Brendan Duncan-Shah

Marxism in the imperial core is currently going through a process of reorientation, regroupment, and renewal. The period from 1991 to 2008 constituted what Samir Amin has called the second belle epoque of capital.¹ Emerging out of a period of relative defeat for socialism, capitalism was ascendant. The wave of privatisations and the relocation of manufacturing to the Global South injected a wash of surplus into the system. Emboldened by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. led imperialist alliance consolidated its hold on the world capitalist economy through its organs, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Centre. The U.S. itself indulged in unrestricted, ‘naked’ imperialism, carrying out a slate of invasions with complete impunity in Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq again (2003), to mention just the well known ones.² In the Global North, “radical” thought withdrew from Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985 heralded a trend that was to consolidate itself up to 2008: the retreat from class politics. Various kinds of “post-Marxisms” emerged and became dominant in the centres of intellectual production. Non-class based forms of political organisation entered the scene with increasing frequency—tailed theoretically by works like Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (2004). The spontaneous working class movement itself fell into a lull, settling into a total divorce from Marxism. Unions, softened by the sop from half a century of unequal exchange, either made peace with their integration into the bourgeois state or vanished as a serious social force. The result was that working people were deeply unprepared to contest the slow rollback of the social wage. All of these trends should be seen for what they were: symptoms of a period of defeat for the real movement.

2008 reversed the downswing, but was beset by political disorientation and confusion, mistaken analysis, strategic dead-ends, and tactical errors. Class politics were once again tabled, but in a highly obscure form, and suffered from an absence of strong organisations positioned to advance the class struggle. Overall, the contradiction of the decade 2010-2020 was this: a global resurgence of mass activity coupled with underwhelming—and in some cases even retrograde—social progress.³ Horizontalism was the order of the day. “Decentralised,” “non-hierarchical” forms of organisation predominated, sometimes in self-conscious opposition to the supposedly outdated Leninist cadre organisations of the twentieth century. The feeling in the room in the Global North was that the supposed “failure” of actually existing socialism had shown Leninism to be a dead duck. Decades of New Left and post-Marxist social theory had contributed enthusiasm for structurally flat, networked organisations—made easier by new social technology.⁴ But again and again the spontaneous movement failed to achieve its aims, and in some cases punctured a hole in the social structure that made room for the forces of reaction. To deploy an expression used by Marx and Engels in a very different context, we carried on the ‘fight separately in every town and in every province for one and the same advance.’⁵

Since 2020 or thereabouts we’ve seen a very different set of trends gain traction. Slowly, but progressively, the left in the imperial core is overcoming its fragmentation; it is returning to firm class politics and effective organisation; it is reconnecting with the Marxist mainstream, the projects of socialist revolution and construction in China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere, but also with what Domenico Losurdo called ‘the principal question of the twentieth century,’ the world anti-colonial revolution ‘mostly led by communist parties’; and perhaps most importantly, it is coming to grips with the worldwide regime of imperialist accumulation, the primary obstacle to our collective social emancipation.⁶

This is the context in which Gabriel Rockhill’s recent book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, has been published. In my view, it is best understood as a part of, and an attempt to accelerate, the ongoing process of socialist reconfiguration, reorientation, and ultimately renewal. Its central plea is political: an appeal to move away from some of the predominant “left” frameworks which have left us in such bad stead.

There is an intrinsic difficulty with this project. The features of the old landscape remain in place: an inserted distance between theory and mass practice; a fondness for spontaneity and horizontalism; a refusal to confront imperialism; and so on. There exists an inertia induced by the defeats of the preceding period; the tendency towards reorientation is only that—a tendency. The problem, to use a formulation from Hegel, is this: that although it is hard enough to build a new city in a devastated land, even greater is the difficulty ‘when the task is to give a new layout to an ancient and solidly constructed city, with established rights of ownership and domicile.’ For ‘one must also decide, among other things, to not make use of much otherwise valued stock.’⁷

This is a long review of a dense book that deserves serious engagement, adequate to what is evidently the tremendous labour involved in its production. It is an ambitious book, the first volume of planned trilogy titled The Intellectual World War: Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry. It has a number of aims and objectives, and its scope is enormous, making it difficult to summarise. I would compress its main argumentative thread as follows.

Ideas do not create and disseminate themselves; instead, their production and circulation depend on a whole host of material institutions dedicated to that purpose. These institutions are themselves embedded in social formations characterised by a definite mix of definite relations of production, exchange and distribution, and which reflect a definite configuration of class power. For this reason, intellectual production cannot escape the influence of class forces. In capitalist society, the capitalist class, enjoying monopoly control over the central means of intellectual production, conditions and shapes the production and circulation of ideas in conformity with its own interests. It does this by means of a whole architecture of uplift and suppression, of incentive and disincentive, which it is able to put in place directly by means of its own class power and indirectly by means of the bourgeois state and its organs. In contemporary capitalism, the world economy is dominated by an imperialist alliance led by the United States, an arrangement in which the U.S. capitalist class and its allies are the principle beneficiaries. The United States and its ruling class therefore play the role of overall guarantors of the existing system of accumulation, and they work towards this end not only through directly economic and political means but also by structuring intellectual production. On its own and through the state, the U.S. ruling class conditions the production and dissemination of ideas in conformity with the needs of imperialism. The main centres of ideological production—the mass media, the culture industry, and academia—all reflect their social location within this overall system, which means they all generally output ideas that support or otherwise accommodate capitalism and imperialism. The tradition of Western Marxism, represented especially the Frankfurt School and its doyens—Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—is not exempt from these pressures; it circulates freely and widely within certain sectors of academia precisely because it is largely accommodating to the existing capitalist and imperialist system. Moreover, the predominance of Western Marxism is at least partly explainable in terms of the profound integration of its major figures into networks of patronage and uplift constructed by the U.S. state and its organs—permitted, and indeed encouraged, because they did not represent genuine oppositional forces to capitalism and imperialism. The social effect of Western Marxism’s predominance has been to induce theoretical disorientation and practical submission in the face of imperialism among those for whom it is the central, orienting framework. Reorientation away from Western Marxism and towards a genuinely oppositional theory and practice is therefore a political necessity if our aim is to dismantle imperialism, the central obstruction to socialism and collective liberation.

It should be clear that this is a complex and sophisticated thesis. In my view, it is essentially correct, and moreover politically important. If theoretical reorientation is a necessary condition for the revival of Marxism as a social force in the imperial core—as I believe it is—then any contribution which advances that project is to be enthusiastically welcomed. The book does, however require careful attention and frankly time to digest—not least because of the rigour evident in its construction (it contains, by my count, in excess of a thousand individual footnotes, including a good deal of first-hand archival research). What I have tried to do in this review is lay out what I take to be the essential structure of the argument. The sheer quantity of empirical evidence, however, is impossible to do justice to. These facts recommend reading the book yourself.

The political economy of knowledge

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? is best described as an exercise in the material history of ideas or the political economy of knowledge. At the beginning of this review, then, it is necessary to locate Rockhill’s project in the basic tradition of Marxist theories of ideology and ideological production.

