Domenica Losurdo’s Ideas On Stalin

Foreword

Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

Born in the olive-grove endowed town of Sannicandro di Bari in 1941, the political philosopher and prolific scholar Domenico Losurdo departed our world in 2018 when a tumor took his life. With more than fifty books published since the early 1980s, he had been in the midst of completing what may have been a triptych on the history and future of communism.

The first volume, published in Italian in 2017 and not yet available in English, was a critical reassessment and rethinking of the history of Western Marxism, its failures, fragmentation, derailments, and possible futures (Il Marxismo Occidentale: Come Nacque, Come Morì, Come Può Rinascere) [Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How it Died, How It Can Be Reborn].1 In that volume, he exposed the politically self-neutralizing Eurocentrism underlying Western Marxist dismissals of or animosity towards Marxist successes in the East. What would have been the sequel was published posthumously in 2021 (La Questione Comunista: Storia e Futuro di un’Idea) [The Question of Communism: History and Future of an Idea].2

In that work, Western Marxism still featured as part of the analysis but as just one among diverse currents. He traced communism’s evolution in comparison with different variants of socialism, including the more recent ecologically-mindful versions. But his lens was much wider, studying communist movements as part of a totality of communist politics transformed by and bringing about shifts in global social tendencies. As Giorgio Grimaldi mentions in his Preface to La Questione Comunista, Losurdo had already started publishing to some extent on the third theme on the prospects for communism as a movement and future society. It was centered on the People’s Republic of China. Losurdo’s work in that direction can be argued to be present already in his 2005 volume comparing the Russian and Chinese Revolutions (Fuga dalla Storia? La Rivoluzione Russa e la Rivoluzione Cinese Oggi) [Escape from History? The Russian and Chinese Revolutions Today]. But his trajectory relative to the above-mentioned, implicit triptych was evident in an article that appeared in International Critical Thought in 2017. There, Losurdo acknowledged the great strides made in the People’s Republic of China and saw the Deng reforms as being in continuity with the aims of the preceding Mao government and with the historical progress made by communist movements in general (“Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”).3 The tumor that shortened his life deprived us of much needed intellectual and political incisiveness and clarity in this moment of potentially grave danger to the People’s Republic of China from the intensifying belligerence of imperial countries headed by the United States. At the same time, there is great confusion and parochial thinking among Western leftists over the situation in the People’s Republic of China and the world more generally.

Losurdo would have doubtless contributed valuable insights to help us wade through the present challenges. A staunch and unflinching Marxist, he never tired of exposing the fatal flaws in all currents of liberal thought, the ideological bulwark of capitalism (see his Liberalism: A Counter-History). Likewise, he has been among the few within liberal democracies to demolish the prevailing disinformation on socialist states, including within the Western left. These two of the varied aspects of his lifetime’s work have made him a controversial figure in leftist circles, including communist ones, in core capitalist countries. This has been particularly so regarding Losurdo’s perceived or alleged support for Stalin, a historical figure frequently used by most Western leftists as a litmus test for faithfulness to democratic principles or as a way to silence critical support or even any serious discussion about socialist states. These matters comprise to a large degree what motivates this translation, since Losurdo’s assessment of Stalin is yet to be widely available in English.

We are also animated by a concern that Losurdo’s great achievements will be reduced in the Anglophone worlds to a matter of where one stands relative to the Stalin question. Losurdo’s work and political activism spans such a large range of themes (e.g., Western Marxism, Gramsci, Lukács, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, imperialism, liberalism, revolution, class struggle, peace, racism) and provides such an inordinate magnitude of insights for a single intellectual that any dismissiveness towards his work would be unconscionable.

