Rev Left Radio - Western Marxism and The Imperial Theory Industry

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

In this episode, Breht is joined by philosopher, author, and cultural critic Gabriel Rockhill to discuss his new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism vs. the Imperial Theory Industry. Rockhill argues that the Cold War was not only fought with bombs, coups, and sanctions -- but with ideas, institutions and intellectuals. Drawing on extensive archival research, Rockhill shows how U.S. imperial power built a vast apparatus of foundations, universities, media outlets and cultural organizations to shape what kinds of Marxism were allowed to exist in the West. Rather than simply repressing Marxism, empire promoted a "compatible left"; a version of critical theory and Western Marxism that rejected actually existing socialist struggles and experiments, detached theory from mass struggle, and helped neutralize anti-imperialist politics. Together, they explore the role of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Cold War cultural warfare, and the long shadow this history still casts over today's left. This episode was recorded in the immediate wake of the U.S.'s invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, which they discuss at the beginning of the conversation.  Check out Critical Theory Workshop HERE Follow Rockhill's work on his Substack HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. Today we have on the episode a guest that I am actually ashamed has not been on Rev Left sooner than this. I hope to correct that in the future and have him back on many, many more times. But the one and only Gabriel Rockhill, who if you're at all plugged into Left Discourse Online, you may have heard about him in his book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. It's a wonderful, important intervention in the history of ideology. and ideological counter-revolution and the co-opting of radical revolutionary theory within and without academia.

This is a really important thing to understand, and Professor Rockhill goes into great length describing the machinery of how it actually happens. It's not conspiratorialism, it's not free-floating idealism, it's based superstructure analysis as applied to the theoretical machinations of academia. and how that spills out into the broader culture and populace and the forces that were behind that counter-revolutionary struggle on the terrain of ideology. So it's a really fascinating book. An interview can only scratch the surface of a book. I hope the interview, wet your appetite to actually go get the book and wrestle with that book, especially if you're in the context of organizing this would be a great book to do a book club or to get together and read through together,

to just kind of understand the machinations of counterrevolution and all the levels at which it truly does operate. So I'm very excited to share this conversation with you today. And again, hopefully it will be the first of many conversations me and Gabriel have over the coming months and years. As always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, we are 100% listener funded always have been, always will be. You can support us directly at patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio. And in exchange for your support of $5 a month, you could actually, access to our meditation group, our Rev Left Live Situation Room, Zoom calls where we all get together

to discuss big political events when they unfold, early releases, bonus content, and so much more. I really go out of my way to make sure that the patrons that actually financially support this show get as much as possible back in return for their generosity. It's a core priority of mine because, again, I couldn't do any of this without all of you. And we are coming up on our ninth year on air. This February will be the ninth year that Rev Left has been on the air. When I started this program, I never thought it would have the reach it does. I never thought it would have the longevity that it does.

It was really born out of local organizing and an attempt to kind of create political education for like local organizing groups and kind of the milieu around us at the time. And it took off in a way that none of us ever expected. And I'm so grateful for that. I'm so thankful for that. So thank you to so much everybody that supports the show in any way. Even if you can't do it financially, sharing episodes like this, leaving positive reviews, they all truly make a difference. And from the bottom of my heart, it means the world to me that we're still able to produce

this show and keep it going. And early on, I thought if we could reach a decade of being on air, that would be a monumental achievement. And we are well within striking distance of that. And that's all thanks to you, the supporters of the show. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Professor Gabriel Rock Hill on his newest book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Enjoy. I'm Gabriel Rock Hill. I grew up on a farm in rural Kansas working construction, and I've had a little bit of a trajectory

because in order to kind of pursue the life of the mind as in part alleviation from a lot of manual labor, I ended up studying in France for over a decade and pursuing higher education, became a philosophy professor, and have always been seeking out radical discourses that could address some of the principal issues that I was faced with even as a young person, and that is exploitation, but also forms of super exploitation that I saw operative if it be within kind of racial hierarchies or gender hierarchies. And so I currently work as a professor and I run an educational nonprofit and I just wrote this book called Who Paid the Piper's Western Marxism, which in many ways, I mean, it took about a decade to write, but it is coming to terms with both my own education where I come from and kind of what

I set out to do intellectually. So it's a little bit of a buildings woman in the sense of a kind of story of self-education, if you will. Well, yeah, it's a, as I was saying before we started recording a genuine honor to have you on i've been following you in your work for a while um and then as we were talking i realized we actually have quite a bit of similarities i kind of have an inverted path uh compared to you instead of kansas i'm in nebraska started off i'm going to college for a philosophy degree tried to get my phd in it i had kids and financial issues where i couldn't see that grad school program through so dropped out now i find myself in the trades as a construction worker myself um that that's my yeah that's my monday through friday uh job um

So it's kind of cool and a little inverted version of what you're doing. But it's an honor to have you on. Like I said before, it was way too long to get you on. I'm glad we're finally doing this. And hopefully this is the first of several visits back to Rev. Left that you can make. But today we are talking about who paid the Piper's of Western Marxism, your new book. It sparked a lot of discourse.

I know you've been on a little roundabout with various podcasts and interviews talking about it. I hope, and I believe you and I will have, you know, a unique conversation around this book. even if people out there might have heard another interview or so with you. But before we get into it, you know, relevant to current events and also relevant in so many ways to the book itself is the issue of Venezuela, the U.S. kidnapped Maduro and his wife. And it's kind of up in the air as to what comes next. I'm wondering if you just have any opening thoughts on the situation in Venezuela and maybe how it relates to your work more broadly. Well, it's a horrific occurrence, of course, with an intensification of U.S. imperialism, and it's more openly fascistic orientation with less and less of the liberal cover. And it came out that actually the New York Times and the Washington Post were both aware of the fact that the attack was going to take place. But instead of warning anyone or publishing that information, they decided to keep quiet so that they would find. function kind of in lockstep with the U.S. government. And this reveals one of the deeper themes of the book,

and that is that, well, actually two things. One is that if you want to understand how the U.S. government actually functions, you have to come to terms with what I refer to drawing on the work of others as dual governance so that there are forces within the kind of political theater of the U.S. government. But there's also a large segment of the government that's not beholden to any semblance of democratic politics, and that is, you know, the security agencies. And the central intelligence agency, of course, was directly involved in this hit on Venezuela. And so if you want to understand U.S. state politics, you have to understand the history of its intelligence services. But the other is that these intelligence services function hand in glove with the bourgeois cultural apparatus or the kind

of larger system of cultural production and dissemination and consumption. And so the fact that the New York Times and the Washington Post would take these positions should not at all be surprising if you know the actual history of these platforms and others like them. I spell some of this out in the book. In fact, one of the longest serving directors of the New York Times signed a confidentiality agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency, which is the highest level of cooperation. And this is only one aspect of the larger kind of integration between the bourgeois media and the bourgeois state. And so all of that, I think, demonstrates, and this is not. not to say that there aren't other examples of it, but it brings to the fore the extent to which

if you want to understand the contemporary world, some historical perspective on imperialism, the functioning of the bourgeois state, and how bourgeois culture operates will go a long way to explaining that and much, much further than a lot of the hot takes that you might see, or for that matter, a lot of what you find in the bourgeois media. Last thing I'd like to say, Brett, though, is that I wanted to kind of take it right back to you and say that it's a real honor to be on this platform. I remember listening to you, it seems like, ages and ages ago and just being very empowered as someone who came from Kansas learning that, hey, here's this other person who's doing radical education and bringing people on and trying to develop a project that was so unique,

particularly when it first hit the ground, and is doing a great service to developing the kind of tools of political analysis, intellectual exchange, theoretical sharpening that are so important for what all of us are doing as progressives within the belly of the beast. And so thank you for your years of work. I know how thankless it can be. And also I look forward to ideally future collaborations as well. Well, I can't express in words how much that means to me and how much I'm kind of taken back. I wasn't fully aware that you were even really aware of our show, much less somebody that listen to it all those years ago. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.

