The New Dark Age

Liquidating the Revolutionary Tradition

Domenico Losurdo’s War and Revolution begins from a simple but devastating observation: the ruling class has spent two centuries trying to cut the nerve that connects 1789 to 1917, and 1917 to every anticolonial revolution that followed. Historical revisionism is not a marginal academic hobby; it is a counterinsurgency operation against memory itself. By treating the French Revolution as a “crime,” the October Revolution as a “tragedy,” and the wave of anticolonial victories as “dictatorships,” the bourgeois intelligentsia rewrote the story of modernity to make capitalism look like the only survivor left standing. The so-called “Black Book” of Communism was not the first entry in this genre, but only the latest—its balance sheet compiled in the banks of the West, its arithmetic calculated to erase every gain wrested from empire by the oppressed.

Losurdo patiently unravels the trick. The same historians who insist that 1917 inaugurated an era of barbarism forget that colonialism had already refined concentration camps and extermination as statecraft. They clutch their pearls at the Jacobin terror while nodding politely at the American Revolution’s scorched earth against loyalists and Indigenous nations. They speak of Bolshevik “original sin” as if the Atlantic slave trade had been a seminar in liberal civility. What is called “revisionism” is really selective amnesia, and its function is class war by other means: to strip the working class and colonized of a usable past, to make every road to power look like a dead end.

This is why Losurdo situates the twentieth century as a “Second Thirty Years’ War,” a global conflagration in which the decisive question was not whether parliamentary niceties survived in Europe but whether the oppressed majorities of the planet could break the chains of empire. He reads Lenin’s appeal to the “colonial slaves” not as rhetorical flourish but as the hinge that converted a European civil war into a world revolution. It was the oppressed of Asia, Africa, and Latin America who transformed Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s empty promises into demands for national liberation. To understand this epoch only through the lens of “totalitarianism” is to surrender to the very ideological arsenal crafted in Langley, Bonn, and the academies of the West.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: much of what passes for radical critique in the imperial core has already internalized this arsenal. Entire traditions of “Western Marxism” built their identity on opposing real revolutions that dared to seize power, preferring to philosophize in defeat rather than dirty their hands with the contradictions of victory. They inherited the bourgeoisie’s contempt for the Jacobin and the Bolshevik, then repackaged it in the language of “critical theory.” The result was not critique but confession, not solidarity but self-disarmament. By accepting the premise that revolution’s history is a ledger of crimes, they disarmed the movements of today before the first shot is even fired.

Losurdo’s wager is different. He does not write to sanctify leaders or excuse errors, but to return history to its rightful terrain: the clash of classes, the war of empires against the oppressed, the long arc of resistance that runs through every so-called “excess” of revolution. If terror is the yardstick, then measure first the plantation and the colony. If democracy is the prize, then count the millions lifted from sub-citizenship by the very revolutions that respectable opinion now treats as calamities. And if memory is a battlefield, then to forget is to defect. This is not just a history book—it is a reminder that in the imperial core, the fight over the past is already the fight over the future.

Terror, Hypocrisy, and the Grammar of Revolution

In the second movement of War and Revolution, Losurdo strips bare one of the most convenient fables of the Western academy: that terror is the exclusive patent of Jacobins and Bolsheviks, while the American and British traditions were supposedly birthed in liberty and moderation. This is the catechism every schoolchild in the imperial core recites—red terror versus white freedom, guillotine versus gavel, gulag versus parliament. But when you follow the blood trails with a historian’s lantern instead of a priest’s incense, the story curdles fast. The American Revolution, so often dressed up in powdered wigs and parchment, waged its own terror: land seizures, massacres of Indigenous nations, persecution of loyalists, and the cementing of a republic built on the backs of enslaved Africans. Britain, the “mother of parliaments,” perfected concentration camps and scorched earth warfare in its colonies long before Hitler imported them to Europe. The French bourgeoisie, in its war against the Vendee, practiced annihilation with a zeal unmatched by many of the so-called “excesses” of 1793. Terror was not the exception; it was the grammar of revolution in an age of empire.

Losurdo is merciless with the double standards. If violence to defend property and empire is baptized as “order,” then violence to abolish property and empire is anathematized as “tyranny.” When Robespierre acts, it is dictatorship; when Washington hangs deserters, it is discipline; when Lenin represses counterrevolution, it is barbarism; when Churchill orders bombings of colonial insurgents, it is statesmanship. The West, he shows, has always reserved the right to kill in the name of civilization, while denying the colonized and the exploited the right to defend their freedom with equal ferocity. This hypocrisy is not incidental—it is the ideological shield that allows the victors of class war to present their bayonets as ballots.

