Horne misrepresented those sources, to what degree do you think that was intentional, and what are the particular consequences for his analysis?

    • @阳明子
      @阳明子 Месяц назад

      @@hotcakesism I would refer you to Marius Trotter's article for the misrepresented sources and Tom Mackaman's article on the WSWS for a general critique. They lay out the case better than I'd be able to on a youtube comment.
      If you google 'Marius Trotter gerald horne' and 'Tom Mackaman gerald horne counter revolution' they will be the first results.

  • @RBLXGaming23
    @RBLXGaming23 Месяц назад +11

    I hate this whole false dichotomy between "western" and "eastern" Marxism. Petrograd is in Western Europe. Moscow is on the western European continent. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were German westerners. Soviet Socialism and Soviet Marxism are every bit as much a part of the tradition of "western" Marxism as capitalist-controlled Trotskyism.

    • @danyalghaznavi6818
      @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад +4

      Not exactly an identity based on geography but a form of thought elevated over and above a different kind.

    • @mattiafabbri8944
      @mattiafabbri8944 Месяц назад +1

      China is surely eastern

    • @jankan4027
      @jankan4027 Месяц назад +1

      that's partly true. In today's context West and "global south", but this is more of a political term..

    • @dinnerwithfranklin2451
      @dinnerwithfranklin2451 Месяц назад

      You must realize that "Western Marxism" is used a symbol for a theoretical school, prevalent in the West, that abhors actual action toward socialism while "Eastern Marxism" is a symbol for the style of Marxism that emphasizes action combined with theory?

  • @xSaecredChaotixx
    @xSaecredChaotixx Месяц назад

    While I can see a kind of petit-bourgeois radicalism in the tendency towards social democracy (in variation), I don't think the deviations in petit-bourgeois ideology are emphasized in the context of a divided ruling class where in shoring up up the interests of domestic capital after periods of financialization and crisis there's a turn towards a anti-elite business nationalism and bourgeois anti-imperialism against "globalism." In other words, I would consider forms of Peleo-Conservativism and the "Post-Liberal Communitarianism" just as much petit-bourgeois radicalism as the US Green Party.

  • @jankan4027
    @jankan4027 Месяц назад +2

    Would love to hear comment on Agamben and Lacan :)

  • @jamesayres6697
    @jamesayres6697 Месяц назад

    😊what you are attempting to get at, feels like the next step in the evolution of the human psyche, if we are to develop

  • @CRManor
    @CRManor Месяц назад +4

    This is one of the most inept and misleading discussion of Alain Badiou I’ve ever heard.

  • @ramboz494
    @ramboz494 Месяц назад +3

    If Rockhill cares so much about "Actually Existing Socialism," then he must condemn Stalin's Soviet Union for denouncing Nasser. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1952: "On the night of July 23, 1952, power in Cairo was seized by a reactionary officers’ group connected with the USA."
    It is only later, after Nasser seeks weapons from the West and Baghdad Pact is signed that the USSR made the Czech deal after the Fedayeen raids. It was just an attempt to use nationalism to counter another camp. But politics is a who-whom question, as Rockhill should be familiar if he keeps mentioning Lenin: When Shepilov then visited during Khruschev's tenure and was asked about Nasser locking up communists, he said "it's an Egyptian affair." He used the Communists in the name of anti-imperialism.
    The letter (not an article as Rockhill wrongly says in his 2022 article) was more a critique with the UN's infinite deferral to legality, which is usually a common socialist argument! Especially when this had happened in the lead up to WW2!
    Let alone the earlier predecessor of Hamas (Mujama al-Islamiya) used to refer to Nasser as the "new Pharaoh" in Gaza because of his persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is one of the reasons Sheikh Yassin pursued Islamic education up until the 1st Intifada because he was shook by the persecution of Nasser's Egypt.

    • @dinnerwithfranklin2451
      @dinnerwithfranklin2451 Месяц назад +1

      So your criticism of Rockhill's "actually existing socialism" over pure theoretical socialism is that he isn't holding "actually existing socialism" to pure theory standards?

    • @ramboz494
      @ramboz494 Месяц назад

      @@dinnerwithfranklin2451 What is "pure theoretical socialism" (which is not a phrase I said at all but that you are bringing in)?