That truly means a lot. And to your other point, like the more I learn about history and politics and society and the American state, the more it's obvious that the CIA is the organized crime branch of the U.S. bourgeoisie and that the first domestic act of any revolutionary movement that seizes political power is to absolutely crush and dismantle these intelligence services here in the U.S. as well as abroad and the foreign. form of the UK's intelligence apparatus as well as, of course, Massad, that they are behind so much of the evil in the world. You almost sound like a conspiracy theorist to a regular person when you

talk about this in an objective way, but it is startling the crimes, the blood on their hands, and that they are behind so much of the world's disorder, anti-democracy and anti-freedom movements all across the world. Can I just share one statistic that goes to the heart of that? Please do. There were 14 former members of the Central Intelligence Agency that got together to study the agency in 1987. And they found that in the 40 years that it had existed since 1947, the CIA had been involved in the direct murder of 6 million people internationally. So that brings a little bit into focus some of what this agency has done historically. And these are only direct assassinations.

We're not talking about all of the forms of social murder and eucoside that have been generated. out of the puppet governments and, you know, the death squads and everything else that they've been running. So I couldn't agree more that it is an extremely, extremely nefarious force and that people who want to understand how the government works need to study both its history and how it functions today. Yeah, I've been calling the U.S. Israel and NATO axis the Fourth Reich because it really is a continuation of the worst of European fascism. And it masquerades as liberal democracy, but it is it is pure corporate dictatorship and fascism the world the world around and and people need to realize it and and your criticisms of the status quo your criticisms of the state or or the corporate

apparatus is really hollowed out if you do not at the same time have a centralized critique of these intelligence agencies and the roles that they play in all of this um yeah but let's go ahead and move into the book itself um i really really appreciated this book i really enjoyed it i think it's an incredibly important intervention than I think anybody who listens to a show like this you would do you well to actually read the book. An interview can only cover so much. The book itself, obviously, just by the nature of the medium, goes much deeper. So I'll link to that in the show notes. And I encourage people to support you and your work and to pick up the book and read it because it really is important. So my first question for you is that your book frames the Cold War

as a sort of intellectual world war, where ideas themselves, kind of functioned as weapons. So for Marxists who tend to focus on economic exploitation or state power, how should we understand ideology and knowledge production as a sort of decisive terrain of class struggle in its own right? I would say that a systemic materialist ideology critique is really at the core of the Marxist project. And ideology, therefore, is not seen as operating in a separate autonomous sphere from economic forces. or the influence of state power. In that regard, my book really seeks to draw on and then further develop the Marxist analysis of the superstructure,

in particular in the age of late imperialism, as well as the relationship between this superstructure and the socioeconomic base. I realize most of your listeners probably are familiar with this terminology, but just to be clear, the socioeconomic base is composed of the kind of the political economy of capitalism that is driving the world. And the superstructure is the set of interlocking political legal institutions and cultural institutions that function as a kind of outgrowth of that capitalist base. And Marx, of course, identified these two elements of the superstructure, both of the, political legal apparatus and what I call in the book the cultural apparatus, meaning the entire system of cultural production, dissemination, and consumption, which of course includes the intellectual world. But it also is, you know, Hollywood and TV and sports culture and all of these other things.

And one of the elements that I tried to develop in the book, and this relates to actually what we were just talking about, is that if you really want to understand how political legal apparatus of bourgeois states like the United States function, then you have to recognize this phenomenon of dual governance, that there's the political theater of elected representatives, but there are also all of the forces that aren't beholden to democratic power, even the semblance of democratic power, like the intelligence services, and that they often operate with a level of power that exceeds the political theater.

And there are sometimes direct contradictions, in fact, between these two elements of the government. The Central Intelligence Agency, which is one of the key intelligence agencies, obviously, it would be better understood as the kind of capitalist internationalization agency. They are tasked with expanding and intensifying global capitalist social relations by any means necessary. And that includes, of course, illegal means and doing things that would not be acceptable within the even limited confines of the bourgeois democracy that we have in the United States. You also have, within the broader cultural apparatus, a phenomenon of kind of dual management. You know, we're always told

in the university or in the cultural sphere that there's just a marketplace of ideas or a marketplace of artistic products. But we all know full well, anybody who has real experience or has studied how these work, that this marketplace is very powerfully controlled from behind the scenes, so that ideas that aren't palatable to the ruling class are either sidelined or shadow banned or they're simply eliminated and not given a platform. So a lot of my book then, you know, can be interpreted as a kind of further development of the Marxist analysis of the superstructure in both of these components, right, both the political legal apparatus, state apparatus, if you will, and then the kind of broader cultural apparatus, trying to extend them from earlier

analyses thereof, you know, going back to Marx and Engels and Lenin and others, but then extending them to the contemporary era. And in particular, one of the focal points for the book is, of course, the U.S. Empire and the U.S. since it became the leading imperialist force in the world at the end of World War II. Maybe the only other thing that I'd say in that regard is that ideology is very important for a Marxist analysis as well, because ideology is what situates us in the world and it orientes our activities. And so just as we know that there is no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory, there is also no counter-revolutionary practice without counter-revolutionary ideas. And so we need to be able to understand how those ideas are produced, what forces are

driving them, what shapes them, how they can be countered. And a lot of my work examines a kind of political economy of knowledge production. It applies Marxist methodology to Marxism itself, right, beginning with the question that or the issue that Marx and Engels raised, which is that the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of its ruling class. And what we have in the imperial core is a Marxism. That was the Marxism that I'm sure you as well as I were exposed to because it's the dominant form of Marxism, what people call Western Marxism. But what I reveal in the book is that this version of Western Marxism actually was,

supported and promoted in various and sundry ways by both capitalist forces, so forces coming from the socioeconomic base, but also superstructural forces, those within the cultural apparatus, so in the university, publishing industry, et cetera, but also those within the, what some people call the deep state or the invisible government. And I'm sure we'll get deeper into this if I've kind of laid this out into kind of abstract of a fashion, but bringing all of that to a close, I would say that the book proposes a kind of dialectical analysis of the relationship between the socioeconomic base and the superstructure so that we can understand better how ideas function in the era of late imperialism and why it's important to get clear on the travesty

of Marxism that goes under the name of Western Marxism. Incredibly well said. And so we have the methodology. We have the approach. We have the background sort of theoretical structurally. structure of what you're trying to do here. Before we move forward, maybe it might help just to maybe define what you mean by Western Marxism and kind of make it clear what you set out to do specifically in this book, which is, you know, one way I would articulate it is that you're seeing

that actually the construction of Marxist and radical theory itself is and was a terrain of counter-revolutionary struggle, that instead of just having like this isolated, theoretical patch of radical theory that was sort of like used against the system. The system itself realized that it had to sort of infiltrate, influence, shape that theory directly so as to weaken and neuter it. Let me know if you think that that's fair or what you would add to that. A hundred percent. The threat to imperialism that is identified in the internal documents that I've read, because I do a lot of archival research, both physical documents, Freedom of Information Act requests and digital archives. And I've been doing this basically a decade

of research goes into this book. And one thing that is very clear is that they identify the doctrine that is the enemy of U.S. style imperialism. They don't tend to use that terminology. They refer instead to the free world. But those of us who have done a materialist analysis can understand what they're actually indexing. The enemy is Marxism-Leninism. It's dialing. It's dialing. It's dialing. electrical materialism. They're very, very clear about it. And they understood that they needed to try to undermine it in any way that they could. And so there, I guess, are two ways of understanding Western Marxism. One is what its deep historical roots are. And I would refer people to Domenical De Sordos great book, Western Marxism, on this, where he traces Western Marxism back to

the split in the global socialist movement diagnosed by Lenin. And that was between a form of Marxism that was proffered by the labor aristocracy, so by the workers in the imperial corps who had the best working conditions of any workers around the world and who therefore became complicit with imperialism and with colonialism in, you know, to varying degrees. And that that constituted a split where Lenin, Luxembourg, Leipnecht, and others, you know, accused them of selling out on the internationalist project of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist liberation and instead simply using Marxism as a tool for their own workers in their particular country. So there was a kind of version of social chauvinist Marxism or what two authors have

recently referred to is heron folk Marxism. So a Marxism for the ruling people, for them and their peoples, but not Marxism for all peoples around the world. This elucidates the kind of socioeconomic forces driving Western Marxism, meaning at one level you can understand that Western Marxism is a byproduct of imperialism. That imperialism overdevelops the imperial core, and with that it perverts the very nature of Marxist science by bringing with it a version of Marxism that ends up wanting to consolidate imperialism because the people who were the Marxists like Kalksky who were proffering it benefited from it. But another very important factor, and this is more what I focus on in this book, as, you know, partially further developing some of Lesotho's work or attempting to contribute to a further development of it, is that that version of Western Marxism was then given new lifeblood when the U.S. Empire emerged as the dominant imperial force in the the wake of World War II because it inherited imperialism on its heels. And this is very important for us to understand because there's so much power projection on the part of the U.S.