For Losurdo, this is not about scoring debating points; it is about reclaiming revolutionary legitimacy. If we accept the myth that terror is the original sin of socialism, then every new attempt at emancipation is already guilty before it begins. The “purity fetish” of the Western left, which demands revolutions remain bloodless or be denounced as betrayal, functions as a police cordon around history. It ensures that every uprising dies young, canonized as noble failure, while every survivor is exiled to the gallery of monsters. In this catechism, Guevara is a poster on the wall but Castro is a dictator, Sankara is an inspiration but the ANC in power is corrupt, Mao in Yan’an is a hero but the People’s Republic is authoritarian. Revolution is safe only so long as it loses.

Here lies Losurdo’s challenge: to think about revolutionary coercion not as a deviation but as a necessity imposed by the material conditions of struggle. No revolution is made in a laboratory; it is made in the mud, in civil war, under siege, facing sabotage and invasion. To demand a revolution so pure that it never represses its enemies is to demand a revolution that never wins. The terror of 1793 and the iron discipline of 1919 were not caprices—they were the forms survival took when the old order threw the full weight of bayonets, famine, and foreign armies against the new. To deny this is to side with restoration, whether you wear the robes of a priest or the robes of a professor.

The lesson is clear for our own time. If we inherit the myths of Western Marxism—that history is a cemetery of failed revolutions, that terror disqualifies socialism, that purity is the measure of legitimacy—then we become the empire’s junior partners in the war against memory. Losurdo asks us instead to inherit the tradition whole, with all its contradictions and its dirt under the fingernails. Better to grasp the revolution in its messy, tragic, victorious totality than to clutch the empty virtue of defeat. In a world hurtling once again toward crisis, the demand is not for angels but for strategists—for those willing to face the contradictions of power, and to wield it in the service of the oppressed.

The October Break and the World Revolution

When Losurdo turns to October 1917, he refuses the parlor trick of treating it as an isolated Russian drama. The Bolshevik seizure of power was not a provincial disturbance—it was the detonation of a global fault line, the moment when the cycle of revolutions leapt from the European continent into the bloodstream of the world. To read October in the narrow frame of “totalitarianism” or “Soviet backwardness” is to amputate it from the storm that raged between 1914 and 1945, a conflagration Losurdo calls the “Second Thirty Years’ War.” In that furnace, empires cracked, republics collapsed, and the very definition of democracy was rewritten by the oppressed who poured into the breach. October was not an aberration; it was the sharpest expression of the epoch’s central contradiction: empire versus liberation, capital versus labor, the white world versus the colonized majority.

Losurdo emphasizes Lenin’s wager: that the key to breaking the imperial chain was not waiting for Berlin or London to ripen, but igniting the weak link in Russia and fusing it with the struggles of “the colonial slaves.” This was not romanticism—it was a sober assessment of where the revolutionary energy of the century lay. The European proletariat had been marched off to mutual slaughter under nationalist banners, but the peasants of Asia, the workers of Africa, the insurgents of Latin America carried no such loyalty to empire. By aligning the Russian Revolution with the colonial question, Lenin transformed a European civil war into a global insurrectionary sequence. From Mexico to China, from Vietnam to Algeria, the shockwave of 1917 shattered the myth that history belonged only to the parliaments of Europe.

Here Losurdo is particularly lethal against the comfortable dichotomies of the Western left. For generations, professors and pundits treated October as a tragic detour, a symptom of Russia’s “backwardness,” while holding up Western Europe as the natural home of socialism—just as soon as its philosophers worked out the details. Meanwhile, it was the “backward” peasant armies of the colonial world that beat fascism, broke the European empires, and carried socialism into living practice. To claim fidelity to Marx while scorning these revolutions is to cling to a Europe that had already disqualified itself in the trenches of Verdun and the camps of Auschwitz. What the so-called Western Marxists dismissed as “Eastern despotism” was, in fact, the world revolution stepping onto history’s stage.

Losurdo’s reframing is strategic, not sentimental. He reminds us that the social-democratic promises mouthed by Wilson or Roosevelt—self-determination, Four Freedoms, a people’s peace—were not conjured from the generosity of liberalism but ripped from it by the pressure of Bolshevism and the threat of the colonized. Every concession wrung out of the imperial core was backed by the existence of a workers’ state and the specter of insurgency in the colonies. To narrate the century as “democracy versus dictatorship” is to launder the fact that what democracy the West grudgingly extended was bought with the currency of Red victories and anticolonial fire. To forget this is not neutral—it is to join the counterrevolution in erasing the leverage that oppressed peoples created for themselves.

