Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

by Gabriel Rockhill

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and ideology. Author Gabriel Rockhill demonstrates the explanatory and transformative superiority of a dialectical and historical materialist approach, while elucidating how the world of ideas is a crucial site of class struggle. He then engages in a meticulous counter-history of the Frankfurt School—which made a foundational contribution to Western Marxism—by situating it within the global relations of class struggle and the imperialist war on actually existing socialism. With the explicit and direct backing of powerful elements in the capitalist ruling class and the world’s leading imperialist state, the Frankfurt School developed a widely promoted form of compatible critical theory as an ersatz for dialectical and historical materialism. The volume concludes by bringing to the fore the positive project that serves as the guiding methodological framework for the work as a a thoroughly anticolonial and anti-imperialist Marxism dedicated to building socialism in the real world. Drawing on extensive archival research to pull back the curtain on ruling class machinations, Rockhill’s book elucidates how the intellectual world war on the socialist alternative has sought to shore up and promote a “compatible left” intelligentsia while misrepresenting, maligning, and trying to destroy the revolutionary left.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Economics, American History

415 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2025

Reviews

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is striking that our country’s leading “socialist” politicians have all morphed into J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio when talking about imperialist politics. You’ll hear Bernie Sanders lead his statement on the U.S. invasion of Venezuela with “Of course, Nicolás Maduro is a dictator.” You’ll hear Zohran Mamdani say “I believe both Nicolás Maduro and Miguel Díaz-Canel are dictators.” You’ll hear AOC refer to the Palestinian resistance as “disgusting and antisemitic.” Depending on where one is in their political journey, these statements can conjure disappointment, betrayal, or anger. Gabriel Rockhill puts them into their proper historical context: “the hostility of the ‘compatible left’ to actually existing socialism makes them natural allies to imperialism.”

He situates the intellectual war on communism in the aftermath of WWII as a parallel war to the official war on communism that has claimed tens of millions of lives throughout the world. The gains made in the communist sphere were undeniable, and addressing the most serious needs of the working class was a danger to the capitalist dictatorships of the West. The intelligence agencies thus had to be careful in how they approached their propaganda. The most successful iteration came in splitting ‘leftists’ into ‘compatible’ (social chauvinists and those who feed right back to capitalist rule) and ‘incompatible’ (communists and anti-imperialists who support actually existing socialist states).

The strain of “imperialist Marxism” has been bred through the imperial superstructure, and the willingness of these ‘left’ scholars of critical theory to accept the imperialist analysis of socialism as scientific (and deride the socialist analysis as thoroughly ideological) underscores the importance of the willingness to question the dominant dogma and apply true dialectical and historical materialism to analyze present conditions and the value of socialism, and resist the propaganda that is so embedded in our society.

As an aside - the haters are the reason I picked this book up, and I have to say, if you truly read this and are angry at the premise or the theory presented, the book might just be about you!

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This thoroughly researched text combines two strands of left argumentation that don't usually meet each other--the practical anti-imperialist thread (as in Blum, Chomsky, Zinn) and the theoretical critique thread (familiar in Marx and others). It turns the tools of both against one sector of left theory, a sort of inversion of the maoist principle of making the party both the arrow and the target. Here of course there's no party under examination but rather a group of academics who never really sought to be the vanguard.

Perhaps that's the ultimate charge, as insinuated by the title--that 'western marxism' is a pied piper leading otherwise good lefties down the primrose path of cappy corruption, rather than adopting a proper leadership role and fashioning them into the hammer that would bring capitalism down. The text is convincing on the main point that the persons being examined were situated within a context wherein it would be difficult to avoid influence by objective material conditions. It's not 'western marxism' proper, however, a term I normally associate with Lukacs, Korsch, and Gramsci--all unimpeachable in this argument--none of whom are analyzed in depth here, with only Lukacs being mentioned twice (positively) with numerous citations to his Zerstorung. Rather, the primary object here is the Frankfurt School.

We know that the Frankfurt School involved a number of academics who worked for a university institute that was funded by a wealthy patron. They had to seek refuge outside of Germany during the fascist period, as they were persons whom the NSDAP would have proscribed. They ended up mostly in the US, entering the employ of the US government to assist against fascism. They mostly stayed in the US after the war or returned to West Germany, remaining involved in numerous associations that were keyed into CIA fronts and capitalist media. They more or less all had critical responses to Stalinism. I don't think any of that is reasonably controvertible; nor is much of it newly known. The argument here attempts to situate these scholars into this material reality and then argue that they were a pet 'compatible left' that made anticommunism into a leftwing standard.

