At the root of academic leftism is a history where “Western” Marxism has seen no reason to stay rooted in dialectics, as it’s detached from the anti-colonial struggle. This is part of how Dominoco Losurdo explains the anti-Sovietist, dogmatically anti-statist, and otherwise idealist tendencies which have come to dominate the left throughout the imperialist countries.
A disconnect from the struggles of the periphery
In Western Marxism, Losurdo describes how for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other participants in the revolutions of formerly colonized countries, anti-colonialism had to be inseparable from workers struggle; which meant that to survive, these revolutions could not let utopian desires get in the way of their fights against the imperialists. The thinkers of “Western” Marxism, though, have not been invested in this existential battle against genocidal enemies; so they’ve viewed any socialism which fails to immediately abolish the state, or get rid of all capitalist vestiges, as being an invalid socialism.
This was how the “Western” Marxists reacted to the formation of the USSR, which had immediately found itself under attack from the colonial powers and therefore couldn’t prioritize the withering away of the state. As Russia then needed to fight off Hitler, and the Leninist model spread to countries within the colonized sphere, the attacks upon existing socialism from the imperial left intelligentsia took on new forms. The thinking of the “Western” Marxists was incorporated into academic leftism, a process which had been directly facilitated via the CIA’s infiltrations of student organizing. It was this intelligence operation that played a critical part in killing the American workers movement, with the petty-bourgeois “new” left acting as a substitute for the actual workers struggle. And we’ll therefore only be able to rebuild the proletariat’s power when we’ve sufficiently unpacked academic leftism.
To understand how the academic left operates, and how it’s able to perpetuate its dominance, we must examine the “Western” Marxist tendency that formed the basis for left academia’s thinking. Something important to know about this brand of Marxism is that according to history, its propagators are willing to dismiss even forces of anti-fascist resistance, as these forces will inevitably have internal contradictions. Describes Losurdo on how Block, Horkheimer, Anderson, and other Western Marxists have blamed history’s workers states for not resolving these contradictions:
At the end of the First World War, Ernst Bloch called attention to the colonial aims of the Germany of Wilhelm II, which not by chance treated "the country of Tolstoy as if it were part of the Black Continent" and had recourse to brutality typical of colonial wars. Beyond annexing vast territories, Germany had "destroyed the liberty and let drown ten million Ukrainian Bolsheviks near the city of Taganrog." That did not prevent the German philosopher from accusing the Soviet government of postponing the building of socialism and achieving socioeconomic relations of freedom and equality to a time that would never arrive. There was no justification for the policy followed by Lenin, "the Red Czar," because "there still exists in the Russian countryside the old institution of the mir or the semi-communist village communities." "In accordance with that and the will of the majority of the Russian people, the agro-proletarian policy he wants can be achieved."
Max Horkheimer later expressed a similar attitude. While the German army was at the gates of Moscow, he denounced the Soviet government's lack of attention to the problem of the abolition of the state. Later, in a not dissimilar way, Perry Anderson celebrated the absolute superiority of Western Marxism over the Eastern version.
Since Russia’s workers movement pressured its government into starting the resistance war against fascist Ukraine, we’ve seen the left intelligentsia repeat these patterns. In the case of Ukraine, the problem of academic leftism and “Western” Marxism hasn’t just been that they’ve mischaracterized the war as an “inter-imperialist” conflict; this particular narrative is something that grew out from the original ideas of these tendencies, the ones which devalue the anti-imperialist struggle in favor of an abstract “pure” socialism. And because these ideas come from a lack of connection to the anti-colonial struggle, the modern left’s role in laundering NATO’s proxy war on Russia is absolutely tied in with the narratives which vilify Palestine’s resistance. Including the versions of these narratives that come from a particularly left angle, like the ahistorical ideas that Hamas has fought against the Palestinian left, that Hamas was created by “Israel,” and that Hamas is reactionary.