We know from Marx that on the basis of society’s economic structure—itself comprised of relations of production and corresponding (or partially non-corresponding) forces of production—there ‘arises a legal and political superstructure’ and correlate ‘forms of social consciousness.’ Because of the dependence of both the superstructure and social consciousness on the overall organisation of production, the system of production ‘conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.’⁸ However, as Rockhill notes, social consciousness and the superstructure proper are ‘heuristically distinct.’⁹ Social consciousness refers to the mental life of an embodied, socially situated individual—it encompasses her attitudes and beliefs (both conscious and dispositional), ideas, habits, desires, values, affects, and her overall practical comportment to her everyday milieu. The superstructure proper, on the other hand, refers primarily to institutions. In Marx’s original formulation cited above, from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, superstructure designates the juridico-political structure or the state, encompassing parliament, the courts, the police and all the other means of social administration and domination. That conception of the superstructure is commonly and uncontroversially expanded (by Marx and Engels themselves) to include institutions of cultural and intellectual production: ‘schools and universities, think tanks, libraries, media, publishing platforms, culture industries, the means of communication, the digital world’ and so on, as Rockhill has it.¹⁰

Naturally, there is a positively enormous theoretical tradition on the mechanisms through which the structure and superstructure together compose social consciousness, to which Rockhill has contributed elsewhere.¹¹ In Who Paid the Pipers, the accent is generally on the institutional side, ‘on the objective systems that produce particular ideologies’, and more specifically on that arrangement of institutions occupied with intellectual production.¹² The basic conviction here should be acceptable to every Marxist: ideas are not generated spontaneously, like Aristotle’s little worms; neither do they circulate with ease through empty, airy social space; instead, their existence and dissemination depends on institutions dedicated to their production, circulation and consumption. As Rockhill puts it, ideas ‘are developed within particular, concrete circumstances, and they result from specific theoretical practices, which themselves are an outgrowth of society’s overall organization of intellectual production, as well as production more generally.’¹³ The crucial point for Rockhill’s purposes is that, in capitalist class society founded on private ownership of the means of production, the ruling class enjoys ‘monopoly control over the world of ideas.’¹⁴ That is, if, as Marx famously put it, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,’ then in capitalist society this is on the one hand a consequence of the intrinsically mystifying character of capitalist relations of production (the obscure character of the wage, for instance, or the occlusion of surplus-value by profit), and on the other the result of bourgeois monopoly control over the institutions of ideological production and distribution.¹⁵ As Rockhill notes, ‘ideology, while arising out of class dynamics, is shaped, developed and overseen by an ensemble of institutionalized forces that condition social life.’¹⁶ The simple fact is, as Lenin memorably observed in What is to Be Done?, that when compared with the working classes the capitalist class ‘has at its disposal immeasurably more means of [ideological] dissemination.’¹⁷ In capitalist society then, the dominant centres of intellectual production and circulation—not least the media and the universities—tend to output knowledge that conforms to capitalist class interests. The bourgeois social sciences, for instance, typically produce fragmentary knowledge that fails to bring into view a social totality dominated by capitalist class power, that erases class struggle, and that renders the wage-relation a neutral exchange relation rather than a relation of class domination.¹⁸

This much should be universally agreeable to any Marxist. Later in this review I go into the precise mechanisms of ideological control over intellectual production that Rockhill brings to light, but so far it is difficult to imagine any self-professed Marxist objecting to the above picture. This is, in my view, a great strength of Who Paid the Pipers; it advances on top of the basic Marxist theory of intellectual production and circulation. As I see it, the book should be understood as an attempt to extend this foundational Marxist perspective by drawing into consideration a key element—probably the key element—of the contemporary capitalist system: imperialism.

The imperial superstructure: imperialism and intellectual production

Imperialism refers to (1) the current hierarchically organised world capitalist structure in which a small group of very wealthy countries—in most cases the beneficiaries of historical colonialism—dominate and exploit the great majority of humanity who reside in the Global South; (2) the mechanisms (diplomatic, economic, military, cultural) which produce and reproduce this worldwide structure of accumulation; and (3) the social and political expressions of the structure. Rockhill himself deploys Cabral’s concept of imperialism, which is in essence commensurate with my gloss here:

imperialism may be defined as the worldwide expression of the profit motive and the ever-increasing accumulation of surplus values by monopoly finance capital, [centred] in two regions of the world: first in Europe and, later, in North America.¹⁹

This formulation of imperialism has its roots in Lenin and the early Comintern tradition; but it extends through the twentieth century socialist and socialist-led anti-colonial movements, as well as through the tradition comprised of dependency theorists, theorists of unequal exchange, and world-systems theorists.²⁰ It differs from a notion of imperialism (not yet a concept) that circulates widely throughout the left in the imperial core, which figures imperialism as any sort of territorial aggression or expansionist activity by a state—a flat and analytically unproductive formulation that formally equates countries as materially diverse as Indonesia and the United States. In the last few years the imperial core left has been compelled to return the term “imperialism” to the agitational docket by the increasingly shameless actions of the United States and its allies towards Palestine, Iran, Venezeula and Cuba, to mention just the most direct expressions of contemporary imperialist violence. But as John Bellamy Foster has argued, the Western left has failed to properly situate these gross crimes within the system of accumulation they are intended to uphold and of which they are an expression.²¹ Generally speaking, the Western left evinces a complete ignorance of the world imperialist system, despite the fact that the political economy of imperialism—which is undergoing something of a renaissance—has probably advanced our knowledge of the system further than at any other point in history.²² In my view, one of the most enduring contributions of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism will be its work in bringing into view the following fact: that the worldwide imperialist structure has its superstructural correlate.

U.S. leadership of the world imperialist system was consolidated following World War II. Britain, the former head of the imperialist bloc, had been devastated by the war along with the rest of Western Europe, leaving the U.S. as the defacto leader of the bloc. Still, as Samir Amin notes, the thirty-five years from 1910-1945 should not be conceived solely as a succession struggle for leadership of the system of accumulation, of which the U.S. was only the final victor. Instead, the period must also be understood as one of a ‘long war conducted by the imperialist centers against the first awakening of the peripheries (East and South).’²³ Anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America were ascendant; communists in Vietnam and China were rapidly becoming the dominant domestic social force; and the 1918 invasion of the soon-to-be Soviet Union by the frenzied imperialist powers had failed completely. All this indicated a profound threat to the world imperialist arrangement. Accordingly, when the U.S. emerged in 1945 as the leading imperialist power, it was compelled to enlist the imperialist bloc in an offensive against those forces dangerous to the system of accumulation, of which the existing and emerging communist powers were the spear-tip. As Rockhill summarises:

the United States sought to integrate the former imperialist powers of Western Europe, which had been ravaged by the war, as junior partners in an international war on communism. That way, the imperial looting of the Third World could continue unabated, with the United States taking the leading role.²⁴

We all know from Marx, Engels and Lenin that the state under capitalism is not a neutral institution, but a tool for advancing capitalist class interests. Likewise, we know from the work of Radhika Desai and others that capitalist states in the global arena will generally work to maintain the incumbent regime of world accumulation so long as that regime is beneficial to their own ruling class.²⁵ When it comes to the United States—which, as the main beneficiary of the imperialist system of accumulation, plays the role of its principal overall guarantor—the scope of activity in service of the existing arrangement is enormous and criminal. Of use to it are not only diplomatic, political and economic measures, but a whole host of coercive mechanisms: wars, coups and covert operations of all kinds. On this point Rockhill cites a series of facts from William Blum. Since World War II, the United States has:

• Endeavored to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;
• Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries;
• Attempted to assassinate more than fifty foreign leaders;
• Dropped bombs on the people of more than thirty countries;
• Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in twenty countries.²⁶

As Rockhill points out, Blum’s facts are over a decade old. Since then, we could add a whole host of events to the tally just from those that we know of. The accelerated pace of imperialist incursions should not allow us to forget that just this year the United States plucked a sitting President from his capital and imprisoned him, something nearly unprecedented in human history, and certainly something unthinkable for any other state on the planet.

