Ep 366 - Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? with Gabriel Rockhill

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese, and today's guest is Gabriel Rockhill.

This is exciting for me as we've moved through class struggle and we've dug into theory and we've looked at the historical implications of things we thought we knew but turned out to not know so well. This is a furtherance of that journey, that adventure, into developing a stronger understanding of class struggle, quite frankly.

And the thing that has been most absent in the U.S. setting, I mean, we don't have unions. We don't have things taught to us in school.

And the things that we are taught are things that probably aren't really real, or if they're real, they're told from the perspective of the empire that we live in. And today's discussion is going to dive into a book.

It's going to dive into a few things outside the book, but it's going to dive into a book that recently came out called the Intellectual World who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill. And let me introduce Gabriel. Before we get started, Gabriel is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist.

He's the founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop.

He's a professor of philosophy and global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University and research associate at the laboratory the Anthropologie Politique Lap in Paris.

Review Press publication for: 2025

And with that, let me bring on my guest, Gabriel Rockhill. Welcome to the show, sir.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:02:43

Thank you so much for having me on.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:46

I appreciate you doing this. I mean, this book, I want to tell you right before starting to read this book, I had read Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare.

And so you start out with a bang in this book describing the way the US powers, the CIA, really wanted to destroy Che, and not just Che, but the concept of communism and erase the story of struggle that he represented. And I think this is super important to kind of set the stage for the rest of what we'll talk about.

And you do a magnificent job in the book of breaking it down, the brutality of how they dealt with Che. Can you start us off, I guess, first of all with that story and then break into the larger why you took on this project?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:03:40

Well, Che was such a threat to the US Empire because he represented the, the revolutionary rising of the global south and its not only desire, but capacity to break the chains of imperialism to liberate nations around the world.

ntina, radicalized seeing the: 1954

And the story that I tell in opening the book is how Che was not only assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, which is a relatively well known fact and established by the archival record, they undertook a international manhunt and then captured him alive and then proceeded to execute him. They actually also sought to take over his literary estate and control his intellectual legacy.

When they captured him, it was in Bolivia and he was seeking to organize the Bolivian people in yet another kind of revolutionary struggle against a US backed dictator. And the Bolivian diary that he kept fell into the hands of the dictatorship that quickly shared it with the US National Security state.

And relatively quickly there was a process that developed where the US National Security State, working with assets in the journalistic and publication world, sought to publish, and eventually did publish a version of the Bolivian diaries that presented a version of Che that's quite different than the version of Che that you would get, for instance, by the Cubans themselves.

And the reason this story was important is because it demonstrates that what most people know about the Central Intelligence Agency, if they've studied it, is that it has run death squads and supported coup d' etat junta's military dictatorships around the world. And it's also been involved in some of the most heinous immoral activities, including targeting the U.S. population.

But many fewer people are aware of the extent to which the United States Central Intelligence Agency is also involved in an intellectual world war on the very idea of an alternative world system that would be non capitalist and would break with imperialism.

And so I thought that this was a helpful framing to the book insofar as a lot of what the book focuses on is the ideological war that has discredited, at least in the eyes of some actually existing socialism and the anti colonial project of Marxism, due to the fact that it is the project that is the greatest bulwark against imperialism. And so the opening of this particular book is actually the book itself is the first in a trilogy.

And I wanted to frame the overall trilogy in terms of a war of ideas because, and this is maybe the last thing that I'll say is that the archival research that I've done and the Freedom of Information act requests that I've engaged in have really made crystal clear to me that the imperialist forces in the world understand that the primary war is a war of ideas and that the pen is actually mightier than the sword.

If you can control people's minds, then it is much easier to control their bodies and to engage in military exploits of the more kind of explicit sort. And so much of what the U.S. national Security State has done historically and continues to do is engage in a war of disinformation.

In fact, one of the things that I point out in the book is that Ralph McGehee, who worked for the CIA for 25 years, referred to the agency as a disinformation agency. And William Casey, who directed the CIA under Ronald Reagan, said that his job would be done when everything the US public thought was false.

Steve Grumbine: 00:08:15

Very well stated. When I look back when we first got started in this, the allure of learning about the Russian Revolution, you know, it was interesting.

It caught our attention.

And in that pursuit of learning about that, I really got to feel that hinge of what is CIA tainted information and what is actual ground based material reality of the time. And one of the books that I read on the heels of this was a book by Clara Matei called the Capital Order.

And she broke down how economists had basically created austerity to discipline working class, to bring everybody back to capitalism, to kind of save capitalism. And you can see this through the lens of Keynes.

And you can see this with obviously the presidency, if you will, of Roosevelt, the fdr, when FDR made the Great Compromise to keep capitalism alive and so forth.

And then obviously the history of McCarthyism and other things, you know, the easy relationship with Joseph Stalin and the US military through World War II and then everything thereafter. It felt like, you know, based on the readings, was about a way of defeating Communism.