Within this tendency of left pro-imperialism, there is an element that purports to be on the side of Palestine’s resistance; the ones who take this stance are typically the “ultra-lefts” which have become directly involved in radical politics, and have learned that Gaza’s freedom fighters must be supported, yet still insist that Russia is imperialist. Within the worldview that imperial leftism comes from, these two positions are seen as fully consistent, because this view perceives imperialism as being something which can come from even semi-peripheral economies like Russia’s; and the world’s principled Marxist formations know that this notion is wrong, but it’s a belief that has an identifiable origin and class background, one which Marxists must examine.
It’s a product of personal and historical detachment from the experiences of peoples like Russia’s masses, who lost tens of millions to Hitler’s aggression and have now needed to fight off a modern Hitlerite regime. This is the problem that’s driving all the other efforts by the compatible left to obstruct anti-imperialist solidarity, whether with China, Venezuela, or even the clearest national liberation struggles.
The role of academic leftism in today’s growing chaos
It’s critical to unpack academic leftism’s origins and thinking, especially at this moment. The geopolitical aspect of our struggle has reached a series of pivotal junctures for the same reason that America’s domestic class conflict has recently entered into a new, more dire phase, namely when it comes to state crackdowns against “antifa” and “the left.” Our government has been compelled to orchestrate these crackdowns, and to boost ultra-left adventurism that facilitates this state violence, because of the threats that the U.S. empire is now facing. The resistance efforts of Russia, Palestine, Yemen, Venezuela, and others have been able to get this far due to their skills in taking advantage of capitalism’s collapse; and it’s these resistance actions that make capitalism’s unraveling translate to real hope, because on its own capital is capable of re-setting.
Victory for these revolutionary forces is the only way that the world can put a stop to the genocidal campaign the hegemon is waging as part of its current re-set, and Americans have an instrumental part to play in this. If we learn from the liberation struggles of the Global South, we will be able to carry out the step of defeating imperialism at its heart. And going through this process of learning-by-example is easy to do, but we’ll have to overcome academic leftism’s efforts at making the easy appear difficult.
Losurdo explains how “The October Revolution had come to power launching an appeal to the West to make the socialist revolution and one to the East to make the anticolonial revolution. The latter, therefore, was never lost sight of and, within a short time, assumed an unexpected centrality, one looked on with suspicion by Western Marxism.” Though the petty-bourgeois radicals share this suspicion, the working-class forces will not be inclined to, not if they receive the proper guidance. Reconciling class struggle with national liberation is very simple, we’re seeing this be done right now by forces like Palestine’s communists. Moreover, the American workers movement has successfully combined these two things throughout history; there have always been American fighters for workers rights who’ve at the same time fought against imperialist wars.
When the CIA sought out to kill this solidarity, a critical part of its maneuverings was to isolate antiwar or anti-colonial politics to student activism, and thereby instigate conflicts between the “woke” left and the broad working class. Academic leftism has been instrumental in this, and the adventurist ultra-left elements that we’re now seeing gain traction are forces which grow out from the false “Marxist” intelligentsia. These are problems that we’ll need to dissect in order to have an effective pro-Palestine movement, to be serious anti-imperialists, and to win workers victory.
When we address the left, we do need to be careful that we’re putting our attention on forces that are actually relevant; but all parts of this problem are worth studying for the sake of refining our own revolutionary knowledge. Focusing on these more niche kinds of enemies is productive, if we use our studies of these enemies to improve our practice. A pitfall of combating left opportunism is that one could get pulled into debates which serve no productive purpose, or become unproductive as the conditions change; a recent example of this is when the “decolonial” leftists have kept baiting Marxists into their circular arguments about America being equivalent to “Israel.” The only way we can counter the enemies of the working class, without wasting our time and becoming insular ourselves, is by staying oriented around the popular struggles.
We know that these struggles can be consistently engaged in and supported, whether they’re anti-imperialist or they’re more directly related to the working class. Let’s use this knowledge to lead the masses into triumph against our capitalist dictatorship.
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