Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad — Episode 30, Part 2
The Left Didn't Betray Anyone: Material Conditions and the Limits of Rockhill
Matthew Remski
Welcome patreons to part two of episode 30.
Part one was with Richard Gilman-Opalsky discussing the background behind Gabriel Rockhill's borderline conspiracy theory book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. And this follow up is a reflection on how the viral success of Rockhill's — going to call it paranoid — view tells us something about how leftists manage feelings of loss and betrayal. And I'm calling it The Left Didn't Betray Anyone: Material Conditions and the Limits of Rockhill. I'm grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days.
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Okay, so to review our subject very briefly, Gabriel Rockhill's new book builds on work by Dominic Lacerda in critically defining the category of Western Marxism, which in their view is a melancholic and dissociative corrupt of the original robust ideology that had and still has the potential to free us all from the capitalist ruling class.
Rockhill builds his argument around evidence that powerful capitalist and state institutions — the CIA, various foundations, elite universities — funded and promoted Western Marxism's leading figures, which produced what he calls a compatible left that appeared critical but whose irrelevant and navel-gazing output neutralized genuine revolutionary passions.
Rockhill argues that this wasn't incidental but systematic, that the Frankfurt School and its heirs served imperialism's interests whether they knew it or not, because they were captured.
Now, Rockhill works with an elegant methodology in his work, which he unpacks in almost every YouTube appearance that he gives. He says that we have to look at the material conditions under which knowledge is produced and that will tell us who it serves and why. Like, why do these books come into existence? What is their social and political function? What is their origin? What are the conditions under which they're produced?
This is not an original observation.
Many people have picked apart the more commonplace, idealistic view, the great man of history framework, with its focus on individual genius breaking through the muck. But for Rockhill, this deconstruction that he works with carries a personal charge as well, because his thesis rides on a personal experience of that very disillusionment. And so I think it's worth summarizing his biographical background briefly. It's just a few details to make this clear.
Rockhill was a Kansas farm kid, very familiar with manual labor and its culture. And so he had a sharp embodied experience of capitalist exploitation.
And along with a searching mind, he was really driven to study revolutionary theory.
But what was mainly available to him were the texts and tools of what he calls Western Marxism.
And he took them as far as he could take them. He actually moved to Paris and he studied under luminaries like Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. He describes his youthful self as a devotee of French critical theory. And he built his early academic identity in that milieu, albeit with a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the distance between where he found himself and where he came from.
But when the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, something broke for him.
As he tells it, his mentors had nothing to offer the moment except what he calls conceptual gibberish. Things like Lacanian concepts of desire or Derrida's concept of difference.
These, for him, were utterly useless for explaining crucial historical events. And so he began to feel that his elite education was basically a training in imperial ignorance, fostering a conceptual la-la land — these are his words — that paralyzed revolutionary action.
Now, on this note, I just want to repeat something that I've mentioned before, which is — or I think Richard mentioned it — Richard Gilman-Opalsky also studied in person with Derrida and had no illusions that a continental postmodern philosopher who mainly studied language might not have the clearest take on Osama bin Laden and his entanglement with the CIA's effort to use radical Wahhabism to defeat Islamic socialism.
Richard notes that he had other sources for news like that.
But these disillusionments set Rockhill on the track to his current table-turning project that targets what he calls the imperial theory industry, a superstructure designed for radical recuperation, which uses revolutionary symbols and ideas and texts to mask counter-revolutionary substance.
And now he views his former bread and butter as a means to, quote, police the left border of critique.
And in practice, this means abandoning or criticizing or even defaming practical anti-imperialist state-building projects known as actually existing socialism in favor of a milquetoast academic discourse that capitalists can enjoy chatting about at wine and cheese parties but can ultimately ignore.
But I think it's crucial to note the extremely strong feelings that Rockhill documents as central to his journey and just how self-denigrating they are to the point of — I would say — near Catholic levels of guilt. I say this as a near-Catholic. He describes going from being an acolyte of empire to realizing that he had been brainwashed — that's his word — by the very education he thought was liberating him.
How could I not be ashamed, he asks, given where I had come from and what I had set out to do?
These are very extreme terms, perhaps even grandiose, because I, for one, can hear in these comments the sense that if only he had seen the light, the world could have been so much different.