For those of us organizing in the heart of empire, the lesson cuts deep. The capacity of the oppressed to seize and hold power cannot be judged by the textbooks of their enemies. It must be judged by whether they broke the imperial chain, redistributed the land, armed the people, and held the line against restoration. October did all of this, and in doing so it gave birth to a century of resistance. To call it a mistake is not critique—it is capitulation. It is to prefer the false dignity of defeat to the messy burden of survival. And that is the line between those who recite the catechism of Western Marxism and those who practice the guerilla intellectualism Losurdo demands: to see October not as a deviation, but as the opening act of the world revolution whose stage we are still standing on.

The White Civil War and the Empire Coming Home

Losurdo sharpens the lens further by naming the heart of Europe’s twentieth century carnage: the “white civil war.” What the textbooks politely call two world wars were, in truth, internecine clashes among the ruling classes of the colonial powers, dragging their subject peoples into the slaughter while masking it as a defense of civilization. For centuries Europe had exported its violence outward—massacres in the Congo, famines in Bengal, scorched earth in South Africa—but beginning in 1914 that violence boomeranged back. Concentration camps, exterminationist logic, collective punishment—all of it had been perfected in the colonies before it appeared in Europe’s heartland. The difference was not in kind but in geography. Empire came home, and the white world tasted a fraction of what it had long inflicted abroad.

This framing explodes the tidy mythology of “totalitarianism” as the unique creation of Bolshevism or Nazism. Camps did not descend from the sky in 1917, nor did aerial bombings sprout spontaneously from Hitler’s brain. They were the long echoes of colonial practice, baptized in blood overseas and then reimported under conditions of imperial crisis. To forget this lineage is not just poor scholarship—it is ideological cover, a way of exonerating the West by pretending its greatest crimes were tragic deviations rather than the logical extension of empire. It is why mainstream histories treat the Holocaust as unspeakable but the transatlantic slave trade as a footnote, why Dresden is remembered in horror while the Bengal famine is filed under acts of God. Terror is universal; what differs is whether it is remembered or erased.

Losurdo’s category of “white civil war” also clarifies the stakes of socialist construction. Against this backdrop, the Soviet Union’s ferocious industrialization and military mobilization were not optional cruelties but strategic necessities. A revolution born in a sea of hostile powers could not survive on moral purity alone—it required steel, discipline, and the capacity to withstand the hurricane of fascism unleashed by that civil war. To denounce these measures from the comfort of seminar rooms in Paris or New York is to play the empire’s favorite game: demanding the oppressed wage warfare without weapons, resist invasions without armies, and build new societies without coercion. It is critique designed to guarantee defeat.

Here the Western Marxist posture stands revealed for what it is: an allergy to victory. Preferring the intoxication of failure, it sneers at revolutions that dare to survive the fire. It can praise Rosa Luxemburg for dying in the mud but cannot stomach Ho Chi Minh for outlasting the French, the Japanese, and the Americans. It can romanticize the barricades of 1848 but recoils from the People’s Liberation Army marching into Beijing. The “white civil war” is the mirror held up to this hypocrisy: if Europe’s ruling classes were willing to drown their own continent in blood to preserve empire, why should the colonized be expected to triumph without cost? If the West calls its violence civilization, then why must revolutionaries apologize for defense?

The lesson is unforgiving but necessary. We cannot allow the narrative of the twentieth century to be reduced to a morality play where Europe’s self-inflicted wounds are tragedies and the revolutions of the oppressed are atrocities. We must insist on the continuity: that the camps, the bombings, the genocides, and the famines are the empire’s common tongue, and that socialist power was the first counter-language strong enough to break it. Losurdo forces us to confront the fact that memory itself is colonized, and that to liberate the future we must decolonize the past. Without that act of intellectual insurrection, every revolution to come will be judged guilty before it even breathes.

