I heard that Jones Manoel wrote the preface to the new Portuguese edition which was worrying and so I downloaded a PDF copy and skimmed it.
If you don’t know MWM is a patsoc ‘institute’, and though they try very hard to appear serious and legit they fail at that and endlessly trail behind other patsocs, namely a twitter celebrity and a twitch streamer. Must feel bad.
My thoughts are that… I don’t know who this book is for? The complete title is The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, but it doesn’t really talk about Western Marxism as a movement. The author expects you to be familiar with western marxism already, i.e. having the same definition he does, and he never really expands on it. I mean, the introduction opens with the words “Western Marxism” and the definition of which is relegated to a huge footnote that honestly doesn’t really say much.
He essentially expects the reader to be familiar with the subject matter already, leading me to ask again: who is this book for? It doesn’t seem to try and revolutionize western marxism, so it’s not addressed to them to get them to change their views. It doesn’t seem to try and do anything really new, so I’m not even sure it gives arguments to people that are opposed to western marxism. If I’m already opposed to western marxism then I don’t need more arguments to convince me of it. And finally it doesn’t even try to excise possible remnants of western marxism in the reader?
It reads more like bourgeois philosophy. Needlessly complicated, expecting you to be familiar with the subject matter before you read the book, and being an exercise in showing the reader just how much the author knows and has read.
But don’t fear, because every little bit is cited… with no more explanation. If you want to learn more about the “Hitlerite forces [who] would have been able to – as the West expected (and hoped) – trample over the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ menace, destroying the first worker state and the notion that working class people could, indeed, rule themselves”, you will have to get a copy of Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend because this is not explored at all in this book. I haven’t read Losurdo yet but I have to wonder if he was as roundabout in his writing as Carlos is.
The introduction, which I’m only talking about now, starts with a comparison to The Great Gatsby, which again I’m not sure is doing here. Is it to make the subject content more relatable, by comparing it to a book most people had to read in high school? It just feels haphazard and out of topic, especially as the author promptly goes into Zeno, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Engels, and even Darwin just to explain dialectics, because somehow western marxism’s false dialectics are rectified with overly unbearable dialectics. He’s not dethroning Politzer any time soon.
It offers no historical examples, no clear definitions and topical explorations, instead laying out a bunch of broadly-connected segues from one topic to the next, relying on a definition of ‘western marxism’ that will certainly speak to many people, but is never once established.
I’m including the whole page so you can judge for yourself, but this is where the author speaks for the first time about Adorno and Horkheimer. He expects you to be familiar with them and everything around them – the time period they wrote in, what they wrote about, who for, etc. The job of the writer is to persuade the audience. If you’re starting from the premise that we’re already persuaded, then, again, who is your book for?
The author insists that the two were western marxists, with claims such as:
This same duo, today promoted as Marxism par excellence in the academy, supported the US’s barbaric invasion of Vietnam with the sort of rhetoric commonly heard from the most far-right elements of US politics.
But why? Why is it important that they did that, and why did they do that? Why does academia today uphold them as ‘marxism par excellence’? Why is it important for the reader to know about them? Why did you choose to mention them – clearly you had a reason to pick these two over other examples?
We never get an answer. Instead, he segues into his next point like so:
The paradox here is that, on the subject of the Soviet system, the CIA was itself to the ‘left’ of these ‘Marxists.’ As a 1955 CIA document, accessible thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, says
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team.[68]
The only link between his first and second point is the CIA. There’s no more explanation. This is word association; the CIA was mentioned in point 1, so we can mention it in point 2. But the two arguments are so different as to not be connected at all.
When I ask who is this book for, there is perhaps the beginning of an answer later on:
But, this is enough for one session and I will maybe look at all of this later in a second post. There’s also a whole chapter on China.
It’s actually interesting that this book has been translated to Portuguese (I assume for the Brazilian audience) because… I really can’t tell who this is for. Who will this speak to in Brazil. Who in Brazil will be familiar with The Great Gatsby and also care about US problems. To be honest I think they just wanted to show off on this with the Jones Manoel preface. Just like they show off with all the citations from Rockhill, Hegel, Parenti (which he cites more than 7 times almost consecutively), Prashad, etc. Very basic patsoc tactic complemented by the usual Dugin mysticism of being so broad and vague you can be interpreted in many different ways.
As the cherry on top, this book is 143 pages long in its official PDF format, including the references index at the end (of which there are over 200), and the word ‘purity’ appears 154 times – a little bit over one instance per page!
Not to say he’s ontologically wrong, just that his class conciousness seems more generally aligned with the settler communist/labor zionist which makes sense for his material conditions. Mostly talking about this event he held plus other collabs he’s done with MWM like promoting this book (I’d assume which would require at least somewhat agreeing with its critiques)
I am referring to that quote and I think referring to decolonial theory as anti-marxist is strange and aligns with the common settler conception of attempts to move beyond some of the eurocentric biases in the Marxist tradition. By decolonial theory I think of Fanon and in the current day the EFF (among many others) that are only anti-marxist in that they don’t believe Marx came up with dialectical materialism/communism and just applied it and described it from a eurocentric perspective (and of course, how could he do anything but?)
That doesn’t mean their contributions aren’t respected or especially that dialectical materialism is thrown away but rather is an effort to transcend dogmatism and Marxist orthodoxy, rethinking conceptions of modernity/development, the linear progression of modes of production, and applying marxism (dialectical materialism) particularly to the colonial states and the conditions they face.
All that said, my investigation is thin. I have seen good interviews and Marxist analysis by Rockhill, but I have also seen this problem in many white/settler communists and generally am unsurprised when I hear one is unable to tell that MWM are actually just American labor zionists. I’m also unsurprised when they condemn decolonial critiques of western strains of marxist thought and the settler class. But for sure he should’ve known better than to collab for them and recommending this book is hella sus
I’ve had the misfortune of reading a lot of anti-Marxist
Not sure if I have any receipts as I dismiss it when I realise what it is. I can’t speak to the other fields mentioned but it’s a major strand of Western academic thought. Academic ‘decolonial Marxism’ sometimes fits into that category. In the same category is a strand of ‘decolonial’ theory that uses Marxist aesthetics while being anti-Marxist – often written by ‘radical’ academics, the kind of people who comprise Rockhill’s theory industry.
Rockhill could be referring to that literature. Given his usual target and starting point of French critical theory, I’d be inclined to assume that’s what he’s referring to. I wouldn’t assume that he’s talking about e.g. Fanon. I’d have to read his intro to the Losurdo collection to understand what he means by ‘decolonial Marxism’.
Fair. I mean “academic” Marxism in general is lol. In my mind supporting this Purity Fetish book is helping build an ugly picture but I’d have to see as well.
That’s so strange. Because Colin is now firmly placed as an anti-patsoc, from what I’ve seen.
Not too familiar with Colin either, I will say though there are those with settler marxist tendencies that will condemn PatSocs for being a little too obvious. CPUSA officially condemned them while still having many of the same problems that stem from the same sources.
I think it also reflects the fact that Hamas has made it so some kind of theoretical support for decolonization is a litmus test for any self respecting leftist, even the magacoms have to at least pretend to be pro-Palestine now. This theoretical support often fails to be applied to home in America though, most obviously with the ACP (thus condemnations from even the less advanced among us)