So that is the origin story of Rockhill's project. And I think it's elegant, it makes sense. On paper, it would make for a good character arc in a novel. But using this experience as a starting point for an historical analysis of several generations of scholars, I think, is very risky because it implicitly asks for readers to join in on the same emotional journey, to taste the same betrayal. And I think this might account for the very driven and anxious communication style that I think does so well on his YouTube appearances.
To underline the stress of his evangelism, he begins the section on his transition from self-criticism to systemic critique with a quote from Mark Twain.
It's easier to fool someone than to convince them that they've been fooled. And Rockhill has a lot of people to convince, and not just convince, but to shock and amaze. Because the narrative depends on a moment of unveiling — the dramatic discovery that institutions once believed were critical or emancipatory were in fact compromised or captured. And so that will reorganize an entire worldview.
But the problem I think he faces is that many people are already there.
It's not a revelation to realize that academics struggle with the confines of capitalist institutions.
So what Rockhill experiences as a shattering insight, I think maybe older materialists experience as confirmation of something obvious.
Rockhill is also an analyst of pollution and contamination, and reading him gives the impression that no thinker in what he calls the Western Marxist tradition can be trusted.
And because the purity of an intellectual tradition has been violated, no partial or graduated critique feels adequate.
So this logic of contamination — like, even one drop of CIA money taints the well — it replaces the logic of structural analysis, as in: how did this funding shape conditions of possibility without necessarily determining content?
Now, I'm just a year older than Rockhill, and I had some of the same interests, and with a few different turns of the screw, I could be standing in his shoes and wearing his Stetson hat — like, I had one of those once too.
I came to my leftist politics through my parents, but to an equal love for English literature through my mom, but a particular transgressive type of literature. I remember one day she showed me the section in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers that begins with, God is alive, magic is afoot.
And my mind was blown because he was using religious language like some sort of free jazz musician.
My mom and I never talked about the book because I think the sexual content was probably too old for me, in her view. But I think she wanted to open the door to the poetry, and so she gave me the book. And I thought that Cohen's willingness to challenge literary form and spiritual piety was just so extraordinary.
So in college, it was through English literature that I came into contact with the same French theorists that Rockhill came to believe were capitalist shills. But I didn't see them that way.
I simply loved their adventurousness, their willingness to excavate and pick apart the bones of power wherever they could be found.
I loved a whole bestiary of eccentric thinkers. Barthes, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Derrida, Cixous, Spivak, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Guattari.
I wasn't clear that they had all emerged from Marxist discourse in one way or another because that wasn't my focus.
I was reading as someone interested in language and power and mystery.
It was always implicit in this literature that the world of capitalism we lived in was oppressive. But Rockhill is right. There were decades there where if these were the thinkers you were in love with, they were not telling you to organize general strikes or figure out how to arm the proletariat.
Now, in my interview with Richard Gilman-Opalsky in the first part of this episode, he lays out why that late Cold War focus was not on class struggle or violent revolution. So I'm not going to repeat that here, but rather jump to the fork in the road of my story because according to Rockhill, my own disconnection from revolutionary theory — even though I was reading these Marxist-ish books — was part of a larger plot to depoliticize people like me, to make me into a useless bourgeois intellectual.
And even though he's mainly studying the US portion of the theory industry, the effects are international, of course, because whatever the CIA did in the 1950s to make Herbert Marcuse comfortable and middle class somehow wicked northward over the border to infect Canadian leftists as well.
But because Rockhill is using a material conditions argument to talk about how the Rockefeller Foundation and other foundations reached their cold fingers into my brain, I want to bring other material conditions into play here and put them on the table. And I'll start with this.
The post-war university system that Rockhill is targeting had a few decades in which history and poly-sci departments could actively nurture leftist academics like Michael Parenti, whose scholarship and communist activism went hand in hand. Now that didn't last for very long, but part of that condition coincided with an historically strong — especially post-Vietnam War — labor movement culture in which unions had a lot of organizing and propagandistic power.
The Black Panthers were still a force on the streets for a while in the 70s and there were groups out there doing direct actions.
So there was a self-reflective streak in leftist literature for sure. But that's not all there was.
But what happened?
Neoliberalism became the dominant political order. Austerity, union busting, gentrification.
