Upstream - The Intellectual World War w/ Gabriel Rockhill

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

In this episode we're joined by Gabriel Rockhill to discuss his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, which takes a fascinating dive into the world of anticommunist Marxism and the role that the CIA and other nefarious imperialist forces play in dividing and neutralizing the left. Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist teaching Philosophy and Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University and he runs an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop. He is the editor of multiple books, including Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, by the Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo.  The conversation opens with an overview of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, orienting us towards Gabriel's analysis of bourgeois intellectual production and its role in perpetuating anticommunism among the left. We then bring in the Epstein files and discuss their relevance to our conversation before exploring what led to Gabriel writing about the intellectual world war and the process of putting this book together itself.  We then introduce the idea of intellectual warfare and the role that the intellectual world war plays in shaping our ideologies in the most insidious and pervasive ways. We explore why the US empire must control our minds in such a way in order to maintain its hegemony, and what this looks like in practice. Gabriel then tells us about the political economy of knowledge production and the role of the imperial professional-managerial class plays in intellectual production.  We then discuss real world examples of how the compatible left was used by the financial-state-intellectual complex in its global war against communism—from the Frankfurt School to Noam Chomsky and beyond. We end with a commemoration of a left figure who embodies the opposite of the compatible, anticommunist left: Michael Parenti.  Further resources: Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, Gabriel Rockhill (Monthly Review Press) Critical Theory Workshop "Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder, Vladimir Lenin Related episodes: Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill Listen to our ongoing series on China (which includes an episode with Gabriel Rockhill) US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 1: the War Against Communism w/ Jeff Schuhrke US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 2: Zionism w/ Jeff Schuhrke (Palestine Pt. 16) [UNLOCKED] How Fascism Works (a Michael Parenti Reading) Intermission music: "Song for Alicia" by Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You couldn't make Marxist-leaning intellectuals into right-wing ideologues, but what you could do is engage in the soft-cell approach, allowing them to hold onto their Marxism while making their Marxism compatible with the interests of capitalism and imperialism. And so this brings us to the category of the compatible left, which is useful for articulating how the U.S. national security state decided to run the soft power operations. They wanted to split the left between the compatible left, meaning a left that was amenable to capitalism and even imperialism and the non-compatible, which is socialist or revolutionary. What they wanted to do as well is then use that compatible left to integrate people into a camp that was at least accommodating to capitalism, imperialism, if not vociferously in support of it. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Knowledge is not produced in a vacuum. It's produced in material conditions under very specific contexts. Contexts that are shaped and controlled by those in power. And this is not just knowledge in the abstract. It's about academia.

It's about publishing houses. It's about foundation funding. It's about which intellectuals are invited to press junkets and which ones have trouble getting their books published, which ones are turned into celebrities, and which ones are cast aside to live and work in obscurity. The political economy of knowledge production under capitalism favors those forms of knowledge which are not a threat to the system,

and this applies to knowledge producers on the left just as much as any other position on the political spectrum. and the institutions of empire, the CIA, the State Department, etc., know this very, very well. In this episode, we're joined by Gabriel Rockhill to discuss his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, which takes a fascinating dive into the world of anti-communist Marxism and the role that the CIA and other nefarious imperialist forces play in dividing and neutralizing the left. Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist teaching philosophy and global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University. He runs an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop and is the editor of multiple books, including Western Marxism,

How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, by the Italian Marxist Domenico Lucerto. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist Political Education podcasts are not easy.

fun. So thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's my conversation with Gabriel Rockwell. All right. Well, Gabriel, it is a great pleasure to have you back on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. I have to say that you are definitely one of our most popular guests, and it's always a pleasure talking with you. And every time we have had you on the show, we have a lot of positive feedback. and I think this will be true for today's episode as well because we're talking about your new book, which has actually had a lot of buzz around it over the last few months since it's been out. And yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you about it for quite a while because I ended up reading it a little bit later than I had planned because just life gets in the way.