Everything from the imf, the World bank, the Peace Corps, usaid.

I mean, so many items that the US put out there was a direct counter to what they saw as the potential rise of communism, bringing it to your book here.

Obviously, when Che Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare, the US military took that to West Point, devoured it, and built an entire training and school of thought on how to deal with guerrilla warfare. Che was a huge figure in this process.

I guess my question is, given all the effort that the CIA and other internal operations within the empire, if you will, the tools they use to change perception, to alter reality, I mean, it feels like you cover that in this book extensively. Can you explain what exactly was the motivation of the US Empire in attacking the communist ideal and the spread of communism?

What was their general underlying fear and what pushed them into this realm?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:10:45

The easiest way of understanding it is that capitalism generates super profits through imperialism.

And imperialism is a process of accumulation on a global scale where the imperial core, countries like Western Europe and the United States seize or are able to, you know, grasp or procure at a pittance natural resources and cheap labor from the global south, mainly Asia, Africa and Latin America. And that creates a value flow of the value produced by nature or labor across the global south to the global North.

That imperial world system is precisely the reason why you have a hyper developed imperial core and you still have major regions of the world where you don't have running water, electricity, basic infrastructure and things like this, the Global south has been systematically underdeveloped by the global north for imperial super profits. What Communism represents in the real world is the end of that system of servitude and subjection which is imperialism.

And if you study the history of actually existing socialism outside of what the imperial propagandists have told us about it, what you'll recognize is that it has been a process by which, to use the words of Lenin, the slaves of the colonies have sought to liberate themselves. And so in the case of the Soviet Union, you have an enormous landmass leveraging itself out of the chains of imperialism.

cularly the period from about: 1945

The reason that this is a problem for the capitalists has nothing whatsoever to do with all of the disinformation about a lack of democracy and authoritarianism and totalitarianism and all of these other ideas that they've put forth.

What it has to do with is the break in the imperial value flow, the idea that the slaves could keep their own natural resources, their own labor, and that they could develop themselves as nations independently of the imperial core. And that is the real threat posed by the actually existing socialist states. They're a threat to the imperial world order.

Moreover, they're the greatest threat to the imperial world order.

There are other forms of resistance, like national development projects that are capitalist or anarchist, islands of resistance, things like this, but none of them have proven themselves capable of really breaking the chains of imperialism and then also working with other countries across the global south to advance a common agenda of human liberation and ecological sustainability.

And it's for that reason that they have attempted to eliminate the socialist alternative, because they recognize that if the anti imperialist socialist project is successful, it will eventually spread around the world and it will end imperialism. And that's the last thing on earth that they want.

Steve Grumbine: 00:14:44

Yes, to say the least. One of the things that I found interesting through my own pursuits is, you know, we started digging into historical and dialectical materialism.

And this is not something that's taught in regular business school, right?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:15:00

Oh, really? That's shocking.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:01

It's not taught in, you know, high school. My kids aren't learning about it as they're being taught about apple pie and flags and bombs and, you know.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:15:10

Exactly.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:11

They hate us for our freedom and stuff like that. And, you know, as I'm learning about this, I'm realizing that some of this stuff is intuitive. You just been brainwashed to not see it.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:15:22

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:23

And talking to Vijay Prashad, one of the things he told me was, Steve, you know, this stuff, you just don't realize, you know, but you do.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:15:30

Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:30

We had a couple folks come through that walked us through kind of the understanding of Stalin's book, historical and dialectical materialism, and again, taboo. What are you doing reading Stalin? What are you doing? And it was weird, it was spicy, it was, wow, I'm reading Stalin, I'm reading Lenin.

These are things that feel taboo at some level. And as you cross over into that, it's like, wow, now I know why they don't want me to read this stuff.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:16:00

Exactly.

Steve Grumbine: 00:16:01

Now I know why they don't want me to understand this stuff.

But the reason why I bring that up is not just to throw some big words in there that, that I'm just stumbling onto, but you go to great lengths to say, I took this as my approach to writing this book. You chose to really use that dialectical and historical materialist lens to unearth and to cobble together this Amazing amount of research.

And let me tell you folks, when you get this book, and I hope you will get this book, when you get the physical copy of it, half of the page is notes, notes that go with the actual narrative. It's so important because this is not some opinion piece.

This is something that is deeply researched, which is, I think, the most jaw dropping aspect of this. I don't think I have ever seen a book so, well, notated in my life.

I mean, hats off to you for the amount of work and the amount of reading you put into just synthesizing your own analysis here.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:17:03

Thanks for saying that. Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:17:04

But explain to us what historical or dialectical and historical materialism means to you and why it was so important for you to use in crafting this novel, this book, this wonderful tome.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:17:18

Well, one of the reasons that I included a lot of notes, there's actually a ton that I didn't put in because it just became unwieldy and more difficult to read, is I want it to be an educational tool for people, meaning that if any reader is interested in a particular aspect, then they can trace out the notes, read the materials that I've read, and pursue it even further, ideally.