The text includes several disclaimers that the arguments of any particular scholar need to be assessed on their own merits. So it would be unfair to say that this text seeks to dismiss everything written by Adorno, say, simply because he took capitalist money and wrote things that sound kinda mccarthyist-adjacent. This task is not undertaken--in fact, nothing in this text attempts to refute anything written by the Frankfurt School, though some ideas are held out for presumed ridicule.

Where the text fails, I think, is two places. First, it is well known that the Frankfurt School is a group of marxists who also read and accepted influence from rightwing thinking. This is what makes them interesting and sometimes surprising. Heidegger, Schmitt, Freud's more arrière-garde persona, German Romanticism, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer are all nontrivial influences. I'm fine with that. We can see it in the writings--Frankfurt had the assumption that one's philosophical opponents are not valueless and one can learn from them. There is no discussion of these nuances in this text. Some are mentioned but it is not really discussed in detail. In some ways, the argument here is contingent on these philosophical proclivities not being front and center. That Frankfurt Marxism has complicated opinions is what makes them not classical marxists or orthodox leninists or blinkered stalinists. Were these antecedents highlighted, it might come across as no surprise that they are ambivalent about everything, including actual existing socialist states. We need not accept their ambivalence even if we like some of their arguments otherwise. One can assume that the school's members were damaged by living under fascism and the experience of exile, presumably causing them severe psychological harm, as described by Fanon, with the attendant effects of interiorized inferiority, self-alienation, and horizontal violence--the lashing out at one's co-oppressed rather than at the structural source of oppression. Fanon's liberation theory (holding the purported virtue of oppressed groups less relevant than these deforming effect of domination) has answers for this problem; Frankfurt never got there. (Per Aimé Césaire, the NSDAP treated Europeans like the rest of Europe treated Africans.)

Second, there is not much here in the way of placing CIA words in Frankfurt mouths. The closest the text comes is in the discussion of Marcuse's Soviet Marxism, which it establishes was written while Marcuse accepted sums from CIA-connected foundations, and which has conclusions consistent with the hypothesized goal of the cappies using compatible left writers to make anticommunist arguments. I'm decently read in Marcuse, and this text of his does not come across as propagandistic or as failing to take the Soviet Union seriously. It certainly is not an anticommunist screed, even if it is critical of Stalinism and some aspects of Soviet policy. (The objection can't possibly be that one is not allowed to be critical of Stalinism.) These items can of course be bracketed away by the reader--I really doubt that anyone who is reading Frankfurt Marxist materials is a blinkered ideologue. (That leads into another problem: as China Mieville notes, "a 500 page fantasy novel is a hugely inefficient vehicle for propaganda." That is, Frankfurt Marxist writings are labor intensive--they are not exactly ideal for propagandizing anyone.) That's all well and good--we can be charitable to Rockhill on this point, as the circumstances of the writing of Soviet Marxism and the general drift of its argument fit his thesis. That said, though, there is no indication here that Marcuse wrote the text in bad faith or that he didn't believe the argument, or that he parroted some CIA bullshit. Were there rough drafts of specific marcusian arguments in CIA files somewhere but over the signature of some agency asshole, or cover letters from an agency handler to Marcuse with instructions to include some specific rightwing mendacities in his next book, I'm sure that they'd be front and center here. And of course they are not. I very much doubt that anything like that occurred. The agency already had plenty of fiction writers and venues to publish them. The goal was to capture a compatible left--which meant allowing it to retain its liberty of inquiry (but while trailing them with FBI investigators).