empire. But when the U.S. became the leading imperialist power, fascism had just been defeated by socialism by the Soviets and the Chinese, who were the overwhelming force. You know, some, the best statistics that I've seen is some 70 million Soviets and Chinese gave their lives defeating fascism versus some 400,000 U.S. America. who entered the war very, very late based on opportunistic decisions by the United States and then proceeded, as you alluded to, to then recuperate a lot of the fascists and put them right back in power in order to continue waging war against communism, which is yet a different story. But what the U.S. inherited then was an empire in which fascism was globally discredited. The anti-fascist struggle

continued across the global South or what people called the third world in the form of the anti-colonial struggle. And so the U.S. had to present itself as being for decolonization while trying to recuperate these colonies through neocolonial mechanisms, dirty tricks, covert operations, etc. And the socialist world was expanding until at least the end of the 1970s because it was the driving force behind the most successful anti-colonial revolutions. And within that context, Marxism had incredible level of credibility. Pablo Picasso was the most famous artist arguably of the 20th century, was a self-proclaimed communist. You know, Paul Robson, you know, he had major, major figures who were self-declared

communist, Marxists, you know, they'd use different terminology for it, but people understood that they supported the struggle of what Lenin referred to as the slaves in the colonies against imperialism. So what the U.S. Empire was faced with was a situation in which Marxism had incredible levels of global credibility, arguably unprecedented, before or since. But at same time, they needed to shore up and further advance imperialism. So they had a contradiction on their hands. And one of the things they decided to do, I have a large sections in the book that deal with the Rockefeller's Marxism-Leninism project, is that the capitalist ruling class decided to fund and support a version of Marxism as an ideological weapon of war against the

real enemy. And the real enemy, they say again and again, it's Marxism, Leninism, it's dialectical materialism, it's Soviet-style socialism, you know, and that. things affiliated with it because, of course, you know, they would include within that, you know, China, Cuba and other examples. And so what they ended up doing was funding and supporting a version of, you know, you can call it an academic Marxism and idealist Marxism. I mean, it's basically Marxism in theory and anti-communism in practice. And just to bring all of that to a close so we can get on to your next questions and comments, I would say that the core of this Western Marxist orientation as supported by U.S. imperial interests is that it might be opposed to certain forms of capitalism as least in name, but it systematically identifies the principal struggle against capitalism as being actually worse than capitalism itself, so much so that they end up coalescing with the position of there being no alternative.

So they are generally capitalist accommodationist, if not imperialist accommodationist, and some of them are outright supporters of capitalism and imperialism. And they tend to denigrate socialism as perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. That's what Slavoiejijs says about it. El Mbedou doesn't have much kinder terms to use. And some of them will then identify socialism with fascism, as Adorno and Horkheimer did with the Soviet Union or Slavoyzijek today does with China. He says it's fascist. These are just some of the examples of the extent to which this Western Marxism really perverts the revolutionary core of the Marxist tradition. Yeah, I mean, perfectly said, there's so much to go into. And we're going to work through a lot of that, especially the history.

I am interested on the firsthand of you continuing maybe to talk about some figures and some concrete examples, kind of like how this Western Marxism manifests in our contemporary society today. One way, why you kind of think about some of those, one way that it manifests in the wake of something like what just happens. in Venezuela is these ostensibly left-wing thinkers, activists, whatever, making sure that first and foremost they condemn, you know, Maduro, condemn the brutal dictatorship, right? Try to simultaneously be against Trump or this overt form of what they would call right-wing authoritarianism or interventionism, while at the same time at the other side of their mouth, really, ensuring that you know that they agree with the imperial apparatus that Maduro is. is indeed a terrible tyrant and a brutal dictator and that we should listen to Venezuelans,

only the ones huddled in Miami, of course, about what Venezuelans writ large truly want for their country, et cetera. And that's just one tiny example. We see it all the time, but one tiny example of how this manifests. I'm hoping you can maybe give us, you know, more, more large figures, more maybe politicians that emphasize or express this strain of co-opted Western Marxism and some other examples of how it manifests in our current, before we go into some of the history. Yeah, I think one of the things that has come out of my research, because in many ways, I've been working on this since, you know, my graduate student days because I was trained in

France and worked with, you know, Badu was my PhD director and worked with a lot of the leftist intellectuals there, Aetan Balibar, Jacques-Giacan, people like that, but then also was reading a lot of Western Marxism, as well as what we could qualify as kind of contemporary radical theory in the United States, anyone from Spivek to Judas Butler to other figures like this, Nancy Frazier, etc. And one thing that became very clear in writing this book is that there is an incredible level of ideological consistency for all of their brand management and their attempts to delimit what it is that they're doing from anyone else and the divisions, that they have, you know, tried to articulate, they almost across the board reject any form of socialism in the real world.

And if they do support some form of socialism, it is a new idea of socialism, a different idea of communism, some third way that magically exits the pitched battles between actual capitalism and actual socialism. So they're utopian socialists at best. And they have an enormous amount of rancor to express, you know, regarding their, their hatred of actually existing socialism. And so it would be more difficult to actually find a single exception to the overwhelming tendency. You know, in the three-volume book, the idea of communism that Verso published, they go on at length about how they could. couldn't possibly have this, you know, one of their conferences took place in South Korea, which happens to be a military dictatorship that is supported by the United States in an ongoing war on Korean self-determination. They say how they couldn't possibly have this conference,

you know, in North Korea or in a place like China. And they criticize the Venezuela for relying on kind of strongman politics. They basically have various forms of derision that they express regarding the very difficult struggle of building socialist states in, you know, underdeveloped regions of the world that have been underdeveloped by imperialism. And so one of the, you know, remarkable things when you actually go through and look at what all of these figures have said about the most important things in the world, meaning the principal contradiction of imperialism and how you fight imperialism and win, which is building socialist state building projects, they are almost in categorical agreement. And any minor exceptions

that you find to that are usually exceptions that are perfectly explainable. Like Badu will say that he supports a few years of the cultural revolution in China. But what he means by that, if you read through it, is that he supports the revolution against the revolution, against the party, against the state. So he embraces a kind of anarchist, anti-state anti-party politics that he reads into the cultural revolution like many Western Maoists do and then denigrates, you know, the majority of everything else that has happened in China. Zhijek, I wrote a long piece on just kind of pointing out that he was actually just directly

involved in destabilization campaigns and ran as president advocating for pro-capitalist reforms and brags about having hand and dismantling socialism in Yugoslavia. So this isn't only a theoretical enterprise. It's very practically oriented. You know, there's many who have signed petitions against Cuba, denouncing the so-called authoritarian regime in Cuba with no analysis whatsoever, no materialist analysis of what's going on in Cuba or anywhere else. That's the other thing is that the level of imperial arrogance is only outsized.

stripped by the degree of imperial ignorance. Like, these people don't actually study actually existing socialist states. And they just repeat bourgeois historians and bourgeois talking points within the press. And they don't take seriously the difficult struggles of those who have tried to build socialism in the real world. I'd just add to that that on the list of people who are practically dedicated to overthrowing socialism in the real world, we have to add Jacques Derrida and Michelle Foucault. And this book that I just wrote ended up being turned into three volumes because I just, after a decade of research, I just had too much material. And so the second volume I just completed, and it's called French Theory Made in USA. And it's a deep dive into the effects of postmodernism, if you will, on the global class struggle as well as the forces driving it.