But in addition to these coercive measures, the central conviction of Rockhill’s book is that the United States deploys state power to conform intellectual and cultural production to the requirements of maintaining the imperialist arrangement. Above I discussed the sense in which in the capitalist class are able to generally condition the production and circulation of ideas via their monopoly control over the institutional means of cultural and intellectual production. In light of this, it stands to reason that the capitalist state, insofar as its represents the agency of the ruling class, will itself attempt to influence the production and dissemination of ideas. As far as the principle imperialist power, the United States, is concerned, this influence will take the form of efforts to maintain and extend the global imperialist system from which it benefits—and in fact this is exactly what Rockhill’s book evidences at length. As Rockhill reveals, the enormous and criminal scale of the coercive measures deployed by the U.S. correlates to the enormous and criminal scale of its attempts to condition the production of ideas. As he puts it,

While each society has its own specific superstructure, the United States, as the foremost imperialist state, has developed the most powerful superstructure, and it has engaged in cultural imperialism to extend its influence as much as possible around the world.²⁷

The U.S. state’s most well known organs of ideological influence are the State Department and, crucially and infamously, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The impact of these institutions on ideological production has already been documented extensively by scholars like Hugh Wilford and journalists like Frances Stoner Saunders, whose work Rockhill makes much good use of.²⁸ (On this see the rather comprehensive discussion in Part 1 of Rockhill’s book, which is a wide ranging treatment of the “Imperial Knowledge” system.) But in addition to the work of others, Rockhill’s account benefits from what must have been a tremendous amount of first-hand time in various archives housing intelligence material, the result of which is a great deal of extremely revealing documentation. Here, one set of materials in particular deserves to be highlighted: the documents from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). As Rockhill explains, the PSB ‘was established in 1951 to oversee and coordinate the psychological warfare operations of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, military services, and other government agencies.’²⁹ The significance of the PSB material, according to Rockhill, consists in the fact that it directly and clearly lays out the U.S. and its agencies’ operative orientation to psychological warfare since the post-war period. One such document from 1952, for instance, outlines the very concept of ideological or doctrinal warfare:

Doctrinal (ideological) warfare is, or should be, a central factor in our psychological warfare. It exposes the basic vulnerabilities of the hostile systems and exploits the beneficial or favorable aspects of one’s own system to persuade people away from the former and to adopt rational solutions. It should provide the foundation on which effective propaganda could be based.³⁰

In other words, a key objective of the U.S. state was (is) the intellectual discrediting of communism as a worldview. Other material from the PSB that Rockhill unearths shows just how this was to take place. As another document explains, the aim is to cultivate ‘long-term intellectual movements, which will appeal to intellectuals, including scholars and opinion-forming groups.’³¹ This document, writes Rockhill,

recognized that the target audience for doctrinal warfare is the professional intelligentsia. The logic is simple: because it manages the minds of the masses through the media, education, religious organizations, civic associations, etc., the intelligensia—if correctly trained—can establish and consolidate an ideological doctrine among the general population.³²

Of particular salience is an utterly astonishing document from the PSB which calls for ‘attacks against Communist ideology developed in Marxist terms,’ and for a ‘defense of Western society in Marxist terms.’³³ To jump ahead to arguments I discuss below, this document constitutes as strong a piece of documentary evidence as one can reasonably hope to find for Rockhill’s thesis that at least some forms of Marxism were intentionally fostered as part of a “compatible left,” a move in an overall anticommunist strategy. Surely this is one of the most compelling archival finds in the book.

Still, as stunning as some of these material discoveries are, it is important not to focus excessively on any particular agency such as the PSB or even the CIA itself, as Rockhill is at pains to stress throughout the book. As he puts it, evidently trying to forestall (unsuccessfully it seems) crude representations of the book’s argument:

This book, like its companion volumes, is most definitely not advancing a simplistic and reductive argument that the intelligentsia has been remote-controlled by the CIA, or that there is a centralized theoretical conspiracy that explains every aspect of intellectual history.³⁴

Rather:

In undertaking a dialectical analysis of intellectual collaboration, it is essential to avoid focusing narrowly on particular agencies, such as the CIA, and instead construct a comprehensive understanding of the social totality, encompassing various state agencies, non-governmental organizations, and corporate soft-power initiatives.³⁵

The point is well taken. It is the ruling class (especially the U.S. ruling class) that has an interest in shoring up the existing system of imperialist accumulation, and it does not need to rely solely on the state to make headway in that direction—the monopoly control exterted over intellectual production already serves that end. For this reason, the normal functioning of the system of ideological production will tend to elevate ideas that are in conformity with capitalist class interests, and withhold from circulation ideas that are in conflict with a bourgeois outlook. As Rockhill has it:

there is already a relationship of ideological confluence between the bourgeois regime of knowledge production and its leading producers. This means that direct intercession or additional resources are not always necessary if the system of bourgeois knowledge simply functions as it is supposed to by providing uplift to those who excel at giving the system what it demands.³⁶

What is at issue is the overall system of knowledge production, circulation and consumption, of which direct state influence is a part (perhaps a very important part), and in which most intellectual production is situated. Below I discuss the concrete mechanisms of knowledge selection Rockhill takes to be operative in the dominant institutions of intellectual production. Before that, however, it is worth bringing clearly into view the practical motivations behind such an exercise in the political economy of knowledge.

Towards a reorientation of Marxism

As noted above, Who Paid the Pipers is the first part of a planned book trilogy titled The Intellectual World War, intended to be ‘a systematic ideology critique of the Western left intelligentsia.’³⁷ In Who Paid the Pipers Rockhill evinces his typically French intellectual training by burying the thesis statement of the whole trilogy 50 pages into the book (to be fair, this is where the “Introduction” is located). There, Rockhill describes four purposes to the project of the Intellectual World War. First, to bring into view the system of ideological production, circulation and consumption in general, and to highlight some of its mechanisms. Second, to outline, through materialist analysis, the broader system of production and accumulation in which intellectual production is situated. Third, to develop the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism, rendering it a guide to action in the current conjuncture. And fourth, to contribute to a fundamental reorientation of the left in the imperial core.³⁸

The final item here appears to be the unifying or ‘primary’ purpose, as Rockhill suggests in the conclusion.³⁹ That is, the project of ideology critique serves the end of ideological reorientation. This naturally raises three related questions: reorientation from what, to what, and for what end? As I understand Rockhill, the short answers to these respective questions are, “away from Western Marxism, French Theory, and their contemporary inheritors”, “towards anti-imperialist Marxism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism”, and “to furnish us with theory adequate to the collective project of social emancipation.” The long answer is the trilogy itself.

The purpose of this section is to examine why Rockhill takes it to be necessary to reorient away from Western Marxism, the subject of the trilogy’s first volume. Rockhill shares this conviction with Domenico Losurdo, whose earlier book, Western Marxism, he edited.⁴⁰ Although Who Paid the Pipers is best described as a political economy of knowledge, it should be clear that the upshot of Rockhill’s book, like Losurdo’s, is fundamentally political. That is, there is a political need to orient away from Western Marxism. The point here will be to spell out the precise sense in which this is so.

The term “Western Marxism” does not refer to all Marxism from the West. Instead, it designates a particular form of Marxism that emerged following the October Revolution. Rockhill summarises Perry Anderson’s famous account of this process as follows:

the failure of the socialist revolution to move westward after 1917 led to a situation in which Marxists in the West tended to turn away from Communist Party organizing and the analysis of political economy toward an investment in the academic world and a predilection for cultural and philosophic issues.⁴¹

Losurdo’s earlier book deploys the term “Western Marxism” in a particularly wide-ranging manner, since its object of investigation was not so much a distinct tradition—with defined disciplinary norms and boundaries, central points of philosophical reference, and a shared outlook on questions of theory and politics—but rather recurring tendencies of Marxist thought and practice within the imperialist countries. Rockhill’s book, however, has a much more precise scope; its object of investigation is the early Frankfurt School tradition, and in particular its premier intellectuals, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, all of whom are central, agenda setting figures in the so-called Western Marxist tradition and in critical theory.⁴² The complexities of the term “Western Marxism” have been discussed by Rockhill elsewhere.⁴³ In what follows, I use the term “Western Marxism” to refer primarily to the Frankfurt School and its three main figures, which seems commensurate with the way Rockhill uses the term in the book.