That failure to definitively trace Frankfurt arguments back to some CIA cappy fiction mill makes it difficult to understand the vitriol that drives much of the writing here. There's some fairly mean-spirited talk, personal invective against Frankfurt scholars, as though they made fascism or capitalism happen or caused the Soviet Union to fail. One moment seems to blame Horkheimer for Benjamin's death during a heinous circumstance in impossible times. I mean, come the fuck on. I get it--Horkheimer added his opinion supporting the unlawful US invasion of Vietnam--it's deplorable but the allegation can't possibly be that, had Horkheimer possessed the correct opinion, the war would've stopped. Similarly, Adorno didn't like student protestors. That makes him a bit of a jerk but that fact does not make his analysis wrong (which of course it could be wrong but not for that reason). The personal invective is really tiresome, as though anyone should be able to step out of history and material necessity to make a heroic stand in isolation. We must recall that Frankfurt was in exile and had to make its way--if bad decisions were made during that exile--and I suspect that Rockhill is correct that some members zigged when they should have zagged--some deference is due to those who lived the moment. We can subject such moments to critique, but not for the purpose of casting aspersions on their motives or contributions. It's not about personal accountability or reputation at this point, but rather perhaps learning for the next time the fascists cause a lefty diaspora.

Similarly on this point regarding invective & vitriol, there's at times an uncritical construal of capitalist surplus extraction and colonial expropriation as 'theft.' This is a lawyerly point, but these processes are of course precisely not crimes--surplus extraction being specifically legal under capitalism and colonial expropriation occurring through legal mechanisms historically (when not, we get international tribunals and the concomitant metamorphosis of colonialism into new forms of neo-colonialism, debt leverage imperialism, Hudson's superimperialism, and so on).

And there's also the question of how much counter-penetration occurred. Rockhill notes that the Soviets had penetrated most western institutions, and that Neumann seems to have been working for the Soviet Union while in the employ of the US. It is difficult, then, to discern just what quantum of Frankfurt Marxist work in the US was covert faux accommodation or sneaky entryism or dunyain-style getting captured in order to run this bitch from the inside. This is certainly the fascistic interpretation of Frankfurt School activities in US--and it is satisfying to see them get their bloomers in a twist about 'cultural' marxism, CRT, political correctness, and other things that they don't like and then blaming them on Adorno et al. as snakes in their Eden. I mean, Rockhill needs some revision, but the fascists are just braindead, blaming the problems for which they signed up on persons who didn't cause them, as usual.

Overall, Frankfurt School members were already interested in conservative ideas, so they had a pre-existing affinity consistent with the CIA's desire to create or manage a 'compatible left' during a time when the philosophies and politics of the right had taken a blow in the world war. Given that constellation, nothing more is needed to explain why one end would want to pay and the other would accept payment. Likely there's no need to vilify anyone over it. I'm a socialist who makes a living as an attorney, doing work for non-socialists. Must I purify my praxis by only doing pro bono work for labor unions? Were I bodiless, existing ethereally as a spirit of communist justice, sure, this sort of immaterialist criticism would be salient; in the absence of that fairly cool condition of being, it's just bad idealism.

Incidentally, he opens the book with an anecdote about not having anything to say about 9/11 when it occurred because he'd been immersed in critical theory, post-structuralism, and so on. I get it--but I happened to be a university instructor at the time and as soon as it happened, I suspended my regular syllabus so my undergraduates could read Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History," with especial attention to theses VI through IX. I'm sure the kids hated me for telling them that the US is a lying asshole &c., but I think it patently untrue that unorthodox leftwing theory had nothing to offer the moment.

[Massimo Andolfatto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a much needed and clearly written book that lays out the political economy of knowledge production, and how the US’ imperial superstructure shapes and influences dominant ideology, in particular focusing on a left portion of its intellectual apparatus, i.e., the Frankfurt school. I’ve seen so many people dismiss this book as a “conspiracy theory” before it was even released; people like Sebastian Budgen and Ross Wolfe want to deny the book’s validity because they have built their intellectual identities using theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and want to maintain the illusion that all efforts at socialist construction are “Stalinist” deviations. Yet, Rockhill’s argumentation and documentation are nuanced and irrefutable as far as I can see. Certain key documents obtained via FOIA are included in the index.

This book should be read by anyone seeking to understand ideology, and how it is conditioned by the socioeconomic system, etc.

[Ahmed Abdelfattah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read. A must read for any critical thinker, a must read for anyone who is interested in: propaganda, culture, philosophy, Marxism, Empire and factual history.

