Western Marxism Through the Looking Glass

A new book dismisses the entirety of Western Marxism through circumstantial evidence, insinuation, and ad hominem attacks. Ultimately, it vindicates the very tradition it seeks to criticize.

Review: Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025)

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The history of Marxist theory is replete with figures who lament the sectarianism of everyone except themselves. In his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Gabriel Rockhill stands in this august tradition, hurling out accusations of bourgeois treachery while painting his “own theoretical practice” as above the degradations of his Western Marxist teachers.

Sometimes Pipers is an almost spiritual autobiography of the author’s life as a left-winger, with Rockhill as our postmodern Augustine. We learn how he studied at “premier institutions in Paris” and attended “all of the lectures and seminars by the thinkers who were the most renowned in the United States, as well as those who had potential to become so…. I also shunned those doing work that sounded old school or unsophisticated.” When none of these philosophies proved edifying, Rockhill then found a sterner creed. His discovery of the one true faith is also chronicled in Pipers. Rockhill presents theoretical apologias for a very orthodox version of dialectical and historical materialism. He claims that Soviet-style materialism is a “science” which operates at a higher level than “bourgeois social sciences, including their disciplinary divisions” which are “a direct outgrowth of the material social relations of modern capitalism.”

But the core of Rockhill’s book is in his claim that most Western Marxists functioned to combat the “real existing socialism” of the Soviet Union and its allies throughout the Cold War. After 9/11, he writes, he began to develop a “materialist analysis of the system of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption within which I had been trained.” One of the “ultimate objectives” of this materialist analysis was to sharpen “an objective ideological critique of the material system of ideas that produced an ideological subject like me and, much more importantly, legions of others indoctrinated into the same brand of imperial ignorance.” The practical upshot is to show how Western Marxists directly or indirectly abetted imperialism. This remains true, in Rockhill’s telling, to this day. It’s even true, he argues, where radical intellectuals and academics fancy themselves to be opponents of the system:

One of the most intriguing and strategically significant tactics that is encouraged, which is essential to understand for a complete picture of the history of Western Marxism, consists in a subtle, soft-sell campaign against communism…. By putting Marxism itself in the service of doctrinal warfare, intellectuals convinced by Marxist theory were thereby encouraged to hold on to a purportedly authentic version of Marxism while using it to vilify Marxism in practice and—at a minimum—accommodate capitalism.

Rockhill’s materialist analysis and critiques has what he calls “objective” and “subjective” dimensions. Objectively, his book paints a vast web of associations, conspiracies, pressure campaigns, funding schemes, etc. by American power to combat communism. Rockhill claims this includes using American money and soft power to prop up Western Marxism for its perceived value in undermining the legitimacy of Soviet and Chinese style communism on the Left. Subjectively, he tries to show how Western Marxists propagated arguments and analyses detrimental to really existing socialism, and consequently provided ideological cover for imperialism, capitalism and even fascism. The latter accusation might seem extraordinary, but Rockhill insists that even if critical theorists “subjectively considered themselves to be antifascists and, more important, worked to uproot fascism through bourgeois democratic means (which, again, is a laudable tactic), they remained accommodationist toward the capitalist system, the seedbed of fascism, while fighting the truly antifascist communists.”

St. Gabriel the Red

One of the first major problems is that Rockhill uses the term “Western Marxism” in a very sweeping and transparently skewed way. His targets have very different motivations, political opinions, and philosophical orientations. Foucault, Habermas, Marcuse, Zizek, Derrida, Arendt and others all come in for a ribbing, and all, despite their own criticisms of Marx, somehow participate in the tradition of “Western Marxism.” According to Rockhill, what “they all share in common, and what becomes visible via a materialist analysis of the social totality, is their opposition to actually existing socialism, with only the rarest—and absolutely explainable—exceptions.” This is a bad criteria with which to lump very ideologically different figures together, bordering on crude “friend/enemy”-level Schmittianism rather than dialectical nuance. As a point of comparison, no leftist would accept a Heideggerian quoting Introduction to Metaphysics and claiming liberalism, socialism, and all other modernist philosophies were “metaphysically the same” simply because of their opposition to fascism.

In fairness, some of the material dealing with how ideological figures were funded offers a clear indication of how the United States worked to manufacture consent on a global scale. The expansive map of CIA agencies, covert ops, shell foundations, academic liaisons, and connections he draws showcases both the extent and sophistication of American Cold War imperialism, which had a canny awareness of the popularity of left-wing causes and realized more nuanced weapons were needed in the fight against communism. Moreover, Rockhill and Domenico Losurdo (a significant influence on Pipers) are undoubtedly right to chastise Western intellectuals of a previous era for their willingness to call out racist imperialism and genocide in Europe, while adopting a far more tepid and even critical attitude towards colonial aspirations for independence. When Rockhill goes after Max Horkheimer for defending the Vietnam war, or Arendt for her racism and excessive hagiography of the American founders, it’s easy to cheer. In these circumstances the accusations of gross hypocrisy and descriptions of how selectivity in the application of bourgeois principles reinforces capitalist imperialism have real bite.

