The term Marxism is widely used but frequently misunderstood, misrepresented, or employed without adequate theoretical precision. This article reconstructs Marxism as understood and developed by Lenin, arguably the most influential Marxist theorist after Marx and Engels. It argues that Lenin's Marxism constitutes a systematic and integrated theoretical framework encompassing four interconnected components: dialectical-materialist philosophy, the materialist conception of history (historical materialism), political economy, and revolutionary political theory. Drawing directly on Lenin's major writings, the article shows that Marxism, for Lenin, provides a scientific explanation of class society grounded in objective material relations and class struggle, culminating in the revolutionary transformation of capitalism and the establishment of proletarian political power. It also demonstrates that Lenin viewed Marxism not as a dogma but as a living and developing theory that must be continuously elaborated in response to changing historical conditions. By reconstructing Lenin's Marxism as a unified system, the article clarifies its philosophical foundations, analytical structure, revolutionary implications, and highlights its enduring relevance for understanding capitalist society and struggles aimed at its transcendence.
This article examines the erosion of scholarly volition under contemporary institutional conditions. Drawing on critical social theory, it argues that the strain experienced in academic life cannot be adequately explained by familiar accounts of marketization, audit culture, or performativity alone. Instead, the article develops alienation of will as a diagnostic concept that captures how the historical reorganization of academic labor under late capitalism reshapes not only the conditions of scholarly work but also the capacity to intend, sustain, and identify with inquiry. It shows how this condition is stabilized through crony academic capitalism, understood not as a deviation from market competition but as a form of academic capitalism organized through oligarchic gatekeeping, reputational dependence, and patronage. It further shows how cynicism emerges as a socially produced mode of consciousness that renders estrangement livable without overcoming it. By tracing the movement from material conditions to institutional form and subject formation, the article treats the contemporary university as a privileged site for diagnosing broader dynamics of voluntary compliance under late neoliberalism. The analysis concludes by considering the fragile conditions under which intellectual self-determination might still be sustained without recourse to programmatic or managerial remedies.
This article examines the historical and contemporary trajectories of Brazil and China through the analytical lens of dependency theory, emphasizing how external capital, domestic coalitions, and state strategies have shaped their economic development. Drawing on a comparative-historical approach, the study traces Brazil's path from the mid-20th century "new dependency" phase-marked by accelerated industrialization tied to foreign capital-to the 21st century, in which structural vulnerabilities persist despite global integration. In contrast, China pursued a state-led development model that combined selective openness to transnational groups with the preservation of policy space, enabling both technological learning and an improved bargaining position in the global economy. The analysis highlights how these two trajectories reinforced economic asymmetries: while both countries registered economic gains, distribution was profoundly unequal, with Brazil remaining largely dependent on primary exports and China consolidating its position as a major industrial and technological power. By integrating insights from structuralist and neo-dependency perspectives, the article argues that dependency theory retains significant explanatory power in understanding the dynamics of development and underdevelopment in the Global South. The findings contribute to ongoing debates about state capacity, external constraints, and the prospects for more autonomous development strategies under conditions of global capitalism.
This article offers a critical examination of the Marxist Theory of Dependency (MTD), particularly through the work of R. M. Marini, from the perspective of Marxism. While MTD advances the analysis of the global capitalist system by emphasizing the specificity of center-periphery relations, it also reproduces key conceptual limitations. Drawing on recent contributions and debates, the article highlights how this approach combines a dualist vision of capitalism with functionalist assumptions that undermine its explanatory coherence. Central to this critique is the category of super-exploitation, which leads to inconsistencies regarding the law of value, wage formation, and crisis theory. The analysis contends that the MTD grants primacy to the sphere of circulation and to international value transfers, weakening the labor-based foundations of value theory. As a result, it posits two distinct capitalist systems governed by different internal logics, yet fails to reconcile this with the global operation of the law of value. The article concludes that while the MTD remains a key contribution to dependency thought, it requires further theoretical development to avoid reproducing the same limitations it originally set out to transcend.
China has become a prominent external actor in downstream and midstream infrastructure projects, including oil refining and mineral processing, in Africa. This raises the question whether such investment alters the structural patterns described by dependency theory. Through a comparative analysis of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda, this article examines whether the localisation of refining and processing infrastructure enables greater domestic retention of value and reconfigures the geography of surplus production. Situated within critical political economy and historical materialism, the study conceptualises infrastructure as a contested site of industrial strategy and political sovereignty. The three cases are interpreted as operational, transitional, and anticipatory moments along a continuum of infrastructural development. The findings suggest that Chinese capital, under specific political and institutional conditions, can expand the scope for partial delinking by supporting the onshoring of value-added activity. These engagements reshape the terrain on which dependency is negotiated, with outcomes contingent upon state capacity, regulatory coherence, and the strategic appropriation of surplus.
Primary and secondary education in the imperial core serves to reproduce the ideas of the ruling capitalist class. Revolutionary educators such as Paulo Freire have articulated ways that education may subvert this reproduction-a pedagogy of the oppressed that occurs both inside and outside the classroom. However, a group of left anticommunist recuperators surrounded Freire in his later years, twisting his words and tempering his radicalism. Domenico Losurdo's anti-imperialist framework of analysis helps discern Western Marxist ideology in the works of Freire's followers and critical pedagogy theorists, allowing us to interrogate the sanitization process Freire's followers have enacted while also reasserting Freire's anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist orientation. This article engages in a close reading of two works from Henry Giroux, one of the best-known theorists of Paulo Freire and critical pedagogy. Applying Losurdo's analysis, the article locates numerous Western Marxist distortions of Freire in Giroux's writing, particularly regarding the role of power for educators. Because education is an important part of the ideological superstructure of capitalist societies, a comprehensive approach to ending imperialism must include a critical examination of how educators may disrupt ideological reproduction and help build the subjective conditions for revolution. Only by ending US imperialism can we have true multinational liberation.