If bookish leftists got timid or too self-reflexive during this period, it wasn't because Herbert Marcuse was a sleeper agent sneaking lithium into his essays.
There are a thousand reasons for the intelligentsia to turn inwards, to hunker down, to take refuge in the life of the mind. And — and here's a big one — to stop traveling.
And this is really important because part of what Rockhill is claiming is that the scholars who illuminated his youth had lost all sense of their practice and concern for internationalism.
But consider: in September of 1973, as we know, Augusto Pinochet is installed as the Chilean leader via a CIA-backed military coup. And among the countless things that are lost during that coup, one stands out in relation to Rockhill's concern.
Pre-coup, Santiago was the South American hemisphere's most concentrated site of radical left intellectual production.
There were no less than five different think tanks in the city that hosted an international network of Marxist economists and sociologists. And this is the important part. They were coming to study and do their work in direct dialogue and observation of Salvador Allende's functioning socialist government. They had a test case.
And so this became a study hub for European scholars — Santiago did.
And at the time they were all working on something called dependency theory, which described how wealthy nations developed through colonialism and then by actively underdeveloping their former colonies through structural instruments.
The global periphery exported cheap raw materials and labor to the core, transferring its surplus there.
Now, Pinochet destroyed this intellectual ecosystem. One of the think tanks, the Center for Socioeconomic Studies, permanently closed within hours of the coup and its members were killed, imprisoned, or scattered across Mexico, Europe, and Latin America. While Pinochet carried out his shock doctrine measures throughout the administration, he appointed retired military goons as rectors of universities who carried out purges.
The troops tear-gassed campuses, they violently arrested students, they destroyed lab equipment.
Pinochet assumed control of all universities and slashed funding to higher education.
Now consider the case of Orlando Letelier. Letelier was a Chilean Marxist economist and diplomat under Allende. And after the coup he fled to Washington D.C. where he held several academic positions until 1976, when agents of Pinochet's secret police killed him in D.C. with a car bomb.
This was one of the first foreign state-sponsored terrorist attacks on American territory because a CIA-backed right-wing dictator did not like what this guy had to say about the flow of capital in Chile.
So is it possible that this fallow period of maybe excessive theorizing in Western Marxism that has so chapped Rockhill's ass wasn't about apathy or institutional capture at all, but also it might have been about intellectuals watching the hammer come down all over the world.
And so it was time to retreat.
Chile wasn't unique.
Similar purges of Marxist academics happened in Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Argentina in 1976. Rockhill talks about the compatible left as a product of ideological corruption. But he might also be describing a demographic of pragmatism and even survivorship.
Because wherever the less compatibles raised their heads above the trenches, they risked being murdered.
All that said, how did I wake up to the disconnection between cultural theory and its Marxist roots?
It happened slowly and piecemeal in my discussions of poetry with my friends.
This is in the mid to late 90s.
Now one of those conversations wasn't even with a Marxist, but it showed me something important.
If you look up a Canadian poet — I'll put it in the show notes — named Christian Bök. You'll read about a very eccentric guy. He's an experimental poet known for extreme formal constraint and conceptual weirdness. He wrote a book called Eunoia in 2001 that uses only one vowel per chapter. So the first sentence of the book is: awkward grammar appalls a craftsman. And it took him years to go through the Oxford English Dictionary to find all of the single-vowel words and then organize them into categories so that he could create sentences out of them. Like, he's manic with using language as a material system, you know, pushing alphabetic limits to their ends. But then he also does it with biology because his latest book is called the Xenotext, which encodes poetry into bacterial DNA so that he can write a poem that survives human extinction.
He literally does that in a lab.
He is not really overtly political in his public orientation, and that was true 30 years ago when we hung out a lot together.
He had a general leftist opposition to the academic infrastructure and funding agencies that we were all sort of battling with.
But once he did say something that really stuck with me. He talked about how a lot of the poetry of the post-war period was what he called kitchen sink poetry, where the writer was meant to record tiny, intimate moments of domestic wonder and bafflement.
And so he made jokes about how precious and self-important it all was. And he talked about how far poetry had fallen since Homer, when it literally spoke the entire world into existence.
And that set me to thinking about the problem of abstraction. Like, what do my most complicated internal thoughts have to do with anyone else? Why should they be interested?
