As you readers of this blog have doubtless noticed, my posting frequency has fallen off in recent years. I’ve been much busier with my job, working as a high school history teacher in Manhattan. Of course I’m still writing, but for the most part for other websites and publications. Someday I’ll put together a list of my publications with links and whatnot.
For now, though, I’d like to draw attention to a piece that just came out over at New International magazine. The publication is run by Henry Wallis, whose influences range from Amadeo Bordiga to Jean Jaurès. He’s been a guest on the Antifada several times, and is very ecumenical in terms of what he’s looking to publish. You can read the editorial statement over at their website.
My piece is many years in the making, and concerns the work of the Italian Stalino-Dengist Domenico Losurdo, whose influence on the Anglophone left has only increased in the years since I interviewed him on his Liberalism book back in 2012. Translations of his work on Bonapartism, war and revolution, class struggle, as well as political figures like Stalin and philosophers like Nietzsche have appeared.
The latest of his works to be rendered into English is a polemic against “Western Marxism,” and this book serves as my point of departure. Part one deals with the career of the category, the politics of left publishing houses, and Losurdo’s comparative methodology. The second part will examine the various Marxists he disparaged, and see whether his accusations hold water. Finally, the third part will demonstrate the ways Losurdo revised the theory of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
As subsequent installments come out, I’ll add links. Read my Anti-Losurdo here:
https://qubit.hu/2025/10/24/az-elitistanak-tartott-avantgard-joval-kozelebb-allt-a-munkasokhoz-mint-gondolnank-es-sokszor-utkozott-a-hatalommal
This might interest you Ross
Have you seen this defence of Losurdo: https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/04/the-poverty-of-anti-stalinism-or-how-not-to-criticize/ I’ve only skimmed through it, but it seems pretty desperate, and characteristic of what I call ‘lowest common denominator’ leftism, which today is usually anti-western ‘decolonial’ purification.
Not everything on the site is this bad, but its overarching Russo-Soviet fetishism sets the general tone.
Editor Donald Parkinson was part of those Tampa people who were in dialogue with ICC for awhile.
I’ve been a not uncritical sympathiser of the latter for over twenty years.
One of the last things, possibly the very last, posted on their blog, was a “critique of ICC Ideology”, by Parkinson, which mostly criticised it for not following bien pensant leftist preoccupations, and dismissed the theory of decadence, without any actual references, and comparing it to the likes of Spengler.
It seems to have disappeared offline, only in the last few years, without being archived anywhere.
I doubt ICC saw it, as it didn’t respond.
That “defence” might have too much in common with this third-worldist barrel scrapings: https://fuckyeahmarxismleninism.tumblr.com/post/20905939108/the-problem-with-your-critique-of-stalin
I’ve already sent this as a message via academia.edu
Yeah, I saw it. Honestly I am content to just let it stand without a response. I feel like my original Anti-Losurdo trilogy more or less speaks for itself, vis-à-vis the critique posted on Cosmonaut, and will allow readers to judge for themselves which is more correct.
Don’t exactly recall Donald’s critique of the International Communist Current.