30. Another Conspiracy Theory about Marxists w/ Richard Gilman-Opalsky

Antifascist Dad, Episode 30: Another Conspiracy Theory About Marxists Guest: Richard Gilman-Opalsky --- Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with episode 30 of Antifascist Dad podcast. This one's called Another Conspiracy Theory About Marxists with my special guest Richard Gilman-Opalsky. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok and as antifascistdad the Patreon for this show so that you can support and also get early access to every part two of these main feed episodes is antifascistdadpodcast and yeah, you can go there. I appreciate your support early access to some of the materials, but everything actually comes onto the main feed sooner or later because this is an educational project and I don't think things should be paywalled indefinitely. Also, please check out my new book which is called Antifascist Dad. The link is in the show notes and if you have it already. Also there's an audiobook, there's an ebook format. If you have it already, please review it if you are so moved. Okay, some of you will remember my guest today, Richard Gilman-Opalsky from episode 11 in which we discussed his book The Communism of Love in which he basically says that certain baseline social relations can be seen as communistic, cooperative, distributive, non-transactional and that's what gives them meaning. And if we can figure out how our instinct for collaboration can escape the containment and isolation of the nuclear family and other hierarchies like it, that is a revolutionary mode of life. So if you want to hear him pour his heart out on that subject, we talk about parenting as well. You can pick up episode 11 by scrolling back just a little bit. But today Richard joins me as my first return guest to discuss something more technical, but I think super important given the culture war landscape of our fascist age. It's a difficult topic, but I want to make it as accessible as I can for regular folks out there. Because while you may not live in the weeds of Marxist arguments as I sometimes do, you may well feel the impacts of these conflicts on the fringes of your life as you bump up against frictions in organizing spaces and insinuations about people's motives and questions about who is radical enough and who you can trust, who is too harsh and mean, who is a sellout, who can really guide us towards a post-capitalist future. So it's not exactly a family and talking to kids subject. However, to the extent that it addresses a part of the culture war chaos we have to live with, I think it provides some general clarity that can filter down into less academic zones and spaces. So the subject is that we're going to be talking about the viral popularity of a new book by philosopher Gabriel Rockhill. It's called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Now, when I say viral, I mean Rockhill is all over YouTube and podcast land these days, and he might even be breaking into more mainstream progressive platforms soon. He was recently given over like two and a half hours on Bad Faith with Brianna Joy Gray, which is kind of extraordinary for a book of this complexity and sort of niche. But at this point, there are four highly critical academic reviews out there and on these larger social platforms, Rockhill is earning nothing but praise, which is kind of strange. It seems imbalanced, but I think he's getting the praise for a very good reason. He's charismatic and he's persuasive and he has an alarming and for some a validating message which kind of boils down to that all of the smartest left wing writers and theorists you know about aren't really leftists at all. They were actually bought and sold by capitalism as a form of controlled opposition. And that's why everything sucks. So that's the general thesis in the crudest, simplest, most reduced terms. Now, in the spirit of accessibility, I'm going to back up, zoom out, rise above, and approach these ideas through something that most of us will be very familiar with already, which is that there's a general impression out there, fueled by right wing influencers, that the academic work of the last few generations that focuses on social justice, decolonization and feminism has eroded intellectual integrity. It's demeaned the classic pillars of education and turned all the kids into weirdo social justice warriors. You might recognize this as Jordan Peterson level horseshit. And it comes out of a politics of grievance ginned up by crusty misogynists who are usually white, who can't tolerate the basic dynamics of social power just changing. So Peterson resurrected an old fascist and antisemitic label for his complaints. He calls it Cultural Marxism. Now, the Nazi label was cultural Bolshevism. So, same difference. The Nazis wanted to smear all new cultural critiques with the specter of degenerate communism. They wanted to distract people from Marx's basic analysis of capital so that they could conflate Marxism with cultural weirdness and unacceptability. Cultural Marxism, however, is a weird concept. It is sufficiently undefined and misunderstood that it can also be attacked from the left by a different flavor of traditionalism. This coming from Marxists who believe that the Cold War leftist academic focus on language, meaning, communications, identity, sexuality and psychoanalysis was also a form of degeneration, but a degeneration from the purity of the Marxist ideal of class struggle. So they argue that the ultimate impact of a Western Marxism, as exemplified by the Frankfurt School, which we'll get into in the interview, was a loss of contact with the working class, internationalism and an abdication of revolutionary necessity. Peterson argues that Cultural Marxism erodes the classical values of the Enlightenment. I mean, he's not totally wrong, but he thinks this is a bad thing. But these more traditional Marxists argue that Western Marxism erodes Marx's original analytical goal, which is to change history. Now over the past few years, the most eloquent expressions of this back-to-basics Marxism have come from discussions of the work of Dominic Losurdo. Now Losurdo's primary inheritor is the charismatic and persuasive Gabriel Rockhill, who furthers this criticism of the degeneracy of cultural theory with a new book which is called, as I've said, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Now if you listen carefully to that title, you'll suss out that Rockhill is not just talking about a theoretical shift over time. He's not just talking about people responding to the pressures of academic institutions and the pervasive violence of neoliberalism. For Rockhill, it's not that Marxists around the world went into a Cold War fallow period of reconsideration as they really grappled with the problems communist projects like the Soviet Union and China, all while global capital surged and neoliberalism militarized its police to the point that it's now a life threatening risk to just stage a basic protest. No, for Rockhill it's much more than that. The pipers of Rockhill's title are the chief intellectuals of the Cold War left. And in his telling they have led all the little naive leftist children astray, never to participate in real social change again. And moreover, the pipers were paid to do just this. So Rockhill is not simply claiming that Cold War leftism turned towards self-examination and a criticism of communist state projects because they were earnestly alarmed by the atrocities of Stalin and Mao, but because the U.S. through the CIA, funded them to do exactly that, whether they knew it or not, to become part of what Rockhill and others call the compatible left, which not only would never really challenge, but would ultimately capitulate to it while feeling very smart about itself. Now if this sounds like a conspiracy theory, well, that's a good thing to think about. My guest today, Richard Gilman-Opalsky, joins me to walk through the technical and historical problems with Rockhill's argument, but will also tackle the stickier issue of how Rockhill's framework, in an attempt to resuscitate class struggle, which was arguably never forgotten, echoes right wing caricatures of a sometimes misguided, often creative, but always diverse scholarly culture that attempts to see and remake the world through the eyes of justice. Richard Gilman-Opalsky, welcome back to Antifascist Dad. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Thanks for having me back. Matthew Remski: You know, you have been on strike, so I really appreciate you taking the time. How is it going? Are you seizing the means of production? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: I wish I could tell you that it was going better, honestly. It's a grueling strike. It's the longest strike in the three-campus history of the University of Illinois. Matthew Remski: Wow. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: What we are asking for from the university would have probably been rejected by us as an insult at a different time period. But right now we are fighting like hell to get close to cost-of-living adjustments from an administration that has tons of money for its own raises, its own pet projects, from a university system that is literally drenched in cash, billions of dollars. And they are trying to break us. They are trying to break the union. They don't want to have to deal with it ever again. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: So it's important to them that we lose. We are staying strong. It's two weeks in and members get weary. It's a difficult fight. It's a long fight and it's not what any of us expected. Matthew Remski: I wish you all the best with this. I think we'll get into this story that some people tell about, you know, Marxist academics actually being super well paid. And this is a good place to start. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes. Matthew Remski: So we're going to be talking about the viral popularity of Gabriel Rockhill's Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. I wanted to just start with some basic facts because this is a quite complicated book and discipline and territory. But if we start with some basics, I think my first question would be for you. What was the Frankfurt School? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Well, the Frankfurt School, it was founded in association with the Institute for Social Research in 1923, and it was founded during the Weimar Republic. So, you know, there was the German Revolution of 1919 that many radicals and revolutionaries, people like Rosa Luxemburg, hoped would result in a socialist transformation of society. But after the German revolution, Germany transitioned instead to what we would recognize today as a kind of liberal capitalist society. It was also, of course, a pre-fascist Germany, right. 1923 is when the Frankfurt School was founded. But it was made up of highly interdisciplinary intellectuals and academics, and also included dissidents and activists who were developing a new critique of social, political and economic systems, incorporating new insights from psychoanalysis and sociology and thinking about culture really grounded in Marx and Hegel, Marxism and Hegelianism, also in German idealism, philosophers like Kant as well as Hegel, but they were highly interdisciplinary. And what happened, of course, Weimar Republic was really ended up being a short passageway to Nazi Germany, to a full blown fascist society. And so the thinkers in the Frankfurt School, which later would just be called the classical school of critical theory, German critical theory, they were trying to make sense out of how revolution led to liberal capitalist society as a short passageway to fascist totality. And this was quite a surprising and quite a complex and confusing series of historical and political transitions. And so, I mean, just to give you one example of that, one of the early co-authored books by two of the major figures of the Frankfurt School, that would be Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, was a book called Dialectic of Enlightenment. So dialectics was very consciously an invocation, a reference to German idealism, Kant and Hegel, and also of course Marx, because these philosophers of the Frankfurt School were thinking deeply and in a very formative way with Marx. But when they think about dialectics, they're thinking about historical materialism and dialectic, social change and enlightenment is a very direct reference to Immanuel Kant, the great German idealist, who wrote a famous essay called What Is Enlightenment? But the idea of Adorno and Horkheimer was okay, so where does the dialectic of Enlightenment lead us? For Kant, it would have been cosmopolitan world order, a world of total, as Kant called it, perpetual peace. For Hegel, it would have been universal rationality and spirituality, the universal Geist. For Marx, the dialectical process would lead to some kind of an abolitionist transformation of the world in the direction of a better world that we all deserve. But from their point of view, all of the hopes of German idealism and Marx's dialectical optimism led to the concentration camps and the Nazi reality of a German society. And so they were struggling with this progressive idea that was in some ways the beating heart of German philosophy up to that point. I mean, Kant famously said, we have to get to cosmopolitan world peace, and those who are unwilling will be dragged. That was Kant's famous line in the theory and practice essay, those who are unwilling will be dragged. And Marx often wrote about the inexorable historical process that inevitably, inexorably, because of the unsustainability of conflict and antagonistic social relations, you know, something's got to give. But the idea that antagonism, transformation and dialectics could lead neither to enlightenment nor to cosmopolitan or communism, but instead to fascism was something that these theorists felt needed to be explained. And so they brought to that project of explaining the conditions of their lives and societies. They brought all these different disciplinary resources and tools. Social psychology, Freud and psychoanalysis, an analysis of technology, of relatively new technologies like the radio, which it's important to remember. Things like radio and film were brand new. These are early 20th century forms of mass media. And one of the earliest pieces that Theodor Adorno wrote was an essay, and I hope I get the title right, it's called On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of the Listener, which was all about how the radio was creating short attention spans. Matthew Remski: Wow. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And how the radio was eliminating people's ability to listen to complex long-form musical compositions. And so everything was getting shortened and shorter and shorter and shorter. And Adorno worried that this would be a gift to fascists and totalitarians and authoritarians, that creating people who were not any longer able to listen to complexity for long periods of time. So he was watching the radio being deployed in propagandistic ways in the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany. And he was writing about the dangers of radio technology. Matthew Remski: And he's doing this in the moment in which it's happening. He's doing this sort of on the ground in the moment in which it's happening. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Exactly. They're watching it and they're thinking about it and they're worrying about it, and they're saying, you know, how do we understand it? How do we understand what's happening? Matthew Remski: Their application of theories of social change, their ideals for better societies, had to reach for an analysis of more complex developments in media and technology that would not be contained in either the philosophical traditions or in, you know, historical materialism. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes, that's exactly right. You know, it was a surprising series of developments, aided and embedded by the deployment of new technologies that had never, for perfectly understandable reasons, had never been a part of the analysis. Matthew Remski: They weren't there. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: They weren't there to analyze. They weren't being deployed in the ways that they were. You know, the use of film and radio technology by the Nazis was crucial. And so they saw that they were trying to understand it in real time as it was happening. And it did produce, as the title of that book, Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests, a cynical, sad, I would even say somewhat defeated point of view, which I think makes perfect historical sense. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: They wanted still to understand the problem as a part of the process of addressing it and solving it. Right. The idea of the critical theorists was that understanding is a political necessity. So that critique is a part of politics. It was part of the idea of Max Horkheimer's famous essay Critical or Traditional Theory was the idea that we have to think critically about what's happening. And that is actually a part of what is called politics. Matthew Remski: And I can see that if these thinkers have Marxist commitments or a Marxist background and they're recognizing that these new technologies of film and radio and then later television are interrupting the great educational project by which a working class is going to come to some sort of self-awareness. Because it actually takes a long time to have your discussions and to have your meetings and to read the texts and to develop some kind of awareness of how capitalism is working. They're saying, oh, actually there are these interruptions now that we have to really take into account, we really have to look at. Because how this was going to go or how we hoped it would go is really being flummoxed by these forces that we couldn't predict. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes, that's correct. And I mean just on this point, you know, Marx himself and earlier Marxists were never indifferent to the question of culture. It sometimes is said that Marx thought that culture was irrelevant because he was a materialist. And culture is nothing more than the realm of ideas, norms, values, songs, poetry, symbols and so forth. But Marx did talk about structures and superstructures, and early Marxists like Antonio Gramsci did talk about structures and superstructures, the structure being the material conditions of the world and the superstructure being the way that we understand them. With Adorno and Horkheimer particularly, but with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, there came this challenge to the classical Marxist view, which was okay. The classical Marxist view was okay, there's culture, there's religion, there's all kinds of ideological content in the world. But people's lived experiences will ultimately bring any bad thinking, any wrong thinking, any misguided understandings to their breaking point. That working class experience would inevitably, inexorably lead to the kind of class consciousness that it produces. It would have no choice but to produce. And what Adorno and Horkheimer were saying in that book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, there's a very famous chapter that was written by Adorno that has been published as a separate book. Sometimes instead of buying the book, you can buy the one chapter, it's called The Culture Industry. And what they were interested in is how culture can actually survive class exploitation. So they were interested in how people who were exploited, how people who were impoverished, how people who were suffering would not necessarily develop an antagonistic class consciousness. Instead, they may think, well, I guess I need that kind of alcohol that I'm seeing advertised on a billboard. And the billboards would be designed specifically for what part of the city you lived in. And so they were saying, look, we come from Marx, we come out of Marx. Our work is intimately and irrevocably connected to the Marxist project. But the power of culture to get in the way of the kind of material conditions giving rise to this or that social struggle or uprising has to be contended with. They are more sophisticated now, these workers within the cultural industry, the ones who control the mass media, they are more effective now than ever before at taking our disaffections and channeling them into consumption patterns and consumptive habits. Matthew Remski: It's incredible because we're talking about like an in-the-moment anthropology of how social change might work and might not work. And I think what they're saying is that discontent can become its own form of entertainment and discourse and commodification. And the loop continues. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes, and I mean, I think they were right about this basic insight. And I think that Marxists today are the beneficiaries of that insight, that penetrating insight in how culture intervenes and does something with whatever it wants to do. In many cases, our attention, our affect, our feeling, our emotion, our sadness, it seizes upon it. But of course, there was also a negative, you could say a problematic dimension of this mode of analysis in the 1930s and the 1940s. And that is that it was pretty dissuasive of optimistic, strident political organization. I mean, it's sort of like we can go out — here with the strike that we're on. I mean, I can give you that as an example. The faculty at my university, as we were discussing, are on strike. And you know, the idealism, when we get together in a members meeting and the question comes, are we going to keep fighting? And one person stands up and everyone stands up. But then there's the question of power. That's a separate question. We have the passion, but do we have the power? And this is sort of the old Marxist idea of the ideas may not be powerful enough on their own. We have to be able to shut down the university in order to win, right? So one of the things that, you know, the early critical theorists were, the problem of it is that a lot of the ideals that they were dealing with were dissuasive of politics. You know, you go to the strike meeting, people say, can you win? And they think of the worst possible failed strike, and they stand up and say, probably not. We're all going to be replaced. They're probably going to replace us with robots. We could be fired summarily tomorrow. And so you can see how many people who are activists, radicals and revolutionaries, you know, then had to contend with the dissuasion of politics, this pessimism. If dialectics leads to the concentration camps, it's hard to be hopeful. Matthew Remski: You know, Richard, I think this is actually exemplified in how we opened our conversation, because I said, you know, how's the strike going? Are you seizing the means of production? And you kind of went, well, you know, it's kind of rough. I don't know. You know, I hate to laugh, but, I mean, there's something about — there's something melancholic at the center of the Frankfurt realization that I think carries through to our culture today. And I think as we'll get into what Rockhill is saying about that kind of affect, study and realization, it can have some drawbacks. But then he goes farther with that. But it occurs to me that the next sort of movement that we should define, and maybe these two things can come together, is, I think, some of the same dissuasion and melancholy emerge in both French theory and the New Left. Is that fair to say? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yes. In fact, I would say that for your listeners and for our conversation, the example of French, what we could call French critical theory, if we want to, is more clear. So why is it more clear? Well, because you can begin at different starting points. But let us take Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist writer who wrote famously Being and Nothingness. So Sartre was an interesting philosopher. He was a Marxist to the end. Some people forget that when I was taught Sartre as an undergraduate student, my professors always left out that he was a Marxist to the end. And he got more and more Marxist every year. Matthew Remski: I didn't know this, Richard, either. This was left out of my understanding of Sartre. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Often philosophers like to teach Sartre without his Marxism. But, you know, at the end of his life, he was writing openly Marxist books. He was claiming that identity — and there was no secret about it. But Sartre was interesting because he was a major part of the revitalization of interest in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. And Nietzsche hated socialists. He wrote about socialists. He hated liberals, too. He also hated conservatives. Nietzsche hated politics. But he really didn't like socialists because he didn't like any kind of collective action which he associated with herd behavior and herd mentality. But Sartre, who was a philosopher who was reading Hegel and Marx, was also reading Nietzsche and felt that Nietzsche had penetrating insights into life that intersected with — shortly after Nietzsche, of course, is when you had Sigmund Freud and the rise of psychoanalysis. So in French critical theory, there's a kind of, if you will, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud synthesis. There's a kind of soup of thinking about revolution and collective action, while also being very nervous about collective action and the herd mentality. And also at the same time, you know, trying to think about identity and how do we determine what is the purpose of a life? That's the idea of existentialism. What does it mean to be? What is the purpose of a life? So Sartre is sort of the major figure of 1940s French philosophy. And in the generations that came after him, you had all kinds of permutations of new radical thinking in French theory. So you'd see people like Jean-François Lyotard, Guy Debord and the Situationists later on, Jean Baudrillard, who was critical of Michel Foucault. And these thinkers were, in some ways, like their earlier-generation German critical theorists from Frankfurt. They are also trying to deal with culture. They're trying to deal with symbols and mutations and new obstacles and consumer society. I mean, Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called The Consumer Society, dealing with the enduring relevance of Marx, but the limitations of Marx in a world that Marx himself could not have possibly ever imagined. And so what you get is you get a lot of philosophers who are deeply critical of capitalist society, deeply critical of capitalist culture, who at various points either were revolutionaries or really wanted to be, but didn't exactly know how to be. So, like, there's a famous discussion which you can read in Michel Foucault's book Power/Knowledge, where he's arguing with the French Maoists, and they're like, how are you not with us? I mean, he sees what they see. I mean, Foucault was in the French Communist Party for an early time. He was not thinking with them, but he was very insecure and anxious about the utility of that mode of analysis, what it was missing, what it was leaving out. And so Foucault was, in some ways — the anarchists and the Marxists wanted French theory like Foucault and Baudrillard and Lyotard on its side when the battle lines were drawn. But many of these philosophers were not sure about it. They weren't sure about it and some of them were sure about it and then became unsure about it. So you take just two guys. Jean-François Lyotard was an ultra-left and he wrote with Cornelius Castoriadis — who was a Marxist, Greco-French Marxist — for Socialism or Barbarism. I mean this was a radical, anti-capitalist revolutionary journal. It was recently anthologized. If you look at the French theory that was published in Socialisme ou Barbarie, Socialism or Barbarism, it is full of revolutionary ferocity. You know, the Algerian situation, decolonization, revolution. But when the Algerian situation didn't — you know, the French government was pushed out, all these guys were against their own government being in Algeria as a colonial power. When decolonization happened and Algeria didn't go in any radical direction from a Marxist point of view, there was massive disillusionment throughout the 1960s and 70s, massive disillusionment about the revolutionary project. It's not that they weren't committed to it in various ways throughout their lives, but their commitments were — how should we say — they were troubled, they were challenged by the realities of what was going on. Matthew Remski: And that becomes a general theme in French theory and what we call the New Left, that there are problems or failures in revolutionary projects and in Marxist-inspired state communist projects that they're very concerned with. That's a sort of a droning sound underneath all of this. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, when you look at the engagement in Marxist theory with state socialism, it's complicated because most of these thinkers, the ones who were around, let's say for the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution — the ones who were around, these ones that we are talking about now are later, they're a later generation. But the Marxists all over the world were quite excited about revolutions in China, revolutions in Russia, they were quite excited about these revolutions, but they turned out to be not the clear transformations into a new form of life, a new form of society that many Marxists hoped that they would be. And so by the time you get to the 1930s, the 1940s, the 50s and the 60s, there's quite a lot of disillusionment. So in Russia, just for example, there was lots of hope. The Russian Revolution was full of hope. Even critics loved the Russian revolution. You take the anarchists, someone like Emma Goldman, she was deported to Russia, she had meetings with Lenin. She was so excited about the Russian Revolution. But she wrote a book after her time in Russia called My Disillusionment in Russia. That's the title of her book. She was worried about the way that the Russian state was treating its own critics. Comrades inside of the Soviet Union who were becoming increasingly or variously critical of Lenin and the state were sometimes put down with different repressive forces. One example of that is the great writer — I think of her as a philosopher, she's so wonderful — Alexandra Kollontai. Matthew Remski: Kollontai, right? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, she's so fantastic. But she was insisting at the time of the revolution that we are going to create a whole new form of life. We're going to create a whole new form of life where women are not the property of men, where children are not the private property, like a tractor or a horse of a family, who belong to the whole society. And she, along with other radical women of the revolution, was given control of what was called the Zhenotdel, the women's department, to create, you know, a new society. Well, it was supported, it was funded, but eventually it was destroyed. This women's department that Kollontai was the head of, when Stalin came into power, he said, what the hell are we doing trying to reconfigure social relations between men and women? We've got other bigger issues to deal with. It was destroyed. It wasn't given a chance. Then you had people like Nikolai Bukharin. You could criticize Bukharin, like people criticize many of the critics of Stalin or Lenin or so forth. There's so much debate happening. But Bukharin was killed by firing squad at Stalin's orders. So people were not sure about that. Is that a revolutionary society? Then, of course, you had critics like Cornelius Castoriadis, who I mentioned before, who in 1949 wrote an essay called The Capitalist Mode of Production in Russia, where he was saying, you know, they're doing something different with the economy. The state is regulating industry and economy in