And the approach of dialectical and historical materialism has been important for me precisely because it overcomes the limitations of bourgeois knowledge. What I mean by that is knowledge as it's commonly taught and framed within the capitalist world. Right.

So I have kids as well, and we're subjected to the American flags and the Founding Fathers and a lot of fabricated narratives about the history of a settler, colonial, genocidal, white supremacist imperial project. But that doesn't end when you're 6 or 12 or 18.

In fact, it continues and often gets much more sophisticated when you go to the university or you do doctoral degrees.

And one of the things that I realized in studying philosophy and the historical social sciences within the capitalist world is that the extant regime of knowledge that we have carves up the world in such a way that you cannot easily have a holistic and systemic understanding of it and the primary forces that are driving it. And this is one of the primary reasons why they don't teach you dialectical and historical materialism.

Instead they teach you, in my case, I don't know, Borgesian sociology and Derridian deconstruction or other kind of versions of philosophy.

And so in the book I, as an autodidact, because everything important that I've learned has been outside of the university, I wanted to tap into this tradition that focuses on the overarching framework of human societies. And asks the question of how goods and services are produced Within a particular social formation.

And based on that, then analyzes how that society develops over time. And what the primary forces are that are driving that society.

So what Marx and Engels gave us is a kind of big picture, deep historical overview of human societies and what drives them. And in a society that is based on profit rather than on people and the sanctity of nature, the world that is produced is a world where the.

The framework of knowledge doesn't allow us to understand the very world within which we operate.

The historical materialist vantage point begins then, with this kind of the socioeconomic base, if you will, the order of production of goods and services of a particular society. But it always understands those orders as dialectical in the precise sense of being dynamic and interrelational.

And so what I was saying earlier about imperialism Reveals that capitalism didn't just develop in particular areas. It developed as a global system in which every nation is situated in relationship to it.

But that global system itself is driven by a fundamental force that dialectical and historical materialism always centers.

And that is the force of class struggle, Understood both as class struggle from above, Meaning the struggle of the capitalist ruling class to impose its agenda and shore up its power, but also class struggle from below, Meaning the oppressed workers of the world Driving to develop a world that is more in harmony with their interests and the interests of nature.

In that sense, what the dialectical and historical materialist vantage point provides us with is, is an understanding of knowledge that's very different than what I was trained in philosophy or the historical social sciences. Knowledge is deeply embedded in structures of power. And within the capitalist world.

The types of knowledge that are cultivated Are those that advance, directly or indirectly, capitalist interests. And so we have to be able to both definitely diagnose how that's happened historically.

But then also the flip side of that is cultivating the forms of knowledge that contribute to human and extra human liberation. And so I also defend dialectical and historical materialism as being much more rigorously scientific. Than the other options that we have.

Not scientific in a kind of objectivist or positivistic sense.

Like one individual could sit down and apprehend the true nature of reality once and for all, but more scientific in the sense that it is rigorous, Open to new inputs, and constantly evolving to make sense of the world. And if you rely on a dialectical and historical materialist framework, Then you're given a kind of systematic understanding of the world.

And when you encounter new phenomena, you can more easily situate them within that systemic framing. Right?

So when the US kidnaps the democratically elected president of Venezuela, or with the Mossad, MI6, CIA instigated violent protests in Iran, you can take that empirical data and plug it into a broader systemic understanding of the history of imperialism, how it operates, the destabilization campaigns, and quite quickly diagnose what is going on.

And so it's not only that it's more systemic, if you will, it's also that it gives you the tools necessary to constantly integrate new information and make sense of a changing world.

Steve Grumbine: 00:23:42

I love it. I mean, one of the first experiences I had at dipping my toe in the water, and I'm a total noob at this, was the Ukraine stuff with Putin.

And the official narrative is, you know, Zelensky is fighting against the evil Russian empire.

And they don't talk about the history of NATO, they don't talk about what it would be like to have your country engulfed by US missiles and all the rest that goes into the history of NATO and the struggle between the USSR, slash, now Russia, etc.

I guess my next follow up to this is that class struggle is so like front and center with the Marxist theory that I've read going back to Marx and Engels, even reading Rosa Luxembourg and then over on the Lenin side and reading Lenin and even some Trotsky and then of course Stalin.

Now I am curious, what do you think it is that generated this pivot, if you will, from class struggle as a core concept to this cultural revolution, if you will, this kind of identity politics and so forth? It seems like that.

And I don't want to oversimplify because I don't know, I'm guessing here to some degree, even though I have read the book, what is it that generated this Western Marxism that you write about in this book? I mean, that is in essence the divorcing of class struggle from the foundations of Marx, the anti communist leftist.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:25:18

Yeah, there is a tradition that goes all the way back to Marx and Engel's lifetime of a Marxism that is revisionist. And people use that term in many different ways.

But I'm just referring to the idea that you would revise the foundational insights of Marxism to such an extent that you create a theory and practice that actually is alienated from the very essence of Marxism.

