This "Eastern Marxism" sure looks a lot like neo-colonialism

Please please please stop defending China

Marxists exhibit a penchant for schism which is perhaps only superseded by Protestant Christians.

However, I’m encouraged to see a growing critical discourse which aims to unmask the contemporary Left’s obsession with symbolic identity as a pernicious deviation from the original Marxist goals of rebuilding society on the principles of solidarity and mutual aid.

In their preface to the forthcoming English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s book Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, Jennifer Ponce de Leon and Gabriel Rockhill position the Italian Marxist’s work within a stream of critique which accuses Western Marxism of having become obsessed with the image of the rebel in revolt, rather than remaining focused on political organizing which seeks to seize power and change society more in line with Marxist ideals.

In the wake of the failure of Communist movements to gain any political power in Europe and North America, many academics and theorists in the West have turned towards discourses of decolonialism, critical theory, subaltern studies, and intersectionality to perform as radicals while nonetheless maintaining their privileged roles amongst the bourgeoise. Now that they are entrenched in powerful cultural institutions such as universities, nonprofits, government agencies, art galleries, and museums, these Western Marxists have decided to become beautiful losers rather than actually changing anything for the better.

[I think in this respect of figures like Geo Maher (whose recent text Decolonizing Dialectics has for its cover a drawing of a black slave beating his white master) who, having been let go from his academic position at Drexel University for making approving comments about white genocide on Twitter, now holds a visiting position at New York University, one of the most expensive schools in the country (including its newest matriculant, Barron Trump).]

Although Ponce de Leon and Rockhill include Slavoj Žižek in this group of merely performative Marxists, Žižek has been attempting to draw attention to this problem for a long time, indeed well before “wokeness” was as hegemonic in the academy as it has become. I agree with him that the endless struggle for recognition in a landscape of constantly proliferating identities serves as a tool of capitalism to produce new market demographics, foment division, and distract from the project of freeing people from the wage-labor relationship.

However, despite my belief that such a critique is needed within contemporary circles on the Left, reading Ponce de Leon and Rockhill’s preface left me with the clear sense that their proposed alternative is not what we’re looking for. While they castigate Western Marxism for its resignation, they point instead to those nations which actually organized Communist states — Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and others.

This book’s critique of Western Marxism relies on a contrasting notion of “Eastern Marxism,” and this is where the analysis really started to sour for me. The authors attempt to present these Eastern Marxist nations as a more vital, pragmatic, and effective strain within the Marxist tradition, and they valorize those non-Western leaders and nations where Communist experiments were actually attempted, and where these socialist projects remain ongoing today.

Ongoing and unfinished, indeed!

Are we to believe that places like Cuba and China stand as shining examples of the type of human prosperity which is possible with Marxist thought? I’m sorry, but Marxists look like clowns when they peddle nations like the Soviet Union or Vietnam as indicating the genuine possibilities inherent within the Marxist project. You really have to become skilled in ignoring whole domains of facts to lionize these nations in the way that the authors do in their preface.

For instance, Ponce de Leon and Rockhill take as a core part of their argument that the “Western bourgeoisie and its ideological gatekeepers” have unfairly smeared The People’s Republic of China as capitalist and imperialist. Against this characterization, they boost China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a new model of international development, and praise the lifestyle improvements which the Chinese people now enjoy under the CCP’s rule.

However, they pass over without mention the catastrophic failures of the Communist regime in China, such as the estimated 45 million people who died during the Great Leap Forward, saying simply that China’s extraordinary achievement “has required monumental sacrifices on the part of the Chinese people, which is one of the contradictions inherent in socialist development (in part because it does not rely on colonialism like capitalist development).” (pg. 30)

Yes, I’m sure the innumerable people who have died in the “contradictions” of socialist development consented to this noble sacrifice for mankind.

But is it even true that China’s development has not been imperialist, like Ponce de Leon and Rockhill claim? I personally can’t imagine a more imperialistic project than the Belt and Road Initiative, and I recommend reading more about its sordid history. I especially appreciate Robert Thornett’s piece in "“American Affairs” a couple years ago — Belt and Road Hazards, Coming to the Americas.

