Against "Western Marxism" and For Gaza

The concept and its weaknesses, Marxism in the past, Gaza and the Left, Radical Abolitionism and Zionism

A picture of me at my last job. It didn’t end well.

I have been in the Marxist movement (such as it is) for about six years in varying capacities.¹ During this time, the key themes of my politics have been: labor aristocracy, settler-colonialism, race and class, imperialism and war, and stratification of nations. That is to say, I have always been a Third Worldist of some kind, so the term “Western Marxism” is very familiar to me. It has always had a negative connotation, but the reasons for that have shifted over the years. I will unpack those reasons in the hopes of encouraging readers to treat Marxism as the powerful political and historical analysis that it is. Let’s first try to define “Western Marxism.”

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The term was first coined in 1955 by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe an alleged split in Marxist thought between an Eastern or Soviet trend (originating in the Bolshevik Revolution and associated with the USSR) and a Western trend (originating in the early work of Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch). This Western trend later became a tradition of Marxian thought about culture, ideology, and philosophy, with less emphasis on political economy or history. According to early Lukacs, the strength of Marxism was not in certain principles or conclusions but in the dialectical method. In addition to Lukacs and Korsch, notable Western Marxists were the members of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, Perry Anderson, Louis Althusser, and all of their students. However, this seemingly useful way to understand cleavages in Marxist thought had clear problems.

The inclusion of Lukacs, Gramsci, and even the Frankfurt School into “Western Marxism” raises immediate questions. Even in the 1920s, Lukacs was a fervent Bolshevik supporter despite his ideological differences. By 1955, he had long been supportive of the Soviet-installed communist government of Hungary and openly aligned himself with the Soviet sphere, though he maintained his intellectual independence. Similarly, Gramsci was always highly supportive of the USSR and the Communist International regardless of his distance from their thought. Furthermore, during the interwar period, the Frankfurt School had not yet come to its defining emphasis on culture and still supported the USSR. For example, Friedrich Pollock wrote a large tome, Attempts at Planned Economy in the Soviet Union 1917–1927,² which harshly criticized the NEP period and argued for a hard-planned economy, not unlike the Stalinist period.

In other words, these men were not so neatly divorced from “Soviet Marxism” as their supposed students and Merleau-Ponty alleged. Since Gramsci died in prison, it is much easier than otherwise to project one’s own views onto him. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt School qualitatively changed after the war, becoming overtly hostile to the USSR. However, Lukacs lived past the war and his views changed in favor of “Soviet Marxism.” His magnum opus, Destruction of Reason, shows ideological evolution since the 1920s and increased political alignment with “Stalinism.” This work was much more mature than History and Class Consciousness, which is said to have birthed “Western Marxism,” yet it is not typically included in this tradition because it is unmistakably “Soviet Marxist.” In short, there is a tension and vagueness inherent to the concept.

Indeed, when used today, “Western Marxism” is a broad label that describes pernicious trends in Marxist thought that supposedly originate and circulate strictly in the West. The trends in question depend on the given author or speaker, and the label is never defined, but there are a few key themes. The most important is an aloofness, if not hostility, to the nature of capitalism and revolutionary struggles in the Third World. At best, “Western Marxists” are out of touch with the Third World reality, and at worst, they are opposed to Third World struggles against imperialism and capitalism. In contrast, “real Marxists” are said to be in touch with and support these struggles. At one point, I repeated and believed such talking points because they were easy ways of delineating political allies and enemies.

What is clear is that these terms are smokescreens for the user’s own beefs and resentment against others. This was certainly the case with me. An individual disagreement is laundered into a grand debate over the heart of Marxism. To be clear, most people whom we may call “Western Marxists” (e.g., Sebastian Budgen and the Verso-Jacobin sphere) are entirely guilty of the accusations against them. The issue is not that these people are not wrong–they are–but that they are wrong for reasons that go deeper than supposed adherence to “Western Marxism.” In fact, what makes “Western Marxism” so pernicious is a crude method of thought and analysis that unfortunately afflicts Marxists worldwide. It is not strictly “Western.”