And so if your listeners are familiar with Marx's critique of the Gotha program, it was a critique of the kind of reformist project in Germany that did not maintain the revolutionary core of Marxism.

So already in Marx's own time you have his kind of critique of revisionism, but as this developed over time, and Lenin is extremely insightful in this regard, you have a phenomenon that can best be described in the following terms, that if we understand Marxism as a collective and fallibilistic. Fallibilistic, just meaning that it's open to revision. Right? It's true until proven otherwise. Sure.

It's a collective infallibilistic science of liberation. That science itself has unfortunately been transformed and perverted by the history of imperialism itself.

What I mean by that is that since imperialism has hyper developed the imperial core, the working class in the imperial core is situated at the apex of global labor pyramids, and their conditions, as exploited as they might be, tend to be far superior to those of the working class in the global South.

What this means is that at a material level, many workers in the imperial core actually have a vested interest in maintaining imperialism because they benefit directly or indirectly from it.

And so what Lenin pointed out is that some of the leaders of imperial Marxist political parties around the time of World War I actually lined up on their national bourgeoisies, their national ruling classes, and supported the war effort.

Instead of taking the Leninist position, which is that there is no war but class war, and that we shouldn't support an imperialist war in which workers are used as cannon fodder, we should instead make war on the imperialists, meaning the imperial ruling class.

And that led to a major split, what's referred to as the split in the global socialist movement between the Leninists, who were a very small group at that point in time, and then the people who became known historically as the social democrats. At that point they were indistinguishable. Lenin himself referred to himself as a social democrat.

And now we refer to them kind of as the Communists or revolutionary socialists, or those like Lenin and Luxembourg and others like them. And the others are the social democrats who were, want a version of kind of softer capitalism with a social safety net.

And that history has continued to play itself out over time.

And so part of what I focus on in the book is the kind of academic version of revisionist Marxism that you get through the course of the long 20th century.

So if your listeners have studied at the university, then usually the forms of Marxism that you're exposed to are what people call Western Marxism, or I kind of redefine in the book at one point in time as Imperial Marxism, meaning it's a form of Marxism that is highly academic. It's Disconnected for the most part from political parties, from unions, from other political organizations.

And it emphasizes the primacy of theory rather than the primacy of practice.

And it's deeply and thoroughly revisionist in the sense that I just mentioned, meaning that it's breaking with the central tenets and of revolutionary Marxism. This history has developed basically due to two forces, if you will. One is that it's an organic outgrowth of the history of imperialism.

The social and economic forces in the imperial core have tended to foster a version of Marxism that would compromise itself with capitalism and imperialism.

But there's also ideological forces, because a lot of the dominant institutions within the imperial core and the forces that fund them, the capitalist ruling class, have wanted to, and in fact very explicitly decided to support these versions of Marxism as a weapon of war against the anti imperialist Marxism or just Marxism in general.

And part of what I tell in the book is based on a lot of archival research that I did that brings to the fore the fact that the U.S. national Security State and other national security states of imperialist powers, as well as the capitalist ruling class has actually had a longstanding project of supporting certain versions of Western or imperial Marxism over and against real Marxism, because then they could shore up a kind of neutered, toothless version of Marxism that would allow people to think they're being Marxist, when in fact they're actually just embracing a theoretical project that is anti communist.

Steve Grumbine: 00:31:03

Very well stated.

Intermission: 00:31:05

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Steve Grumbine: 00:31:28

That takes me to the next question, because there's some names that you throw in there, some of which I think everybody will see from just YouTube and Zizzek and others. But you spoke historically about folks like Gloria Steinem.

I'm curious, in terms of the US propaganda that we consume on a daily basis, who are some of these people and what was the story behind them? And we could start with whoever you'd like, but I know folks will be interested in hearing about Gloria Steinem for sure.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:32:00

You know, and I realize in giving a slightly more long winded response than I originally anticipated, that I didn't really address the courier question is why is there displacement from class struggle to cultural politics?

But the social chauvinism kind of blended into that and you have elements of it already in the New Left and Then of course, with the vulgar multiculturalism and then identity politics.

Beginning in the 80s and through the course of the 21st century, there's an attempt to replace the class war by the cultural war and also to cast a shadow over the reality of class struggle, which historically has always been national struggle. So the struggle for national liberation of all, all races of peoples around the world, and it's also always been a gendered class struggle.

The very first form of class struggle, according to Engels, was a struggle between men and women.

And so in that sense it's also these kind of culturalist or identity politics are an attempt to erase the history of actually existing socialism's forms of class struggle that include the struggle for racial and gender liberation as quintessential elements. So I'll just add that quickly concerning the complicity of intellectuals under empire, the list is very long.

In: 1975

And some of the more recent scholarships suggest that there might even be higher levels in our day and age.

Steve Grumbine: 00:33:44

Age.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:33:45

And there are of course, different levels of complicity or of collaboration. If it be the CIA or other intelligence agencies.