a certain way, but it still looks just like a capitalist mode of production. In China, the same thing. When I was teaching in China in 2018, I wasn't in the cities. I was in mainland China. I was teaching in Xi'an, at Shaanxi Normal University. And I went to the largest cultural museum in the entire country. They told me to wear sneakers because it's gonna be impossible to see it all. You'll have to do it multi-days. Well, there was everything covered except for the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution — we could discuss it, we could have a whole conversation about what was the aim of the Cultural Revolution. It even had some very defensible and worthy commitments. But it ended up being a catastrophe in many ways that the people of China at the time, and even up to the present day, feel that they have to apologize for. They're embarrassed by it. It's too shameful for the largest museum. Mao, for example, wrote an essay called On State Capitalism in which he insisted that China was capitalist. So in these countries, many Marxists saw that there were still problems of capitalism, there were still problems of inequality, there were problems of corruption, and there were problems of repression. Not just repression of dissidents, but repression in forms of life and what we might think of as human freedom, artistic freedom. If you think about things like the Cultural Revolution and other examples. So do these things have their justifications? Perhaps. Can these different examples be contextualized? Maybe yes, they can be better contextualized than we have time to do. But it seems to me and to many other Marxists that it is necessary to critically interrogate the successes and the failures, the noble experiments and the catastrophic limitations of the so-called socialism of the 20th century. It doesn't make any sense philosophically or politically to romanticize those projects and to treat them as — in the same way that Hannah Arendt would have treated the ancient Greek polis as if there were no slaves there. You know, just this perfect society. If you read Hannah Arendt, who comes under attack in Rockhill's book, when she thought about ancient Greek society, she thought it was like perfect, but you know, it was a slave society. It was a society with a pretty decadent and brazen ruling class. And so we need to be willing to criticize and condemn what deserves criticism and condemnation, and romanticization is actually pure ideology. It's actually one of the least Marxist things you can do. Matthew Remski: As we lead into what Rockhill argues, I think the last piece of this puzzle is that all of these intellectual influences stemming from the Frankfurt School go on to help inspire this huge range of thinkers who are not only attacking capitalism and imperialism in this older, more traditional Marxist sense, but also they're looking at other injustices of power involving race, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity. So what are some of the leading names and contributions there? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: We've mentioned Adorno and Horkheimer, we've mentioned some of the French theorists. But one of the big ones that's connected with something you mentioned just a moment ago, Matthew, is Herbert Marcuse, who's obviously also — for those of your listeners who are following the Rockhill debate and are interested in this conversation — Marcuse is in many ways the centerpiece. Marcuse, like many of these critical theorists, had to get out of Germany. They had to get out because even if Rockhill couldn't see it, the Nazis did. They saw that there were philosophers who should be indistinguishable from the Jews. Now, some of them, of course, many of them were Jews, but even if they weren't, they would have to be treated in the same way because they were going to be visible critics. And so they had to get out. So they were often — I mean, Dialectic of Enlightenment was actually written in California. It was written when Adorno and Horkheimer came to the United States in exile. But Marcuse went to California too. Herbert Marcuse. And by the 1960s he was such a major figure, he's associated as being the father figure of the New Left in the U.S. I mean, one of his students was Angela Y. Davis. He would show up at student rallies against the war. His books were widely read by young activists. So in addition to the ones we have mentioned, you know, from the French and the German milieus, I would say the major one that we haven't yet mentioned would be Herbert Marcuse. Matthew Remski: Well, we'll get to Rockhill's kind of synopsis on his life in a bit, so we can come back to that. But his basic thematic contention is that in this development, this sort of flourishing of Marxist pathways, he finds a kind of disposition, dispersal of attention away from class struggle, away from very strong theories of change, away from revolutionary interest. And he also suggests that the basics of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism get de-emphasized. And so, I mean, just point blank, is he wrong about that or does he have a point? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: He's right about it, but he draws the wrong conclusions from the fact. The attention to anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism was there. However, the idea of many of these theorists, including Marcuse, in the earlier period we've been discussing before the 1960s, more in the 30s and 40s, was that it's harder and harder to get to anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. It's harder and harder to get to class politics. So it's not an abandonment of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and class politics. It's a confrontation with how much harder it is to get to it. Matthew Remski: Oh, that's so interesting. So in other words, what we were saying earlier about we have these intervening forces of culture, we have film and radio, create almost what, like a moat around the sort of progress towards the goal of getting to the heart of the matter. Right. Like it's just harder and harder to begin the conversation of class consciousness as time goes on. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Absolutely. And part of the reason why it's harder is because of liberalism. When you talk about fascism, for example, in the United States — or we've seen some recent development in Hungary that's promising with Orban. But when you think about Trump and the rise of neo-fascist and other forms of politics, the starting position is no longer, oh well, obviously the opposition to fascism is communism. Now, in the Weimar Republic it was different because the only major party that was opposed to the German Nazi party was the German Communist Party. And the antifa that everyone talks about in the United States now, the original antifa — you can find black and white photographs of the communists in the Weimar Republic with big antifa banners. They were antifa, but antifascism was coming out of communism. Even in Spain in 1936, the movement against Franco and the fascists was communist and anarchist. But also at that time, and moving into the 40s and 50s, was this idea that we can oppose fascism without anti-capitalism, we can oppose class inequality without Marxism, without communism. So the liberals became, in some ways, they maintained and perpetuated the dominant discourse. And so in order to get to anti-capitalism, there's a lot of work to be done. For example, in my classes at the university, my students are always ready to talk about race, gender, sexuality. They're always ready to talk about growing global inequality. But it takes a lot of work to get to the point where my students might consider that capitalism is the problem. You know, that capitalism is necessarily racist, that capitalism exacerbates gender divisions of labor, that capitalism is inevitably imperialist in terms of its logic. It's internalizing logic of power and conquest. So part of the problem is you can't just look as if the only opposition to