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An example of such crude thought is Utsa Patnaik’s claim that the British Empire drained $45 trillion from India during its colonial reign. The number is quite shocking, hence why it has spread so far and wide, describing British perfidy in a single word. But the number is nonsense. Patnaik calculates the “drain” by summing several items during the years 1765 to 1938, then bizarrely applies 5% annual compound interest until 2016. She does not explain her choice of 5% interest, nor why it should persist at this level for such a long period of time. On its face, the logic of the argument is ridiculous:

The choice of interest rate outstrips the modern economic growth rate which “greatly exaggerate[s] the magnitude of the drain” as the historian Clive Dewey puts it. In addition, the assumption that an investment would provide such returns is unlikely and unprovable. If such returns could be guaranteed, then Britain’s drain fails in comparison to the drain caused by some lowly thief in the early Mauryan empire who stole a loaf of bread: assuming he stole the equivalent of two pounds, he has robbed some poor sod’s family of a figure so obscenely large, it outstrips the combined GDP of every country on Earth! Such is sufficient to demonstrate the folly of compound interest applied over large periods: indeed, both Patnaik’s figure and the figure of our ancient Mauryan thief will continue to grow exponentially, racing beyond the combined wealth of every country on earth and on towards infinity. And all of this is by design: she wants us to believe that this is the true wealth of a counterfactual, uncolonised India.³ [Emphasis mine]

Patnaik’s sloppy work provides an easy opportunity for a right-wing scholar (such as Hira Jungkow, quoted above) to attack Marxism and undermine its credibility. Marxism is always under attack, so it is best to minimize the times when right-wingers are actually correct, thus giving them an opportunity to spread their thought. For instance, in the piece cited, Jungkow claims that it was right for India to pay for “the cost of the 1857 mutiny and the losses incurred by wars waged by the East India Company in order to consolidate power over India” because “it is only natural that India would pay for its own civil ‘war’, as America did for its.” During the American Civil War, neither side was a profit-seeking corporation backed by a foreign government. Had this been the case, Washington would have been justified in demanding partial payment from the foreign government in question. Patnaik’s error has been turned into a soapbox for right-wing drivel. “Western Marxism” is not responsible for this–unrigorous, poorly grounded thought is.

This seemingly scholastic debate over colonialism has troubling real world consequences because it buttresses far-right Hindu politics. It is not a coincidence that Patnaik’s number and general line of thought has gained currency among Hindu fascists. The sorry state of India–in no small part of their own making–is neatly blamed on parasitic foreigners, whether British or Muslim. The misrule of various Indian governments, particularly the BJP’s administration, is laundered through a just-so story of foreign evil. In the Hindu fascist imagination, the era of “foreign evil” goes back to the Mughal Empire, the last vestiges of which are supposedly Indian Muslims who have been turned into hated outsiders in their own country. An argument for anti-colonialism is transubstantiated into one for post-colonial fascism. This was made possible because of the original argument’s sloppiness.

One may object that Patnaik cannot be blamed for how Hindu fascists misuse her polemic against the British Empire. On the one hand, this is true–I doubt this was ever her intention. On the other hand, she has an obligation to report and analyze the truth, no matter how embarrassing it may be to nationalist mythology. In the case of India (and South Asia in general), one should be quite suspicious of nationalism due its extremely malevolent influence in the region (best embodied by Partition).⁴ To be clear, I do not reject the “drain” thesis–in fact, I endorse it, but it must be held to high standards. Contrast Patnaik’s work with that of Mike Davis, whose analysis is very rigorous and focused, exposing British perfidy without unwittingly giving credence to Hindu fascist ideology.⁵ Patnaik’s error is especially concerning because she should be aware of how the far-right works in India. After all, she is a scion of the Indian left.

“Western Marxism” is (rightly) condemned for supplying arguments in favor of right-wing and even fascist politics, yet here we see a “non-Western Marxist” guilty of exactly that. At the root for both is deference for irrationalist ideology (usually nationalism), unrigorous and half-baked analysis, and distance from real-world political struggles and consequences. Mike Davis is an especially useful foil against Utsa Patnaik because he hails from Trotskyist political tradition, which is often lumped into “Western Marxism,” but his work is decidedly aligned to Third Worldism. The difference is that Davis was always highly rigorous and closely linked to political struggle–its successes and failures–and grounded his work in best serving such struggle. The questions behind his work are simple: What is happening or has happened? How and why? How does this information help us understand the world? What lessons can we glean for our politics today? What do we practically do with these lessons? These are the questions that should motivate every Marxist.