Antifascism, State Power, and the Right to Survive

In Losurdo’s telling, the Soviet Union’s antifascist struggle is not a side note but the decisive hinge of the twentieth century. Strip away the myths, and the record is unambiguous: it was the Red Army that broke the spine of the Wehrmacht, it was Soviet sacrifice that bled Nazism dry, and it was the existence of a workers’ state that transformed the Allied war aims from empty rhetoric into binding concessions. Yet in the official memory of the West, this truth is buried beneath endless invocations of Normandy, Churchill, and the “arsenal of democracy.” Hollywood can make ten films about Dunkirk and none about Stalingrad because the stakes are clear: to acknowledge the Soviet role is to admit that socialism saved civilization, and that without state power the fascist project would have triumphed.

This is why Losurdo insists that antifascism was inseparable from the question of state-building. The Soviet experiment had no luxury of retreat into academic speculation; it confronted tanks, bombers, and collaborators with the cold calculus of survival. The Five-Year Plans, the forced march of industrialization, the purges of genuine conspiracies—these were not monuments to cruelty but grim necessities carved out of a world that wanted the revolution strangled in its cradle. To condemn them in the abstract is to demand that socialism die nobly rather than live uncomfortably. It is to side with the poetry of defeat against the prose of survival.

For the Western Marxist sensibility, this reality is intolerable. It prefers to imagine itself eternally on the moral high ground, where the revolution remains pure precisely because it never touches power. But antifascism in practice required tanks, commissars, and alliances with forces far removed from theoretical perfection. The Soviet state, flawed and brutalized, held the line so that the petty-bourgeois critic in Paris or New York could one day write books without a swastika on the cover. That these same critics now turn around and declare the USSR a totalitarian twin of Hitler’s regime is not just hypocrisy—it is the consummation of the Black Legend, where the oppressed are condemned for surviving their executioners.

Losurdo pushes the point further: antifascism was not merely a European episode but the global spark for decolonization. Soviet victory emboldened colonized peoples, armed liberation movements, and tore open the myth of European invincibility. From Hanoi to Havana, militants understood that the defeat of Hitler in Berlin was also the defeat of white supremacy’s aura of eternity. To erase the Soviet role is to erase the very conditions that made the Bandung Conference possible, that gave courage to Algeria, to Ghana, to the ANC. In this sense, the vilification of the USSR is also the vilification of the entire anticolonial century.

And so the stakes are clear. To defend the legitimacy of antifascist state power is not to idolize a leader or canonize a party—it is to defend the right of the oppressed to organize their survival in the face of extermination. Those who sneer at “authoritarianism” while enjoying the fruits of Soviet victory are not radicals but freeloaders on the sacrifices of others. The choice remains what it was in 1941: side with the messy, compromised, armed survival of socialism, or side with the purity of defeat dressed up as “critical theory.” Losurdo’s answer is clear, and ours must be as well. The only revolutions worth defending are the ones that refuse to die.

Decolonization and the Expansion of the Revolutionary Century

After 1945, the flames lit in Petrograd did not die out; they spread across continents. Losurdo insists that the twentieth century cannot be understood without placing anticolonial struggle at its center. The so-called “postwar order” that the West celebrates as a triumph of liberal democracy was, in truth, an order shaken to its core by the eruption of independence movements. From India to Algeria, from Ghana to Vietnam, oppressed peoples refused to go back to the plantation of empire. And at each turn, their enemies and their allies revealed the same pattern: imperial powers called their resistance “terror,” while the socialist camp, however unevenly, provided lifelines of solidarity. What Washington and Paris denounced as Stalinism or Maoism was, for the colonized, often the first proof that the white world was not invincible.

Here Losurdo draws out the continuity between the antifascist war and the wars of liberation. The same rifles that defeated Hitler now armed the Viet Minh. The same rhetoric of “freedom” that Churchill mouthed in 1940 was thrown back at him by the Kikuyu in Kenya and the Malay communists in the jungle. Decolonization was not granted by imperial benevolence; it was wrested through blood, and it leaned on the existence of states that had broken with capitalism. Without the Soviet Union, without China, without Cuba, the map of the Global South would look very different. The oppressed did not fight alone, and empire knew it.

But in the ivory towers of the imperial core, another story was being spun. “Western Marxists,” who should have seen in these struggles the living pulse of revolution, often responded with condescension or silence. To them, the real action was still in the seminar rooms of Paris or the debates of West Berlin. They fretted about “bureaucracy” in Moscow but had nothing to say about napalm in Hanoi. They wrote elegies for the failures of 1968 in Europe while ignoring the victories of the Vietnamese peasantry or the Cuban workers. Their Marxism was a philosophy of loss, allergic to the messy, imperfect victories of the colonized. By turning away from state power, they turned away from the actual class war unfolding in their time.