[Klejton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The high reviews are a little insane to be honest. I find myself agreeing with Rockhill, pretty much on everything. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the likes of Jacobin cope and try to grasp at straws at what is a fairly incontestable thesis on this book. Like any industry in capitalism, theoretical production is also one and it functions similarly to other industries, affected by the class structure of capitalism. Intellectual elites in the imperial core are incentivised to defend capitalism and attack communism, based on their class position and their career advancement. I also found myself really relating to Rockhill’s story about 9/11, about the inability to come up with something worthy to say after you immerse yourself in critical theory.

With that being said, it is just a non-interesting angle of attack for me personally. It’s basically 350 pages of “X guy took money from Y agency who was a front for the CIA”. I would have been far more interested in discussing the actual ideas of some of these thinkers in their own terms and only after that, situating them in their material context. What we get instead is a detailed map of how various “left” thinkers were connected to the American propaganda apparatus. It’s fine but not stimulating at all.

[spacemonkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are so back 🚩

[Burton DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this book was a bit of a drag, as it could have been 80 pages instead of 180 pages. Rockhill described it in an interview I listened to as the methodological portion of the series (this book is merely Part I of III), so I get the purpose, but it is way too repetitive as he often re-establishes in one section what he already discussed in a previous section, only to then re-establish it a third and fourth time in future sections. When he gets into the meat of the analysis, however, Rockhill provides a cogent and nuanced analysis of the careers of three titans of the Frankfurt School and their connections (both direct and implicit) to various engines of the US imperial machine, and how that influenced both their scholarship, their renown, and their career advancements, while avoiding making any firm conclusions where the evidence is ambiguous, incomplete, or unavailable.

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a free copy from the publisher after requesting it*

Rockhill argues that the Frankfurt School was funded and (perhaps indirectly) steered by the deep state. They were funded, Rockhill argues, because the Frankfurt School were part of the "compatible left". That is, the Left that aligned with the state's anti-communist aims. He's not entirely wrong, but the argument's narrow analysis on funding seems to ignore examples that don't fit the model. For example, Rockhill's publisher, who shares many of his views, literally runs the American Sociological Association. Also, if American academe shunned radical pro-communist thought, how did Al Szymanski (another key figure in the American Sociological Association) manage to write pro-Soviet material using only Western Sovietologists and teach his radical social science textbook at Rutgers? Was the deep state not aware of the tankies or were they also wrapped up in the conspiracy?

Also, this single-minded emphasis on funding seems to forget the actual point of Critical Theory. Who funded Critical Theory isn't as important as whether the theory corresponds with material reality and provides a method for social change. I think in its current state it does neither, and that's a better reason for critiquing it and avoiding its more useless offshoots. Sure, funding comes with strings and students should know that their radical theory comes funded by their taxpayer dollars, but most of the revelations outlined in this book are already well known and don't provide much insight beyond the fact that major powers will fund an intellectual enemy of an enemy.

[Ryan Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to write this review only in hopes that it will convince you to read this book. The connections made between people and the ideas formed from those connections make up the spiderweb we call life. Seeing how those connections are used by the powerful to mold the minds of the people is paramount if we are going to fight those people and their ideas. History has made clear that we must fight because their world has no place for everyone.

This book helps illuminate how even our most sacred ideas can be warped and twisted by the brokers of power to fit their agenda, if not completely then at least to the point they stay in power. Lives be damned. We have to fully understand that in order to fight it. Mr. Rockhill puts the Frankfurt School on blast in the complete way of the best Marxist Leninist thinkers. Run don’t walk and get this book.

[danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a metaphor that Rockhill introduces early in this book that I really appreciate in his discussion of the relationship between bourgeois state ideology and supposedly left, radical, or Marxist intellectual production, where he claims that the compatible left professors and thinkers are less like puppets whose strings are being pulled by CIA, but rather that state agencies "generally prefer to build and manage marionette theaters, allowing the puppets to come of their own accord." While Rockhill doesn't make a big deal of this particular metaphor, I found it useful in thinking through his argument about the role of supposedly oppositional intellectuals who are situated within a discursive and material world that has been shaped by capital and empire.