This article critically examines Domenico Losurdo's expansive critique of Nietzsche as an "aristocratic rebel" as a way to understand more broadly his unique brand of Marxist intellectual history as a form of "counter-history." Situating Nietzsche back into the historical context of the Second Reich, Losurdo interprets him as a consistent reactionary political philosopher whose project for a revaluation of all values towards aristocratic radicalism was from beginning to end constituted by an anti-socialism. This brings Losurdo into dialogue with Gy & ouml;rgy Luk & aacute;cs, who critiqued Nietzsche as a "chief irrationalist" and an anti-socialist of the imperial age of late 19th-century Germany. The article compares Losurdo's critique with Luk & aacute;cs's, and argues that Losurdo presents a more discerning observation of the Nietzschean influence on the post-war liberal Left as a problematic one that requires further critical engagement. Although Losurdo's own prescription of a critical-historical method for overcoming the "hermeneutics of innocence" that shrouds Nietzsche is not without limitations of its own, this work in the context of Losurdo's larger project brings to the fore the ongoing relevance of revaluating the relationship between Hegel and Marx to the role of ideology critique as part of the praxis of class struggle.
In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo identifies the antithetical and sometimes hostile positions expressed on anti-colonial struggles as the salient feature of the "Western Marxist" tradition of radical European theory. As Losurdo shows, the formation of such positions, which dispense with an essential component of the Marxist theory of class struggles, is a result of a prevalence of theoretical concepts and tendencies within the Western Marxist canon, absent in leading spokespeople from countries in which Marxist governments held power after October 1917. As the article develops in part 1, the positions at issue include messianism, anti-statism, utopianism, anti-scientism, anti-technologism, anti-modernism, anti-labourism, antinomianism, romanticism, and idealism. In part 2, responding to critics who have challenged the value of Losurdo's characterisation of a "Western Marxism" spanning into post-structuralist thinkers, the article shows how discerning Losurdo's analysis is by focusing on popular "radical" Italian theorist, Giorgio Agamben. In the conclusion, the article is situated within the critical responses to Western Marxism, and calls attention to a perceived tension in Losurdo's treatment of Ernst Bloch, and more widely, in the Marxian stance towards bourgeois rights and liberties.
A thorough study of Domenico Losurdo's discursive projects reveals a distinct, yet implicit, set of methods for analyzing the material conditions of the world around us and for the development of his dialectical lens of "critical communism." In this article, the authors set about to make concrete Losurdo's methodology by outlining the potential, value, and implications of his method to contemporary political movements, and its use in constructions of historiographical narratives, while still maintaining the integrity of historical materialism. To illustrate this, the authors will be engaging with several of Losurdo's works-including his texts on liberalism, his critique of Western Marxism, and his broader understanding of class conflict through the "struggle for recognition"-as well as their own analysis of recent Herrenvolk movements within Marxism in the West. This discursive analysis is in service of concretely outlining how Losurdo's theoretical and methodological contributions to historical materialism can be applied in scholarship and political practice.
Losurdo's commitment to emancipation overcomes dogmatism and bestows a pioneering character upon his theoretical endeavour. One must remember that Losurdo's environment was not dissimilar to that of Western Marxists, whom he unapologetically criticised and distanced himself from. Instead of being seduced by neoliberal promises commingled with the so-called "End of History," Losurdo's work demonstrates a commitment not only to theoretical but also to practical emancipatory struggles. This article examines three elements that make Losurdo's work significant and highly topical: a counter-history, a counter-philosophy, and a counter-politics. Losurdo's counter-history demolishes Western intelligentsia's rewriting of history and is, therefore, vital to regaining and repositioning class consciousness in today's capitalism. His counter-philosophy does not investigate "concepts" and "categories" in themselves, in isolation, as transcendental entities. Instead, he brings philosophical categories and social institutions together, examining how they have been apprehended historically, thus superseding simplistic views that reduce philosophy to hagiography. Finally, unlike most intelligentsia of the capitalist core-who systematically overlooks Western imperialism, (neo)colonialism, and the remaining consequences of centuries-long imperialist exploitation and violence-Losurdo's counter-politics pays heed to various liberation struggles and contextualises them not from a moral standpoint but rather dialectically in relation to dominant powers from which people liberate themselves.
This article examines the European Green Deal (EGD) from a critical realist perspective and engages with two key approaches in eco-Marxist thought: the theory of metabolic rift and the world-ecology framework. Although these approaches have not directly addressed the EGD, they provide conceptual tools to analyze it as a hegemonic project of restructuring capital accumulation. The purpose of the study is not only to compare these approaches but also to explore how each can comprehend the EGD and, more importantly, what they offer in terms of emancipation, revolutionary agency, alternative forms of social organization, and transformative political imagination. Critical realism's ontological view of nature as a material and autonomous domain, independent of human perception, together with Roy Bhaskar's conception of emancipation as the ultimate goal of social knowledge, provide a unique foundation for rethinking the transformative relation between structure and agency. From a critical realist perspective, the metabolic rift approach conceptualizes the EGD more clearly in terms of class antagonisms and praxis, whereas the world-ecology framework tends to obscure the role of the revolutionary subject and thus limits political imagination.