Still, the prevalent rejection of or dismissiveness about Stalin as a historical figure merits closer and critical inspection, which is what Losurdo’s Stalin provides. We encourage readers to make up their own mind on Losurdo’s take on Stalin, rather than uncritically accept received notions. In fact, it is precisely the now widespread caricatures of Stalin as personified evil—rife in liberal democracies and uncritically accepted by most Western leftists—that Losurdo shows to be more related to contingent ruling class preoccupations than actual evidence. Even pointing out such problems with conventional representations of Stalin brought a shower of accusations of ‘Stalinism’ or ‘neo-Stalinism’ upon Losurdo, who made it clear that Stalin is not a rehabilitation but a contribution to contextualizing and ending the demonization of Stalin, who was even praised by Gandhi in 1946. We would also add, to build on Losurdo’s historical analysis of representations of Stalin, that W.E.B. Du Bois was among the many calling Stalin a great man in an obituary in The National Guardian.4 Losurdo’s work on the historical representations of Stalin, as well as other works like it, is perhaps more vital today than it ever has been. With the passage of time, we become further removed from the contemporary voices challenging the construction of what has become the hegemonic view of Stalin. These counter-hegemonic narratives have effectively been swept under the rug by the ruling ideological overlords and the media apparatuses they maintain and sustain, smothering any and all alternative and more constructive narratives. The hegemonic view has been embraced by the anti-communist liberal/conservative axis, and their constructed mythological “Stalin” is weaponized consistently to bolster the anti-communism and fascism we see globally.

Excessive detention and punishment is always compared to ‘Stalin’s Gulags,’ despite the contemporary United States having the largest prison population in world history, its practices of extraordinary rendition, and operating torture facilities worldwide for “threats to the State” in lieu of holding a trial. Enforced hunger as a tactic of terror is always compared to the ‘Holodomor’ despite scholars as fervent in their anti-communism as Kotkin conceding that the famine in question was not intentional or engineered, or that actual engineered and “genocidal famines had been carried out numerous times by the likes of the British government, who, lest we forget, willfully condemned 3 million Bengalis to starvation in 1943-1944.” The suppression of political opposition is always compared to ‘Stalin’s Totalitarianism,’ whereas a more relevant contemporary example might be the current Ukrainian government outlawing not only the Communist Party of Ukraine, but dozens of other parties that are left-wing, left-adjacent, or simply not in favor of the post-2014 political regime in place. The list of projections for the historical horrors of liberal democratic regimes goes on.

Not only is the temporality of Losurdo’s work critical, but his committed historical materialist approach to history is no less crucial. Without maintaining this principled analytical framework, there is a tendency to judge past actions on either utopian grounds or through the lens of present conditions. This is no less true in the case of the Stalin administration, who faced pressures and challenges few today can appreciate without a deep understanding of the material conditions under which they were forced to operate. The outcomes and deeds are incomprehensible without appraising the conditions that led to them. Losurdo does us the service of contextualizing these material conditions and orienting the Stalin administration’s actions and decisions in relation to them, as well as in relation to similar events outside of the world’s first socialist experiment. Far from a hagiography, Losurdo’s Stalin provides a tool for breaking free of that hegemonic narrative we have all been inundated with, and for combatting lazy anti-communist tropes that utilize the name ‘Stalin’ as a byword for all things evil in the world. This reductive approach does not allow any grasp of what happened and why and does nothing to help build strategies to avoid or pre-empt future harmful outcomes. Critical engagement here is then of utmost necessity. Losurdo’s work opens a constructive way to re-evaluate those 29 years, under the Stalin government, which shaped not only the USSR’s contradictory forms of development (for better and worse), but also the subsequent socialist revolutions that succeeded elsewhere in the world. A lot is at stake. The currently hegemonic narrative impedes the capacity to learn from what went wrong, to recognize what went well, and therefore hampers our collective ability to prepare better for the chaos and horrors that capitalist states will stoke or directly inflict on future revolutions.

One may remain critical of, if not inimical to Stalin or what he stood for, but that need not translate into yielding even more to ruling class ideology and denying the struggles for a better society and the consequent impressive and lasting achievements of millions of people under Stalin’s formal leadership in the USSR. Among such achievements were the steady improvements in living standards for all, in such forms as effective sanitation infrastructure for the majority, secure jobs, guaranteed housing, the eventual defeat of the threat of famine, and, on the environmental side, the unprecedented and massive expansion of ecological protection areas, successful long-term afforestation and soil conservation, effective and increased biodiversity conservation, and much else. To erase all that would be as justifiable as erasing all the mistakes and terrible outcomes from the Stalin administration and the external mass-murderous attacks on the USSR by capitalist regimes, whether liberal democratic, fascist, or monarchist. Losurdo teaches us, among other things, that historical contextualization and coeval comparisons are crucial to testing one’s political philosophy and principles, to deepening our knowledge of socialist history, and at the same time a key to dismantling bourgeois ideologies. Lamentably, many of his works remain untranslated and this effort will hopefully stimulate the translation of further works of that committed, deep, and forward-thinking scholar.

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