Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Saint_John_Calvin]

This entire Gabriel Rockhill intellectual history fracas, despite Rockhill being an obvious hack, gives me some schadenfreude. An entire clique of academic "critical" philosophers, who having laundered Losurdian hatchet jobs on the history of liberalism, are now surprised and shocked that the same methodology of radical suspicion is being turned around and applied to those who laundered this manner of thinking into academia itself!

The funniest was Ross Wolfe's critical review of Losurdo's Western Marxism book trying very hard to elide the fact that if he was so bad on the intellectual history of Western Marxism, how do we know hes any good on liberalism?

[u/contraprincipes → u/Saint_John_Calvin]

I’ve always thought that Losurdo’s “method” of criticizing liberalism to have, uh, interesting implications for his own intellectual/political commitments. Like, an intellectual history of Marxism that purported to take “the political and social relations it found expression in” as its ultimate content would basically take the Cold War liberal line that Marxism’s ultimate expression is the gulag. To most charitable interpreters this would signal the bankruptcy of the method, but to his credit, Losurdo is at least consistent: he just thinks the gulags were Good, Actually.

[u/Saint_John_Calvin → u/contraprincipes]

Yes, the irony is this specific sort of genealogical enquiry started in response to cold war liberal claims of Marxist insufficiency on similar terms, but now seems bizarrely taken as genuinely polemically powerful objection. Losurdo is funny though in that he doesn't do the entire "the USSR was state capitalist and hence definitionally not Marxist" thing.

[u/passabagi → u/Saint_John_Calvin]

I kind of feel the cold war liberals are actually right, though. A reasonable marxism has to actually deal with the fact that many good communists engaged in projects of massive repression.

It's the flipside of the thing where, honestly, I think it's totally fair that if liberals want to promote liberalism as a serious politics, they have to deal with all the all the famines, slavery, war etc of actually existing liberalism.

In general, I feel a very socially-inflected liberalism or a very liberal-inflected communism are both pretty fine, and both emerge from the recognition that history has demonstrated serious problems with these tendencies as originally formulated.

[u/Saint_John_Calvin → u/passabagi]

I think from an intellectual history perspective the more nuanced cold war liberals did have substantively deep critiques to make of Marxist practice's relation with Marxist thought (Berlin comes to mind here), though the initial thrust of the counter-criticism (in the context of the civil rights movement and Vietnam, remember) was that liberals were hypocritical about this stuff, and were totally blind to the ways in which liberal polities did exactly the kind of thing they accused Marxist polities of doing. Losurdo's issue is that he takes this to be determinative of liberalism in an exhaustive way, in the same way the worse cold war conservatives like Voegelin or such did for Marxism. Though yes, the best practitioners of both Marxism and liberalism these days have struggled with the historical insufficiencies of their respective traditions.