This is one of the denser academic works I've read in a while, and to really do justice to all the thoughts and occasional critiques or skepticism I felt while reading it would require a full length review or academic paper, which I'm probably not going to undertake (unless someone from the state department or Ford Foundation would like to pay me to do so!). But what I will say is that I found this to be an incredibly useful text in thinking through many of the frustrations I have personally experienced with academia, to put it in the broadest sense. To be more specific, I think there is a kind of futility that comes with thinking about what it would mean to do any kind of intellectual work within the structures of the university or the broader think-tank/foundation world that could actually be meaningfully oppositional to the ruling class or US empire writ large. It feels obvious to me at this point that to find any degree of success, career stability, or reputation in western academia is to conform to a set of rules, conventions, and relationships of power that necessarily and structurally foreclose any kinds of political activity that could be revolutionary or at least threatening to capitalism and empire.

While that broader point may feel obvious or perhaps intuitive, it is still worthwhile for people - and I suppose, specifically people committed to dialectical and historical materialism - to do the work of showing exactly how the superstructure of capital works when it comes to knowledge production, as Rockhill sets out to do here. By looking at the case of the Frankfurt school first (further editions on French theory and more are promised), Rockhill examines how the fledgling US security and philanthropic state created the conditions for the intellectual success and prominence of a certain brand of Marxist or Marx-inflected scholar who while critical of certain aspects of capitalism would still ultimately fall in line with the broader anti-communist politics of their patrons in the ruling class. Focusing even more specifically on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, Rockhill meticulously documents each of these figures' involvement with the US intelligence services, rehabilitated Nazis working for the west Germans after WWII, and the broader network of government and philanthropic funding that in turn shapes academia and the wider market for social scientific ideas (magazines, newspapers, research funding, etc).

Even if you are not particularly invested in the Frankfurt school figures discussed (as I, admittedly, am not), or the various trends and subtrends within Western Marxism more broadly (which, still, meh), I think Rockhill's detailed analysis of this specific school and set of thinkers is still useful for thinking about the role of supposedly critical public intellectuals or political thinkers that we have in the West today. In their own way, I think a lot of people are working through these questions when, for example, someone's critical theory darling fails to apply the theory they've made a career off of analyzing to the politics in the world or, say, opposition to genocide. The role of the compatible left - those that claim to be critical, yet ultimately fall in line on imperial designs - is a pressing issue in this moment within and beyond social movements, and I think Rockhill has done a real service by providing a language and a framework grounded in theory with which to think about these figures.

While this is not Rockhill's project and I think he even explicitly disclaims the need to do this at one point, it is interesting to think about and juxtapose the counter-examples, those figures whose politics and intellectual thought did actually put them squarely in opposition to US empire - the George Jacksons and Walter Rodneys and Assatas. While Rockhill does, at one point, contrast the fate of Jackson with that of Marcuse, the discussion is not really detailed or nuanced enough to make, in my opinion, any real point. But again, that is perhaps wishing for a different book or project than that which Rockhill set out to write.

All of this being said, perhaps the most important point I see Rockhill as making in the book (or perhaps just the one that best aligns with the politics I bring to it), is an emphasis on the primacy of practice over the primacy of ideology when it comes to Marxism or socialism. For Rockhill, when you examine not only the material background and personal lifestyles of left intellectuals but also the way that they seek to operationalize their political ideas in the world, you get a much better picture of their place within the system of bourgeois knowledge production than to take them at their words, accolades, or reputation alone. Particularly in a moment when there is actual material resistance to capital and empire going on in the world, and thinkers and movements of the western left fail to take up a meaningful role in joining this resistance, we all need to be thinking about which pipers we're following (or something).

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my final reads to close out 2025 was Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology. In that work, author Richard Wolin makes it clear that, whatever one's assessment of the subjective utility of the concept of Dasein, no amount of eschewing of intelligibility could uproot it, or its progenitor, from ties to a reactionary political project.

If that applies to Heidegger, then why wouldn't it apply not just to other authors, but to philosophical "schools" situated in a broader military-industrial-academic complex?

I went into this book having watched several hours of interviews or panel discussions with Gabriel Rockhill, knowing largely what to expect and how some disingenuous bad-actors have caricatured the thesis. It's not a matter of concentric circles of evil-by-association, but the political economy of knowledge production. The broader institutional and social context in which schools and any given theorist operates naturally informs their background assumptions, lines of thought and investigation, etc.

That said, I tried a benefit-of-the-doubt approach when opening this book: What if Herbert Marcuse, for example, knowingly collaborated with the U.S. State Department not out of real affinity with imperialism, but expediency, for promoting a 'tendency' of Marxism that offered a needed alternative but would otherwise find itself marginal in a context of two predominant and duelling hegemonic forces?