But I was able to read it really quickly. And so I read it a while ago just really was a page turner. so I've been really anticipating this conversation. So yeah, first of all, congratulations. Thank you. And yeah, maybe just before we get into the book, you've been on this show, I think, at least a couple of times already, but maybe just for folks who may have missed you

or may just want a refresher for who you are. Maybe you could just start with a brief introduction. So I'm a philosopher who is dedicated not only to interpreting the world, but changing it. and I work with the Critical Theory Workshop and educational nonprofit. We have a whole series of kind of collective endeavors that are invested in intellectual class struggle and more. So if people aren't familiar with my work or the work of the Critical Theory Workshop and all of the different organizations that we collaborate with, I just encourage them to check that out and hopefully

it'll be a helpful resource for them. All right. Well, thank you for that introduction. And I think before we dive into all of the granular details of the book, it might be helpful to just start with a quick overview, just to help orient people towards what the basic idea of the book is. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the basics of who paid the Piper's of Western Marxism. What is it about? So the big picture framework of the book is that it is diagnosing and trying to explain the forces behind the transformation of the left, particularly within the imperial core, into a fake hollow left that tends to, at a minimum, accommodate capitalism and imperialism, but often even aggressively support them,

as well as opposing the project of breaking the chains of imperialism through building actually existing socialist states. In order to engage in that project, which is, of course, a very vast and broad one, the book is broken down into two parts. The first part really focuses on the imperial superstructure. What I mean by that is the state networks of the leading imperialist forces, on the one hand, or what Marx referred to as the political legal apparatus of the superstructure. And the other is the cultural apparatus, which is the entire material. system of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. And what I try to bring to the four in that analysis is the overall architecture of bourgeois cultural production in the contemporary

world. The reason this was important is because it lays the groundwork for all the studies that follow. So the book is not just a critique of Western Marxism or, for that matter, other intellectual developments within the imperial left. It is more broadly, trying to provide people with a materialist understanding of how the bourgeois state functions, and more specifically the bourgeois state of the world's leading imperialist country, the United States, as well as how the bourgeois cultural apparatus functions. This then also hopefully will provide readers tools for understanding how that architecture then relates to other fields of analysis and studies so that specialists in English literature

or someone working on the history of unions, or which I know we'll probably talk about in a little bit, or on U.S. foreign policy, or the inner workings of the intelligence services, will be given some of the kind of materialist systematic analysis that provides, ideally at least, a framework for understanding some of these other specifics. The second half of the book, then,

is a deep dive into what is considered to be one of the foundational contributors to the tradition of Western or imperial Marxism, and that is the Frankfurt School or the Institute for Social Research. And this was an opportunity to then look or descend, I should say, from the general architecture of the imperial superstructure that's outlined in the first part of the book to one particular manifestation within it and more specifically within the kind of intellectual apparatus, the material system for the production dissemination of ideas,

which is just nested within and part of this broader cultural apparatus. And since I know we'll talk more about that in a moment, I'll just maybe leave it at that as a first overview. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. And I have to say the first half of the book was like definitely one of the most clear presentations of dialectical and historical materialism that I've ever come across. And it really helped me in refining my understanding. So just for that alone, very, very excellent book. And then also just, yeah, the second half. and when you go into sort of looking into the archives and going through the history and applying that dialectical and historical materialism to real life examples of the intellectual world war just brings that theory and that analysis to life. I do have to ask you this because I think it's such a huge thing and it's so related to your book in so many ways. And we'll get more into

Nome Chomsky specifically, I think near the end of our conversation. So maybe we don't have to go into so much depth about him. But just real quick, before we jump in, just because it's on all of our minds and this is all happening in real time in terms of the Epstein files and all the fallout regarding the Epstein files and Epstein himself, just if you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts a little bit on the Epstein files and just generally the rot of our ruling class. Well, one of the things that the Epstein files brings to the four is the extent to which the ruling class intelligence services, the other elements within the bourgeois state, the celebrities of the cultural apparatus and leading intellectuals do indeed work together

on various projects behind the scenes. And they have an orientation in which they have shared interests that often aren't visible to the more general public because of the public positions that they take. Thinking, for instance, of the photograph of Noam Chomsky with Steve Bannon or him meeting with Ehud Barak or other things like this. And there's more, I think, that remains to be known about exactly what some of those exchanges were. But the idea that the ruling class and intelligence services wouldn't somehow conspire in their own interest, has, has been on broad display as incorrect. And so one of the things that people have tried to do without reading my book is to tar and feather

me as a conspiracy theorist because this is a tried and true tactic. In fact, there are internal documents on the part of the CIA, particularly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination that recommended mobilizing their media assets to label anyone who raised questions about the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy. theory so that they could kill the messenger and not have to deal with any of the evidence. Here we have the ruling class conspiring in an international pedophilia ring that is also a financial ring, most likely also involved in a whole series of other forms of illegal international activities. And someone who spoke out five years ago and said, oh, the ruling class probably is