People like Francis Fukuyama, whom most people are familiar with due to his end of history thesis, was working very closely with the US Government and is kind of indicative of the types of figures who move between US national security posts and then academic posts positions.

The same is true of Samuel Huntington, who was a big professor at Harvard, wrote the book Clash of Civilizations, but was also involved in the US national security state.

Steinem was not only involved with CIA operations, but later bragged about it and said that the CIA was, you know, a chummy group of people doing good work. I don't know why it is that they have such a negative reputation.

the CIA did a calculation in: 1987

So this is the kind of chummy group of old boys that Steinem was very happy to cozy up to. Some of these figures are lesser well known today.

Sidney Hook and James Burnham were both big name philosophy professors at New York University back in the day, and they were moonlighting for the entire intelligence agencies.

Burnham in particular did a lot of work for the opc, which was one of the organizations that was integrated into and very close to the Central Intelligence Agency. There are also a number of journalists who have worked. In fact, Anderson Cooper of CNN did two internships with the CIA.

And so one of the things that I point out in the book is that due to the nature of US law, you can usually get certain documents through Freedom of Information act request after a number of decades, but it's much more difficult to get information about today. And so one of the things that I try to chart out is a lot of the kind of Cold War history which is well documented.

And I also draw on cases where people have openly admitted to working with the CIA, but in other instances that are more recent, it's difficult to know the extent to which they have collaborated because the record is not yet absolutely transparent. Jason Stanley, we know who is a big name Yale professor famous for his extremely liberal book on fascism, which I think is misguided.

His father worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Timothy Snyder, another well known professor who has made part of his career off of supporting the so called Ukrainian freedom struggle and ignoring all the while, of course the history of the Maidan coup and US support for the banderites who were Nazi collaborators and pro fascists. And he has a whole series of suspicious ties to both U.S. interests and to the kind of Ukrainian ruling class.

So there's lots of examples that one could point to and many of them I highlight in the book.

Maybe the last thing that I would say is that obviously when you point out that Emmanuel Wallerstein, for instance, who's another very famous Western Marxist of sorts, he actually was the vice president of a student organization that was discovered to have CIA funding and it was an anti communist student organization. When you point these things out, it, you know, grabs headlines or likes or retweets or things like this.

But one of the things I really insist on in the book is that I'm not doing an individualist analysis of particular figures as much as I am diagnosing the system that produces those figures and will continue to reproduce them.

Because what I want people to come away with is an understanding of the system of imperial knowledge production, how it operates or what its forces are, so that they can then see that system operating independently of the particular individuals that might play a specific role. At one point in time I said it was the last thing.

I'll add one more thing, and that is that some of the book goes into the history of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is arguably the most well known school of Western Marxism.

And the majority of those members of the school who had sought exile in the United States States during the Nazi reign of terror, worked for the US National Security State, including the State Department, the oss, the predecessor organization of the CIA, Voice of America, the Office of War Information. And many of them continued to work for a long time after the war in these organizations.

And then these National Security State agencies functioned as a kind of springboard to their academic career.

Steve Grumbine: 00:38:49

You know, I watched a lot of the blowback, granted on social media. I'm sure it was far more intense for you.

There had to be a badge of honor at some level that people were taking not only an interest in your work, but taking exception to it. And you could tell some of them, once I had read the book, had not actually read the book, they were just attacking you ad hominem.

But it does show just how powerful that kind of system is in defending itself. Yeah, but I think it actually did wonders for you, actually elevated this thing big time, I guess. Congratulations. At some level, or in order.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:39:24

Well, I was just going to say quickly, it's funny when the gatekeepers are so poor at their job that they actually promote the book that they wanted to censor.

And so I'm glad that they did what they did because they not only revealed themselves, at least to the people who weren't in the know, as being the most heinous gatekeepers who would engage in forms of ad hominem mudslinging of the worst and most despicable sort, just absolutely immoral.

But at the same time, they actually created a lot of hype around the book because people thought, well, if the gatekeepers are trying to stop me from reading this book and they'd like to burn it, then maybe there's something in it that's worth reading. And so thank you to the gatekeepers for doing your job so poorly.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:13

That's wonderful piggybacking off of that, though.

One of the things that made me put the book down, it was a couple weeks ago when I first started really reading it, but it stuck, was your description of what I'm going to use my own frames. I wish I could remember the words you chose. You were like a hollowed husk of nothing.

You had gone through all the schooling, you've learned all this stuff, and you were sitting there like, this is just nonsense. I, what am I? And it forced you to make a change.

It forced you to pivot in the way you approached your scholarship and your work and your view of the world. Because I'll tell you, I came from a far right wing Background. My mom and dad were Reagan folks.

s. It was not until, like,: 2007

Even though it wasn't from being a Rush Limbaugh guy to this, it was definitely an eye opener. Can you describe what you were up against in your initial work? And then that kind of personal change shift that occurred?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:41:27

Well, hats off to you, because I know how difficult those personal changes are, and it's much easier for people to keep their heels dug in and just stick to whatever it is that they've inherited from the world they've been born into. And in my own case, I was, I guess, very cerebral as a young person.

