Domenico Losurdo
Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist philosopher better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism. For the latter, he has been criticised for relativising Joseph Stalin's rule and Stalinism, being often characterised as a neo-Stalinist as a result.
Biography
Born in Sannicandro di Bari, Losurdo obtained his doctorate in 1963 from the University of Urbino under the guidance of Pasquale Salvucci with a thesis on Johann Karl Rodbertus. He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.
Losurdo died on 28 June 2018 at the age of 76 due to throat cancer.
Thought
A trained Marxist, described as both a noncomformist and heterodox Marxist as well as a communist militant, Losurdo's work ranged from contributions to the study of Kantian philosophy, the revaluation of classical German idealism, especially by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in an attempt to re-propose the legacy and the reaffirmation of the interpretation of German and non-German Marxism, with incursions into the sphere of Nietzschean thought and Heideggerian.Losurdo's philosophical-political reflection, attentive to the contextualization of philosophical thought in his own historical time, moved in particular from the themes of radical criticism of liberalism, capitalism and colonialism as well as the traditional conception of totalitarianism in the perspective of a defense of Marxist dialectics and historical materialism, devoting himself to the study of anti-revisionism in the Marxist–Leninist sphere. Losurdo included his works in the history of ideas and concerned the investigation of questions of contemporary history and politics, with a constant critical attention to historical revisionism and the controversy against the interpretations of Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper and Ernst Nolte. In particular, Losurdo has criticised a reactionary tendency among contemporary revisionist historians such as Nolte and Furet. According to Losurdo, the intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition as their true motivations have little to do with the search for a greater understanding of the past, but rather he claims it lies in both the climate and ideological needs of the political classes and is most evident in the work of the English-speaking imperial revivalists such as Niall Ferguson and Paul Johnson. His 2015 book War and Revolution provided a new perspective on the English, American, French and Russian revolutions, among other 20th-century revolutions.
Losurdo also turned his attention to the political history of modern German philosophy from Kant to Karl Marx and the debate that developed in Germany in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century as well as a reinterpretation of the tradition of liberalism, in particular starting from the criticism and accusations of hypocrisy addressed to John Locke for his financial participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Taking up what Arendt stated in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Losurdo argued that the 20th century's true original sin was the colonial empire of the late 19th century, where totalitarianism and the internments manifested for the first time.
Historical revisionism
According to Losurdo, despecification is the exclusion of an individual or group from the civilian community. There are two types of despecification:- Political and moral despecification in which the exclusion is due to political or moral factors.
- Naturalistic despecification in which the exclusion is due to biological factors.
Losurdo was a strong critic of the equation between Nazism and communism made by scholars like François Furet and Ernst Nolte, but also by Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. Likewise, Losurdo criticised the concept of a Red Holocaust. He argued that in the Nazi concentration camps there was an explicit homicidal intention as the Jew who entered was destined not to get out of it while in the Gulag there was not. In the first case, the Nazis imprisoned those whom they regarded and called Untermensch while in the second case dissidents were locked up to be re-educated and not to be killed. Despite being a practice to be condemned, Losurdo stated that "the prisoner in the Gulag is a potential "comrade" and after 1937 he is a potential "citizen".
Taking up the opinion of Primo Levi and against Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Losurdo maintained that although it was a disgrace that a socialist country born to abolish exploitation retorted to imperialist and capitalist systems and methods, the Gulag was more analogous to many Western concentration camps which in some ways were more akin to the Nazi concentration camps as a death camp and not a re-education one, taking up the history of the Indian genocide. He also argued that British concentration camps and penal colonies were worse than any Gulag, accusing politicians such Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman of being guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity just like—if not worse—those attributed to Joseph Stalin. As such, Losurdo also stated his belief that communists suffer from autophobia, a pathological problem that according to him—unlike healthy self-criticism—must be faced.
In excerpts from a conference organized in 2003 to re-evaluate the figure of Stalin fifty years after his death, Losurdo harshly criticised the revelations contained in Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech". According to Losurdo, Stalin's bad reputation derived not from the crimes committed by the latter which he compared to others of his time, but from the falsehoods present in the report that Khrushchev read as General Secretary during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. He also gave credit to one of the main accusations that were at the base of the bloody Stalinist repression against the opponents, i.e. the existence of the "full-bodied reality of the fifth column" in the Soviet Union ready to ally with the enemy. Losurdo reiterated that he did not want to rehabilitate Stalin, but put him in the historical context and present a more neutral analysis of the facts, implementing a revisionism of the general experience of real socialism, considered a past yet useful study to understand the future dynamics of socialism.
Work
''Liberalism: A Counter-History''
In , first published in English in 2011, Losurdo argued that while purporting to emphasise the importance of individual liberty, liberalism has long been marked by its exclusion of people from these rights, resulting in racism, slavery and genocide. Losurdo asserted that the origins of Nazism are to be found in what he views as colonialist and imperialist policies of the Western world. He examined the intellectual and political positions of intellectuals on modernity. In his view, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were the greatest thinkers of modernity while Friedrich Nietzsche was its greatest critic. It received a number of positive reviews from critics.''Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend''
In Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend, Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, on whom he claimed it is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit all communism. Opposed to the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, Losurdo criticised the concept of totalitarianism, especially in the works of Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper and Ernst Nolte, among others. He argued that totalitarianism was a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and that applying it to the political sphere required an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes and the Soviet Union and other socialist states in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.Reception
A review written in April 2009 by Guido Liguori in Liberation of Losurdo's 2008 book Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend in which Losurdo criticised the demonisation of Stalin carried out by majority historiography and tried to remove it from what he calls "the black legend about him", was at the center of a controversy within the drafting of the aforementioned review. A storm of protests ensued when around twenty editors sent a letter of protest to the editor of the newspaper in which they criticized both Losurdo's attempt at Stalin's rehabilitation in his book and Liguori's review as well as with the choice of the director of the newspaper to publish this review.While the book has been criticised for its claims and the methodology used, Losurdo's work has been praised by Grover Furr, who has been called "a 'revisionist' on a career-long quest to exonerate Stalin" and has written the book Khrushchev Lied on the "Secret Speech", starting a mutual friendship with Losurdo, whom Furr praised especially for his 2008 book on Stalin. His book also caused controversies internationally, especially in Germany, with critics labelling Losurdo a neo-Stalinist.
Losurdo continued to actively cooperate with Furr, introducing him to an Italian publisher who published the Italian translation of Furr's book Khruschev Lied in 2016, with Losurdo's introduction. Additionally, Losurdo wrote a back-cover to Furr's 2013 book The Murder of Sergei Kirov and an introduction to the book which remains unpublished.
Political views
Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, Losurdo supported the interpretation that Mao Zedong gave the plurality to the class struggle by paying attention to the process of female emancipation and colonised peoples. Losurdo also took a highly critical view of the European intellectual tradition of liberalism.Close first to the Italian Communist Party, then to the Communist Refoundation Party and finally to the Party of Italian Communists, confluited in the Communist Party of Italy and in the Italian Communist Party, of which he was a member, Losurdo was also director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
Strongly opposed to American interventionism and its foreign policies, imperialism and NATO, Losurdo contested the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, stating that Liu is an open supporter of Western colonialism.