One problem, touched on by Rockhill, is that there is that Eastern/peripheral/subaltern Marxism had various "currents" that offered something of an "alternative" for those eager to abandon a 'distorted' revolution. But even these are ultimately disavowed by Western Marxism. It's not that it was necessary to reinvent the wheel---it's that confining that wheel to the roads of pure theory allowed an escape from the inconveniences of a positive project. As Rockhill goes on to explain, it's the objective consequences that matter. Not that we should sacrifice the veracity of critique on the altar of pragmatism, but that an honest accounting of available means for long-term strategy requires suboptimal shorter-to-medium-term choices.

Even those familiar with NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, and Operation Paperclip, will find some new sordid details in this book about just how far this phenomenon extends into academia, as well.

[Hailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

thesis got a bit redundant but the specific examples are hella great for dunking on my opps

[Court · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should go down as one of the most important interventions in Cold War scholarship. Don’t let the controversy in the compatible-left press/academia scare you away: every serious Cold War scholar simply must read this book and come to their own conclusions.

[Narek Yeranyan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every 1751 books or so, I write a book review. It is not easy. If you asked my opinion on any book concerning politics, you would get a 5 hour speech, 4.5 of which would be historical context (a trait I share with the author). To keep the review from turning into a book, I will ignore most of the book.
This work deserves both 1 and 5 stars. There are other books like this. The best parallel is Stalin by Domenico Losurdo (an author Rockhill highly admires). I liked every page of Losurdo’s book, right up until a single sentence (which is itself mostly true) on the very last page, where he writes:
"Obviously, the war that Washington has in mind is not against Germany, France or Italy, but one against China (the country that emerged out of the greatest anti-colonial revolution and led by an experienced communist party) and/or Russia (that under Putin had made the mistake... of shaking off the neo-colonial control that Yeltsin had submitted to or complied with)."
My paranoid mind instantly went: Wow, an entire book just to smuggle in that one sentence. To get the reader to agree with 99% of the historical critique so that they would uncritically swallow the final suggestion: View Vladimir Putin as some kind of Russian Thomas Sankara, and do not associate China with capitalism since it emerged from anti-colonialism.
Rockhill does the exact same thing.
In his concluding pages, Rockhill invokes Lenin, reminds us of the NEP, and casually suggests that even if an NEP takes decades, it can still "advance the socialist cause." He doesn't mention China, and he doesn’t have to. Anyone reading this deep into communism understands that he is selling a 35-year NEP with Chinese characteristics.
And the question I have is: Who is the target audience for books like Losurdo’s Stalin, Western Marxism, or Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers?
The average person knows that communism killed a hundred billion people and that Stalin personally ate half of them. That narrows the reader pool down to people who somehow have doubts. If you narrow that pool further and further down, the potential reader for this book would be someone with a QAnon-level of paranoia—someone who knows that entire libraries can be written and distributed just to suggest that Stalin tortured one cute mouse in childhood. They know that a person can be the highest Marxist authority on earth and still justify voting for war credits in an imperialist world war. A reader like that will have no problem believing Rockhill when he argues that Herbert Marcuse was a CIA asset operating under radical language.
But that exact same reader will justifiably suspect you of subtle (not at all subtle if you ask me) propaganda.
And the question becomes: Who paid Rockhill?
The thing is, you don't need to trick me to sympathize with China. You don’t need to "NEP-wash" capitalism. An honest "let's pragmatically support China (a saintly state compared to the US, Israel, or Germany) or Russia or really anything that is against Satan" will do. You can support Churchill, who was kind of like Hitler, against Hitler. And it is better to be honest about why you are doing it rather than attempting to prove that Churchill (or Ilyin-loving Putin) is a disguised communist.
Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe Rockhill and Losurdo are completely innocent. I will do as Rockhill does every time he admits he doesn’t know about many actions and intentions of someone like Marcuse. He goes, "We don’t know what he was doing on Monday, but I assume he was strip dancing for someone from the Ford Foundation."
And just one bit of historical context: Marcuse claimed that he worked for the US state (the OSS) to fight fascism. Rockhill thinks this is a childish excuse. But what about the fact that the Soviets themselves were telling everyone to just pause the class struggle, shut up, and support whoever fights Hitler? If someone under the French colonial boot in Africa was supposed to join the killers of his fellow villagers just to prevent colonialism in Europe itself, why couldn't Marcuse join the OSS? In fact, if he had been a card-carrying communist at the time, he would have been obligated to join the OSS under the current party line.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent ouvrage. Après une étude d'un tell acabit sur la production intellectuelle occidentale, il est difficile de prendre aux sérieux non seulement une part importante des philosophes occidentaux post-guerre, dont la corruption est quasiment totale mais encore le récit anti-communiste issue de ceux-ci. Dans cet ouvrage, premier d'une série de trois toms, l'auteur soummet la productions intellectuelle à la critique marxiste, et sous la loupe de la dialectique et du matérialisme historique, met en lumière le complexe industrialo intellectuel comme produit du système économique capitaliste. En d'autres terme, le marxisme impériale, comme le nomme l'auteur, est un produit, une marchandise du marché intellectuelle dont la valeur est marchande plus que usuel.
L'auteur révèle également comment ces auteurs, entre autre de l'école de Francfort, on été instrumentalisés par les services du renseignement américain, comme gauche "compatible" dans le but de détourner les masses du marxisme réellement anti-impérialiste, le marxisme-léninisme. Ces auteurs, pleinement anti-communistes, plaidaient pour un marxisme idéaliste, défaitiste, dont la lutte des classe a été extirpé au profit d'un libéralisme mettant au centre l'individus et la culture plus tôt que la lutte contre le système d'exploitation capitaliste impérialiste. Ces auteurs ont collaboré consciemment et activement a la lutte contre le communisme et les Etats socialistes dans des buts carriéristes.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great comprehensive overview of western (imperial) Marxism and its history as a school of thought developed with the bankrolling of intelligence agencies and capitalist interests in order to drive a wedge between actually existing socialism (especially the anti-imperialist struggles in the Global South). It also does a good job at demonstrating the creation of a version of Marxism that not only accommodates capitalism and imperialism, but which also shifts the approach of creating academic output that functions more as a commodity and less as a tool for actually implementing socialism.