    • @dinnerwithfranklin2451
      @dinnerwithfranklin2451 Месяц назад +1

      @@ramboz494 My apologies I presumed that when you quoted "Actually Existing Socialism" you were comparing it to something else not just throwing the phrase away.

    • @ramboz494
      @ramboz494 Месяц назад

      @@dinnerwithfranklin2451 Rockhill uses the phrase "Actually Existing Socialism" and says that the problem with Adorno/Horkheimer is their denunciation of Nasser (in a letter) in the lead-up to the Suez War.
      His point is to say that they are insufficiently anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist (or he says "anti anti imperialist" even in this).
      In both this interview and others (as well as his 2022 article), he accuses Adorno/Horkheimer of not paying attention to debates in the Soviet Union. So I was bringing up the policy of the Soviet Union towards Nasser (as well as Nasser towards the world).
      I am not even comparing it - I am saying he is inconsistent. One could be for socialism, "pure theoretical" (?) or "actually existing" or "anti-socialist" and make the same point.

    • @dinnerwithfranklin2451
      @dinnerwithfranklin2451 Месяц назад +1

      @@ramboz494 Oh I see, thanks for clarifying. While I find your apparent lack of understanding that "pure theoretical socialism" as a concept a bit tedious I do appreciate your clarification.

  • @jamesayres6697
    @jamesayres6697 Месяц назад +1

    This is of such import

  • @evilfungas
    @evilfungas 29 дней назад

    Not watching the video but I can almost assure you it doesn't matter.

  • @SatSingh-mm4gg
    @SatSingh-mm4gg 21 день назад

    Nodding, nodding, nodding, noddy

  • @exlauslegale8534
    @exlauslegale8534 Месяц назад +1

    For these two Losurdo-absurdo Tamil Tigers of the West, dead Gilles and Michael are greater enemy than living Donald, Elon, Camala or Jeff...

    • @danyalghaznavi6818
      @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад +2

      @exlauslegale8534 Plenty of Michel Deleudeds on the train of Kamala and Jeff and their own production of reactionary tendencies and careerism as moral and radical.

  • @comradehogan7636
    @comradehogan7636 Месяц назад +2

    Revisionist

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад

    honestly i know rockhill is talking about me without mentioning me, which is why I am making #gorgonwars mythology lol these guys will never cite me.
    "carrying over the burdens of trace"
    Can't wait for his book to shit on my chest.

    • @hotcakesism
      @hotcakesism Месяц назад

      Are you sure he even knows you exist?

  • @vivalaleta
    @vivalaleta Месяц назад +2

    The premonition of Rockhill 's poor education. ILMAO

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад +1

    I trust the messianic over engles

  • @minanovkiril
    @minanovkiril Месяц назад +10

    I have 3000 books in my library, I never heard of this book. I also have been reading my entire life. I'm Marxist. I do not like the Frankfurters BC they do not analyse the political economy and that had me always in doubt what were these guys doing and why are they so influential, their basic thesis was that Marx and Engels wrote that if there is a big war, such as the First world war, the workers from all countries will unite and will demolish the capitalists and will establish workers states and what happened with the Second international and taking national positions in that war, gave the basis of Adorno, Horkhimer, Markuse etc. to say that, there are other forces at play here and that is the culture, that the workers have internalised and which is bourgeoisic and that's why they moved the theory into cultural critical studies. It's true that the workers did not had their own culture, however, if you properly follow the FS you can easily read the liberal framework in their books. Than were culture wars and what became later the cultural Marxism as referenced from the rightwingers.
    Than the postmodernists which I also have been reading BC everybody was reading them, what was I supposed to do. However, I rejected Foucault a long time ago as well as Judith Butler and than I started dismissing them all, Derrida, Deleuse with Guatary etc.
    I think we have lost 70 years with the critical theory and postmodernists. We need to bring our weapon back in the game and that is we need political analysis and political economy Books.
    aaaaarg.fail I think has losurdos books, we should all put them there so everyone can access them

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад

    i disagree with rockhills #hivemindidioms which is the classic sign of the imperial core.

  • @Cyberphunkisms
    @Cyberphunkisms Месяц назад

    watch my "defence of spivak" video as a counter to rockhill's simplification of arendtian conflation of TOTALism

  • @danyalghaznavi6818
    @danyalghaznavi6818 Месяц назад +4

    Finally Dan 😁
    (There are many in the crowd that need to confront Rockhill more seriously).