And then the third volume is called Radical Theory's Infantile Disorder, echoing Lenin's excellent book on. left-wing communism and infantile disorder, but then looking at some of the figures like Hart and Negri and Balibar and Badu and Jizek and Frazier and Butler and these people who are the contemporary, you know, I guess I just call them the sophists of imperialism. They are creating very sophisticated discourses to obfuscate the primary contradiction and the struggle against it. But in the second volume, I go into some of the details regarding Derrida's direct involvement with the destabilization campaigns against Czechoslovakia. And Fouca's primary political outlet in his later work was his dedication to overthrowing socialism in the east, in the eastern

block, and in particular in Poland. And it was involved in a whole series of activities around that that I go into in the book. But in the interest of not speaking too long about this, I'll turn it back to you. Well, you're already invited back on to talk about both of those second and third iterations of this series because I find it fascinating and completely in line with your arguments, completely agree with your approach. And I think it's incredibly important that we understand this stuff. And even though you're mentioning, you know, kind of high level academics, that stuff does trickle down. It manifests into sort of like, you know, a social democratic approach, the things that come out of AOC or Mom Donnie's mouths, some of the stuff that gets pumped out by publications like, like, you know, a social democratic approach, the things that come out of AOC or Mom Donnie's mouths, some of the stuff that gets pumped out by publications like, like, you know, Jacobin or even just in the proliferation of radical liberalism, as we on the Marxist side would often call it, that we see all over the activist organizer and ostensibly left spaces that we engage with or are adjacent to. And so I have a question for you here. You talk about your research also, you know, suggest this. And I do want to emphasize this is decades of serious, deep research, not just a theoretical argument you're making here. This is rooted in an investigative journalist

this sort of approach to the problem, is I'm interested in how it's not just about like shaping exact ideas or pushing out fake ideas. It's about like disciplining how intellectuals, particularly in academia, are trained to think. And that relates to this question of the self-consciousness with which these academics are doing it, right? I assume it's a spectrum from like cynical. There's some level perhaps of cynicism here. But a lot of people are probably operating in a way, that they think is fully authentic and based on like genuine values and they don't see themselves as being co-opted or disciplined into thinking by counter-revolutionary forces in certain ways. So I'm interested in the self-conscious aspect of it and what you make of that.

No, thank you for that question because it goes to the heart of a really important issue in the book. Before addressing it, though, I did want to say that one of the reasons that a lot of the ruling class and the bourgeois state focuses on the intelligentsia is because they're the mind managers who have a platform and can thereby have an impact on the broader population. And the ultimate goal, of course, is to affect the mindscape of the masses. And so everything that I was saying about how the leading luminaries of French theory, Western Marxism, contemporary radical theory, tend to be anti-anti-imperialists, right? So you don't have to be a genius in the dialectical inversion to know that if you negate, the negation, then you're actually kind of a pro-imperialist, or at least imperialist accommodationist,

and tend to be anti-socialist, that those positions are supported within the intelligentsia precisely in order to promote them within the broader kind of circuits of civil society and within the organizing world. And coming to your question, though, it is very important to understand that what this book diagnoses is the relationship between the system and the subject, and that a lot of the predominant idea concerning how intellectuals operate, for instance, is that either they are absolutely free and they come up with their ideas in a vacuum, or they're completely determined by these nefarious forces that control them from the outside a la conspiracy theory. The book goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this polarization between complete determination or absolute

freedom is a myth, and it's rooted in liberal ideology, the kind of ideology of the free subject unaffected by circumstances. Instead, what the book puts forth is a kind of dialectical materialist analysis of how systems relate to subjects, and that there are multiple forms, types, and ranges of agency operative in all of this. It looks specifically at the system of knowledge production within the bourgeois world. And it is absolutely the case that subjects who function within that system but have not critically studied the history of that system and how it operates, think that they're simply functioning in a kind of natural manner. And it would be odd for them to think, oh, I'm actually taking a position that is aligned on the CIA or on the State Department or that the Rockefellers would support.

because what they tend to think instead is that I'm a free intellectual doing the type of work that intellectuals do in this particular system. So there's a kind of naturalization of an intellectual ideology or what we could call drawing on Bordeaux's work a kind of habitus. And a habitus is just an ingrained kind of practical disposition. It's kind of a know-how, if you will. And given the fact that I was trained in these institutions, I know. full well what this know-how is and how to navigate these institutions. And what the book diagnoses is that the system of bourgeois knowledge production has a series of rewards and punishments. And it allocates those in complex and sophisticated ways that communicate to the

subjects in the system what they have to do to rise up within that system. And so what I see as opportunistically giving to the system what it wants, people's lived experience is such often that they are advancing their careers, that they are progressing within the hierarchies of the academy. And so what I'm trying to bring to the fore is a more materialist analysis of how the subjective intellectual production isn't purely free, nor is, is it rigorously determined. This isn't some, you know, fairy tale or Hollywood story about the CIA with a briefcase and a gun at somebody's head saying, you know, write this now. That's not how these operations work. It's much more sophisticated than that, although there

has been the exchange of direct exchange of money in certain cases. And that subjects, I'm glad that you highlighted, there are kind of concentric circles of complicity. So someone like Francis Fukuyama or Samuel Huntington, as I point out in the book, I mean, these are U.S. National Security State operatives who work under university cover and that I kind of spell out. They are very tight with empire. They're part of the intellectual imperial force. But there are other intellectuals who are further out in these concentric circles and you can get so far out that there are intellectuals who are more or less oblivious to the overall dynamic that they're contributing to because what they think they're doing is simply producing scholarship. But if you don't have a materialist analysis of your intellectual production and how it's, you know, situated within the system, then you're simply operating with blinders on and interpreting it, you know, from a myopic point of view, from a limited point of view, and not analyzing the objective system within which you operate. So to bring that all together, I would say that some of the fundamental forces are that the system of bourgeois knowledge production provides uplift.

It gives people careers. It gives them junkets. It gets them translated. It puts them at Ivy League schools, you know, there's a whole pecking order and a hierarchy that is built into that system. And how do you get uplift? Well, do you get uplift like Michael Parenti by writing books that are critical of U.S. Empire that are opposed to the, you know, and getting involved in activism against the U.S. war in Vietnam, pushing back against the narrative of actually existing socialism? No, Michael Parenti was never able to secure a full-time teaching appointment within the United States. The way you climb that ladder is you give to the system what it directly. or indirectly

subtly or not demands of you. And those who have advanced within the imperial theory industry have done so because they've granted use their agency, been very creative. Some of them have worked very, very hard to do that.

And they've operated in a semi-autonomous manner, but they operate within a system from which they are searching for, you know, support at a minimum, if not rewards and more. more than that. And so on the subjective side, what you tend to have are intellectuals who embrace opportunism. They give to the system ultimately what it demands because that leads to their own preferments. It leads to promotion within the system. And this is very subtle, right? People can actually

intellectually convince themselves that they're not doing it while they actually are. Exactly. You know, and so it's, ideology needs to be diagnosed in its complete kind of complexities, if you will, because self delusion and self obfuscation is often necessary because, and maybe this is the last thing. I mean, I could say a lot more about this and maybe you want to come back at me with further questions or comments, but there are ways that the intelligentsia is cultivated to do certain times. types of practices that the intelligency itself is completely unaware of because they have no historical and materialist analysis of those practices. And if we engage in that historical and materialist analysis, then we begin to bring to the four the objective system that produces the types of intellectuals that then in turn create the intellectual products that are promoted. And it's that overall organic system that I'm interested. in diagnosing. This isn't an attack on individuals. I'm not embittered because I didn't like my professors. It's, you know, harmful to my career to, you know, criticize the people who should be writing letters back recommendation for me so I can get a job at an Ivy League school. It's like there are much better ways at self-promotion than than destroying your possibilities of career advancement within the Imperial Corps. It really is a diagnosis of the system that I know from the inside because it was cultivating that within me.