The BRI has been underway since 2013, which has provided ample time for a pattern to emerge — China bribes local officials, makes loans which countries cannot repay, import Chinese workers to build infrastructure, use that infrastructure to support Chinese corporate activities and to spy on foreign nations, and then use economic leverage to pressure recipient nations to acquiesce to China’s whims, such as severing diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

If this isn’t imperialism, what it is? (It’s certainly not Marxism!)

Thornett walks his readers through a litany of Chinese misdeeds, such as when China was caught using equipment in the building they constructed for the African Union to spy on conversations in backrooms and corridors, or the $143 million dollar bribe Chinese official gave to the former president of Panama during his term to allow them to build a rail line sending Panamanian goods to the Chinese run ports of Balboa and Cristóbal. How about that time that Sri Lanka couldn’t pay on their loan so China graciously allowed them to lease their own port back to them for 99 years?

Balaji Srinivasan has a piece that has stuck with me from November 2023 about Gavin Newsom and China (remember when all the homeless people in SF magically disappeared while Xi Jinping visited?) where he points out an interesting divide between Republicans and Democrats, namely, that Republicans are perceived as soft on Russia whereas Democrats have become increasingly soft on China.

What is this weird emergent affinity between the American Left and China? We get a glimpse of one possible mutation of it here in the pages of Ponce de Leon and Rockhill’s preface — China is an unfinished Marxist project that represents an alternative to the neoliberal capitalist order in the West, and Western defeatists are trying to paint China as a new imperialist power.

Xi? “Let him cook.”

Nevermind the ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, the millions of Chinese people slaving away in factories for pitiful wages (better than subsistence farming???), the massive concentration of wealth in the upper classes who live a handful of cities, the emerging high tech police-state for surveillance and curtailment of freedom — it’s all still in process!

Does it ever occur to Ponce de Leon or Rockhill that the hesitance displayed by Western Marxists for taking the reins of political power into their hands might have something to do with the bloody track record of Marxists wherever they have managed to take power? And that’s not just the capitalist classes whining — it’s the ordinary people who have to live with food shortages, inefficient processes, surveillance, and wage labor which seems endemic to these Eastern Marxist nations which present an alternative path forward to human flourishing.

I do agree that nations like Russia and China exhibit today an alternative political option to the neoliberal and capitalist order of the West, but their ambitions are imperial, not Marxist — the Chinese strategy has been announced publicly by officials time and again, and it focuses on creating an economic sphere of influence which China controls through finance, technology, and resources, in just the same way that the US has exerted control within its sphere of influence since WWII.

This is the move towards a multi-polar world which has been unfolding.

Ironically, the hysterical cries that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the mad empire building of a dictator looking to take over the world reveals the inner intention of the American Empire — we believe it our right, even our duty, to rule the world. Anyone else who exercises violence must have the same ambition, right? However, it’s precisely Russia and China who have said that they neither wish to be ruled by the US nor do they wish to rule the world. They want a sphere of influence where they can exercise political and economic pressure to generate wealth for their people.

Ultimately, even where Marxism took power in the East, it’s not clear that it was really Marxism that took power. Marxists are probably better off maintaining that “Communism has never actually been tried!” than they are hectoring Western Marxists with hagiographic accounts of the supposedly unfinished socialist projects of the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.

Marxism in the West finds itself a paradoxical victim — it never achieved much political success, but somehow its ideas found a home amongst the elite intellectuals and institutions in Western society, thus severing it from the economic concerns which animated it in the first place.

However, Marxism in the East finds itself with more blood on its hands than any other political movement in human history, while nonetheless not obviously being Communist in any meaningful sense. At best, actually existing Communisms in the East ought to be viewed as horrific learning opportunities concerning what might go wrong with a Marxist revolution, and they certainly should not be looked to today as models to be emulated in any significant way.

Caught between impotent theory and bad practice, what is a Marxist to do?

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Note that I was able to read the preface and intro to Losurdo’s text because

Daniel Tutt

is organizing a reading group for the text, and he generously shared with his subscribers a pdf of the front matter. Other time commitments will prevent me from joining the group, but I suspect that the discussion will be excellent, and I’d encourage you to check it out if you are interested in the history of Marxism or contemporary conflicts within Marxist theory.