running, conspiring to run an international pedophilia ring, most people would have dismissed as conspiratorial or outlandish claims. Now we have a lot of the evidence that is out there. And one thing that's also important is that we're in the moment of what the agency refers to as a limited hangout. They want to make the story all about, first they wanted to kill the story, then they didn't want to release the files. They still haven't released all the files. They're not releasing videos. They're doing everything they can to try to control this because it reveals the extent to which the managerial elite, both the Democratic and Republican Party, are involved in these operations at the highest level, or at least significant portions of these parties are. And now we're dealing with a

limited hangout where they not only want to avoid any prosecution, they want to simply have it focused on Epstein and in particular particular activities that he was involved in. They don't want to dig us to dig into the connections to Zionism and Israeli intelligence. They don't want us to connect the dots to the larger financial mechanisms that are operative. And most importantly, they don't want us to raise a very simple question. That is, who is Epstein working for? Are these networks still in existence? Because everything tends to demonstrate that they absolutely are.

And they're banking on a kind of moral outrage at the most heinous crimes of torture, rape, disappearing bodies, and other things. There's even some evidence that they were eating human beings, at least according to some of the testimony that is in the files, they would like to have people just focused on that spectacular, absolutely horrific, very newsworthy elements while ignoring the system that produced and continues to reproduce figures like Epstein and those with whom he was involved. And that way you can use the tried and true tactic of one bad apple while keeping the Orch

orchard as is, and what we need to do is look at the systemic elements that are operative so that people come to terms with the fact that the capitalist ruling class is not only hell-bent on unbridled forms of social murder, ecological destruction, etc. They have a level of depraved immorality that means that they use other human beings as things. They destroy them, and they clearly take sadistic pleasure in doing that, and they vacuumed up through their wealth and through various forms of manipulation, working-class people, women in particular, around the world,

destroyed their lives as much as possible, in many cases just spat them right back out if they didn't just kill them and bury them somewhere or dissolve their bodies in acid. This level of depravity should give all of us a very clear understanding of what the imperial world looks like and how the ruling class thinks of the rest of us. We are disposable. We are of no importance whatsoever, and they would just as soon kill us.

And this should also hopefully then bring people in, including even conservatives who might be supportive of certain right-wing agendas or Christians, for that matter, who would recognize that, well, this is not following Christian principles. This is not in line with even a conservative morality. It is absolutely reactionary, heinous, and despicable. And it's a manifestation of a level of imperial decadence that should go down in history as, you know, representative of what it really is. And maybe the last thing that I'd say is just imagine for a moment, which is something that's impossible. It's a counterfactual, at least in my opinion, that these revelations were about Xi Jinping.

or the Chinese government or sectors of Chinese intelligence, right? This would be a completely different narrative. The United States would basically be using it to try to invade China. And so we should really, I think, keep the spotlight on this, but also dig deeper in order to reveal the systemic elements. I didn't touch as much on Chomsky. I have a ton to say about him because I've studied his work for years and years and years. And so I hope we'll circle back to him.

But if you want to double down on the Chomsky connections, I'm happy to dive right into it right now if you'd like. Oh, I have a lot to ask you about Chomsky as well. Let's maybe we can get back into this specific conversation in like the second half of the conversation because I do want to lay some of the groundwork first because I think it really helps contextualize a lot of this. And I'm sure that if we did talk about Chomsky right now, you would also be able to contextualize it. But I want to get into the book first.

let's talk about, so one thing that I really appreciated in the book is that like you talked a little bit about your personal experience, both in how you sort of emerged in this sort of academic intelligentsia world, so to speak, as a student. And then also your experience in kind of like researching and writing the book, which I think is really interesting. So maybe before we dive into the actual content of the book, I'd love to talk a little bit more about the process of writing the book and like your experience and how it relates to the content of the book. So maybe, yeah, if you could just maybe tell us a little bit about the experiences that you had that led you to feel like this was the path that you wanted to explore and then sort of what it was like actually writing the book because I know there were some, you ran into some roadblocks and some resistance in the publishing. world as well. So yeah, if you don't mind, maybe we could start there. Yeah, the reason that I put this in