And it was demanding of me certain things that, you know, some of my early scholarship I'm not happy with. I think it was materialist, but I think it was compromised to some degree. But I'm, you know, try to be mature enough to just recognize that as part of the learning process and move on and, you know, deepen the analysis. And so maybe the last thing that I would say is that there is a kind of way in which it makes perfect sense that imperial intellectuals would be some of the last people to be able to understand. understand my materialist diagnosis of the imperial system of knowledge production. The people who are well positioned to understand it are those who suffer from it, those who've been excluded from it, those who see it more from the outside, because materially, they have a better vantage point on it.

Absolutely. So well said, and I think it's so essential that people understand the machinery and the architecture of how this actually works so that we don't fall into the errors of free-floating idealism and the autonomous, you know, maverick intellectual and, academia going his own way or the hyper deterministic, you know, this is just controlled, conspiratorial lockdown of every thought that passes through the heads of somebody that this is a dialectical and structural analysis of how this works. And yeah, from the perspective, from the first person subjectivity of somebody engaged in this sort of thing, you kind of can get your

cake and eat it too because you can still put out work that it is ostensibly radical or whatever it may be while also moving up the career ladder. But if that radical theory goes in any direction that is actually hostile to imperialism itself, points out the core contradictions of the global system, or threatens the material interests of the ruling elite in any serious way, you know, that will be punished through your, like you said with Michael Parenti, not being able to be the beneficiary of that uplift. And there's a reason why the most radical revolutionary, anti-imperialist, consistent and principled revolutionary movements in U.S. history have not flowed out of academia or the middle class. but have bubbled up in the streets of, you know, ghettos with the Black Panther Party and organic intellectuals coming out of the gutters themselves, having an actual experiential and material engagement with the system as it actually operates not, you know, sort of cocooned in comfort and launching abstract theories from there. So it just makes total sense. Let's go into some of the history here, in particular the Frankfurt School, right?

as a Marxist in the West, I've done episodes on the Frankfurt School. I would even say that I've gotten some genuine bits of insight out of it, but you focus on them and I think it's really important that we do the same in this interview. So many Marxists in the West, as I said, do encounter the Frankfurt School as some of the more sophisticated, perhaps critics of capitalism. So how does your archival and institutional research and analysis kind of complicate the standard narrative that critical theory represents a radical break from bourgeois ideology? Well, I go into the political economy and the material history of the Frankfurt School, tracing it from its original founding with the capitalist investments on the part of Felix Vile through its U.S. American exile and the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Frankfurt School scholars in the United States were working in Washington, D.C., in the U.S. National Security State and in propaganda agencies, not in universities, following that to then their promotion in some of the most prestigious universities

largely due to their contacts that they made within the U.S. National Security State, and then back to their relocation thanks to ample funding from the Rockefeller Foundation back in occupied West Germany and their ongoing support for a kind of compatible left version of Marxism. Compatible left, I use that vocabulary because I've read it in so many internal documents. It refers to the version of leftism that the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to promote because it's a left that is compatible with capitalism and imperialism. It's the kind of left that will say things like, you know, oh, Maduro was kidnapped,

but he was a dictator, he was authoritarian, he was this, that, or the other thing, without instead recognizing that, well, he was demolished. democratically elected and that the reason for targeting him is because there is a Bolivarian socialist project and a desire to steal the natural resources and turn the Venezuelans back into the slaves of empire. And all of that kind of history is ignored, the material history. What comes out in the kind of history of the Frankfurt School, because there are three chapters, right, one deals with Adorno and Horkheimer and the extent to which they pretty systematically took very reactionary political positions, but then I also look at the members of the Frankfurt School who are working in

the U.S. national security state. And then finally, I explore the complicated case of Herbert Marcuse, who is often touted as being the most leftist of the Frankfurt scholars. And that's certainly true because he was radicalized in no small part due to students like Angela Davis, Abby Hoffman, and others, as well as the anti-imperialist movement and the, you know, movement, and the kind of student movement and the new left radicalizations that he was exposed to. And he certainly moved to the left. There's no doubt about that. But he did remain a kind of stalwart anti-communist to the end of his days and continue to collaborate with many of the people who he knew from his time serving the U.S. national security state. And so what you come away with in the book is a kind of

counter history, if you will, the Frankfurt School or a counter history of Western Marxism that reveals that instead of being the kind of vanguard of Marxist theoretical production in which they were overcoming the limitations of so-called orthodox or old-school Marxism by opening up to these new ideas, engaging in cultural analysis, developing a kind of elucidation of fascism via their account of authoritarian personalities, you know, pushing Marxism to be even critical of actually existing socialism, all of these supposed innovations, instead you see that the kind of marketing image of the Frankfurt School as more innovative than the rest of the Marxist tradition is presenting the world upside

down. It's interesting, just as a side note, that Horcomer actually hired a public relations firm in order to promote the work of the Frankfurt School within the United States and had a lot of money at his disposal. And instead, what we see is that the Frontenfer's school is shoring up a version of compatible left Marxism that is capitalist accommodationist, imperialist, and at times actually openly supportive of imperialism, and that they function as a bulwark against the Marxist tradition that is the actual vanguard of history, that is the anti-imperialist Marxist tradition from across the global south and, of course, within the imperial core, like some of the sources that you mentioned a moment ago, if it be Parenti, George

Jackson or others who are really pushing the envelope on a kind of anti-imperialist framework of analysis. And so all of that gives us a very different perspective on the form of Marxism that is promoted by the empire. And the last thing that I would say is that if you stand back from the book and, for instance, if you know a lot about Adorno or you know nothing about him, and you just think in terms of a materialist analysis of intellectual production in the world's leading empire, and you ask yourself a very basic question. What form of Marxism would be the most widespread or promoted version that they would teach in universities and say is the kind of vanguard of human history? Would it be that of Che Guevara and Thomas Sankara and Mariatagi and all of these other people?

Or would it be that of people who are actually counter-revolutionaries? It doesn't take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that, well, the empire would promote a version of Marxism that would serve the interest of imperialism and otherwise they would demote. it, which is precisely what they did in the case of Che Guevara and many other examples one could point to. And so in that regard, the overall framing of the book is just trying to get us to understand how Marxist intellectual work were best understood within the overall global framing of imperialism and the struggle against it. And if we center that, then a lot comes into focus. Absolutely. A Marxism that is quick to point out the flaws in every actually. existing socialist project and then shift the lens of analysis away from actual material

and imperial dynamics to culture and subjectivity. While there might be something to gain in an analysis of culture and subjectivity, the overall shift to that away from, you know, the actual material dynamics of the world system, plus a sort of denigration of the actually existing socialist movements, which by definition are not going to be perfect. They're not going to reach any reified idealist utopian conception of how a single individual in an armchair thinks socialism should ideally play out. You could see how that would play directly into a compatible left that yes, is on the surface and ostensibly and, you know, posturally left wing. And that gives, you know, sort of something for people with, you know, radical opinions or maybe a disgruntledness

with the system. You can flow into that very easily. But that, what the, thing you're flowing into is very much sort of contained and is not any longer a threat to the actual system itself. So I think that is really important to note. And I want to get into this next question about contrasting Western Marxism with anti-imperial Marxism. But I quickly just want to make a point that the exact argument you made about academics, right, how there's a sort of uplift to your career if you take certain positions. And many people are sort of not self-consciously or necessarily cynically, lying about their beliefs to skew things in a certain way,

and there's these concentric circles of influence and all of that. I think there's an exact proxy outside of academia in the political sphere. And, you know, I think Bernie Sanders and AOC and Mom Donnie are the political, the political expression of this thing that we're talking about within academia, which is this sort of compatible left, right? Like AOC and Mom Donnie and Bernie Sanders, they're not terrible fucking people. You know, they shouldn't, whatever. You know, there's room for people to say some nice things about them.