I grew up on a farm in Kansas and wanted to, you know, pursue the life of the mind. Was very into poetry and literature, and I kind of followed what was on offer and was also quite, I guess, a workaholic.

And so I ended up through a series of complicated relations that probably aren't worth getting into. I went to college, and then I was able to get a grant to study in Paris with people who are considered the leading luminaries of French thought.

And at that point in time, it was in the 90s, you know, and I was in my early 20s, I really thought that I was going to study with the most important philosophers in the world because that's how they were presented within the US Intellectual landscape within which I was operating.

And I basically engaged in a process of empirical verification, and little by little began discovering that, well, the things that they were talking about didn't really map on as well as they thought they did. And yet I was an interloper.

You know, I was working in a foreign language, coming from a farm, and hanging out with a Parisian intelligentsia is a little bit of a stark contrast, to say the least. In fact, I used to joke with my girlfriend that when I first went to Paris, I was such a heyseed that I would, like, say hi to people on the street.

This is a big cosmopolitan city, you know, and there I am like, hi, bonjour, bonjour. You know, with a bad American accent.

And so it was a process, if you will, of transformation that was at once gradual, but then there were moments of intensification.

,: 2001

And it dawned on me that I had been studying with the leading luminaries in the world, apparently, and yet I was ignorant of the most basic facts of human existence on planet Earth. And that process of self critique is what would lead decades later to this book and other projects related to it.

Because I realized that I was just a cog in the system of imperial knowledge production. And one of the reasons the gatekeepers are so pissed off at me, most of them are elite.

You know, they're born into the elite and they wanted to make sure that they could maintain the kind of sanctity of their special handshakes and inner circles and whatnot.

And here there's somebody from the outside who had succeeded in working through the ranks and got all the distinctions and all of that, for what that's worth.

But then I saw through the system and thought that, well, I didn't want to just continue to be a cog in the kind of knowledge machinery of imperialism. I actually wanted to pour, you know, sand into those gears and to stop the way in which it operates.

And that is the biggest threat, if you will, that I pose to people like that. I actually call out the system for what it is.

It's a system of industrialized ignorance in which some of the leading intellectuals in the world don't understand the most basic things regarding the global structures of imperialism.

The struggle to break the chains of imperialism, actual history of socialism in the real world, and these are the forms of knowledge that we have to produce.

The last thing that I'll say is that, you know, in going through this process of self critique that, you know, I'm quite glib about at this point in time, but I assure you was very painful. It was also a detriment to my career. I got basically banned from a whole series of spaces and uninvited and things like this.

And there were elements of career blowback that continue to exist. But when you look at it from the vantage point that I have now, it actually makes perfect sense.

The forms of knowledge that are actually going to help break the chains of imperialism and liberate humanity and save the planet before it's too late are the forms of knowledge that imperialism is going to try to destroy by any means necessary. Therefore, we should always ally with, learn from and get plugged into the knowledge producers from below around the world.

And one of the groups of people that I've learned the most from are the anti imperialist Global South Marxists around the world. And that form of knowledge is absolutely priceless. You're not going to find it at Harvard or Columbia or any of the elite institutions.

And if you do, then they will probably slander it or misrepresent it. But it is the form of knowledge that we need to turn the human project around before it's too late.

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:41

You know, the reason why I brought this up is it really touched me really deeply when I read your story, because that conversion process. You know, this is going to sound, possibly even silly, but it means a lot to me.

I've spent almost 20 years trying to teach people basic macroeconomics because the stuff that we're taught is a lie.

And when you understand where money comes from and you understand the power of the state and whose interests are represented by the state, and then you see them waxing on about the national debt now, you know, basically beating down on poor people for being moochers and all this other ridiculous stuff, it really put me into motion. It was the escape hatch from right wing thinking. And it really was the catalyst for me moving left and left and left.

But I was not an academic, I was not invited to the party, and I stuck my nose in the door with modern monetary theory, where there was a bunch of people already doing this stuff. And I had a passion for it. And I started groups, I started a podcast, I started a nonprofit, I did a bunch of things without permission.

I didn't kneel, I didn't ask, I just did it. And there was people that said, you know, we don't need a messianic figure representing modern monetary theory. And I was cut out of things.

I was ignored. And the further left we've gone, you can see the distancing of various people that I once thought were dear friends.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:48:11

Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:11

But they're pushed away. And it was quite painful. And. But the information is taking me somewhere that I didn't plan.

I didn't have a grand thought of where we were going with this.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:48:21

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:22

And so seeing a book like yours here, it starts exposing some fractures in my own brain and my own thought process and the some of the things I thought were absolutes and true and so forth. So this really touched a huge vein in me and it made this interview, quite frankly, really important to me.

I want to pivot back to the book momentarily.