And then I had another poet friend, Saro D'Agostino. He was Italian, from a working class family. He adored García Lorca, Neruda, the surrealists, magic realists, the films of Vittorio De Sica and Pasolini.
And he made this joke about what he considered to be like an orientalist fascination with the haiku of Basho. This was very popular in the 80s for some reason. So he would — a frog leaps into the forest pond, plop, plop. And then he would say, where is the suffering? He's doing the hand motion, the Italian hand motion. Where is the suffering? Where is the class struggle?
So, you know, he felt very deeply about what poetry should do with regard to iterating the suffering of common people. He knew a lot about suffering. He died of suicide. And I miss him.
Finally, I had a TA at U of T named Steven Pender, and I'm still in touch with him. He teaches medieval literature now at University of Windsor. And he was the only overt committed Marxist that I knew back then. Also an extremely perceptive poet and editor. He actually published my first ever poem.
And, you know, if he ever took me aside to comment on my work, he always pressed me to lean away from romantic and idealistic registers, to fully engage with the materials I was observing. And especially, especially how they came to be. Like, who made these floors and walls? And what labor did these stones hold? And this is specifically in relation to — I used to write a lot about churches and religious buildings. Like he was like, who has actually done these things?
So this was all in the late 80s, early 90s.
And so my contact with OG Marxism was pretty spotty, you know. Over in London, David Harvey was teaching his year-long class on Capital back then that he's done for 30 years. He repeated it year after year. But this was before the internet. It's not like you could tune in to him every week.
And so I was largely unaware of international Marxism as well. I had glimmers of it, but no program.
There was no Black Panthers reading list or Marxist-Leninist book club.
I think there was also a curricular problem at U of T and probably elsewhere during that time, which meant that anyone in humanities could just start taking critical theory courses without taking 19th century economic theory and history, where you would have to study Marx at least, you know, in an introductory sense. And then you could maybe connect the dots.
So I don't know how it all happened. And I'm not averse to the Rockhill view that the education I got was the crystallization of many neoliberal programs and their limitations and selection biases and their labor contradictions.
But to be honest, this seems like a banal observation because this is true of the music produced around me, the jobs available to me, the shows on TV, and the choice of sneakers I'd wear.
And then there's just luck and where you are at any point in time.
The Battle in Seattle in 1999 was in — well, Seattle. When the G20 protests exploded here in Toronto in 2010, I was up to my neck in a yoga business and I wasn't in touch with any of the groups that organized.
I had a little more bandwidth to raise money the following year for the Occupy encampment, but I wasn't connected enough to these networks when they came together. And so when they dispersed, I just carried on as before.
And then by 2012, our first child was on the way.
I believe that Rockhill's viral success depends on a kind of revelatory impact that generates feelings of betrayal.
However, we've had other revelations like this before.
We know, for instance, that the so-called Jazz Ambassador program, in which Louis Armstrong was the most famous participant, used music tours as fronts for intelligence operations in the Congo.
We know that the Iowa Writers' Workshop review received CIA-connected funding and helped to shape American literary culture towards apolitical individualism.
The Kenyon Review was similar. It came out of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
It was also partially funded by the CIA and State Department.
And from 1939 they platformed a new literary mode called New Criticism. And this treated the literary text as a self-contained aesthetic object to be analyzed purely on formal terms. Imagery, irony, tension, ambiguity. And so biography, history, authorial intention, and especially political context were just declassé. And if you imagine this in a different sort of medium, imagine somebody who studies ancient pottery picking up a pottery shard and then just examining it for its own sort of material textures and its own shape and comparing it to other things, but without sort of understanding where it came from or the conditions of its production, or what it might have been used for, or what it said about the politics or the station of the person who used it. That's kind of what New Criticism did to literature.
Now, Eric Bennett argues in a book called Workshops of Empire, in which he tracks the funding pathways between the state and creative writing programs, that the aesthetic ideology promoted at Iowa and also Ohio — so a lot of emphasis on compression, interiority, the luminous particular detail, and the avoidance of explicit political statement — this all had an ideological function.
There were tens of thousands of World War II veterans streaming into college programs on the GI Bill. And given what they had seen in Europe and the Pacific, a sizable percentage of them could easily have become the backbone of an emergent socialist literature through documentary fiction, proletarian realism, and — who knows — communist anarchist love stories. And this was seen to be a real concern.