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With all that said, most of this so-called Marxist drivel is still concentrated in the West. The usual answer as to why is that Western conditions (labor aristocracy, over-development, etc.) incentivize and cultivate rightist politics. This is correct but trivial–the privileged will obviously peddle ideas that justify and reproduce their way of life. This points to a better question: Why have genuinely insightful Marxist writings been produced in the West at all? Our frame of mind has changed. We now assume that the default state of Marxism in the West is mediocrity. The anomaly to be explained is when things go well, not when they go wrong.

My theory is quite simple: Marxist (or broadly left-wing) knowledge production is at its most rigorous and insightful when the Marxist political movement is at its strongest. This creates an ecosystem where knowledge and real world politics constantly inform one another.⁶ I have stated elsewhere that I prefer older works of history because they are usually better than recent scholarship. 1985 is my half-serious cutoff point after which historical scholarship takes a steep decline in quality.⁷ I originally picked this year on a whim. Books published afterwards just seemed worse as a whole than those published before. I later realized that this was the same year that Gorbachev took power in the USSR, commencing its final decline. I don’t think this is a coincidence, but this is admittedly based on vibes.

In any case, the existence of the USSR as a viable alternative to the West and the global communist (or left-wing) movement that it backed, created a new political baseline with which the Western knowledge production apparatus had to engage. Western thinkers and scholars (whether left or right) had to take the communist project seriously and could not simply dismiss it as bogus. It had to be explained. Meanwhile, communist sympathizers and adherents in the West had tangible models and struggles which they could study, engage with, and learn from. In a similar way that the USSR’s existence forced the West to create the welfare state,⁸ it also forced the West to intellectually compete. Historians could reasonably expect institutional support for lengthy research–the great Charles Maier recently lamented that his best works would not be possible in today’s universities.⁹ Although anti-communism was rife, to be a communist was still politically legitimate and valid in the West.¹⁰ Academia, publishing houses, newspapers, etc. all could and did platform communists.

For a practical example, consider that Le Monde (the French version of the New York Times) printed a debate about Third Worldism between Charles Bettelheim and Arghiri Emmanuel as its front page. Bettelheim and Emmanuel were not stuffy armchair theorists. Bettelheim had been to China during the Cultural Revolution, while Emmanuel had been an anti-colonial militant in Congo. Both had enthusiastically taken part in the Cuban economic planning debates. In brief, these were serious communists, and they were given perhaps the largest national platform of their time. This is unthinkable today. Note the direct relationship between theory and practice here. Bettelheim and Emmanuel were both active members of the international communist movement, and they produced incredibly insightful works of Marxist theory.¹¹ The strength of their movement meant that even the bourgeois press would print their debates.

Furthermore, due to Soviet competition, the West felt it necessary to invest in mass education and access to knowledge. The postwar was the era of the mass market paperback, the very name of which reflects both popular interest in diverse book and business sector support for such spheres. Before Penguin Books became the dreadful monopoly it is today, it was a solidly left-wing publishing house, called Pelican, which regularly printed Marxist works of theory and history. For instance, EH Carr’s magnificent (and highly sympathetic) History of Soviet Russia was printed in mass market paperbacks by Pelican. It also printed the Penguin African Library, a series of books by left-wing Africanist writers, analyzing the then-ongoing anti-colonial revolution sweeping Africa. Many titles in this series were written by actual Marxist revolutionaries (such as Ruth First or HJ & RE Simons). There are countless other examples (whether from Pelican or otherwise),¹² but the point is clear: There was serious Marxist (and overall left-wing) knowledge production in the West for a long time, and it was inextricably linked to the state of the Marxist movement, both domestically and globally. Marxism in the West could retain its analytical power despite the conditions of its environment.

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The situation today is not so rosy. The death of the international communist movement has removed any countervailing tendencies to rightist thought in Marxism. As befitting their privileged position, Marxists in the West now overwhelmingly produce either useless tomes or malicious propaganda. The situation elsewhere in the world is not much better due to the same underlying reason. But Marxism is slowly regaining its bearings and focusing on what really matters in this world. This is largely due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has created a global crisis. The drama now unfolding in the Gaza death camp must be understood before it can be stopped and the perpetrators held to account. In this respect, there have been meaningful advances since the crisis began–though still wholly inadequate to bring relief to Gaza. A number of movement intellectuals and theorists have emerged, all of whose work has met the severity of the moment.¹³ Indeed, Gaza must be the anchor for all of our analysis and investigation.