Losurdo exposes the class function of this posture. The petty-bourgeois intelligentsia of the West could afford to admire revolution only when it remained abstract, distant, and defeated. Once the colonized took power and threatened the pipelines, plantations, and markets that sustained the imperial core, solidarity curdled into critique. The very successes that should have been celebrated—land reform in China, literacy in Cuba, resource nationalization in Africa—were repackaged as proof of authoritarian decay. In this way, Western Marxism became the velvet glove over the iron fist, laundering the empire’s denunciations in radical language. It was not an accident; it was an adaptation to their own class interests.

To reclaim the century, then, is to insist on its global character. The revolutions of the oppressed were not deviations from the Marxist script; they were its fulfillment under the harshest conditions. Every step they took toward sovereignty was a step against imperialism, and every “crime” of which they stand accused is in fact the crime of surviving empire’s attempt to annihilate them. Losurdo’s history restores what the ruling class worked so hard to erase: that the twentieth century was not the triumph of liberal democracy, but the century of wars and revolutions in which the colonized majority rose up, armed with both memory and state power, and changed the world.

The State, Utopia, and the Discipline of Survival

In one of the most provocative threads running through War and Revolution, Losurdo dismantles the fantasy that socialism can do without the state. He argues that the notion of the state “withering away,” pulled from Marx and repeated like scripture by anarchists and Western Marxists alike, became a millenarian trap: it allowed critics to denounce every socialist state for the very fact of existing. The petty-bourgeois intellectual could thus keep his hands clean—he would applaud the uprising, romanticize the barricades, and then turn his back once the task of governance began. But for peoples emerging from colonialism, famine, and invasion, the choice was not between utopia and betrayal; it was between building a state or being annihilated.

Losurdo’s point is sharp. Revolutions do not unfold in seminar rooms, they unfold under siege. The Paris Commune collapsed in weeks not because its dreams were too big, but because it lacked the institutional backbone to defend itself against a merciless bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks learned that lesson in blood, and their heirs across Asia, Africa, and Latin America learned it again. To imagine that socialism could simply bypass the state is to imagine a revolution that never survives its first counterattack. The withering away of the state may be the horizon, but to mistake the horizon for the road is to die of thirst in the desert.

This is why Losurdo insists that the real utopianism is not found in those who built steel mills and schools under fire, but in those who pretended socialism could be all roses and no thorns. The “purity fetish,” dressed up as theoretical rigor, functioned in practice as a veto on actual revolutions. If the state exerted coercion, it was condemned. If it forged alliances, it was condemned. If it repressed enemies, it was condemned. The only revolution that satisfied these critics was one that never survived long enough to commit the unforgivable sin of holding power. This is not Marxism—it is political asceticism, a demand that the oppressed immolate themselves on the altar of theory.

Against this, Losurdo counters with the real balance sheet of history. The state, when seized and repurposed by the oppressed, is not the enemy of socialism but its condition of possibility. It was the Soviet state that armed and fed the Red Army to break Hitler’s war machine. It was the Chinese state that turned famine into self-sufficiency for a fifth of humanity. It was the Cuban state that sent doctors to every corner of the Third World while under blockade. None of this was possible without coercion, centralization, and the discipline of survival. To deny the legitimacy of those measures is to deny the right of the oppressed to live at all.

The indictment that Western Marxists fling at every socialist experiment— that it was “statist,” “authoritarian,” “corrupted by power”—turns out to be a confession of their own distance from struggle. They want revolution as literature, not as governance. They want socialism as morality tale, not as construction site. Losurdo does not excuse the errors, but he refuses to confuse necessity with pathology. What the critics denounce as “Stalinism” is, in fact, the unavoidable collision between utopia and survival, between the messianic dream of a world beyond power and the brutal demand to wield power against an enemy that will never surrender peacefully. To stand with the oppressed is to choose survival over purity—and to know that without the discipline of the state, survival is impossible.

Revisionism, Memory, and the Battle Over History

Losurdo closes his excavation with a sobering reminder: history itself has become the most effective battlefield of class war. Revisionism, far from being a neutral academic category, is the instrument through which the victors of empire write verdicts against the revolutions of the oppressed. Every gain is reframed as a crime, every survival as a tragedy, every act of defense as proof of tyranny. In this script, the October Revolution is reduced to Stalin’s paranoia, the Chinese Revolution to Mao’s madness, the Cuban Revolution to Castro’s vanity. The millions lifted from poverty, the defeats inflicted on fascism, the collapse of European colonialism—all are wiped from the ledger so the balance sheet shows only red ink. It is not history; it is counterinsurgency with footnotes.

