Love these more contentious discussions! Forces theory to both better articulate itself and subject its content to interrogation. More please!

"We need a new International."

This is the most important statement made during this interview.

Great discussion, with good points on both sides, I love the idea of an ecumenical Marxism that isn't drawn into the sectarian tendency to dismiss critics and thinkers who have more similarities than differences regarding political liberation and socialist values.

Beautiful presentation.

Karl Marx used the word 'depreciation' 100+ times in his major work. But there were no automobiles when Marx was alive.

Planned Obsolescence is a 20th Century phenomenon. But it did not become a large scale economic factor until after World War Two.

When was the Latest that PhD economists should have figured out PO in automobiles. I figure 1980, a Decade after Apollo 11.

The Laws of Physics do not change style and cause Depreciation regardless of ideology. The economics profession has left consumer depreciation out of the NET Domestic Product equation. In fact they don't tell everyone about the NDP. All we hear is GDP, GDP, GDP.
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❤ Eric A. Marckx Van Keer, Gent/Belgium

31:22 following and promoting their skepticism is doing the work of empire's attempts at delegitimization while self-exonerating by condemning the excesses of slaughter. Chauvinists the lot of them

THE RIGOR OF LOGIC
Because everyone alive at present will eventually die, the present ultimately belongs to death.  However, because future generations which don’t yet exist will survive our present, the future belongs to life.  The question then is should I who exist at present join the ranks of the future army of the living or throw in my lot with the present army of the dead?  Now if I owe more allegiance to life than to death, then I’ll devote my present life to insuring that life in the future is more compelling than life in the present.  But if I owe more allegiance to death than to life, then I’ll agree with death that since life in the future does not yet exist—and may never exist— then it’s as good as already being dead.  Accordingly I’ll confine my life to the present while remaining largely oblivious of the future.

However, I’m surprised to discover that living to enhance life in the future is in fact precisely what gives life in the present its meaning. Consequently if on the contrary I choose to focus exclusively on life in the present and remain oblivious of future life on the planet, then however exhilarating my present life may be I not only lead a life without meaning but also one dedicated to death.  For in truth I have more faith in the certainty of my own death than in the uncertain future continuation of life on earth, a life moreover which I can only anticipate and can’t possibly experience directly since I’ll be dead.  

So people themselves decide whether their lives are to be meaningful or not depending on whether they’re willing to wager their lives on behalf of life in the future which 1) they won’t experience and 2) the continuation of which is uncertain.  Or whether they’d rather bet their lives on death because death is a sure thing although a life founded on the certainty of death, however stabilizing, is a life without meaning.

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FREEDOM IS INDEED TAKING ORDERS BUT CARRYING THEM OUT IN ANY DAMN WAY YOU PLEASE
To my way of thinking that there is no reason why anything exists makes it more not less extraordinary that anything does exist.  For example, there’s no reason why life on the planet should exist except that resisting upward the downward pull of gravity came natural to matter that could pull the stunt off of coming alive.  And by coming alive I mean matter that could be flexible enough to start tiny and grow large without however foreseeing that the energy required to keep changing shape would eventually exhaust an individual organism and cause it to die.  As for me I’d rather die if that’s what it takes to crawl around on the ground proceeding this way or that instead of grandly flowing like a great river but never moving of my own accord in whatever direction I please.

Note.  I believe that the above thought was inspired by my cats Tigrin and Solvey as well as by the coyotes who tore them to pieces a few days ago.

The problem with many of these kinds of people declaring themselves to be "Marxists" is that they use this mythological construction of "Stalinism" in order to veil their own pro-imperalist, anti-Marxist worldview. Any  movement to actually attain liberation in a concrete sense, with all of its contradictions, is dismissed as "Stalinist"; any  historian who provides a more rounded analysis of Stalin is wholesale dismissed as reductive; any attempt to truly center the denigrated voices of us in the global south is viewed as completely misaligned with the essence of Marxism. Its as though, the only way to be taken seriously by people like Wolfe, is to follow the anti-Stalin paradigm.