the Nazis is to go to the German communists, which is exactly what was the case in the Weimar Republic. That's just not true. My colleagues who are on strike are not talking about capitalism. We're talking about policies, higher education, equity policies. We're talking about getting rid of the chancellor and getting in a friendlier chancellor who's not so intent on busting the union. So it's actually harder and harder for cultural reasons, for political reasons, for reasons of psychology and history and philosophy. It's harder just to begin with anti-capitalism. If you go to a conference of Marxists and revolutionaries, okay, everyone there is already in chapter one, right. But outside, in the larger world, the broader world, it takes quite a lot of work to get to those basic Marxist orientations. Matthew Remski: You know, I'm reading a fantastic memoir. I forget the woman's name, but she grows up in Brooklyn in the American Communist Party. It's called The Romance of American Communism. I think it's a memoir. And she talks about how she — it's in the 1930s — she talks about how her Communist parents are hosting one worker after another, one meeting after another, around the dining room table. And there's no ambiguity about who they are, why they are in this condition that they're in, what their status is as workers. And there's this sense in which I can't find any of that in my own culture, like a place where I could go and where everybody would have a sort of cohesive understanding that, you know what, we're working class people, we don't have capital that we are using to exploit others. And that puts us in a kind of solidarity with each other. Like that environment just doesn't exist. And I have this sense that you're saying that the erasure of that space, that meeting space, is what the Frankfurt School was really grappling with. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Yeah, that's very well said and very insightful. And I don't claim to know this offhand. I looked it up. It's Vivian Gornick is the author that you were mentioning. Yeah, I think that's right. It's harder and harder to find a kind of popular and common orientation that is radical, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, anti-capitalist. One would really have to seek out such spaces and places. And many people can't do that. It takes quite a lot of mobility and privilege. And, you know, and sometimes it takes credentials, like you have to be a part of an organization or you have to be in a particular academic milieu. So most of us are living in a world where we are variously, you know, alone, and we do find other people in the ways that we do. But the idea that it's so easy to get together with people who share your perspective on the world, especially if it's marginal, radical, critical and revolutionary, it just isn't true. And I think you're right that the critical theorists were struggling with the kind of eclipse of those spaces, that they were being kind of pushed out, and other ways of thinking about life and politics were taking the center stage, that they were kind of displacing a lot of the more politically radical and critical groups. Matthew Remski: I feel like we together have sort of fleshed out a kind of phenomenology of how Marxist thought becomes hard to grasp. It becomes gaseous. Everything that is solid, you know, evaporates into air and so on. And the thing that Rockhill does is he says there are really concrete reasons for this, and they are tied up with a conscious, I would say, almost borderline conspiratorial structure by which the scholars that come out of the Frankfurt School are actually paid assets and set up to be psyops by the State Department and various governmental agencies. There's a lot of evidence that he provides and he has a lot of paper trailing around. But let's just look at one example to see how this fleshes out. And this is where we can return to Marcuse. And as you've suggested, this is somebody who basically argued that consumer capitalism pacifies people by pseudo-satisfaction of their desires. And this makes rebellion feel unnecessary. And so he sought liberation, not just in economics, but in psychology and desire and everyday life. And of course, Rockhill's going to go on to show how that actually serves capitalists really well because it doesn't really get people thinking about group activity and revolutionary solidarity. But let me walk through a good-faith summary of how Rockhill sees Marcuse. So Marcuse is Jewish. He flees Nazi Germany in the 1930s. And because he's an expert in Nazi politics and psychology, he winds up working from 1942 to 1953 with the OSS and the State Department as an intelligence operative, the OSS being the precursor to the CIA. So here we go. We've got a theorist who's working for nine, ten years with the CIA, and Rockhill says that this professional history and the associated funding from ruling class foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation made Marcuse a compatible intellectual with the state whose work was subsidized to serve imperial objectives. So according to Rockhill, this support directed Marcuse towards anti-communist radicalism as he says it. And he contends that Marcuse's critique of actually existing socialism, the state socialist or communist projects of China and Russia and so on, aligned with the CIA's Cold War wedge strategy, which was designed to fragment the international left. So by framing real-world socialist projects as perversions of Marx, Marcuse promoted what Rockhill calls anything-but-socialism theory. And he also says that Marcuse's success and promotion within elite universities during McCarthyism kind of proves that his work was not a threat to capital. And so ultimately, Rockhill characterizes Marcuse as a Pied Piper who redirected revolutionary energy and all the kids into safe academic cultural critiques that fundamentally accommodated the capitalist world order. So do you think that's a fair representation of Rockhill and what are your thoughts on this arc? Richard Gilman-Opalsky: I think it is a good-faith, short-form summary of Rockhill's presentation on Marcuse in the book. Well, I mean, I think there's some truth to — may be possible for someone other than me to go into the documentary record and, you know, make some kind of an argument or substantiate counterclaims about the OSS affiliation, the State Department connection and so forth. I'm not capable of doing it. I don't have the — I mean, if I am capable of doing it, I don't have the will to do it. I'm interested in doing many other things and I'm not interested in going into that documentary record. And to be perfectly frank, I find the documentary record that Rockhill produces convincing. And it doesn't seem to me terribly surprising. It makes sense to me that somebody like Marcuse coming to the United States at the time that he did with the knowledge and the research that he was doing would be of great interest to the U.S. government and the U.S. State Department. In the review that I wrote of Rockhill's book that is published in the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, I talk about a different example that Rockhill doesn't bring up — the Pentagon airing The Battle of Algiers. It makes sense to me why at different points — and that's a different point, when the Pentagon was airing The Battle of Algiers, it was after 9/11. And it makes perfect sense to me why they would take interest in this kind of classic of radical filmmaking. You know, it's useful. So I think that part of it to me can be accepted or would be and is at least practically accepted by me as a reader of Rockhill's book. The problem comes in this language, which is Rockhill's language about actually existing socialism and anything but socialism. These kind of sweeping categorical conclusions that Rockhill makes on the basis of these State Department connections or OSS-affiliated work. Even the category of Western Marxism, it's so sweeping that everyone's in, including people who are really not even Marxists. I