For all his insistence on materialist analysis, Rockhill frequently indulges in psychological speculation to prop up ad hominem attacks. He describes most contemporary Western Marxists and critical theorists as being “petty bourgeoise.” They find themselves “sandwiched between the bourgeois politics of capitalism and the proletarian politics of socialism, often dreaming of an enchanting but nonexistent third way beyond this pitched class struggle. Fearful of proletarianization, but attracted to a bourgeois lifestyle, the petty bourgeoisie is sometimes resentful of its corporate overlords and capable of celebrating jacqueries, while nonetheless lacking a concrete, long-term collective political project of its own.” Lest one think the scarlet letter ought to be pinned exclusively on posh Western leftists, Rockhill makes it clear his criticisms also apply to “imperially trained” intellectuals from developing countries that were victimized by imperialism and who have since “generally seen their working-class movements crushed and leftist culture decimated.” These intellectuals too he sees as nothing but “snake oil salespeople” brandishing “prestigious credentials” in order to sell “poison.”

Anyone who has spent any time on the academic Left has met the kinds of people Rockhill is talking about: self-described Marxist radicals who wear BLM t-shirts to class before rejecting a job applicant because she completed her undergrad in the global South. An essential problem with Rockhill’s book is that he takes the annoying experience of an encounter with this kind of person and universalizes it. One can admit that the Western (and non-Western but anti-communist for that matter) intellectual Left can be and often is hypocritical. But is this the entirety of it? Rockhill’s methodology textual misinterpretations leave one unconvinced.

Lyndon Larouche Redux

Pipers’ empirical and textual claims are deliberately vague and frequently misleading, if not outright false. Along the “objective” dimension, much of the evidence Rockhill presents is circumstantial (so and so met so and so and took money from this foundation with ties to this person) or ideological (X wrote an anti-Soviet book to cheers from some liberal academics, so for all intents and purposes X must have been anti-socialist). In a pinch Rockhill will insinuate wildly, conclude nothing, but accuse doubters of lacking faith to see and being shills for the status quo.

He implies, for instance, that Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse might have been a stooge of the CIA and various other organs of American repression and imperialism. As discussed in A.J.A. Woods’s recent, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, this accusation has a long history going back to Lyndon Larouche. Larouche was a radical leftist turned right-wing conspiracy theorist who accused Marcuse and other Frankfurt School theorists of being shills for the American state. One might have hoped this bleak example would be the end of it. But, first as tragedy…

Rockhill’s main rhetorical strategy is casting a sinister aura onto Marcuse’s well-documented time working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)—a predecessor to the CIA—and the State Department. In his recent guide Marcuse, Jacob McNulty describes this as part of Marcuse’s wartime effort to support the Allies against Nazism. Marcuse later participated in the State Department’s denazification and anti-Soviet efforts. McNulty acknowledges and lightly defends Marcuse’s never hidden anti-Soviet animus; for instance, in books like Soviet Marxism, which grew out of his time working in OSS. But he stresses that “Marcuse was no cold warrior, and it is clear that he viewed liberal capitalism as sharing the totalitarian tendencies of the Eastern bloc.”

Rockhill isn’t satisfied with this well-documented history. He reheats L.L Mathias’s charge that Marcuse was actually a CIA agent who worked with the “notorious Nazi general Reinhart Gehlen” as part of an anti-communist intelligence agency. Asking whether it is “possible, then, that Marcuse was a CIA agent,” Rockhill admits he was “never overtly employed by the CIA.” But Rockhill muses that since Marcuse spoke German and worked on anti-communist agitation for the State Department, it “seems unlikely that their [Marcuse and Gehlen’s] paths would not have crossed, either in person or via intermediaries and overlapping projects.” Moreover, isn’t it suspicious that in 1951, “...Gehlen was given a VIP tour of the United States to meet the leaders of the U.S. national security state and develop their plans for a common war on communism, which was one of Marcuse’s fundamental tasks.” Or that Gehlen “met William Donovan, the chief of the OSS and Marcuse’s boss during the war, as well as three major figures in the CIA, two of whom had served in the OSS, whom Marcuse almost certainly knew in some capacity: Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, and Frank Wisne.”

If all this seems circumstantial, wildly speculative and conspiratorial, Rockhill has a rebuttal. You’re probably one of the many “Western academics” and intellectuals who “ignored or rejected out of hand all of the allegations mentioned above” because you have a “direct stake in the Critical Theory franchise.” This slippery rhetorical process is tirelessly and tiresomely repeated throughout Pipers: strongly imply nefarious connections and convey conspiratorial associations, never get pinned down by claiming you’ve decisively proven anything, repeatedly suggest you’re just asking questions others don’t have the balls to consider, and when someone doesn’t reach the party line conclusions by filling in the blanks, accuse them of elitism and shilling for the capitalist class.