While I was not familiar with the work of some of its most prominent thinkers, many of their deviations from actual Marxist thought in favor of anarchist, liberal, revisionist views are ones that are still quite prominent today—in fact, given that many “big tent” orgs have not examined the history and function of these ways of thinking, they have become more widespread and trenchant.

Rockhill largely relies on Soviet figures in his analysis, which is elucidating. However, I would have loved seeing more engaging with leaders like Mao and a discussion of the Sino-Soviet split. (This is book one of three in this series, so perhaps this will be included in another volume.)

All in all, I found this a very helpful and illuminating (and fairly digestible, considering the subject matter!) look at imperial Marxism.

[Celeste · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reads like an oedipal tirade against the tradition in which Rockhill was trained.

It is one thing to (correctly) acknowledge and draw attention to the connections between key critical theorists such as Marcuse and the OSS. It is another to use those connections to discredit the flawed, diverse, and occasionally insightful tradition known as "Western Marxism."

The cultural turn was a product of its time; many of its contributions were insightful, many were not. If we are to judge the merit of academic work on its contributions to politics, as Rockhill implores us to do here, then I can only find his own analysis to be impoverished. It's bizarre that essential Marxist terms like class and organisation are absent from a book written by a purportedly socialist author. If you want to think seriously about class struggle, put down the cultural studies books (including this one), engage in debates about building power and learn from history. There is currently an exciting resurgence of workplace organising, union activity, and international solidarity. These possibilities and challenges within the West will be missed by sections of the left more eager to fetishise statecraft in the global south or allege CIA connections rather than doing the hard work of building workers' power where they are.

[Cristobal Peña · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember hearing whispers about how the CIA had propped up certain French thinkers. For a long time, I never stopped to wonder why or to look into it. It wasn’t until I came across the work of Gabriel Rockhill that I began to think about it seriously.

The United States provided massive amounts of funding to individual thinkers, universities, presses, and cultural institutions, all in an effort to control which ideas were promoted, how certain events were interpreted, and, more importantly, how anti-imperialism was undermined. This wasn’t done through open opposition, but by elevating what appeared to be the most sophisticated theory, the ‘correct’ form of Marxism, and the most ‘serious’ intellectual positions.