the book is not because my own subjective story is, you know, particularly unique. It was instead to use my subjective experience as a reflection of larger objective forces. Because I'm generally, as someone dedicated to science, not particularly interested in anecdote insofar as, you know, science isn't the plural of anecdote. You don't add up a bunch of anecdotes and actually learn something about the world. But in this case, it was particularly revealing, and I'll get into why in just a second. The other thing that I just wanted to say as a preliminary note is that I am not a red diaper baby. I was not trained as an anti-imperalist Marxist in my education. And my job was not due to being an anti-imperialist Marxist. I was actually trained primarily as a French theorist or with the in the French theoretical tradition. I was always a materialist and I was always critical of the kind of Pomo French theory stuff,

but I had the credibility of having studied with a lot of these people and had the credentials from doing a PhD and other degrees in Paris. And so I think that's just important context because people often wonder, well, if Rock Hill's diagnosing these things within the imperial theory industry,

how does he have a job? Well, the answer is I got a job and I got tenured because I was flying at least under the cover of being a quote unquote French theorist, meaning a specialist in French theory, even if what I was doing was a materialist critical analysis thereof. In doing that, in my own both intellectual and political trajectory, I moved to higher and higher levels of what I just referred to as maturity or higher levels of political consciousness. And I began to explore the connections between the people

who I had studied directly under as well as whom I was studying, and the broader dynamics of imperialism and in particular intellectual imperialism. And at first, some of that was driven through archival research that I began doing around the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement in the world of arts and culture. And I published a chapter in my book, Radical History on the politics of art about their involvement in the New York art scene and things like this. And as I began doing some of that research, La Fabric, which is the kind of French equivalent of Verso books, expressed their interest in some of what I'd published because they were criticisms of figures like Foucault and a few others.

And then I ended up signing a book contract. I wrote a book in French, which was the first version of the book that just came out. And the entire process was in fits and starts. they were interceding at such an aggressive level that they literally were trying to change every single sentence in the book while admitting that they didn't know anything about the evidentiary basis for the claims that I was making. They also insisted on wanting to have an absolute minimum of footnotes. So I was constantly fighting them saying, look, these claims are quite incendiary within a particular context, within other contexts of like global South organizing.

Everybody's like, yeah, they're all reactionaries. We've already, we've known this for years. within a certain academic setting, particularly in the core, this is considered sacrosanct. And so anyway, this was all a kind of endless fight. And my political consciousness wasn't as high as I think it is currently, not to say that I've plateaued. There's still plenty of things to learn and we're all involved in an ongoing process of political education. But I thought that they would end up running the book anyway because it was likely to drive sales. And that's what they were interested in. But at the last second, the owner of the publishing house pulled the plug on it and just sent me an email saying, we're not doing this book, even though it was primed

and finally ready to go to print. This is important because, and that's the story that I touch on in the book, it really taught me how the power dynamic of the publishing industry works and the ways in which the gatekeepers, including very specifically the left gatekeepers, guarantee that whatever gets published maintains certain fundamentals. And what they were clearly concerned about is the evidence that I brought to the fore about, in particular, Hannah Arendt and the fact that she had connections, not only to the networks of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but also to the Rockefellers, and then to the British Foreign Office,

who provided support for, in particular, the second part of origins of totalitarianism, well as Theodore Adorno, who I didn't even know when I wrote the book in French the extent to his connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In fact, he continued to work with them after it was revealed as it was a CIA Front Organization. He corresponded with the principal CIA agent in Germany who was waging this kind of cultural war and collaborated with him on various cultural projects and was involved in a lot of other things. And those two figures in particular, they pointed out and it was intimated to me that they couldn't possibly publish this type of work because it would go against their niche within the publishing industry. It was politically and

economically dangerous for them to have that type of work out there. Maybe the last thing that I would say is how pleased I was in retrospect that they canceled the contract. If I had a higher level of both political consciousness and independent resolve. I think I would have been thrilled about it at the time. But in retrospect, it's the best thing that happened to the project because what I decided to do, I lost years of research, you know, and they did that intentionally. They were trying to basically derail me. And Verso, one of Verso's publishers has bragged publicly about having a hand in basically censoring this book because Verso was originally interested actually in doing the English version of it. And I'm also very, very pleased that that didn't happen because obviously that would have created a whole series of