But fundamentally, they are compatible with the U.S. Imperial Project. Mondani comes out and says, you know, Maduro is a dictator and that's all true, but we still shouldn't intervene. You know, AOC says very similar things. Bernie Sanders comes out and says Israel has a right to defend itself. I don't want to say genocide for the first two years of it. But once everybody else has agreed that is genocide, then I'll come out and say it like it's some proud or brave thing to do. And this form of leftism is leftism, I call it, not Marxism, is so compatible with the status quo. And like, the system as it exists would not be thrown into chaos or disorder if President AOC arose, right?

And the reason that they get to those positions and the reason they can stay in that system and continue on in their careers is precisely because they do not pose a real threat to it. That's exactly right. I mean, there's a way in which what I diagnosed in the book is much more the intellectual world war and focusing on the intelligentsia. There's a lot on journalism and the bourgeois media and things like this. But ultimately, this intellectual world war is just part of a broader war on the left and the effort on the part of the imperial powers, the U.S. in particular, to shift the spectrum of politics to the right. so that if you have a compatible left, ultimately the real left is destroyed or made so invisible that it doesn't have its impact. And that has largely been successful in a country like the United States where you know, you just go back and look at its history. And if it be in the 40s or the 30s or the teens, like there were stronger leftist positions that have been articulated in the history of the country with mass media.

movements behind them as well. And I do think it's important in a dialectical analysis to always be attentive to the specificity of the conjuncture in which we operate. So we have the most arguably indoctrinated population due to the dysfunctional educational system and the mass media and all of the digital forms of miseducation. But then you also have an ongoing war on the workers movement that has been very, very intense. And so if you're put in a position where you have to choose between, you know, one of these figures that you just mentioned and someone much, much further to the right, I think you can be tactically savvy about recognizing that, well, a kind of mild social democracy is better than right-wing fascism. But you can only do that if you

recognize it as a tactical, you know, orientation because the ultimate horizon and strategy of our struggles has to be to reinvent, develop, and further advance a real left. And the real left is being held back by that compatible left. And so strategically, that's, you know, ultimately what we need. But there's, you know, a way in which I think that you have to, you have to, like, if Lenin taught us at least one thing, it's that politics is messy. It's never pure. And therefore, you have to be able to understand where compromise is necessary, where retreats are necessary, and where you can make real substantive gains and advances. And I would say that some people would argue that what I've criticized with this kind of cultural Marxism and the compatible left, that ultimately I'm playing into the hands of the right because I'm criticizing, you know, the only left that we have left or something like that. I would say it's actually the exact opposite that what we see currently with the transatlantic.

Trump administration is that given how far right the U.S. American spectrum has moved, now they're making an open war on what the CIA actually supported in the 1950s as the compatible left. And if you read the project 2025, they're very explicit about making an open war on cultural Marxism. In the 1950s, they were funding cultural Marxism. The world has shifted further and further to the right. But cultural Marxism or compatible leftism is not a bulwark against It's fascism. It's not a bulwark against, you know, the right-wing swing. It's actually part of the overall objective process of moving things further and further to the right. So what we need to do, I think, is clearly diagnose the state of things while also then articulating what it means

to have a real left position because if the left means anything, it's anti-capitalist and it's anti-imperialist. Otherwise, it is, you know, just social democracy for the few and benefiting off of imperialism and keeping imperialism so that workers can have slightly better social conditions in the north. If you're a real internationalist, this is, you know, obviously completely unacceptable, which is the position, as you've pointed, that, you know, Mom Donnie and others have taken. Absolutely. And I think it's important to state that. Like, I don't, you know, I don't hate, you know, like Bernie Sanders, AOC. I have many things to critique about them, et cetera. I don't think that they're fundamentally bad actors, right? I think they are, they're sort of the,

the recipients of this tradition that you are critiquing. And they probably, you know, feel themselves to be, to some degree like being authentic to themselves. And I would say that the Bernie AOC, Mamdani Ro Khana section of the Ilan Omar section of the Democratic Party winning out, taking over the Democratic Party and representing a force on the national stage that can take on the right is good, I think, for us on the further left. And we should treat that not as something to be seen as pure enemies. We should always be critical of it. I don't think we should hate or or set ourselves as in constant hostile attack mode against them. We should see that as advancing a sort of broader milieu that we can and should struggle within.

That the opening of that left represents an opening leftward that we can then move into, struggle with our arguments, talk about the importance of anti-imperialism, when people over within that milieu and help shape it into a more properly principled anti-imperialist direction. I couldn't agree more. And that's a good dialectical materialist analysis of the situation. We'd all love to be in a world in which you could just have the real, large, powerful, serious left-wing party that's going to, you know, lead us to the end of imperialism. But we're not there. And so in the process of getting there, dialectically diagnosing the situation, recognizing where there are tactical forms of support that are necessary so that we move things further and further to the left makes perfect sense. And we can't let people get stalled out on that bridge, right? We can't let them get stalled out. thinking, oh, socialism is when, you know, I have slightly more benefits, but we overthrow the Venezuelan government. That is completely unacceptable. And, you know, people just need to read and

reread Lenin about the promiscy of practice and the tactics of fighting and winning to know what this looks like on the ground, because ultimately that's kind of what you're alluding to, is the purism of a theoretical position that says, oh, no, I couldn't possibly vote for X, Y, or Z, or I couldn't possibly support this person because it'll somehow. be a blemish on my moral integrity and my beautiful soul. It's not about your moral integrity and beautiful soul. It's about political struggle that's collective and fighting to win. And that does mean, making difficult choices. I mean, look at what the Bolsheviks did. They were, they were regularly making allegiances and doing marches with, you know, groups that they didn't

fully agree with, but they notice or they recognize that to build power, you have to be able to do that. And so what we need is a left pendulum swing. And whatever we can do to foster to that I think would be largely, largely beneficial. Well, of course, pointing out all of the valid criticisms, which I'm sure both of us have, of all of the people that you've just mentioned, because there is also the very serious risk that they are actually much more complicit in just operating as a kind of release valve for leftist sentiments. When Sanders basically, you know, runs to campaigns and then drives people into support

for the Democratic Party, there are some serious questions raised about whether or not this is actually part of a broader strategy of diffusing the, you know, strong leftist sentiments and just corralling them within a, in a corrupt, you know, right-leaning Democratic Party. Absolutely. And yeah, and to your point, you know, the fact that Bernie had that particular run in 2016, I would argue that there are more Marxists, more Marxist Leninist, more communist in the U.S., despite Bernie's personal limitations, just for shifting that Overton window leftward, opening up new horizons for people, and then people themselves went further than Bernie, right? No doubt there are people listening to you and I

shaking their head in approval that were born in or blossomed into political consciousness during the 2016 Bernie campaign. And so that just kind of proves the point that's being said here. So I do want to talk about, you know, real Marxism. I'll just go ahead and say that because you contrast Western Marxism with an anti-imperialist Marxist tradition

that includes figures like Lenin, Mao, Cabral, Sankara, Che, etc. how has this tradition been so persistently like sort of marginalized and caricatured and treated as theoretically inferior within Western intellectual culture because I know people that listen to our show that follow Red Menace we dive into these actual texts the philosophy of Mao right the writings of Lenin this is high philosophically political serious stuff but it is treated as like so it's sort of treated as sort of laughable within academia and the other side of cultivating the compatible left has to be denigrating the contributions of these actually revolutionary thinkers within the Western intellectual sphere. Yeah, they've been denigrated to no end as so old school

and dogmatic and reductionist that we shouldn't even read them. We should be so intelligent that we deprive ourselves of knowledge of what they actually wrote. And in my own education, you know, a bunch of degrees in different fields in different countries. And I never read any of them. You know, of course, they're never, never assigned, never taken seriously. And then there are endless, offhanded comments that you'll read by members of the, you know, intelligentsia and quite prominent ones who will just refer to overarchism with no qualifiers, no, you know, actual engagement with any of this material. And they make, outlandish claims. Like they never thought about race. They never dealt with the woman question. They were just

focused on, you know, white workers in the industrial sector. This makes me think of feminism for the 99% by Nancy Frazier and some others where they make these outlandish claims that are patently, patently false and imbued with a level of social chauvinism, a level of just imperial arrogance that, you know, only comes from people who are so full of themselves that they think that they can then, you know, declare something by authority and have everybody else just follow along with them because ultimately a lot of the intelligentsia functions in terms of these circular arguments where I bet if you put any of them down and gave them literally a multiple choice, you know, simple exam on anything about the actually existing socialist history, they would fail those exams.