Since October 7, when learning or studying a new subject, the key questions for me have been: Can this explain the Gaza Genocide? If so, how? What practical lessons can we take from this subject to stop the genocide and defeat Zionism? These questions are highly focused in their aims but still open-ended enough in their answers that many subjects and concepts can be put to use. When confronting fascism and genocide, nothing can go to waste and no part is too small. Everything and everyone has a role to play. Insights can be gained from the unlikeliest of places.¹⁴ For example, Jake Romm uses the postwar Frankfurt School–which I (among others) had dismissed as anti-communist drivel–to deconstruct Zionist ideology, thus illuminating the ideological background of the genocide. This is not to say that the Frankfurt School was secretly anti-Zionist or was not anti-communist, but that with the right lens, important lessons can be taken from it to fight Zionism on our terms.

This is especially the case with Radical Abolitionism during the antebellum US, which readily lends itself to anti-Zionism today.¹⁵ Black slavery was the paramount crisis in the antebellum period. It defined everything about the US. Planters’ control over the government and society as a whole was contemptuously called the Slave Power–already we find parallels to Zionism. Abuse and repression spurred resistance and rebellion, led by the American Anti-Slavery Society. This was the fusion of radical (mainly white) intellectuals and mass base of free Black people, many of whom were ex-slaves. Their movement was Radical Abolitionism, which called for immediate and uncompensated abolition of slavery, full integration of Black people into American society on equal terms, and land redistribution. The anti-Zionist movement’s demand is a free Palestine from river to sea, led by Palestinians, with full right of return and reparations for Palestinian refugees. The Radical Abolitionists were decidedly non-reformist. As Noel Ignatiev put it:

While abolitionists cited the denial of literacy to the slaves and the breaking up of families as examples of why slavery should be abolished, they did not seek to correct these “abuses” through legislation. They would have thought it absurd to appeal to slaves to join their societies or to attempt to “organize” them to better their conditions. In these respects their behavior differed from that of present-day radicals.¹⁶

The demand was not to improve the conditions of slavery but to destroy it–just as we do not demand a “nicer” Israel but its end. One frequent Radical Abolitionist tactic was to launch petitions against slavery, especially in Washington, DC:

The petition campaign had no direct effect on slavery in the District.(6) Yet it led the South to push through a “Gag Rule” forbidding Congress from receiving petitions related to slavery. While few northerners were sufficiently moved by slavery to take action against it, many came to see that their rights, not merely those of the slave, were being violated by the Slave Power.

Similarly with the Fugitive Slave Law. Northern personal liberty laws and the reluctance of northern juries to return runaways stuck in Southerners’ throats and led them to insist on, and finally pass, a fugitive slave law that transferred authority from the states to the federal government and made every northern elected official an agent of the Slave Power. Many northerners who had mixed feelings about the presence of large numbers of black people among them were turned into opponents of the Slave Power when they realized that their rights, not merely those of the slave, were in jeopardy.

Most Americans are still unmoved to act against the genocide, but public opinion of Israel and Zionism have undergone a sea-change in large part due to Zionist overreach. The student encampment movement of spring 2024 is illustrative. It failed on all of its stated aims, but it was ultimately a strategic success because it exposed and accelerated Zionist hostility to basic civil liberties. The students broke no laws and obstructed no university processes. Their protest was as peaceful as it could be, yet Zionist Fascisti were still summoned to crack their skulls across the nation to the horror of millions. This movement contributed to the election of Zohran Mamdani, who (no matter our criticisms) is perceived by the Zionist establishment as Satan incarnate. The usual Zionist hysterics completely failed because voters correctly perceived that Zionism came at the cost of decent lives for themselves. Ordinary people in the US are slowly realizing that Zionism is their problem too, not merely that of Palestinians. It is no coincidence that this began with October 7, which Norman Finkelstein correctly likens to a slave rebellion. Again from Ignatiev:

The fugitive slave was a catalyst for revolution. The northern black population, made up to a considerable degree of fugitive slaves, in addition to providing the base of the abolitionist movement, set its agenda and pointed its direction. C.L.R. James said it best: “The revolting slave, the persecuted free Negro, and the New England intellectual had got together and forced the nation to face the slavery question.” [Emphasis mine]

To revise: The revolting Gazan, the persecuted diaspora Palestinian, and the anti-Zionist activist had got together and forced the nation to face the Zionism question. A great ally to the anti-Zionist movement has paradoxically been Zionist fanaticism. To draw another parallel to October 7:

John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry was the logical application of the dual-power strategy. Its greatest impact was not military but intellectual and emotional. As Wendell Phillips said, Brown “startled the south into madness.” The slaveholders reacted with fury to the raid: they imposed a boycott on northern manufactures, demanded new concessions from the government, and began preparing for war. By the arrogance of their demands, they compelled the people of the north to resist.