problems, contradictions, etc. But the other thing that was important is that I really wanted to and needed to do a book that was well resourced because I don't want people reading the book and thinking, Rakio makes these outlandish claims about Adorno or Horkeimer or Marcuse. I want them to read the book with the framing that I provide and then say, well, I have to look at the evidence because Rakiel provides an overwhelming. amount of evidence. So it's not about trying to kill the messenger. It's, well, let's look at what the messenger has brought forth and work through all of the evidence that is available and then actually make coherent, rigorous conclusions. And so I'm very pleased that Monthly Review Press

decided to not only support me in this project, but then also allow me to do the kind of extensive footnoting, even including a short appendix with some of the internal documents. And it is a testament to the incredible work that this publishing house, Month Review Press, has been doing for years. And it's really because of the work that they've done that I've been provided with this platform. So I have a deep, deep gratitude towards them that stands in stark opposition

to what I think about La Fabric and Verso books. All right. So let's talk about the book itself. Let's get deep into the book here. So there's a quote by the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in the opening pages of the book. And that quote is, the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. And I thought that was just a really powerful quote. And as I read through the book, it really made me feel like this

is like the summation in many ways of the book can sort of be encapsulated in this quote. Maybe you could unpack this quote for us a little bit and tell us why, as you write a few paragraphs later, quote, ideology is a crucial aspect of the international class struggle. For this book, as I just mentioned briefly, I did a lot of archival research, you know, in physical archives, but then also digital archives and requested scores and scores of documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. And one of the things that's quite remarkable that comes up again and again in different archives from different agencies is the centrality of the intellectual war. You know, there are internal documents that say very clearly the pen is mightier than the sword. The primary war is the war on ideas and the war for hearts and minds. When you think about this from the point of view, because of course the book focuses primarily on, although not exclusively, the leading imperialist power and its state, which is the United States, that they're faced with a fundamental contradiction.

They have to try to manage a global population in the era of imperialism that as monopoly capital continues to consolidate wealth and set up chains of global accumulation that immiserate people around the world, destroy nature, destroy the conditions of possibility of life, they are increasingly in an untenable situation. How do you maintain that system? And moreover, these are people who, in not just the ruling class, but the managers who work for them, they're always engaged in cost-benefit analysis. And it is much easier if you can get people to be ruled by consent, ruled hegemonically because you don't have all of the blowback, all of the costs, all of the difficulties and complications of fighting actual direct repressive wars.

But moreover, given that there has needed to be because of resistance on the part of global humanity against imperialism, when there has needed to be and there continues to need to be from the point of view of the imperialists, wars of a direct, direct military and repressive sort, then the intellectual world war is an essential part of that. It provides cover for the war. It wars. It attempts to justify them. It plays a really, really essential role. None of this is to suggest at all that then what this means is that the primary point of conflict is one that is ideological. Ultimately, what's driving the world is class struggle, not of a purely theoretical sort, but class struggle in the more materialist sense of that term.

And so my insistence on the centrality of the intellectual world war is not to suggest it at all that there's a kind of primacy of the superstructural or primacy of the ideological, because ultimately this intellectual world war is being driven by the socioeconomic base and the contradiction of imperialism that I just mentioned. And it's a particular tactic for trying to manage, sustain, preserve the socioeconomic base, while ultimately not being able to do that, not being able to successfully, you know, curtail human life to such an extent in human resistance that the imperialist world system can continue without significant pushback and even breaks in the chains.

This part of the book was really fascinating to me and I'm really glad that you brought it in so early. So this project of empire is ultimately extremely unpalatable to say the least to the vast majority of people on the planet. And what it is advancing is something that most people with working brains and beating hearts do not want, right? Like endless accumulation for those at the top, planetary destruction for the rest of us, repression for the rest of us, enslavement for the rest of us. And so it has to lie, right? It has to be really, really good at lying. And it has to do so persistently. And it's sort of like with Israel, right? Like the Zionist entity cannot be honest about what its aims are because those aims are so repugnant to the vast majority of humanity that it has to overcompensate by lying and really digging into the lying

and devoting a vast array of resources in its deception. And here I want to bring in a quote from the book that I think is really staggering to read. So you write, David Michael Smith calculated that this same country, the United States is what he's referring to, has been responsible or shared responsibility for the death of 54 million people in its wars abroad between 1945 and 2020. If we add domestic social murder to the equation and open up the timescale to include the entire history of what Smith calls the endless holocausts of the U.S. Empire, the number is close to 300 million deaths. Based on these brute facts, most people would easily recognize this country for what it is, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. many, however, do not share this view, and for one principal reason, this same country, the United States, has developed an incredibly powerful empire of ideas to hide, obscure, or deny these facts. In other words, it is also the greatest purveyor of intellectual war in the contemporary world.