The same oily rhetorical strategies are applied when discussing Marcuse’s late career. Speculating on how Marcuse became a cultural icon, and referencing his connections to elite academia and culture, Rockhill suggests it’s “highly unlikely that the mainstream press was simply acting on its own in contributing to Marcuse’s renown,” implying that media coordination with nebulous state and private entities was responsible for Marcuse’s popularity. Lacking direct evidence for his extraordinary claim, Rockhill insists we can still infer the truth that the American government must have signed off on Marcuse’s work. How else could he have become popular if he was a true radical?

Things get darker still when Rockhill tirelessly tries to snare second-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas into a sufficiently tangled web of fascist associations while hoping readers will extrapolate the worst. Early in Pipers, Rockhill describes Heidegger as an “unrepentant Nazi after the war, as his former students Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas helped demonstrate….” Later he claims that Habermas “had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the ‘Nazi philosopher’ (his description of Heidegger).” Elsewhere, discussing Ludwig Friedeburg’s arrival at the Frankfurt School, Rockhill reminds us how Habermas “had, like Friedeburg, served in the Hitler Youth.” He elaborates in a footnote, saying: “Habermas himself, we should recall, was a member of the Hitler Youth and would later support the Persian Gulf War and NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.”

As with his treatment of Marcuse, Rockhill motte-and-baileys mightily to insinuate a connection between Habermas and Nazism without unambiguously asserting it. The effort is tortured. Habermas was indeed a member of the Hitler Youth, but Rockhill fails to mention that this was mandatory for all German boys over the age of ten after 1939. Moreover, Habermas never studied under Heidegger in any formal capacity. In fact one of Habermas’s early public interventions was a 1953 op-ed condemning the latter’s unrepentant Nazism; the first of several major critiques of Heidegger. This might be the reason, as Rockhill is grudgingly forced to acknowledge, that Habermas has always foregrounded Heidegger’s Nazism. Habermas’ political limitations are obvious enough without having to fantasize about fake ones.

Criticizing the Critical Critics

On the subjective side of things, Rockhill reads texts in lopsided ways to make the case that Western Marxists supported or abetted anti-socialism and anti-Marxism. Oftentimes, all that’s needed to see the problem is to check the original text.

The most egregious example is Rockhill’s treatment of Adorno. He suggests there was a “palpable shift in the Frankfurt School’s political orientation” in 1940 when the Institute “turned its back on class analysis in favor of privileging race, culture and identity.” He points to a letter Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in 1940 where the former claimed that “everything that we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.” Rockhill uses this to blame Adorno for setting the “stage for a more general shift away from historical materialist analysis grounded in political economy toward culturalism and identity politics.” The reason two left-wing Jews exiled from Germany might be concerned with reactionary anti-semitism circa 1940 is something Rockhill largely passes over in silence, while he tries hard to project contemporary animosity over liberal identity politics into the past.

More embarrassing still is Rockhill’s discussion of a short Adorno essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” which was noticeable enough to generate an internet micro-scandal. Rockhill claims that Adorno suggested “that the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union could be retrospectively justified due to the fact that the Bolsheviks were—like Hitler himself had said—a menace to Western civilization. ‘The threat that the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious,’ the famed philosopher proclaimed, ‘and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement.”

What Rockhill deliberately doesn’t acknowledge is that in this passage Adorno was clearly satirizing and criticizing Cold Warriors who make just these kinds of equivocating claims. He even claims that by doing so Cold Warriors retroactively legitimate fascist arguments for attacking the Soviet Union. Here is the quote from the essay in full:

It is a quick jump from the statement ‘Hitler always said so’ to the extrapolation he was also right about other things. Only edifying armchair warriors could quickly ease themselves over the historical fatality that in a certain sense the same conception that motivated the Chamberlains and their followers to tolerate Hitler as a watchdog against the East have survived Hitler’s downfall. Truly a fatality. For the threat of the East will engulf the foothills of Western Europe is obvious, and whoever fails to resist it is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement. What is forgot is merely—merely!—the fact that precisely this threat was first produced by Hitler’s campaign, who brought upon Europe exactly what his war was meant to prevent, or so thought the appeasers.

There’s an essential irony to Rockhill’s project. He is right that Western Marxism emerged in part as a response to the perversions of Stalinism and Maoism. A motivation for Western Marxism was a desire to speak truthfully about the world without having one’s work reprimanded for not toeing the orthodox party line. Or worse, having your writing manipulated and censured to demonize its author. By engaging in these kinds of tactics throughout Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, Rockhill has done more than most to reinvigorate worries about these longstanding tendencies amongst Soviet apologists while staving off an honest assessment of the academic critical theory industry. This means that Rockhill has also done more than most to vindicate Western Marxism.

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Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism and The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism amongst other books.