Slavery bred rebellion, which provoked repression, which led black people to leave the South, which gave rise to a black community in the north, which was the basis of Abolitionism, which engendered John Brown, who provoked Southern retaliation, which compelled northern resistance, which led to Civil War. [Emphasis his]

The Planters’ inability to moderate or make concessions polarized the North against their rule, even if most Northerners were still ambivalent about slavery as such. Sound familiar? As the struggle radicalized, more and more Northerners eventually came under the leadership of the Radical Abolitionists, albeit indirectly.

In sum, the revolutionary crisis of the Civil War did not come about through extremists’ protracted participation in the reform struggle but through a process of reciprocal provocation in which the actions of one side called forth a reaction from the other, a process in which the actions of the revolutionary minority formed a part. It might be worth asking, what issues and tactics offer a similar potential today.

Whether or not anti-Zionists know it, this has been the path we have been following. I have personally called it strategic accelerationism but the idea is similar. Let us escalate this process of reciprocal provocation (or strategic accelerationism) both in the movement and in knowledge production.

However we define (or don’t) “Western Marxism,” I hope this brief discussion offers clues as to how we may avoid its follies.

1. The inspiration for this piece is a Twitter thread discussing a recent panel on “Western Marxism” led by Gabriel Rockhill. The panel discussed Domenico Losurdo’s book of the same name.

2. This is sadly only available in German. It would fit perfectly in Haymarket Books’ Historical Materialism series, but the editors are too busy with the latest Gramscian slop.

3. Hira Jungkow, “British India and the $45-Trillion Lie,” Quadrant, 5 October, 2021. See also: Tirthankar Roy, “Did the British loot India?,” History Reclaimed, 2 November, 2022.

Jungkow and Roy are both right-wingers who are openly hostile to Marxism. My citation to them is not an endorsement of their broader body of work, or even every part of their argument against Patnaik.

4. The South Asian left has been embarrassing in this respect. It’s noteworthy that the best scholar of Hindu fascism is not Indian, Pakistani, or Bengali, but French: Christophe Jaffrelot. It should be cause for serious reflection that a liberal European has done a better job than the entire South Asian left, and he has done so for over three decades.

5. For a masterful account of British perfidy in and drain from India, see: Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso 2017).

6. This is not really “my” theory, but a restating of the classic Marxist view on the relationship between theory and practice.

7. My original cutoff point was 1980, but there were too many good books published after that year, so I had to revise. My bullshitting must be factually grounded.

8. Cf. Magnus B. Rasmussen and Carl H. Knutsen, Reforming to Survive: The Bolshevik Origins of Social Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). For the appendices, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333668227_Reforming_to_SurviveThe_Bolshevik_Origins_of_Social_Policies

9. Even in a far-right society such as Apartheid South Africa, the Marxist historian Charles van Onselen received funding from mining companies for his over a decade-long project to document the life of the illiterate sharecropper Kas Maine.

10. In its July 1974 issue, the prestigious economics journal Econometrica published “Marx in the Light of Modern Economic Theory” by the great Marxist economist Michio Morishima as its front page article.

11. In Bettelheim’s case, I am referring to his work on economic planning, which is still excellent. His “analysis” of unequal exchange and imperialism is junk.

12. Many of these examples are listed here: https://robashlar.substack.com/p/third-worldist-library

13. I have in mind Dylan Saba, Jake Romm, Mary Turfah, among others. I am confident in this set of Marxist and left-wing writers.

14. This is not dissimilar to the principle of Popular Front.

15. The argument that follows is unfinished. I am merely sketching out the historical and political parallels between Radical Abolitionism and anti-Zionism. A full investigation will have to wait for another time.

16. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this section are from: Noel Ignatiev, “Creative Provocation: Strategy for Revolution,” Hard Crackers, 6 December, 2018.