Absolutely. About Mao, about Ho Chi Minh, about Sankara, Cabral, any of these figures. They're just, their level of ignorance and arrogance is incredible, but it is a product of the kind of practical disposition, the ideological orientation of imperial intellectuals. And against that, of course, what they're denigrating is the system. of knowledge and practice that has made the greatest contribution to the overcoming of what Domenico Los Ordo refers to as the Colombian era, meaning the last five centuries during which the overwhelming majority of the planet has been enslaved by a tiny group of imperialist members of the ruling class.

And these are the figures who draw on the rich. innovative, incredibly creative, an ongoing evolving tradition of dialectical and historical materialism in order not to come up with some new brand that they can market in the marketplace of ideas, some new concept that nobody else has thought of, or some neologism, or trendy way to sell a book, but they've actually come up with ideas that have alleviated the mass emiseration of millions of people. Levels of poverty and degradation that should not be unleashed on any human being. And these figures are the ones who have, unlike, you know, someone like Noam Chomsky,

who is, of course, one of the most prominent U.S. American intellectuals because of his rabid and massively uninformed anti-communism, often refers to, figures like Lenin is being power hungry and just, you know, wanting power for themselves. I love Michael Parenti's line where he says, they sure have a funny way of doing it. You know, like basically lining up with the impoverished and wretched of the earth in order to alleviate them from the worst forms of immiseration while risking life and limb themselves. Like if they were power hungry, wouldn't they operate more like you? Right.

You know, within the imperial power structure? Flying on Epstein's jets. Exactly. And going to his mansion and getting money. He has financial transactions between the Epstein interests and Chomsky. Yeah. Anyway, that will lead us further afield. And I'm happy to go there if you want, but just to follow up on what you said, I think it's also really important.

Because I think we're at a moment where there is an increasing recognition of the fascistic orientation of the U.S. Empire. It's an empire in decline in spite of its. mighty power that it can still exercise militarily, economically, through the pharmaceutical industry, through its culture industries. But it is also, it's a moment when we not only need to reconnect the red thread, but we need to rejuvenate and reanimate what Marxism actually is above and beyond these stereotypes. So it's not just that Marxism thought a little bit about the racial question or the woman question. It's that it absolutely put these at the center of all of its concerns, but it didn't frame these in liberal ideological ways. It understood that the real

question is the national question, meaning the question of all peoples of this world to have the right to self-determination and full human dignity. The Marxist project has always been about uplifting all nations, meaning all races, all peoples of this world, and all of the best elements of this tradition have recognized that the domestic slavery imposed upon women, the various forms of oppression and super exploitation, that women have been subject to under capitalism, need to be at the absolute center of these struggles. It doesn't mean that they've always, you know, succeeded in any kind of, you know, pristine way, but there's been a very clear and highly developed set of tactics and strategies for fighting and going to the roots of social chauvinism, racism,

misogyny, homophobia, and actually addressing the material roots of racism and misogyny, which are bound up with the political and economic system that has subordinated certain peoples in order to super exploit them and oppress them. If you want to be serious about fighting racism and fighting misogyny, you can't just do it with a little bit of tokenism, some representation, you know, and things like this. You actually have to change the social structure. You have to change the fabric of society. And in doing that, you have to address class struggles, as Lysorto said, in the plural, which are racial struggles, which are gender struggles, which are sexual struggles. And this is all part of the Marxist project.

And it always has been the vanguard of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-missogynist struggle has been the diet. dialectical and historical materialist tradition. Because it's addressing the real roots of these problems. There's more work to be done. There's plenty of progress. There are critiques that can be made internally. But you need to recognize that the people who are pushing history in the direction of real human liberation and the dignity of all, this is not the kind of liberal multiculturalists or the postmodernists or the Western Marxists. It's actually the people who are changing the socioeconomic fabric of society.

Amen. Beautifully said. And I think a hallmark of the compatible left over the last decade or so has been precisely that largely successful attempt to divorce identity politics, right, from class and imperialist analysis. Hillary Clinton actually found a way to weaponize identity politics against a class and anti-imperialist analysis. And that is quite the innovation of the compatible left. And against women. And against women. And it gets 100%. Absolutely. You cannot be a feminist if you're supporting, arming and funding a genocide, wherein half the people are children with mothers,

and, you know, you're bombing and murdering women all over the globe. De-stabilizing their countries, undermining their ability to exist. That is evil, and it is really taken off. I do think, you know, more and more criticism of that is growing, and hopefully you and I, in our own humble ways, contribute to that.

But I do want to say, like, in academia, it's quite startling. I obviously, you know, got a degree in philosophy. I had a little bit of time in grad school. I remember a whole semester in grad school was dedicated to reading Robert Nozik's Anarchy State and Utopia, just this anarcho-capitalist, abstract, basically nonsense. And think about, but the idea that we would ever read imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which actually helps us understand our world, right?

Or, God forbid, state and revolution. It was anathema. It wasn't even thinkable. if you thought like if you brought that up in class, you would get you would get laughed at. You would get mocked at the very idea that we would read Lenin, even though in every single way, shape, and form, it is actually more helpful in analyzing the actual world as it actually exists here and now than anything that I was presented with in political philosophy classes throughout my education. And I just always have found that incredibly, incredibly like just bewildering to me. Well, not bewildering, but just sort of offensive. Yeah, it's offensive but yet completely explainable when you look at it from a Leninist perspective, right?

Exactly, exactly. Is the empire going to teach you about empire? Walter Rodney is great on this, right? He says, well, the last thing they want to do is give you a science of society. So they tell you there are all these competing paradigms and different frames of interpretation, but they don't actually give you the tools necessary to understand imperialism. It's a last thing they want you to learn. Absolutely.

Yeah, so I know I want to be respectful of your time here. I know you have some stuff you had to take care of. in your personal life. So I kind of want to bring perhaps this conversation to an end, but I want to make sure that I can get you back on the show to talk more about this and your future work, because there's so much that we're just not going to be able to touch on in an hour and a half interview that I wanted to. But just kind of like ending with a vision and kind of solution-oriented, you know, forward-looking ideas, if Marxism kind of is to be reclaimed as a revolutionary science, rather than an academic identity or cultural posture or compatible left, what does,

your research and just your overall approach suggest is required intellectually and politically for those of us Marxists in the West to kind of break decisively with the legacy of the imperial theory industry and kind of push forward a principled anti-imperialist Marxism. What's your vision for that? It would first and foremost be a pleasure to come back on. I love the work that you're doing and also the political education that's happening inside of the academy is so integral to developing the movement. And so anything that we can do in our own small ways to collaborate or just push in that direction in general, I think would be most welcome. And I know that, you know, so many people who have learned from the work that you're doing and that benefit from forms of political

education that the empire is not going to directly support. But speaking more directly to the question that you raise, I think that one way that I understand ideology is that it is a compositional phenomenon. So being subjected to ideology doesn't just mean having some bad ideas that have been poured into your brain. It also means that your entire interface with the world has been perverted in various ways, meaning how you perceive things, how you understand history, affects are very important ideology. So how you feel about something. Somebody says the word socialism. How do you feel about that? The process of ideological recomposition, therefore, is really important to revitalizing a version of Marxism that has some teeth and some bite to it.