Western Marxism in the above sense is undoubtedly one of the most widely distributed forms of Marxism in the imperial core. It is so not because of a social basis in mass practice or revolutionary organising, but because, as Rockhill argues, it circulates freely through key institutions of knowledge production and dissemination. Universities and the forms of intellectual practice associated with them—papers, conferences, public lectures and especially books—remain key nodes in the distribution of ideas in capitalist societies. As a consequence of its frictionless movement throughout these core intellectual institutions, Western Marxism is hegemonic Marxism—that is, for a good many people connected to the circuits of bourgeois knowledge production, Marxism means Western Marxism.⁴⁴ The rub is therefore not only that Western Marxism is a widely circulating form of Marxism, but that it is the predominant circulating form of Marxism, the socially dominant form of Marxism. Coupled with the fact that Western Marxism is an exclusivist discourse (it positions itself in opposition to the mainstream Marxist tradition of the twentieth century, that is, the Marxism of the successful socialist revolutions and anti-colonial struggles), the outcome is that Western Marxism has come to constitute the central and indeed sole orienting worldview for many self-professed Marxists. In this situation, the question that presents itself is then this: is Western Marxism adequate as the principle orienting framework for revolutionary Marxists?

The answer that Rockhill (and before him Losurdo) advance is: no—for what I take to be two central reasons. The first is that Western Marxism is characterised by a related ensemble of tendencies that induce political passivity: a messianic or utopian conception of social progress; a correlate revolutionary defeatism and withdrawal from practice and organisation; and a ‘distance from power’ which entitles one to maintain an authentic Marxism unspoiled by actuality.⁴⁵ These tendencies have been well documented by Losurdo in Western Marxism, and it is very difficult to disagree with his assessment. To take just one of them, the withdrawal from practice, consider, for example Adorno’s declaration in the opening passages of Negative Dialectics that ‘the transformation of the world [has] failed.’⁴⁶ Elsewhere we find the same thinker announce that ‘we do not live in a revolutionary situation’ and that ‘any appeal to form a left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda.’⁴⁷ These latter statements, uttered by one for whom ‘Praxis [is] delayed for the foreseeable future,’⁴⁸ were made in 1956—during the heyday of the Cuban revolution, the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle, the height of the so-called Malayan Emergency, five years after the communist-led Telangana rebellion in India, seven years after the People’s Republic of China was founded, two years after the conclusion of the decade long Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, and during the period in which the Communist Party of Indonesia was consolidating a base that would grow to 25 million persons by 1965. All of this is a wash, apparently.

Rockhill and Losurdo suggest a second reason for Western Marxism’s inadequacy as an orienting framework: its failure to furnish us with a grasp of the main dynamics of twentieth century class struggle. This is a natural outgrowth of the tendencies identified above, namely utopianism, the rejection of practice, and a hostility to constituted power. I referred before to the twentieth century Marxist mainstream. By this I mean the successful socialist revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba, to name just some; the socialist-led anti-colonial struggles in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, and Grenada, to again mention just a few; and the unsuccessful but nevertheless mass socialist movements in India, the Philippines, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere. These constitute the landscape of mass struggle in the twentieth century. Under this “red star over the Third World,” as Vijay Prashad has put it, millions and in fact billions of people struggled for liberation from fascism, colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.⁴⁹ Western Marxism, for the most part, ignores the whole system of imperialist accumulation, and in turn ignores the main thread of mass practice directed against it, which came largely from the Global South. When Western Marxism pays the Marxist mainstream any attention, it stands in outright opposition to it. Rockhill has drawn attention to Adorno and Horkheimer’s consistent equation of actually existing communism with fascism—a well-worn trope.⁵⁰ But to cite a further example that Losurdo brings to light, in 1959, in a rare instance in which Adorno discussed the communist-led national liberation movements in the Global South, he remarked that ‘today the fascist wish-image unquestionably blends with the nationalism of the so-called underdeveloped countries’ such that ‘there exists a convergence of fascist and communist nationalism.’⁵¹ Overleaf, we read that nationalism is ‘the heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes.’⁵² Is it unfair to read barely concealed chauvinism in these propositions? Can we afford to be naive about this? How is it possible for a theory informed by these presuppositions to live up to the Leninist dictum that ‘Marxism learns … from mass practice.’⁵³

I want to put the point as clearly as possible. The purpose of highlighting select passages as these is not to dredge up cancellable material. Instead, the point is to consider the lodestone theorists of Western Marxism in light of ‘where they stand on the most fundamental questions of international class struggle.’⁵⁴⁵⁴ Underlying this approach is a basically political question: if the preeminent Western Marxists refused to seriously and sincerely engage with the main contemporary dimensions of mass practice, if in fact they sometimes relished in that refusal, if they failed to bring into view and theorise the central characteristic of twentieth century capitalism: the system of imperialist accumulation, and if their thought leads generally away from participation in class politics, from the project of collective social emancipation—then how can we take them as the central guides for our own practice? The political conviction behind Rockhill and Losurdo’s projects is that a tradition which has no time for the millions who struggled constructing socialism in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere, for the question of imperialism itself, or for the communist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the great many of humanity in the Global South, has no business being the North Star for Marxist practice. In that I think they are correct.

I want to stress that Rockhill’s argument is not that we should never read or engage with Western Marxism, or with any intellectual production from bourgeois or even imperialist-bourgeois institutions. Rockhill himself repeatedly makes this point throughout Who Paid the Pipers.⁵⁵ Instead, his argument for a reorientation away from Western Marxism takes issue with the political consequences of the socially dominant position of Western Marxism. The reality is that Western Marxism functions as the coordinating theoretical framework for a good many Marxists in the imperial core, namely those plugged into networks of academic intellectual production. If it is the case, as I believe it is, that the questions, concerns, saliences and priorities of Western Marxism—in short, its research agenda—direct attention away from the question of imperialism, inculcate hostility to communist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggle, and demobilise those seeking a theory of collective emancipation, then the objective effect of Western Marxism’s predominance is regressive. This is an argument whose object exists at the level of broad social processes and dynamics. It is an appraisal of the consequences of Western Marxism’s overall predominance for the class struggle; behind it is the question of the theoretical conditions under which Marxism can operate as a genuinely revolutionary and anti-imperialist and social force. The practical defeatism of Western Marxism, its ignorance of imperialism, and its wholesale rejection of communist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle and construction mean that, insofar as it operates as a theoretical locus for many, Western Marxism socially functions to accommodate capitalism and imperialism.⁵⁶ As Rockhill has it, the ‘overall effect of Western Marxism has been the global promotion of a petty-bourgeois cultural commodity with little use-value for practical struggles.’⁵⁷ This is what the predominance of Western Marxism has rendered politically possible, and what it has politically foreclosed.

Anyone familiar with what goes under the name of “critical theory” in academia will recognise the truth in the foregoing account. With the greatest respect to anyone who calls themselves a Marxist, the reality is that the humanities and (less commonly these days) the social sciences are peopled with self-professed Marxists afflicted with melancholia and practical inertia; almost always unorganised, wholly alienated from mass consciousness and living politics, these comrades practically accommodate capitalism and imperialism regardless of their convictions. ‘Their theoretical practice,’ writes Rockhill, ‘is oriented primarily toward exchange-value, not use-value, in the sense that they are engaged in the symbolic economy of the academic world and the so-called marketplace of ideas, not in a collective, practical project of social transformation.’⁵⁸ In other words, they are residents of what Gyorgy Lukacs called the Grand Hotel Abyss,

a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.⁵⁹

The imperial theory industry: mechanisms of intellectual production and circulation

If it is true that Western Marxism socially functions to induce passivity in the face of capitalism and imperialism, the question that emerges is this: under what conditions is the social dominance of Western Marxism in capitalism’s core intellectual institutions produced and reproduced? To put the same question another way, under what conditions do the two senses of imperialist accommodation coincide—what agencies advertise holiday plans for the Grand Hotel?