You talked about theory's use value and exchange value, and you kind of busted out on the theory industrial complex for lack Of a better term, this grand group of people that are, you know, making money on this handover fist. Can you talk a little bit about what. What that industry looks like and how it's funded and how it propagates itself?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:49:12

Well, a lot of that industry functions like other culture industries.

And one of the elements that I bring to the fore in the book is that just as we have critical scholarship on, I don't know, the music industry or the movie industry or the TV industry, we need critical scholarship on the theory industry, the art industry.

And one of the difficulties is that many of the intellectuals who are part of the theory industry, or for that matter, artists who are part of the art industry, they operate under the ideological illusion that the world that they function in doesn't abide by these kind of crass materialist forces that are so prevalent within other industries.

And this is simply the result of the bourgeois ideology of culture that attempts to elevate high theory and art above the kind of cultural products that are for the masses.

And what I try to detail in the book is that these industrial forces make it such that a lot of the theory that circulates doesn't circulate because it has a use value to people's struggles on the ground. It circulates because it has exchange value within insider discourses and symbolic value because of the various connections between these figures.

And therefore, it has a kind of internal logic to it that disconnects it from real political and material class struggle. And that, for me, allows us to see that there are kind of systemic forces that are driving a lot of the theory industry.

Because at the end of the day, the theory industry is a capitalist industry, and it is about generating revenue.

One of the ways that you see this very clearly, if you read some of the people who are touted as being the most important Marxist or post Marxist scholars today. Slavoj Iek, Alain Beddieu, Michael Hart, Antonio Negri. There are many other figures that one could cite.

Often what you'll come away with is a set of critical reflections that are very intricately woven into a bunch of references to other cultural commodities, meaning other books and, you know, movies and things like this. And the final takeaway, often in the case of someone like Zizek, amounts to, well, buy my next book.

And that is supposed to advance the human project. It makes no sense. It's just about hawking one's wares and pushing commodities just like one would push any other commodity.

And so, for me, bringing to the fore the kind of capitalist exchange value and the way in which it perverts theory and makes it much more about selling goods than actually about being useful is essential. And most people at a certain level, if they're exposed to these ideas, identify that at a particular level.

Like if you crack a book by some of these figures and you don't understand anything in the book, and just at the level of the phraseology, just the sentences themselves, people will often think, oh, well, I'm stupid, I'm under educated. They must know a lot more than I do. But that's often not the case.

It's often the case that they're actually just producing intricate webs of words in order to push a particular high theory commodity.

They're creating this symbolic value and the veneer of sophistication that is off putting to most working people because their goal is not to connect to working people. Their goal is to push their commodities and leverage up their symbolic value within the networks within which they operate.

This is the mirror opposite of, you know, the work of someone like Michael Parenti, one of the greatest US American thinkers of the 20th century. You read his work and it's straightforward and just about anybody can read it and understand it.

Of course, in my own case, the book that I wrote is targeting a little bit more of a highly educated population because it's dealing with some intricacies of that world.

But I certainly attempted to use prose that, if you're familiar with some of the material that I'm engaging with, is readily understandable, because the goal is to be as clear as possible, not to create, you know, symbolic value through unnecessary intricacies.

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:08

I appreciate that. I mean, I know some of this stuff. And so everything wasn't like the first time I had read it, but a lot of it was fresh and new and, wow, okay.

And I appreciate the notes. The notes will be sending me off on a lifetime journey of research. So I really appreciate you doing that.

It's so hard to find material that you can trust.

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:54:31

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine: 00:54:32

And at the same time, knowing that you have to have a filter. You have to have a filter. You can't read anything without having some form of filter. It can't go in defenseless.

You've got to go in there with an active mind.

And so I appreciated this very much because, you know, obviously I love that what you said before we got into this, it was like, I don't want to do sectarian stuff, and I don't know enough to be sectarian. Maybe. That's a beautiful thing. I feel good about it because I'M not fighting Stalin versus Trotsky on a daily basis. I'm learning things.

I am getting to a point where I have some ideas and opinions on those things, right? But I'm not ready to go and I don't want to go.

I don't really know that I want to, you know, engage in that kind of relitigating 100 year old kind of stalemates. But there are some interesting things that I'm stumbling onto and learning myself and trying very, very hard to.

I don't know how to say it, but I guess just in general, just come into agreement with the facts, the real facts, and be able to have that lens, that framework for analyzing current events and being able to not be knocked over the head every time something stupid happens and thinking, well, that was stupid. Why did they do that? When in reality it's in their class interest to do exactly that.

The fool was me thinking they were there to serve my needs as opposed to realizing that they are there to serve their own class needs. The institutions, the role of institutions, the role of various intellectual concepts that just don't seem to pass a sniff test.

And I love your phraseology of navel gazing in there.

It's something that we use around here a lot because it does sometimes feel weird that, you know, you've got the world blowing up around you and yet you're talking in terms that aren't going to in any way, shape or form impact anyone. I mean, people are not getting more educated from reading what you wrote. Not you. You were fantastic.