mean, Hannah Arendt's not a Marxist, Judith Butler is not a Marxist. I mean, she maybe flirted with Marxism and Arendt has one or two texts in which she does deal with Marx. But for these people, Marx and the question of revolution is very peripheral to their main interests. So these sweeping categorical conclusions are the problem. Specifically, I think it's worth pointing out that critics of actually existing socialism in Rockhill's book, they were there from the very beginning. They were there from 1917, they were there from the moment of the Russian Revolution. And they were not anti-communists. They were not anything-but-socialists. So this is a long history. You can't start it with Western Marxism and critical theory and Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse. You can't start it there. You have to go all the way back. For example, very famously, Lenin wrote a critique of left-wing communism which he called beautifully and brilliantly — Lenin was not one to mince words. He wrote a famous essay called Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in which he attacked his left-wing critics. But who were his left-wing critics? I mean, these are people who have names. They were always there. Rosa Luxemburg maybe escaped his harshest treatment because he really liked her. But Sylvia Pankhurst, Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, there are, there's a long list of people. So much so that Lenin felt they had to be addressed specifically in a dedicated text. So the point that I would make as a kind of challenge to Rockhill's sweeping categorical conclusions is that being a critic of actually existing socialism doesn't put one into the enemy camp. It never has. And it can't. It can't just by virtue of being critical, it can't just by virtue of not accepting some romantic defensive position about what Rockhill calls actually existing socialism. It can't put you into the enemy camp. Why can't it put you in the enemy camp? Because Marxism is full of such critics since its inception, right? I mean, that is what we call Marxism. The thing we call Marxism, the field, the history, the rich, diverse global history that has the name Marxism, is full of Marxist critics of, you know, different communist philosophies, different communist projects, different socialist initiatives. This is what Marx himself did, right? I mean, so Marx was constantly writing about his people within his own milieu, critically. You know, he was arguing with anarchists. He was debating with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. This is what it is. You cannot say that because Marcuse, for reasons that could be explained in a less nefarious and conspiratorial register, that just because he had these associations — which I do think are condemnable, right, I don't think these are things that should be celebrated and just apologized for. We should not be apologists for — take somebody like Habermas who died very recently. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: You know, Habermas didn't just have a bad position on Gaza. Did he have a bad position on Gaza? Yes, he had a horrible position on Gaza and it needs to be condemned. But he also was doing other things. This view, what I have been calling categorical, is also a very reductionist view. That one could reduce Marcuse's legacy and contributions to left-wing thought and Marxist philosophy to the worst things that he has done is really to do harm to an important phase in the long history of Marxist thinking. Matthew Remski: Because the picture that gets painted is that this is a tradition that is captured by empire and put to work to perhaps provide, you know, interesting cultural commentary, perhaps push back a little bit against the excesses of wealth inequality, perhaps to talk about the problems with identity disparities, but to never really attack the core of imperial and capitalist logic. And this is what Rockhill calls the compatible left. I think you're suggesting that he's idealizing earlier forms of communist organization and Marxist thought as being much more focused and unified and less self-critical, perhaps. And I get this picture that by the time we hit the Cold War, that entire literature and tradition has been captured and muzzled into this kind of class of intellectual elites who move away from any kind of solidarity with the working class. And they're not thinking about union organizing, they're not thinking about colonialism, they're not thinking about actually changing things where they are because they're quite comfortable doing their intellectual labor which is kind of defanged and nobody really cares about it. And they're kind of put away into these drawers called universities. And there's something that's very appealing about this picture that's painted because it seems to confirm for me this sense of like, well, why haven't all of these thoughts gelled and percolated and, you know, worked together to change things? But, you know, I also think that it's very easy to feel as though that has all happened by design rather than through so many different conditions coming together. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Let's be very direct in saying so. We are losing. We are not in a good position. I am talking about the strike. I am talking about the question of fascism and human freedom. I am talking about imperial power and capitalist exploitation of life on earth and even the earth itself, which may not be able to survive capitalism. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: We are losing. And when we are losing, when we are being beaten up and when we are being beaten down and when we are so shocked all of the time by what's able to take the position of power, the least thoughtful, you know, the most brazen, the most racist, the most openly sexist and sadistic tendencies can come right into the halls of power. I think those of us who would have liked to stop it all and still want to stop it are looking for someone to blame. What I find in Rockhill's book are, you know, some claims and historical narratives which cannot be gainsaid on the details. But I also find a terrible concept of the enemy at work in his project. It's a terrible concept of the enemy. We should not be looking inside of the always rich, always wide, always full of disagreement and debate, diverse history of Marxism and revolutionary thought for someone to blame. We should be looking at the ruling classes of the world. And the idea that the ruling classes are rewarding and benefiting from the work of people like Judith Butler or Herbert Marcuse or Jacques Derrida — I mean, this is — of all of the things inside of Rockhill's book, these claims are the least supported. I mean, they're the most unsubstantiated, flippant claims that are made in passing. Every third or fourth page of the book, it is full. I mean, Judith Butler, for whatever you think of them. Judith Butler's not a Marxist, but Judith Butler is burned in effigy. Judith Butler makes a lot of money. Judith Butler makes more money than I'll ever make, than any other Western Marxist I'll ever know will ever even come close to making. Judith Butler makes about as much money as the chancellor at my university who's denying us cost-of-living adjustment increases in our salaries right now. But the idea that people who are doing work that is very subversive on the question of gender and sexuality are just friends of the ruling class because of their salaries, because of their positions in universities — this is just absurd. At the same time as these claims are made in passing, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and fascists in other places also around the world are waging a full-scale cultural war against what they call gender theory and critical race theory, which they'd like to see banned, and in some cases they are effectively banning. So my point is that I would have in another world seen Rockhill at a conference. We would probably, and probably have been at some of the same conferences over the years. We would have had