Rockhill’s answer depends on his account of what he calls the imperial theory industry. To recap: the ruling class, in virtue of its monopoly control over the means of intellectual and cultural production, is able to conform ideological production and circulation to meet the needs of its class interests. The U.S. ruling class, however, as the leader of the imperialist bloc, has an interest not only in maintaining the capitalist system in general but in reproducing the existing arrangement of world imperialist accumulation that subordinates the great many of humanity in the Global South. For this reason, in its conditioning of ideological production, the U.S. capitalist class will aim to uplift ideas compatible with the imperialist arrangement and depress ideas that threaten it. Rockhill’s argument on this front has two aspects. First, that the normal functioning of the bourgeois controlled knowledge system serves this dual aim of uplift and suppression. Second, that the capitalist state may act on behalf of its incumbent class to shape ideological production in service of imperialist interests, particularly though not exclusively through organs like the State Department and the CIA. These are the conditions under which ideological production takes place in contemporary capitalism.

Ideological production encompasses both cultural and intellectual production. Cultural production includes the creation of art—film, television, music, novels, and so on. The two main centres of intellectual production, on the other hand, are the mass media and the academic establishment, the latter understood in a broad sense to include the publication of academic papers and books, the teaching and training of students, the hosting of conferences and public lectures, the drafting of policy prescriptions, and so on. The function of the academic sector is the production, circulation and consumption of science and, in the humanities and social sciences, theory. The totality of the social relations and forces of theoretical production and circulation are what Rockhill calls the theory industry. As Rockhill summarises:

Just as there is a movie industry and a music industry, there is a theory industry. Intellectual production is not the result of individuals thinking on their own or entering a free marketplace of ideas. It is a consequence of the overall social relations of theoretical production and thus, under modern capitalism, an entire industry that not only creates and distributes intellectual productions, but also manufactures the people who produce and consume them.⁶⁰

It is widely recognised among Marxists that the culture industry and mass media are subject to the pressures of capitalist class interests. The ruling class exerts tremendous influence here; it is able to shape the concerns, saliences and output of these spheres in conformity with its own interests.⁶¹ Often this influence takes place through the intervention of state agencies like the CIA, as has been covered extensively by a number of scholars and journalists.⁶² Rockhill’s intention in his trilogy of books is to extend this type of investigation to the theory industry. The claim of Who Paid the Pipers in particular is that Western Marxism has been promoted within the theory industry precisely because, compared with the mainstream Marxist tradition, it is compatible with existing capitalist imperialism.

It is essential to stress that, on Rockhill’s analysis, the theory industry is not coextensive with Western Marxism, or even the left intelligentsia generally.⁶³ The leading figures of the theory industry are those who ‘have made the greatest contributions to the ideological agenda of those who own and control the means of production.’⁶⁴ Overwhelmingly, these figures are not left-wing academics. Rockhill has in mind here such luminaries as Samuel Huntington and his student Francis Fukuyama, both of whom produced theory profoundly servile to capitalist class interests. Huntington’s infamous “clash of nations” thesis diagnosed a supposed cultural incompatibility between the Western world and its victims that justified criminal imperialist incursions; Fukuyama, as is well known, declared the end of history with the ascent of capitalist liberal democracies. As producers of ideological commodities that serve capitalist class interests, figures like Huntington and Fukuyama benefit from a system of uplift and material reward—one key mechanism through which the owners of the intellectual economy shape theoretical production. As Rockhill explains:

In concrete terms, at least for academics, uplift means perks like prestigious appointments, lucrative book deals, academic awards, lavish junkets, funded translations, major grants, coverage by the bourgeois press, international fame, and much more.⁶⁵

These are just some of the normal means by which the capitalist class induces intellectual labourers to produce in service of their interests, and through which they ensure the circulation of ideas that advance these same interests. Such hands off mechanisms are critical because they maintain the appearance that the institutions of intellectual production are genuinely ‘democratic and meritocratic.’⁶⁶ That is, rather than directly paying the intelligentsia to launder bourgeois ideas (which still occasionally happens), the normal functioning of the system rewards those who advance capitalist class interests of their own volition. Over time, this modifies the behaviour of those situated within institutions of intellectual production: more and more they become conscious of, and comport themselves towards, the existing incentive structures. As Rockhill puts it, ‘Intellectuals who want to advance within the imperial academic world are trained to give to it what it wants because a powerful system of rewards and punishments induces them to do so.’⁶⁷

The well-known intellectuals of the day like Huntington and Fukuyama are the main beneficiaries of the existing relations of intellectual production and the incentive structures presently in place. They certainly received uplift from these structures, as Rockhill documents.⁶⁸ But in addition to the normal functioning of the knowledge system, Huntington and Fukuyama are exemplars of another phenomenon Who Paid the Pipers is deeply concerned with: the influence of the U.S. ruling class on intellectual production through the bourgeois state and its agencies like the State Department and the CIA. Above I described how, as Rockhill brings to light, the world’s foremost imperialist state attempts to influence the production and dissemination of ideas that maintain and extend the regime of world accumulation from which it benefits. The theory industry is no exception to this. Instead, as Rockhill argues, the theory industry is itself located within the financial-state-intellectual nexus. That is,

the theory industry (intellectual), far from functioning as an autonomous sphere of theoretical production, is bound up with and largely conditioned and driven by, various governmental forces (state) and ultimately the capitalist ruling class (financial).⁶⁹

Both Huntington and Fukuyama were deeply integrated into this nexus. As Rockhill reveals, they moved in and were promoted by networks associated with the U.S. state and its national security agencies, and were supported by bourgeois financial institutions. To mention just a bit of the evidence Rockhill surveys, Huntington had ties to the CIA’s infamous Congress for Cultural Freedom. His significant book, The Clash of Civilisations (1996), was supported financially by John M. Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation, two major conservative grant-making foundations. Fukuyama began his career at the State Department under George W. Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who would support Fukuyama throughout his career. The two worked together at the Rand Corporation, a conservative think tank connected with the CIA and created with the financial support of the Ford Foundation (more on which shortly). When Fukuyama was writing his name-making book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the president of RAND graciously provided him office space.⁷⁰

Huntington and Fukuyama’s intellectual production was therefore not only supported by the usual overt incentive mechanisms of the bourgeois knowledge system, but was also imbricated in patronage networks and structures of uplift closely associated with the bourgeois state. There was, in short, a capitalist and imperialist ‘social elevator’ that allowed the two to ascend to prominent positions in the intelligentsia, and a social infrastructure which foregrounded their theoretical contributions within the worldly concourse of ideas.⁷¹ Particularly illustrative in their professional lives is the close connection between state agencies and the bourgeois foundations, the “big three” of which are the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. Too large of a topic to go into in detail here, it is worth mentioning that a notable strength of Who Paid the Pipers is the way it brings into view the role such foundations play in the overall system of intellectual production and circulation.⁷²

The upshot of the foregoing for Rockhill’s project, however, is this: the left intelligentsia, Western Marxism included, is situated within the same system of intellectual production, subject to the same bourgeois-dominated mechanisms of uplift and suppression, and to the same interference from the bourgeois state and its organs. Its successful circulation within the institutions of knowledge production, circulation and consumption therefore depends, according to Rockhill, on the extent to which its theoretical product is amenable to the class interests of the imperialist ruling class. Let us consider this account.