But you know, in general, I guess, to close us out and I appreciate your time here.

The nature of this book was not to look at things that we can't dig into as much based on your look, see, if you will, at the Freedom of Information act requests and how hard it is to get actual data. But I guess what I would ask you going out, because this book is 400 pages long, so obviously there's a lot that we didn't cover.

What would you want to have covered that I didn't cover here that you think would be of interest to our listeners?

Gabriel Rockhill: 00:57:02

I would say that one of the most important things about the book is the big picture reason why I wrote it, which has less to do with a lot of the details in the book and much more to do with the history of left organizing and the current state of global class struggle.

And I recognize that the left, particularly in the imperial core, has unfortunately been transformed due to the forces of imperialism into a fake or pseudo left, which is Usually capitalist and imperialist, accommodationist at a minimum.

And that from my vantage point, if we want to save the world before it's too late, we need the rejuvenation of a real left that rejects imperialism and rejects capitalism, while embracing the project of socialist state building that has proven itself to be the material means by which another world is not only possible, but actual in the sense that it is being built.

And that framing, I think, is not only important but urgent because as late imperialism continues to try to seek ways to rejuvenate the super profits of the grand neoliberal era, it is increasingly turning to a fascist option and bringing the forms of colonial violence to the home front, as we see in all of the ICE raids and in so many other ways. We're going to see, I think, an intensification, and we already have, of the kind of colonial fascistic elements of the imperial core.

And we need a strong left response to that.

Doesn't simply attempt to re establish the kind of liberal imperialist status quo of the earlier Cold War, but instead gets on board with charting an alternative path for human development on planet Earth. And it's very clear that path needs to be a socialist path.

And although my book doesn't, you know, very explicitly get into any of these particular issues, although it touches on them in passing in various ways, I think that the main reason that I've written the book is that I want to give people resources for understanding why the left has become a fake left, but then also provide them some of the tools necessary for reconnecting the red thread to the deep, broad international history of revolutionary Marxism so that they can tap into these resources and rejuvenate a struggle for a better world in the contemporary moment.

Steve Grumbine: 01:00:12

I really appreciate you taking us through this. I hope we can have you back on.

I know you've got other books coming out, but we are thirsty, we're hungry, we want to learn and really been binge watching a lot of your material lately. And I feel like that really helped me kind of get to know who you are and get to kind of know where you're coming from.

And I really appreciate this so much. Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: 01:00:37

Well, I'd be happy to reconnect.

I actually have another, this co authored book that you mentioned with Emeric Monville that's going to come out in June with Monthly Review Press and it's called Requiem for French Theory. But it really is a critique of postmodernism as well as a deep reflection on the history of Marxism and a critique of contemporary fascism.

And so there's a lot of material in that book that doesn't just focus on the issue of postmodernism. And I'd love to reconnect in the future if the opportunity presents itself. For sure.

Steve Grumbine: 01:01:09

Absolutely. Well, from my heart and from the gang that supports it, we're all volunteers, man.

It's really nice to be able to talk to somebody who's done this hard work and allow us just to get to know this stuff. I mean, we appreciate it. I appreciate it personally.

So thank you so much on behalf of myself and the organization and Real Progressives and the podcast Macro and Cheese. Thank you so much for that. I know you run the Critical Theory Workshop, which is something else I'd like to touch on in the future as well.

Where can we find more of your work?

Gabriel Rockhill: 01:01:40

I recently started a substack, and I think I'll use that as a portal for interviews, publications, and things like this.

And then the critical theoryworkshop.org is a platform with links to a lot of the different collective activities that I'm involved in, including a summer school that we run and other related activities. So those are probably the two best go to spots.

Steve Grumbine: 01:02:05

Fantastic. All right, I'm going to go ahead and take us out. Thank you very, very much for doing this.

Gabriel Rockhill: 01:02:10

Thank you, folks.

Steve Grumbine: 01:02:11

Gabriel Rockhill, the author of the book the Intellectual World War, who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, Please pick it up. It's definitely a great read and it keeps you going. It just pulls you through. Real progressives is a 501 not for profit.

Please consider becoming a monthly donor. We do not paywall anything that we do. We think that if we put it out there, it's important for us to do so.

It's important for us to make it available to you as well. And if you find value in the work that we do, consider becoming a monthly donor. You can go to patreon.com realprogressives.

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Tuesday evenings every week, we take the podcast that we do. We break it down into segments, and we discuss it in a webinar form. You know, Gabriel, we would love to have you as a guest, if that's possible.

We do it on Tuesday evenings every week. When this podcast goes out, it'll be on the following Tuesday. And that is a couple hours.

We sit down, we break it through, we talk about it and ask questions and build community. So it's a good time for all. And with that, on behalf of myself and my guest and my organization, Real Progressives, we are out of here.

End Credits: 01:03:44

with the working class since: 2015