coffee, we would have had disagreements. We may have read each other's work, we may have liked it or not liked it. But the idea that as Marxists, the enemy is other Marxists, Western Marxists — this idea of the compatible and the incompatible left is deeply problematic. And the fact is that even the incompatible left, it turns out, is compatible. The so-called incompatible left. The books that Rockhill would like us to read, by Michael Parenti, by Karl Marx, they can all be purchased at Barnes and Noble. They could all be purchased on Amazon. This is not a criticism. I'm glad they're for sale in all of those places. I'm glad that they could be. But they are commodities. They are not incompatible. There have been so many repackaged and republished versions of the Communist Manifesto. There have been property rights wars waged by publishers who claim to own the rights to Marx's body of work, so that they become severely litigious in attacking and going after anyone who would publish them without their permission. I'm not saying that this gives a black eye to Karl Marx, not at all. But the idea that, you know, Marx's writings and Parenti's writings are somehow incompatible — and they're part of the incompatible left, they're much more revolutionary — and Judith Butler is a part of the compatible left, or, you know, Gayatri Spivak or Étienne Balibar. I mean, this is just bullshit. I mean, this is complete and utter bullshit. I hosted Michael Parenti for the last major talk of his life before he died. I brought him out to the University of Illinois. And Michael Parenti — I have major disagreements with Michael Parenti. He — of all the places I could have taken him for dinner, he wanted to eat at Red Lobster. And I was like, oh my goodness, really? Can't we do better than that? We went to Red Lobster. Well, what a nice proletarian choice by a great comrade and a very gentle man. Also very sharp intellectually and also very kind and generous and incredibly kind. And we have deep disagreements, but neither one of us could have possibly imagined the other as an enemy. It's not possible that we could have imagined the other as an enemy. And the reason why is because Michael Parenti never forgot who the enemy was. For his entire life he set his sights on the capitalist ruling class. And for every disagreement I have with him, I'm happy to say that we agree in that. Matthew Remski: I think you're getting to something very profound to finish on, which is, you know, what kind of theory of the enemy do we have? And I think that, you know, I hadn't really considered that Judith Butler not being a Marxist and yet being at the center of a firestorm around a global culture war attack on gender theory and transgender people — that makes her effective in some way, that makes her incompatible in some way with rising fascism. And that is not my enemy. I don't know how that — you know, like, there might not be a focus on class consciousness in the older sense. There might not be a drive towards revolutionary strategizing, but there's something that she has done, that they have done, that has put the very ontology of being a man or being a woman into the spotlight of the worst people of the world. And there's gotta be something there. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: The chancellor of my university, who will not give us a fair contract. One of the classes that has been canceled was a graduate seminar on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And it is a subversive text. Right. I mean, it is a subversive text that many people see published in 1990 as, you know, an early phase of the queering of feminist philosophy that would become compatible with what? Compatible with the destabilization of conventional conservative gender politics of the past. Butler also talks a lot about Palestine. Matthew Remski: Yep. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: And as a Jewish philosopher with a large visibility and a high reputation, for Butler to be such a public intellectual and anti-Zionist Jew — really impressive and reliably critical of the Israeli government and its policy in Gaza and in the West Bank. Are we saying that we are not capable of appreciating, you know, a figure like Butler because of their salary, because of their prominence within the University of California system? We can be critical of Butler, but the idea that we would, as Marxists, set our sights on somebody like that — and again, it's a minor — if you read Rockhill's book, you see Butler is barely in it. Butler is a minor figure, but the next book promises to focus on French theory made in the USA. And one of the things that Butler always said when they wrote their obituary on the occasion of Jacques Derrida's death was that Butler's philosophy came out of the engagement with Derrida out of difference. So, I mean, one of the things I would — if you read Butler's obituary text essay for Jacques Derrida, it's quite clear. And Butler has made it clear that Derrida's interest in destabilizing certainty and throwing into question fixed positions was something that Butler was developing in feminist philosophy, and that led to the destabilization of the fixed ontological positions of gender identity. Now I'm not giving Derrida credit or French theory credit for some of the most subversive — and let's be blunt, these are some of the most subversive cultural politics of our time. They are. Are they compatible? Yeah. I mean, capitalists will always try to appropriate everything popular. They try to make a Prius to appropriate pop. You know, department stores will try to seize upon the popularity of LGBTQ politics. Of course that is true. But why do we as radicals have to say that just because these appropriations are happening, we can't resist them? Rockhill loves Che Guevara. I do, too. Matthew Remski: Right. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: Guevara's image is appropriated. We can resist that. The appropriation of Guevara's image on countless billions of t-shirts. It's not a black eye to Guevara any more than a department store that sells rainbow flags is a black eye to queer politics. We can criticize liberals. We must. We can criticize other Marxists, but what is crucial, I think, is to remember that Marcuse and Davis and Butler and Adorno and Horkheimer and Erich Fromm — these people, all of whom we can have very deep disagreements with, none of them should be mistaken for the capitalist ruling class. And the moment that we start to do that, we — yes, we who do it, who make that mistake, we hold a hammer and a nail for the coffin of Marxism. We want to drive another nail in the coffin of Marxism. We cannot be — we have to be able to think openly and freely in any direction that makes sense. Matthew Remski: Richard Gilman-Opalsky, thank you so much for taking the time with really, a maze of a subject. I think it's really, really valuable. I'm glad that you waded into reviewing this difficult book. I think it's important because we are surrounded by demoralizing and often paranoid stories about ourselves and I think we have to see those for what they are and how they impact us. So thank you so much. Richard Gilman-Opalsky: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Matthew Remski: Up now on Patreon is an audio essay that serves as a coda for this interview. It's called The Left Didn't Betray Anyone: Material Conditions and the Limits of Rockhill. And what it does is it reflects on how the viral success of Rockhill's — I'm going to call it paranoid — view tells us something about how leftists manage feelings of betrayal and loss. And in the process of unpacking that, I describe my own journey through the same material that Rockhill is criticizing, and the fact that there's some resonances there because I'm just one year older than he is. So you can catch that, it's up there now on Patreon. I'll release it to the wild in a couple of weeks. And until we meet again, please do take care of each other. And I'm always happy to hear your comments and your feedback, so do get in touch.