The book does not call for a total rejection of the authors and thinkers it examines. Rather, it shows that, if you are aware of the context, you can still take what is useful from their work as a tool.

Without this awareness, you are likely to keep falling for intellectual psychological operations from decades ago. That is why this book is a must-read for anyone interested in modern philosophy and/or Marxism.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much needed book in this day and age. Tells the tale of how Marxism was taken out of the hands of workers and co opted by establishment intellectuals. What was once the most feared ideology in the eyes of capitalists has become just another means of defining yourself through lifestyle branding and intellectual navel gazing. This is part of a trilogy. The first book establishes methodology and goes into the Frankfurt school, while the second book will focus on French post modernism. Not sure about the third. Anyway, I’m ready to storm the ivory towers.

[Hotbean Sluzalek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for the red westoid. This book validated everything I felt but couldn't translate into gobledegook when I first entered academia and was presented with the most "radical" critical theory of the day.

Tldr;

Follow the money, and

Don't feel that you're an unsophisticated simpleton for not understanding why your Ivy-educated, so-called Marxist, decolonial professors insist on the primacy of theory written by Western anti-communists and Zionists who've never organized a day in their life over the praxis of anti-colonial struggles across the Global South.

[Diana Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and worth reading especially if there’s anyone to discuss it with

At the same time that I’m reading this I’m listening to an audio book about the USA in the ‘50’s (fiction) during the red scare which includes the plight of refugees who were taken advantage of by avaricious politicians in the USA and just posted a clip from Michael Moore’s movie “Where to Invade Next” when the 9/11 workers go to Cuba to get medical care because of the current threat to Cuba voiced by the ruling class’s puppet so all of these things are fitting together in my mind. Read it.

[Veronique Perrot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating book on so-called Western Marxism. The author dissects the origins of the western cultural war against the Soviet Union with its roots in the CIA and the US ruling class. This is an extremely well sourced book which hilights the origins of what's wrong with the left and western marxism in general and how the CIA used front groups in western europe to undermine communism.

[Rene Salomon · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book, you can only say we live in the most disgusting place on earth. The atrocities of the West are mind bending. Everything that has happened in history is so shrouded in secrecy , that we almost never get to see the hard truths.
Im thinking this is a realistic look at the truth.

[Clarice Respecter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some books are meant to be split open for their sources and then you toss the book aside like a walnut shell. Read this book to get to Frances Stoner Saunders's "The Cultural Cold War" and some other more important kernels. Good chapters on Marcuse though, if you're into that stuff.

[Lupe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a well researched book with very illuminating and clear-cut analyses. DHM is that girl, always has been and always will be. Shame on these Western intellectuals who have made us think otherwise of a tool that has helped to liberate millions!!

[Omar E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind blown

[Joshua Stonewall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best of 2025! Read this before you die! Read this before you live!

[Mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the shift from class-based Marxism to Western Marxism, which focused only on culture wars among leftists during the cold war and till now.

[Olivia R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for all academics

[Layna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was truly a remarkable book! This book situates Western Marxism and Marxist academia into a dialectical historical materialist analysis as Rockhill’s method of investigation.

Rather than following individual figures and their cooperation with the state department, he shows a full picture of the anti-communist web of the academic superstructure, which was a purposeful project of creating a “compatible left,” that is, compatible with imperialism. He followed this project materially through sources of funding for universities, through following who on the left was platformed at these universities (and who was not), and how this base of material support elevated certain theories (i.e. compatible left theories that prioritize Marxist analysis while denigrating actual socialism in practice). Each of the figures he focuses on have their own interesting contradictions within this web, or expose contradictions within the ruling class, and I found the chapter on Marcuse particularly interesting.

The academic/ideological superstructure of permissible leftism is so pervasive, many people interested in theory have no idea they are engaging in this deeper project. Theory for theory’s sake is enticing, it creates a never-ending wild goose chase of deciphering individual theorists and ideas, popping into existence new postmodern explanations of our conditions that obfuscates any deeper base analysis and obscures their social relations.

I’ve been recommending this book to all friends interested in theory, postmodernism, or who have an academic history in the Frankfurt School, because I truly think that this book exposes the dangers of idealist leftism and Western Marxism so convincingly that no other book has. (This book is also great to read after Losurdo’s Western Marxism, which Rockhill translated.)