So yeah, just wanted to bring a little bit of your writing in the book into this because it's so crucial to understand this. And I mean, even as like people who are on the left and we consider ourselves, you know, relatively well informed and all of that, like, you're also subject to propaganda. And it's so devious and insidious in the way that it permeates just the very way that you think about the world. Yeah, no, absolutely. And one of the ways that the book articulates this, and this is actually related to another research project that I've been working on with Jennifer Ponce de Leon, is that the United States in its imperial endeavors

is at a certain level an empire of spectacles. And it's an empire of spectacles that arguably relies, perhaps more on the production of ideology and its global dissemination than former empires, which is not to say that they haven't also relied on forms of spectacle creation. But the US, and this is important for us to see because sometimes due to historical distortions

and ideological misrepresentations, this isn't as clear, the United States became the leading imperialist country at a moment when it was facing a fundamental contradiction that it had to try to deal with. That contradiction can be described in the following, terms. Communism had just defeated fascism, and it was guiding the global uprising against the colonial fascism of the Western imperialist powers, and socialism was on the march. It was advancing

globally between at least the mid-1940s and the end of the 1970s. The U.S. Empire, given that the World War I and World War II can broadly be understood as a 30 years inter-imperialist rivalry. The imperialist camp due to the world historical communist defeat of fascism needed to reconcilate and stop fighting one another. The U.S. took a leadership position and the European powers and others were, you know, integrated as junior partners, the Western European powers, which doesn't mean that there aren't still conflicts and rivalries and whatnot, but they clearly recognized that they needed to consolidate because they had to fight the rising socialist, anti-fascist, anti-colonial forces.

This then created a situation where global consciousness had made major advances and most people around the world were anti-fascist and anti-colonial and supported things like democracy in a real substantive sense. This meant that what the United States had to do is rejuvenate and advance imperialist interests while appearing to be anti-fascist, even appearing to be anti-colonial, and thus democratic and humanitarian. This contradiction meant that the United States absolutely had to. It was forced to buy the high levels of global consciousness and the high levels of political militancy against fascism and including how it manifests itself in colonialism. So one of the most powerful tools that the United States developed was the mind machine

that aimed at trying to turn the world upside down and present the United States as the greatest purveyor of democracy and humanitarian aid that the world has ever seen. And that contradiction is something that we really have to see through. We have to be able to diagnose the forces that are driving this empire of spectacles due to the increasing rise of the global south and China in particular, the multipolar world and the increasing reliance on turns in a fascistic direction on the part of the imperial powers. It is true that certain current administrations like the Trump administration are helping people see through this because he is quite a explicitly rolling back some of the democratic elements and bringing much more to the fore

the crudely, openly white supremacist, fascist-oriented political agenda. And one of the reasons for that is that this dominant kind of liberal imperialist model that's always been in fits and starts because there were plenty of kind of more fascistic turns under Reagan, Bush, or other examples that one could point to. But there was an attempt to maintain. and preserve this kind of liberal cover. And Trump is still doing that to some extent. But you see that they're having trouble maintaining that spectacle because they can't accumulate at the levels that they want and they certainly can't develop to the point of being able to defeat the principal rival superpower, which is China. And so I would anticipate in the at least coming

months, years, that increasingly there is going to be a pulling back of the veil so that you see the real forces that are driving a country like the United States. Let's talk a little bit. So we're kind of going over right now the why, why this sort of intellectual world war had to be waged by the United States and the imperialist powers, the imperialist block that it leads. let's talk a little bit about how this works. So kind of looking right now at the political economy of knowledge under capitalism. So you write in the book, Ideology, while arising out of class dynamics,

is shaped, developed, and overseen by an ensemble of institutionalized forces that condition social life. Organic class ideologies, such as that of the Imperial Professional Managerial Class stratum, are structured, enhanced, and incentivized by the cultural system within which members of this middle layer operate. So I think it's really easy to see how Fox News propagandizes, but what you get into the book is much more subtle than that. So I'm wondering if you can sort of unpack that quote for us a little bit here. And then in doing so, if possible, if you could talk also about the limitations of bourgeois humanities and social science, and how they differ from the dialectical approach