Western Marxism as imperial Marxism

Rockhill’s thesis is that Western Marxism serves a highly specific function in advancing imperialist ideological interests, serving, namely, as a “compatible left.” Again, Western Marxism does not comprise the entirety of the theory industry; rather, it makes up its ‘left-wing.’⁷³ Rockhill’s suggestion is that the role of the theory industry’s left wing, in the context of the ruling class’s overall strategy of ideological warfare, is to act as ‘radical recuperators who reintegrate potentially insurgent forces within the anticommunist—and ultimately pro-capitalist—camp.’⁷⁴ Rockhill explains the basic logic of this approach as follows:

Since it has not been possible to simply eliminate Marxism due to its broad public appeal, clear explanatory power, and proven ability to transform the socioeconomic order, the managers of bourgeois society have been faced with the dilemma of how best to deal with its existence. … their preferred tactic has been to use their monopoly control over the superstructure to internationally promote a commodified version of Marxism.⁷⁵

There exists some hard evidence for this claim. Recall the document from the PSB which called for ‘attacks against communist ideology developed in Marxist terms.’ To quote further from this same document, communism should be attacked, ‘but on the assumption that the basic [Marxist] premises are correct.’ As the document continues, ‘This type of attack is a universal one in that it would reach members of international Communist movements everywhere.’⁷⁶

Above I detailed Rockhill’s argument for a political reorientation away from Western Marxism. Western Marxism was found to be both theoretically and practically wanting: it failed to connect with the central question of its day, the question of imperialism; it failed to connect with the mainstream dynamics of twentieth century mass practice, the worldwide communist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle; and it foreclosed participation in class politics, the vehicle of collective social emancipation. For these reasons, it was and is inadequate as the central orienting framework for practice. As a consequence of this inadequacy, the predominance of Western Marxism can only have the effect of inducing ‘behaviors of submission, passivity, and demobilization,’ as Rockhill quotes the Cuban philosopher Barreiro Vázquez.⁷⁷ Note that, as explained above, this is fundamentally an argument about the political consequences of Western Marxism’s social dominance within the circuits of intellectual production, distribution and consumption. Rockhill’s political economy of knowledge extends this argument by pointing out that Western Marxism’s socially dominant location has been at least in part designed. On the one hand, to the extent that Western Marxism is in itself largely accommodating to capitalism and imperialism, and to the extent that it generally engenders political paralysis, Western Marxism will be rewarded by the normal incentive structures of the bourgeois system of knowledge production. But on the other hand, as Rockhill reveals, the Frankfurt School and its doyens—Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—were profoundly integrated into networks of patronage and uplift constructed by the U.S. state and its organs.

The evidence for this is extensive and compelling. The whole of Part II of Who Paid the Pipers, some one-hundred and fifty pages, is dedicated to laying it out. It is therefore impossible to detail here, but as Rockhill summarises in the book’s conclusion:

[The Frankfurt School scholars are] a product of the imperial core. They have been bolstered and supported by the imperial superstructure, including both the bourgeois state, where many of them worked for years, and the bourgeois cultural apparatus. They have also been directly funded and supported by the capitalist ruling class, and their extensive promotion has led to their work being widely consumed by the intellectual labor aristocracy and their comprador allies in the periphery.⁷⁸

Here I want to mention just one example. Rockhill forwards fairly incontrovertible evidence that Marcuse, despite his own protestations to the contrary, did collaborate with the CIA in a significant way. Marcuse is listed on a State Department register for 1948 as the ‘Acting Chief’ for the Central European Branch of the Division of Research for Europe. On the same page in which Marcuse’s name appears, it is stated that this division is

responsible for planning and implementing a program of positive-intelligence research pertaining to all of continental Europe … to meet the intelligence requirements of the Department [of State] in the formulation and execution of foreign policy and the intelligence requirements of the Central Intelligence Agency and other authorized agencies.⁷⁹

As Rockhill goes on to explain, Marcuse’s branch was part of the broader Office of Intelligence Research (OIR). According to the same State Department register, the OIR

provides positive intelligence research in regional and functional fields of study, and prepares or participates in the preparation of intelligence studies and spot intelligence for authorized recipients in the Department [of State], the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Federal agencies.⁸⁰

Rockhill draws what appears to be an unavoidable conclusion:

According to his job description, there can be no doubt: Marcuse collaborated with the CIA and other government agencies in producing intelligence reports that guided U.S. foreign policy.⁸¹

There is, of course, even more evidence on the specific point of Marcuse’s collaboration with the CIA. Of note is also, for example, his role as the head of the State Department Committee on World Communism (CWC).⁸² According to Tim B. Müller, whose archival research Rockhill partly relies on, the previously mentioned Psychological Strategy Board ‘used the memoranda of … [Marcuse’s] CWC as one of its most important sources of information.’⁸³ Examples of this kind abound in Rockhill’s book—not just on the Marcuse-CIA connection, but on his general integration into the financial-state-intellectual nexus. To cite two examples connected to the big foundations: in 1954 Marcuse received a grant from the Rockefeller foundation to the tune of USD $9,900 (equivalent to roughly USD $122,000 in 2026) for what would become the book Soviet Marxism (1958); and in 1959 he received yet another grant for the future One-Dimensional Man (1964) of some USD $6,250 (roughly $71,000 in 2026 USD).⁸⁴

It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the copious amount of documentation Rockhill provides on these topics; the quantity of archival and other evidence Rockhill marshals in this section of the book is positively enormous—the Marcuse chapter alone concludes on the crunchy footnote number 309. There is, of course, comparably comprehensive evidence adduced for Adorno and Horkheimer’s integration into the same imperialist networks of patronage and uplift, networks likewise involving the U.S. state and its organs—although not to the same degree as in the case of Marcuse. The same holds for some of the less well-known figures of the Frankfurt School. The only way to appreciate the scope of this material fully is to read the book yourself. Here, I only want to stress the import of this kind of evidence for Rockhill’s overall argument. Rockhill decidedly does not take integration into imperialist networks of knowledge production to automatically ‘invalidate the entirety of a scholar’s contributions.’⁸⁵ The point of reconstructing these networks and situating intellectuals within them is to examine how discourses like Western Marxism come to be produced, reproduced and disseminated. The upshot of Rockhill’s argument is that Western Marxist’s social location within the incentive structures of the imperial theory industry—including those designed by the state and its organs—contributed in no small way to their intellectual production, and subsequently to the wide dissemination of their ideas. That does not occasion a priori dismissal; it does, however, invite us to develop a bit of self-consciousness about our theoretical practice. It should compel us to examine the adequacy of our central orienting references in light of the current conjuncture and mass practice; it should, more specifically, prompt us to examine the political consequences of Western Marxism’s social predominance within the circuits of intellectual circulation and consumption. Western Marxism is a discourses which, as we have seen, induces disorientation and political passivity when taken as central coordinating references for theory and practice. For these reasons reorientation is absolutely necessary. It is to questions emerging from this need for reorientation to which I now turn.

Renewing Marxist theoretical practice in the imperial core

The point of this concluding section is to raise three questions that emerge from the central line of Rockhill’s argument. First, if reorientation is called for away from Western Marxism, then with what should it be replaced? Second, how should Marxists engage with Western Marxist scholarship, conscious of its social integration into the imperial theory industry? And third, how should we orient as Marxists towards the bourgeois-controlled sphere of knowledge production itself?

