Domenico Losurdo

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. During the sixties, he was radicalized and belonged to a small group of Italian communists which sided with the People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split. Losurdo hailed the Cultural Revolution which was launched in 1966 by Mao Zedong in an attempt to purge Chinese society of capitalist and traditionalist elements and which claimed up to 20 million lives. Losurdo 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. From 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. Losurdo was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association. Losurdo died on 28 June 2018 at the age of 76 due to brain cancer.

Upon Losurdo's death in 2018, Gianni Fresu wrote that "from the classics of philosophy to the debate around the figure of Stalin; from the analysis of the role of China to historical revisionism; from liberal thinking to the issues of Bonapartism and modern democracy; from the history of Western thought to the problems of colonialism and imperialism ... Losurdo's studies of historical materialism, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche, are a fundamental milestone in the history of ideas and events of human societies, such is their scientific seriousness and intellectual autonomy, their problematic richness and interpretative complexity."

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 criticized a reactionary tendency among contemporary revisionist historians such as Nolte (who traced the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution) and Furet (who linked the Stalinist purges to a "disease" originating from the French Revolution). 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 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, published by Verso Books, provided a new perspective on the English, American, French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions.

A review written in April 2009 by Guido Liguori in Liberazione (the official organ of the Communist Refoundation Party) of his book, in which Losurdo criticized the demonisation of Stalin carried out by the predominant 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 (judged to be too positive with respect to the book) as well as with the choice of the editor of the newspaper to publish said review. The book was criticized for its claims, and the methodology used, by Valerio Evangelisti, Antonio Moscato [it], Niccolò Pianciola, and Andrea Romano.

In Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend (2008), Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, about whom he claimed is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit the whole of communism. Opposed to the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, Losurdo criticized the concept of totalitarianism, especially in the works of Hannah Arendt, François Furet, Karl Popper, and Ernst Nolte, among others. Losurdo 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, along with 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.

In Liberalism: A Counter-History (2005), 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. Losurdo 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.

In excerpts from a conference, organized in 2003, to re-evaluate the figure of Stalin fifty years after his death, Losurdo harshly criticized 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 that time – but from the falsehoods present in the report that Khrushchev read during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. Losurdo gave credit to one of the main accusations that were at the base of the bloody repression against his 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 only to place 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 as a past to be studied for the purpose of understanding the future dynamics of socialism.

In Aristocratic Rebel (2002), Losurdo criticized much of Nietzschean thought in the contemporary world, in particular left-Nietzscheanism, whose influence on the left was a major problem because "it hollows out rationalist-oriented socialist thought and praxis and it often leads to an abandoning of universalism in favor of 'spiritual' interpretations of political struggle." This critique came from the application of Nietzsche by Italian leftists such as Giorgio Colli and Gianni Vattimo, although left-Nietzscheanism is beyond just that setting.

In Historical Revisionism (1996), Losurdo criticised the historical revisionism of authors such as François Furet and Ernst Nolte. Similar to how Enzo Traverso spoke of a Second Thirty Years' War (1914–1945) following Arno J. Mayer, Losurdo used the image of the Second Thirty Years War to use as "an expression that historians often use to denote the period of colossal upheavals between 1914 and 1945." Losurdo accused Furet and Nolte for their theory that the Russian Revolution started the European Civil War in 1917 so that the conflict between Bolshevism and Nazism is emphasized and only the former is blamed. In doing so, these revisionist historians omitted two main moments that for Losurdo are indispensable in understanding the Second Thirty Years' War, namely the total war as an experience shared by all those involved in the war and colonialism as a common modern European phenomenon on the other. Losurdo compared Adolf Hitler's struggle for Lebensraum in the East with the acquisition of a German India to the American frontier as part of the American conquest to the Pacific.

About Losurdo's work on Western Marxism, Marxist historian Mario Maestri wrote that this is "a false split and a false controversy", and accused Losurdo of replacing "the proletarian internationalism and class struggles of the 'Western Marxists' with the unified nation – that is, bourgeoisie and united proletarians – in the name of national developmentalism – as if development, as well as science and technology, were ideologically neutral and not dictated by the interests of the dominant versus the dominated classes." Maestri, who defends the thesis "we live in a historical counterrevolutionary phase", whose "milestones were the capitalist restoration in China in 1978 under the leadership of reformer Deng Xiaoping and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 – events that consolidated the globalization of capitalism", accused Losurdo of presenting "an apology for the capitalism of the Chinese Communist Party and its many business projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America", establishing this "as the only alternative for its economic development and the only way for the emancipation of European and American imperialism." According to Maestri, Losurdo defended that "the working classes of the countries on the periphery of the capital – Asia, Africa and Latin America – give up their political independence and pragmatically ally themselves with the capitalism of the Chinese CP."