I also find it telling that many in academia who declar themselves Marxist often outright dismiss the theoretical contributions of thinkers in the global south. Thinkers like Amilcar Cabral are scoffed at as insignificant - the 'true' thinkers are only Adorno and those of his ilk.

I think the more important issue is not Losurdo empowering Third World intellectuals to aspire to power a la China, but rationalizing First World intellectuals abdicating on the necessary struggle for socialism in the U.S., making impotent gestures -- gestures of impotence -- through pseudo-activity and internal recrimination, censorship and thought-tabooing self-destruction instead.

This conversation left me with a deeper appreciation for Losurdo

This guy wanting see the Left as ‘pre-Leninist’ is exactly the issue. It’s always an excuse not to do anything and defer to the future. How heightened do things need to be?

I could have a real indepth and thorough critique here but it’s hard to not just simply say that Wolfe is working from frameworks of social chauvinism and Eurocentricsm. This concept of linking those who forefront anti-imperialism as a primary contradiction as neo-stalinists when imperialism is the most pernicious and totalizing in the global south is one of the more dastardly acts I see on the Western Marxist left, they have a primacy on European existence as the center of history. Stalinism has become a very lazy pejorative and it’s comical considering how offended they are by the term Western Marxist.

The problem with "Marxists" like Wolfe, and so many American/Americanized "leftists" around the West is, frankly, liberalism. Whether consciously or not, their worldview is liberal. So naturally they cannot or simply will not see African and Asian liberation struggles as socialist. They are NOT interested in how socialism manifests in the real world at all, especially in a real world that is not and never has been liberal, socially, culturally or politically. For these "Marxists" socialism is best understood and promulgated as something you find in books and articles or YouTube interviews. When Derrida said "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" he might just as well have been describing the fundamental error of these "Western Marxists" and their commitment to endless discursive "struggle" (to publish) rather than the struggle to "change the world".

Daniel Tutt, I wonder why you didn’t ask these questions from Gabriel Rockhill during your interview. It would actually be great if you both could arrange an open discussion or debate on these issues with rockhill. By the way, Ross Wolfe seems completely blind to the relationship between imperialism and the Frankfurt School, especially when presenting Adorno’s supposed “clarity” on Vietnam.

As a Global South researcher, I’ve never been impressed by the French or Frankfurt schools — they always distracted me from truly radical political thinking. When I read Domenico Losurdo, I was struck by the clarity and historical depth of his analysis. This interview completely omitted the imperial question — particularly how these philosophical foundations, institutes, and research centers are entangled with imperial propaganda.

Honestly, the way Gabriel Rockhill and Domenico Losurdo engage with Stalin, Western Marxism, and imperialism aligns much more closely with the revolutionary insights of Lenin and Walter Rodney.

losurdos book on liberalism was a breath of fresh air !

How would you compare Losurdo's Western Marxism to Ellen Meiksins Wood's Retreat From Class?

the specter of Stalin haunts the souls of the academic western anarcho-Marxists across the world

The labor aristocracy is accurate as it is backed by data and scholarship such as works by Jason Hickle . It is important to acknowledge this so we see the relationship between and the core and periphery and understand the power dynamics . It is not necessarily to create hierarchy of struggle but understand our responsibilities in the core and the task.

Any serious U.S. left would need a coherent macroeconomic policy. When it comes to that, the entire world knows the U.S. left is a joke. Your average American would prefer a CCP technocrat. But instead we are shadow boxing Stalinism and Cold War Trotskyist arguments. This is really about a narrow minded notion of who gets to have a revolution and how. Ross Wolfe has declared anything outside of his completely ridiculous maximalist notion of a simultaneous global proletarian revolution illegitimate.  He thinks all actually existing socialists governments are fake friends that also need overthrowing. When the left can talk economics and actually facilitate human betterment, as China does, no one will take the U.S. left seriously. We will remain a joke that is all talk.