In response to the first question, Rockhill answers, ‘anti-imperialist Marxism.’ This, he explains, is ‘Marxism tour court, or Marxism in the era of imperialism that is unaltered by those who have tried to eliminate its essence.’ In contrast to Western Marxism, ‘which would best be described as an imperial Marxism (indicating both its source and its ideological orientation), the Marxism dedicated to anticolonial and anti-imperialist emancipation is universal Marxism.’⁸⁶ This is the Marxism of the twentieth century Marxist mainstream, the Marxism of the millions who struggled and are struggling for socialism and emancipation. Rockhill mentions the following by name, ‘with the full recognition that they are figured who embodied the collective struggle of the masses’: Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Thomas Sankara.⁸⁷ In my view, those are some very solid orienting references. It almost goes without saying that the movements for liberation represented by these thinkers must be studied, and their lessons internalised and transformed into a Marxist vernacular and Marxist culture. If Marxism in the West can reconnect with these figures and revolutionary traditions, then that already goes someway towards fulfilling one of the conditions Losurdo outlined for the revival of Marxism as a social force in the West, namely, the restoration of our ‘relationship with the world anticolonial revolution, which is mostly led by communist parties and which was the principal question of the twentieth century and continues to play an essential role in the century we have entered for some years now.’⁸⁸

I want to also mention in connection with this question some other attempts that have been made to articulate a genuinely anti-imperialist Marxist tradition and Marxist intellectual culture, one oriented away from the aporias of Western Marxism. I mention in particular the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research’s project of recovering a “National Liberation Marxism,” as well as Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s attempt to reclaim the tradition of “Red Africa.”⁸⁹ A reconstituted Western Marxism might—and in fact must—also take influence from the great Marxist theoreticians of the Global South, and here I’ll supply some names of my own: from Peru José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), from India D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), from Egypt Samir Amin (1931-2018), from Brazil Ruy Mauro Marini (1931-1997) and Heleith Saffioti (1934-2010), from Palestine Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), from Lebanon Mahdi Amel (1936-1987), and from Guyana Walter Rodney (1942-1980), to name just a few. These are thinkers for whom mass practice and socialist construction were constant reference points, and for whom imperialism was a critical, if not the critical, question.

That leaves us with what to do with Western Marxism. There is no question that the layout of Marxism in the West needs changing; I enthusiastically accept the prescription to reorient ourselves away from Western Marxism and towards the figures and traditions mentioned above. But Rockhill is right, I think, to suggest that it would be a mistake to swear off all knowledge produced under the diktat of the imperial system of intellectual production. In general, it is impossible for revolutionary Marxism to avoid some dependence on bourgeois knowledge production. Even something as straightforward as gathering basic data on, say, the development of the childcare industry in so-called Australia will rely on scholarship produced in bourgeois institutions. As Rockhill writes,

the disciplinary regime and intellectual Taylorism of bourgeois research have nonetheless made some major contributions, which should by no means be abandoned. … As Lenin argued, we need to learn from, and often draw on, all the most developed forms of thought.⁹⁰

This holds true, says Rockhill, for the Frankfurt School itself.⁹¹ But this is not a problem: the upshot of Rockhill’s book is not to maintain the absolute purity of anti-imperialist Marxism against all pernicious influence. The injunction is rather to retain anti-imperialist Marxism as our overall worldview—to centre its concerns, saliences, questions and methodology as our own—while managing and incorporating the contributions that come to us from bourgeois knowledge circuits. The risk is not in making use of bourgeois knowledge at all. Rather, the risk consists in taking it as our central orienting framework.

I want to propose a model for how we can conceive of the relation between anti-imperialist Marxism and Western Marxism. The Marxist economist Cheng Enfu has proposed that, when it comes to the relation between Marxist economics and bourgeois Western economics, the formula we should deploy is, ‘Marxist concepts as the body and Western learning for the use.’⁹² As Cheng explains, the ‘body’ here means that which is essential and intrinsic; taking Marxist concepts as the body therefore means taking them as ‘the fundamental and dominant content.’ On the other hand, Western learning for the use ‘refers to a discriminating application of Western knowledge, developing some elements and discarding others, subject to the general premise of “Marxist concepts as the body”.’⁹³ In an analogous way, I would like to suggest we adopt the formula, “anti-imperialist Marxism as the body and Western Marxists for the use.” It is inadmissible that Western Marxism should remain the body; we have considered some clear arguments against taking Western Marxism as the principle orienting framework for our practice. Anti-imperialist Marxism should comprise our North Star, or rather the ‘shining sun’ Ho Chi Minh wrote about so enthusiastically, which, raised up by the October Revolution, ‘illuminated the five continents, and awakened millions and millions of oppressed and exploited people.’⁹⁴ But for the use, Western Marxist intellectual production may be admissible, provided we are conscious about its overall orientation. Both Rockhill and Losurdo acknowledge that even the Frankfurt has made useful contributions.⁹⁵ There is no reason why we should not, as Rockhill has it, ‘learn anything that we can from them.’⁹⁶

The final question I want to address is how to relate to the bourgeois and imperialist controlled system of intellectual production itself. Rockhill himself argues, and I tend to agree, that it would be a mistake to withdraw easily and entirely from the core institutions of intellectual production. On Rockhill’s view, there are a number of factors that make it possible to carry out politically useful work within the margins of academia. On the one hand, because the academic system must appear open and meritocratic, critical scholarship may ‘be tolerated to some degree because it can be used as supposed proof of the system’s openness.’ On the other, it is simply not possible for the capitalist class to condition all intellectual production to serve their interests; as Rockhill rightly observes, the ‘Imperial academy is far from being omnipotent.’ The result is that there exists ‘a margin of maneuver for research that contests the system from within.’ This margin will not be dutifully handed to anti-imperialist Marxists, however; Rockhill has no illusions about the conditions under which the space for critical scholarship can be maintained: its existence in the first place is ‘the result of class struggle and valiant efforts to keep the university open to forms of critique that overstep the boundaries of the dominant ideology.’ But it is nonetheless ‘imperative to take full advantage of this vital space and attempt to expand it.’⁹⁷ These observations are sound, in my view. It of course goes without saying that Marxists need our own organisations of intellectual collaboration, production and distribution. There is no substitute for our own Marxist intellectual culture, our own publishers, journals and media. But whether we like it or not, the intelligentsia have an agenda setting function in capitalist society; they are located at a critical juncture in the circuits of knowledge production, and are, in some cases and to some extent, able to influence the general consciousness, as our enemies have long recognised. For this reason, Marxists should not easily cede this space, but carry forward a struggle for as much of it as possible, full with consciousness that we will always be working against the grain, and that we will never win hegemony over these spaces.

There is something repulsive about the dismissiveness with which Western Marxists treat mass practice and anti-imperialist theoretical production, especially that which comes from the Global South. Conversely, there is a certain kind of admirable sincerity to standing in solidarity with those who have struggled and produced theory under those conditions—something I see reflected in Rockhill’s book. I like the simplicity with which Torkil Lauesen summarises things in his blurb for Who Paid the Pipers: “ideological struggles matter!” To conclude this review, I want to cite a passage from Who Paid the Pipers where Rockhill expands on this thought:

Whose ideas do we want to carry forth into the world and embody in material reality through our struggles: those of the liberators who have strived, under dire circumstances and constant onslaught, to make the idea of a better world into a material reality, or those who have sought to stop the socialist project in its tracks by not only killing its leaders, but also attempting to destroy the very idea they embody.⁹⁸

Well said.

