I don't have much patience for Losurdo's Stalinist deliriums. In any case, it's awesome that just one of the dozens of famous marxist intellectuals of the 21st century is an apologist of the old USSR and its authoritarian state capitalism...! His critique/rant of Nietzsche just stinks. And Nietzsche is probably my favorite philosopher.
"Losurdo, a self-styled realist, felt that classical Marxism’s assumption that revolution had to happen in the leading capitalist countries was unfounded and needed to be revised. Overcoming capitalism would be a much more drawn out process than Marx, Engels, or Lenin had imagined, and would require state-building.
This brings in one of Losurdo’s favorite hobbyhorses: his thesis that the Marxist doctrine of the withering away of the state has had disastrous consequences for efforts to realize communism. He made this argument again and again throughout his œuvre, at times even arguing that the doctrine betrayed a harmful anarchist origin.80 Whereas Marx, Engels, and Lenin had predicted the eventual disappearance of state power, Losurdo believed that this millenarian forecast stood in need of revision (...) ” In contrast to this more positive attitude toward the state, Western Marxists seized on the most utopian elements of Marxism, “accentuat[ing] the messianic tendency in Marx and Engels.” Eastern Marxists were compelled to take the reins of power, and thus were not afraid to get their hands dirty. Lenin purportedly moved away from the fantasy of the withering away of the state in practice, according to Losurdo, even if he never officially renounced it in theory.
(...)
Needless to say, Losurdo diverged sharply from what Marx, Engels, and Lenin had to say on each score (...) His readings are so tendentious as to strain credulity, and must thus be compared with the source material to gauge the accuracy of his accusations."
https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
#Marxism #Stalinism #Philosophy #Capitalism #State #StateCapitalism #WesternMarxism