And part of that has to do with shelving the kind of social chauvinism that tends to be baked into just about anybody who's come up in the imperial core, even if you're going to, you haven't pursued higher education. There's a tendency to think that, well, in spite of everything, somehow the U.S. or the Imperial Corps is the vanguard of human history. Even if we disagree with it, like, you know, they developing, you know, new technologies and this, that, and the other thing. And there's a misrecognition of the fact that the Imperial Corps is what's hindering history. It's holding back human development globally. And we have a lot to learn from the peoples around the world who have given their lives to the struggle.

Need the shelf, the social chauvinism, and open up the review of analysis to actually look at what building actually existence socialism looks like, tap into the traditions that we mentioned a moment ago that are very rich, broad, and extensive, and also plug into all of the intellectual and theoretical traditions here in the United States

that are traditions to, you know, they might have made mistakes, there might have been sitbacks, there might have been contradictions, They're people who are trying to move things forward. You know, we mentioned Parenti and George Jackson, but there are lots of others who we could bring into this, to this conversation as well. And I do think that pushing back against the imperial theory industry does mean, you know, recomposing ourselves ideologically, reorienting where it is that we get our information from and how we are situated within the world. And we need a broader project of developing political education in which we're reading, you know, Walter,

Rodney and Hedéi Santa Maria and Gassan Canafani and Utsapatnaic and, you know, these types of figures who are really inspiring and who have given really incredibly in-depth analyses that are broad and deep and very penetrating in the way in which they reveal the principal functioning of the world. But ultimately, to rejuvenate the Marxist tradition, this isn't just a theoretical endeavor. Of course, it's a practical endeavor. And so we not only have the theory problem, and that is that so much of the Marxist tradition has been hijacked by imperial impostors, if it be Western Marxism, you know, so-called postmodernism, or contemporary radical theory, and we need to reclaim that tradition, rejuvenate it, develop political education around it, but we also have a fundamental

organizational problem. We need strong organizational forms that can bring us together, allow us to work collectively, allow us to push back against the rank opportunism and sectarianism that unfortunately is very widespread, control the levels of, you know, infiltration that are, you know, kind of unbridled in the U.S. American scene and develop power structures by which we can begin to, you know, advance a more, a stronger leftist position. And maybe the last thing that I would say in addition to the kind of the theory problem and the organizational problem. And I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that there aren't good, strong, powerful organizations or theoretical networks that are doing work. What I'm saying is that we need more of them. We need more consolidated power.

We need to advance to the next level of struggle because the strong left in this country is still very, very limited, as we all know. But the last thing that I would say is that I think it's also important to be able to find forms of communication that bring people in and that allow them to be honest about, you know, either their limitations, their misgivings, maybe the things they don't know, and create a hospitable environment so that we can catch people as they fall. You know, as the U.S. Empire continues to decline, it's going to increasingly take its war to the home front as it has already very directly done with both the immigrant working class, but then also with the broader working class, and for that matter, even the consumer class with the tariffs.

There's going to be more and more people looking for more radical solutions. There's going to be plenty of impostors and there's going to be a lot of imperial lies that are pumped out. We need the forms necessary to communicate with people, to catch them as they fall and bring them into the broader struggle. And that means innovating and coming up with creative ways of connecting with people. I'm very inspired by Bertaud Brecht's work. And one of the things that Brecht was always insistent on is you can have the greatest ideas in the world and even wonderful, practical ideas for how to organize. But if you don't have the form necessary to bring people in, to connect with them and make them part of the struggle, make them feel the agency that they have in this world

and be empowered by it, then you're just going to be an isolated person on a soapbox. So we need the creativity of artists and cultural producers and all of those who are seeking new avenues by which, you know, to create funnels to bring people into a broader struggle. Because, and this is the last thing that I'll say, you know, the fight that we're fighting is kind of against all odds in the belly of the beast. It is one of the single most difficult things to do, and we need all hands on board. we need every plumber and every electrician and every lawyer and every doctor and every member of the unemployed and every Uber driver. We need them plugged in and figuring out how they can contribute.

And people should know as well, you can make tiny contributions. It can be conversations. It could be donations. It could be sharing a podcast with someone. It could be whatever it is. But the more people we have pushing in that direction and working together, the better it's going to serve the cause. because none of us can do this individually, and we can't do this in small groups. We need a collective mass movement that is well organized, theoretically astute, and that has the power to bring people in and give them the resources by which they can understand a fundamental, fundamental lesson in Marxism, and that is that we are the people who make history.

So, so well said. So well said. I would just quickly add my two little points to that. What you just said, I think, is spot on and really should be internalized by everybody. but you know there's there's a tendency among those on our side to sometimes get bitter and that turns them into like arrogant or hostile kind of dogmatic in a way that that is really alienating to regular people we have to constantly kind of be opening our hearts to the fact that people are always trying to learn you know people have kind of been bamboozled by this system people are at different parts of their own development and i think it's our duty to always be open and ready to

you know, it sounds cliche, but meet everybody where they are and to be somebody that people can open up to and they don't feel like they're going to be attacked. They don't feel like they're going to be denigrated. They don't feel like they have the perfect set of ideas in place for them to be respected. I think that's really important. And sometimes on our side, we can get high-minded. We can get snobbish. We can get smug. And that is that is not helpful at all. And the other thing I would say is, especially in the wake of this Venezuela stuff, do not be scared to take a side, you know, because no matter, you will take the side of the proletariat, take the side of the Bolivarian Revolution, there will be a panoply of people attacking you for it, saying,

what about this, Maduro did this, what are you going to say this? You know, from the left, center and the right, attacking you all the time. And what that does do a lot of people, especially people who might not be fully up on this particular Bolivarian revolution in the history, it kind of, it kind of cowers them into a little bit of either silence or hedging their bet, right like i don't know everything maybe i am wrong here you know maybe hamas really did do some terrible things maybe i should just not speak up or when i do speak up maybe i should hedge my point like humas is bad but maduro is bad but and just like kind of let that go and just fully be willing to take aside politics means taking aside hard and not being apologetic about that fact and you don't

need to know everything guarantee your opponents sure as hell don't know everything they might come at you in a way that convinces you that they're somehow smarter or more knowledgeable than you, that's rarely the case. Always educate yourself, arm yourself with ammunition, but just unapologetically take the side of the international proletariat and don't back down a fucking inch. And that is like half of the game from not being, you know, succumbed into this compatible left or soft rad-lib mentality that so many people, I think, fall prey to. I love that summary of the kind of practical orientation of humility, openness, warmth. We're all learning together and the firmness of this is class struggle. And we are on the side of the revolution that feeds the children. Yes, amen. And that's it.

Absolutely. And that's a non-negotiable. Unapologetically. Absolutely. All right, my friend. Well, this has been wonderful. I really do hope I can have you back on the show soon. We have so much more to talk about. Oh, definitely. With pleasure. Before I do let you go, though, can you just quickly let listeners know where they can find your book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism and your other work and your presence online? Yeah, it was published by Monthly Review Press, so you can find it on their website. And I actually have another book that's coming out. There's a co-author book that's coming out with them in June called Requiem for French Theory. And I am relatively new, but I decided to start using Substack as a portal just for all of my work in different forms. So

interviews but also publications and things like that. And I'll just put a plug in for the Critical Theory Workshop as an educational nonprofit I'm involved in. And we, not unlike Rev Left Radio, we're trying to push the envelope and provide forms of affordable or free education. And so we have a summer school that we run that's hybrid. We have a class that we're currently running on imperialism, lots of other webinars and online things. So just check out Critical Theory Workshop.com.com.com and there's plenty of information about what we do with the workshop, but then also book series, journals, and other things that we're involved in. Wonderful. I will link to all of that in the show notes to make it as easy as possible for listeners to follow up on. Thank you again for this book and your work, and let's talk again soon.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Keep up the great work.