Notes

1. Samir Amin, “Seize the Crisis!” Monthly Review 61, no. 07 (December 2009). https://monthlyreview.org/articles/seize-the-crisis/. The following analysis is based on an earlier article of mine: https://redantcollective.org/2025/11/29/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-the-left/ ↩︎
2. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). ↩︎
3. See Vincent Bevins, If We Burn (London: Wildfire, 2023). ↩︎
4. See Bevins, If We Burn, 268. ↩︎
5. Marx and Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League, March 1850,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 285. ↩︎
6. Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024), 224. ↩︎
7. G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 507. ↩︎
8. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Marx-Engels Collected Works vol. 29, 263. ↩︎
9. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 79. ↩︎
10. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 78. ↩︎
11. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 79. See Jennifer Ponce de Leon and Rockhill’s very interesting paper, “Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics, and Cultural Revolution,” Philosophy Today 64, no. 1 (January 2020): 95-116. ↩︎
12. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 59. ↩︎
13. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 25. ↩︎
14. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 25. ↩︎
15. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works vol. 5, 59. ↩︎
16. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 85. ↩︎
17. Lenin, What is to be Done?, in Collected Works vol. 5, 386. ↩︎
18. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 75. ↩︎
19. Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” in Unity and Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 127; cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers?, 31. There may be a small error in Rockhill’s citation, which relies on the version of Cabral’s address on marxists.org. The word “centred” only appears in this version, and not in either the Monthly Review or Unisa Press/Tsehai Publishers edition. Surely “centred” expresses what Cabral meant, though. ↩︎
20. In addition to Lenin’s own well-known work, see the Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions that Lenin jointly forwarded at the second congress of the Comintern with Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy, where the term ‘world imperialism’ was introduced. (Lenin, “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” in Collected Works vol. 31, 146.) That term would be defined as follows at the fourth Comintern congress in 1922 in the Theses on the Eastern Question: ‘The rise of indigenous productive forces in the colonies stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the interests of world imperialism, whose very essence is to take advantage of the variation in the level of development of productive forces in different arenas of the world economy to achieve monopoly super-profits.’ (John Riddell [Ed.], Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 1181.) ↩︎
21. John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024). https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-new-denial-of-imperialism-on-the-left/ ↩︎
22. For just a few of the book-length studies of the economics of imperialism published in the last ten years, see: John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); Torkil Lauesen, The Global Perspective: Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018); Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018); Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019); Sam King, Imperialism and the Development Myth: How rich countries dominate in the twenty-first century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021); Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021); Andrea Ricci, Value and Unequal Exchange in International Trade: The Geography of Global Capitalist Exploitation (New York: Routledge, 2021); Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire 3^rd edition (Dresden: ISLET-Verlag, 2021); Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction (Leiden: Brill, 2023); Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 117-145; Torkil Lauesen, Unequal Exchange: Past, Present and Future (Olympia: Iskra Books, 2025). In addition, there has been a resurgence of interest in the classical works of the political economy of imperialism. To name just three, see Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialectics of Dependency (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), recently translated for the first time into English; and Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), which has just been republished in a new edition for the first time in decades. ↩︎
23. Samir Amin, “The Trajectory of Historical Capitalism and Marxism’s Tricontinental Vocation,” Monthly Review 62, no. 9 (February 2011). https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-trajectory-of-historical-capitalism-and-marxisms-tricontinental-vocation/ ↩︎
24. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 106. ↩︎
25. See Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013). ↩︎
26. William Blum, America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy and the Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (London: Zed Books, 2013), 1. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 312. ↩︎
27. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 107. ↩︎
28. See especially Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009) and Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000). ↩︎
29. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 344. ↩︎
30. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 41. ↩︎
31. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 42. ↩︎
32. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 42-3. ↩︎
33. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 43. ↩︎
34. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 41. Or as he says later on, doing his best to prevent the inevitable, ‘let me be crystal clear: there is not some mysterious cabal of capitalists and state agents who control absolutely everything from behind the scenes, including the entire intellectual world.’ (101) ↩︎
35. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 39. ↩︎
36. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 97; see also 41: ‘materially speaking, [intellectuals] are working within systems of knowledge ultimately controlled by the bourgeoisie, so their advancement within them largely depends on how much their intellectual labor segues with the interests of the owners of the means of intellectual production (this is the real meritocracy).’ ↩︎
37. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 53. ↩︎
38. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 53-5. ↩︎
39. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 336. ↩︎
40. Rockhill suggests that his book ‘seeks, among other things, to extend and further develop Losurdo’s work.’ (Who Paid the Pipers, 178.) Although the continuity between their projects is clear, and Rockhill’s debt to Losurdo is explicit, I think we should refrain from easily assimilating one to the other, and in the first instance consider each’s arguments carefully on their own terms. ↩︎
41. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 177. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1989), 42. ↩︎
42. Rockhill refers to the Frankfurt School as the ‘premier representative of Western Marxism.’ (Who Paid the Pipers, 250.) ↩︎
43. See Gabriel Rockhill and John Bellamy Foster, “Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue,” Monthly Review 76, no. 10 (March 2025). https://monthlyreview.org/articles/western-marxism-and-imperialism-a-dialogue/ ↩︎
44. Consider the following testimony from Alan Shandro: ‘Around 2001–02, Slavoj Žižek invited me to a conference that he organized on Lenin. I went, and felt like a fish out of water. I remember talking with one of Žižek’s associates who supposed that the working class was nothing. Nonetheless, Žižek is supposed to be a representative of Marxism. Much later, it struck me that a number of my students understood Marxism to be the Frankfurt School. I.e., Marxism is now a recognition that the working class is not revolutionary and a matter of grappling with what to do now.’ D.L. Jacobs and Alan Shandro, “Lenin and the logic of hegemony: An interview with Alan Shandro,” Platypus Review 154 (March 2023). https://platypus1917.org/2023/03/01/lenin-and-the-logic-of-hegemony-an-interview-with-alan-shandro/ ↩︎
45. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 207. ↩︎
46. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), translated by Dennis Redmond, 13. Cited in Losurdo, Western Marxism, 201. ↩︎
47. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto”, New Left Review 65, 2010, 61. ↩︎
48. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13. ↩︎
49. See Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World (New Dehli: LeftWord Books, 2017). ↩︎
50. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 220-6. ↩︎
51. Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 97. Cited in Losurdo, Western Marxism, 120-1. ↩︎
52. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 98. ↩︎
53. Lenin, “Guerilla Warfare,” in Collected Works vol. 11, 213–14. ↩︎
54. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 158. ↩︎
55. See Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 39; 77; 331. ↩︎
56. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 332-3. ↩︎
57. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 336. ↩︎
58. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 334. ↩︎
59. Gyorgy Lukacs, “Preface” in The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 22. The original passage is from Lukacs’s The Destruction of Reason. ↩︎
60. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 146. ↩︎
61. On the influence of capitalist class on the news media, see, to give just one citation, Alan Macleod, “Introduction: Propaganda in the information Age” and “Assessing the strength of the five filters today,” in Alan Macleod (Ed.), Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent (New York: Routledge 2019), 1-11; 45-64. ↩︎
62. See the overview in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 131-140. ↩︎
63. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 150. ↩︎
64. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 146. ↩︎
65. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 97. ↩︎
66. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 104. ↩︎
67. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 160. ↩︎
68. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 149. ↩︎
69. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 146-7. ↩︎
70. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 146-9. ↩︎
71. The phrase is Rockhill’s: see, Who Paid the Pipers, 128. ↩︎
72. See the discussion from Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 86ff. ↩︎
73. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 150. ↩︎
74. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 145. ↩︎
75. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 151. ↩︎
76. The portion of the document these passages are sourced from is reproduced in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 346. ↩︎
77. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 27. ↩︎
78. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 332. ↩︎
79. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 272, my emphasis. The whole page is reproduced in the Appendix on page 377. ↩︎
80. Cited in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 273. ↩︎
81. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 273. ↩︎
82. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 274. ↩︎
83. Quoted in Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 276; Tim B. Müller, Krieger and Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2011), 145. ↩︎
84. See the grant document reproduced on Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 383. ↩︎
85. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 39. ↩︎
86. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 337. ↩︎
87. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 338. ↩︎
88. Losurdo, Western Marxism, 224. ↩︎
89. Tricontinental Institute, Dossier no. 37, “Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation.” https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-37-marxism-and-national-liberation/. Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (London: Verso, 2023). ↩︎
90. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 74. ↩︎
91. See Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 331-2. ↩︎
92. Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 21. This formulation derives from the Qing state official Zhang Zhidong’s own proposition, ‘Chinese learning for the body and Western learning for the use.’ ↩︎
93. Cheng, China’s Economic Dialectic, 21-22. ↩︎
94. Ho Chi Minh, “The Great October Revolution Opened the Road to Liberation to All Peoples,” in Ho Chi Minh: Selected Writings 1920-1969 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977), 325. ↩︎
95. See Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 143; Losurdo, Western Marxism, 111. ↩︎
96. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 331. ↩︎
97. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers, 104. ↩︎
98. Rockhill, Who Paid the Piper, 46. ↩︎