And Bennett contends that this is where the elite encouragement for writers to focus on what my friend Christian Bök later laughed at — called the kitchen sink — became a thing.
So where do I land with this?
When I spent time around writers older than Christian and Saro and Stephen, I was taught that New Criticism was the peak of human wisdom.
I was told to focus on the tiny movements of my internal world and to record them as evidence of a sublime mystery.
In fact, my own dad, who's a socialist, did his own creative writing, influenced by that mode, and wrote these beautiful short stories, often focusing on the small kitchen moments that Christian would have guffawed about. One story I remember had a passage about how to know that a peach was perfectly ripe for peeling and how you could do it by running boiling water over it just the right way.
And then my father-in-law was a man who always voted NDP, and he's a novelist in that vein as well. He's deeply observant of the smallest interactions between parents and children and lovers. And as his son-in-law, I have felt those observant and loving eyes on our family for years and years.
So were these boomer writers duped by the CIA into becoming thoughtful men who rejected war and violence and fostered a love for introspection?
That idea is fucking insane, because history is not a puppet show.
Now, I do think that there's a lot for Rockhill and me and Richard and everyone else to mourn.
Marxist communities and networks have been materially and conceptually overwhelmed and fragmented by neoliberalism, austerity, union busting, and scholasticide following CIA coups around the world.
The logic of institutional capitalism has further bureaucratized universities and financialized tuition with predatory loans. It's eliminated third spaces. It's criminalized protest. It's atomized student life.
And many of us have decades of experience now floating through disconnected landscapes, hoping that gentrification does not swallow up those last cafes where we once sat to talk about resistance.
So often I meet people around my age and they say they did humanities degrees. They'll say, oh, I loved reading Baudrillard or Foucault or Deleuze in college, and we can commiserate about that. But then I find out that just like me, they have struggled through a life of freelancing that hasn't left them the time to commit to political activity, to political organizing.
My understanding of the literature that Rockhill is now ashamed of is that it was written to reflect these broken times. And if it didn't point to the Marxism, it was because — as Richard said in our interview — it was simply hard to get to that heart.
There are now five highly critical scholarly reviews of Rockhill out now, and they all say that the evidence he uses to suggest linkages between the CIA and State Department funding sources and certain critical theorists like Marcuse is structurally solid but circumstantial when it comes to tracking the emergence and popularity of ideas and analyses.
And that tracking is what it would take to really justify the depth of betrayal that powers Rockhill's project, because in his telling, he has been betrayed by the intellectual pantheon — Derrida, Foucault, Žižek, and others — against which he formed his critical identity.
So this revelation of institutional capture, which isn't really a revelation at all, retroactively reframes his youthful life as a tragedy of seduction or indoctrination.
You know, I'm glad I'm not an academic, because I can take the liberty here to end on a little bit of a psychological note by saying that I think a more healthy approach would find that once the idealized vision had cracked apart, one would be able to accept its flawed reality. Because isn't that what we must do with Marxism itself, over and over and over again?
The psychologist Melanie Klein has a lot of insight here.
She says that when realizing one's mother or caregiver or life or history isn't ideal or perfect, a person often goes through a paranoid split in which the former conception of oneself must be violently rejected. And often the person must cling — amidst that wreckage — to something else that is idealized. And for Rockhill, actually existing socialism functions as the protected good object, the life raft kept pure by projecting all badness onto the now monstrous Western Marxists.
But becoming whole does not mean keeping a former self exiled.
And you can't anyway. It'll rise like a ghost.
Becoming whole means looking back with clarity and forgiveness and recognizing you are on a continuous, bumpy, flawed journey. And if you can't manage that, for whatever reason, the sense of humiliation might drive you to demand that others confirm how vast the betrayal was. And there can be an urgency to this that comes from an inability to grieve.
But this conundrum is not new to Marxists.
In 1940, fleeing the Nazis who would kill him, Walter Benjamin wrote a passage in his Theses on the Philosophy of History that describes a condition I share with Rockhill. As we look back on failures and rally our resources to advance, Benjamin writes, this is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned toward the past, where we perceive a chain of events. He sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from paradise.
It has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time, take care of each other.