As a Hegelian, Losurdo aimed to bring to historical knowledge two elements that are under-represented in Marxist historiography, namely rational reflection on the role of great men and rational criticism of the original form of moral leftism, or what Losurdo referred to as the "beautiful soul", which seeks to impose "the law of the heart" and the intelligence of its inevitable authoritarian reversal. For Losurdo, the ferment of authoritarianism in the communist movement is to be found more on the libertarian side of the communist utopia than in the reformist desire to build a state. Losurdo described his work on Stalin as a history of Stalin's image and not a biography or political history of the system with which his name is commonly associated. According to Losurdo, questioning the clichés of anti-Stalinism and Stalinism, including in Communist ranks since 1956, required returning to the substance of the question of the evaluation of Soviet history from 1922 to 1953 and even beyond, since the categories of anti-Stalinism and Stalinism have been generalized to the study of other socialist states ruled by communist parties and other personalities, such as Mao Zedong in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. For Losurdo, the study of "the black legend" was partly mixed with a rehabilitation of the personality and the figure of Stalin the statesman, who is clearly distinguished from the political regime. The starting point was the observation that at the time of his death in March 1953, the image of Stalin was rather positive in the world, propaganda on both sides aside. It was the dissemination of the Khrushchev report that "cast the god into hell." According to Losurdo, it was a document originating in the internal struggle in the leadership of the party, therefore lacking in credibility.

Losurdo 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 New Imperialism in the form of colonial empire of the late 19th century, where totalitarianism and internment manifested for the first time. Diego Pautasso wrote that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo "devoted himself to four areas of research: 1) critique of liberalism and the fight against the belief that liberals they were at the forefront of democratic struggles; 2) balance of socialist experiences (USSR, China); 3) criticism of colonialism, imperialism and 'the various forms of subjugation of peoples to Washington and its allies'; 4) the critique of the contemporary left, in particular of 'Western Marxism', which would have 'neglected the great problems of its time', abandoned the 'class struggle and the struggle against imperialism' and embraced 'the narratives of globalization.'"

Domenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician.

Losurdo was a strong critic of the equation of Nazism and communism, made by scholars like François Furet and Ernst Nolte but also by Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. Similarly, Losurdo criticized the concept of a Red Holocaust. He argued that in the Nazi concentration camps there was an explicit homicidal intention because the Jew who entered one was destined not to get out of it (as there is a naturalistic despecification) while in the Gulag there was not (as it is political-moral despecification). In the first case, the Nazis imprisoned those whom they regarded as and called Untermensch (subhuman), while in the second case (in which, he claimed, only a part of the dissidents ended up) 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' [the guard was required to call him this] ... and after 1937 [the beginning of the two year long Great Purge following the murder of Sergey Kirov] he is ... a potential 'citizen.'"

Losurdo's view that purges were legitimate because of the "permanent state of exception caused by imperialist intervention and siege", with Liguori summarising Losurdo's argument that "the harshness of his leadership was due to the Western powers' intrigues and the existence of a powerful 'Fifth Column' within the USSR of the 1930s" and a continuation of the Russian Civil War, described as being imposed by imperialism, were criticized as being a defence of the Stalinist purges by Cicero Araujo and Mario Maestri. Losurdo's work has been praised by Grover Furr, who started a mutual friendship with Losurdo, whom Furr praised especially for his 2008 book on Stalin. Losurdo continued to 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 blurb for the back-cover of Furr's 2013 book The Murder of Sergei Kirov and an introduction to the book which remains unpublished.

The book rendered Losurdo's a polarising view. O Globo summarized that Losurdo has been "[p]raised for his criticism of liberalism by some, and accused of Stalinism by others. ... From liberals to the far left, everyone has an adjective on the tip of their tongue (or fingers) to refer to Caetano's new favorite author: Stalinist, revolutionary, farcical, anti-imperialist, revisionist. For some, the Italian was a champion of socialism who denied the farces propagated by liberalism. For others, he was a defender of the crimes of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) and of Chinese authoritarianism." O Globo wrote that Losurdo compared the crimes of Stalin with those of liberalism (genocides sponsored by capitalist nations, concentration camps maintained by the colonial powers, and war crimes) and argued that in the end it is the liberals who have the dirtiest or worst track record.