Losurdo refuses this accounting. He names the “Black Legend” for what it is: a composite weapon forged by fascists, liberals, and renegade leftists to disarm the possibility of revolution. Its method is simple. First, inflate every contradiction into a crime against humanity. Second, erase the context of encirclement, sabotage, and war that forced those contradictions. Third, canonize defeat as noble and victory as monstrous. The effect is paralysis: a generation of radicals taught to revere martyrs but despise survivors, to praise revolution only as long as it remains abstract. This is not critique in service of emancipation; it is critique as a form of surrender.

For Losurdo, the antidote is neither hagiography nor silence but historical materialism applied without apology. To study revolutions as they were—contradictory, improvised, brutal and beautiful—is to reclaim them as sources of strategy, not just morality tales. The point is not to deny errors or repression, but to situate them in the reality of siege warfare against the most violent system history has known. By doing so, we rearm the present against the ideological campaigns that would make every new revolution guilty in advance. We refuse the colonization of memory that turns Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao into demons, while letting Jefferson, Churchill, and Truman pose as saints.

This is where Losurdo speaks most directly to our own conjuncture. The same machinery that slandered the USSR now targets China, Cuba, Venezuela, and any state that dares to step outside the script of neoliberal dependency. The same “critical” voices that dismissed the anticolonial century as authoritarian now wag their fingers at the Belt and Road, at Cuban doctors, at Venezuelan communes. And once again, much of the Western left plays its assigned role—laundering imperial narratives in radical language, offering “solidarity” so long as it costs nothing. It is the old playbook, replayed for a new century.

Losurdo’s wager is that revolutionaries must reject this role entirely. We must become partisans of memory, guerillas of history, defenders of the revolutionary century not as nostalgia but as arsenal. To repudiate the Black Legend is not to worship leaders or erase crimes—it is to keep alive the knowledge that oppressed peoples seized power, built states, and changed the balance of the world. Without that knowledge, we inherit only defeat. With it, we inherit strategy. And in the war to come, strategy is worth more than purity. To side with memory is to side with survival, and to side with survival is to side with revolution itself.

Conclusion: To Inherit the Century as Arsenal

Losurdo leaves us with no comfortable refuge, and that is why his work matters. War and Revolution is not nostalgia for a vanished socialism, nor is it an academic quarrel over footnotes. It is a reminder that the memory of revolution has been captured, weaponized, and turned against us. The Black Legend, repeated endlessly in schools, on screens, and in seminar rooms, is not about Stalin, nor even about the Soviet Union. It is about denying the oppressed the right to rule. It is about ensuring that every people who rises to expropriate their exploiters is branded in advance as a monster. It is the ideological minefield planted across the twentieth century so that we dare not march again.

Against this, Losurdo arms us with clarity. He shows that the real choice was never between utopia and tyranny, but between survival and defeat. He shows that the bloodletting of the twentieth century was not the proof of socialism’s failure, but the price of refusing empire’s world order. He shows that the oppressed made history not by waiting for philosophy to catch up, but by building states, seizing arms, and tearing open space for a different future. And he shows that every attempt to erase these facts is not innocent—it is counterinsurgency disguised as critique.

The polemicists who sneer at Losurdo for “neo-Stalinism” or “falsification” betray their own role in this war of memory. They would rather condemn victory than reckon with its contradictions. They would rather curate a museum of defeats than recognize the dirt and blood that come with survival. Their Marxism is a Marxism of mourning, embalmed in academic prose, safe for a system that will tolerate critique as long as it never translates into power. Ours must be different. Ours must be the Marxism of the insurgent, the partisan, the worker and peasant who built in the rubble and fought with the weapons at hand. Ours must be the Marxism that remembers in order to arm.

To inherit the twentieth century, then, is not to sigh at its failures or repeat the catechism of the victors. It is to treat it as arsenal. Every hard lesson of siege and survival, every contradiction of state and party, every sacrifice made in Stalingrad or in the rice paddies of Vietnam is ammunition for us now. We cannot afford to surrender memory to our enemies, because without memory we walk unarmed into the next war. Losurdo’s wager is ours: that to defend the truth of revolution, even in its darkest hours, is to defend the possibility of revolution at all. The century is not past—it is a weapon. And clarity, sharpened against the lies of empire, is the first bullet in the magazine.