to understanding the world, and specifically why this is relevant to this discussion that we're having about the intellectual world war. And I'm sorry if I'm throwing a lot at you in one question, I tend to do that. But yeah, I'll pass the mic to you for that. I would say that the bourgeois humanities and social sciences to start with

are conditioned precisely by the owners of the means of intellectual production and that historically, the bourgeois humanities, and arts, for the most part, there are some partial exceptions and hybrid forms have engaged in a kind of intellectual commodity fetishism in which they attempt to separate the intellectual producer or their product from the social relations of production and just study the kind of genius creations that are presumed to have been kind of brought forth by these genius-like figures and they

somehow transcend the material reality within which they operate. And so there's a very widespread fetishization of certain figures and products. Chomsky is a good example of that, right? Many people feel like, oh, that he was an absolute genius who is outside of these crass things in the world. And of course, they're dealing with the fact that that's not true.

The bourgeois social sciences tend, instead of engaging in internal analysis, external analysis, and so they'll plug, for instance, intellectual production into a sociological analysis or in certain instances, economic or a political analysis, but there are many problems with the bourgeois social sciences. One of them is that they just fragment the social world and they tend to assume that there's different spheres and that these are somehow operating in terms of independent logics or something

like that. They don't provide us with a holistic materialist assessment of the social totality. That's what dialectical and historical materialism does, is it overcomes the regressive limitations of the bourgeois humanities and social sciences, because it understands that cultural production, if it comes from certain individuals, as it tends to within the capitalist world and the way in which production is operated within that world, is nonetheless part of a larger social dynamic

in which those individuals are related to larger communities, material institutions, etc. And that the way in which ideas are produced and circulated has a lot to do with that broader material world of the social totality. So rather than beginning with a fragmented social world or an isolated individual, it really looks at the concrete material social totality and how it operates. In doing that, it then provides us with a better understanding of the complex ways in which ideology operates. And so kind of coming to the first part of your question, it is true that, you know, ideology is ultimately driven by the

socioeconomic base, not in some reductive list, you know, simplistically determinist manner, but the way in which we think, perceive, feel, et cetera, is largely conditioned without being rigorously determined by the material system for the production of goods and services within which we operate. At a certain level, it's a really basic point. Like if you're living in a cave or flying in airplanes, you might have a little bit different understanding of how the world works, and that's a kind of really banal and cheap example, but just to kind of get the point across. And the other thing, though, is that particularly when you're dealing with the intelligentsia, it's not just the socioeconomic forces that are driving them.

It's all of the material institutions within which they operate. And so part of what I've attempted to bring to the fore is a history of intellectual production that really grounds intellectual history in the main. material systems of intellectual production and distribution and asks a fundamental question like that of ownership. Who owns the means of intellectual production? And what are the dictates that they carry forth in the systems that they oversee and that they have their managers oversee? If we approach the world in that way, instead of reducing the genius of an individual to an economic system or boiling everything down in some type of simplistic narrative, what we're

actually doing is fleshing out. in a much more complex, nuanced, and dialectically sophisticated manner, how individual subjects operate within objective systems in which they have agency, but also that objective system conditions that agency, drives it in particular ways, and there are many different ways that individuals and subjects within that system can relate to it. And part of what the book does is chart out the kind of different trajectories of various different subjects. So to bring all of that to a close, I'd say instead of just thinking in terms of the liberal ideology of everything's determined or the individual is free and can just think on their own,

these are both abstractions that don't get anywhere close to the material complexity of the world. Instead, we have to grasp the kind of dialectical way in which agents are part of a broader material world that sculpts, shapes, forms them, but then is also sculpted shapes, shaped and formed by them. And it's that complex set of relations that we have to map out in detail. And that's one of the things that I try to do in the book. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Gabriel Rockhill. We'll be right back.

Come round you roving dancers. If this speaks to the souls you were given. If you like me have never believed in this kingdom of commerce we live in. Language is the beginning. But languages never know And the terrorists look like my mother And do most of the same kind of stuff Here's to Pedro, here's to lowly earth

Kept looking at what they were seeing Like those New York signs in the sidewalk crime No black stalks or Puerto Ricans You KVa Alicia Rodriguez In the thousands before and sins Who talk too fast get push and push back and then choose to start talking again So it's right, Alicia, right Move Alicia Moo

I would be bored, Equai even if I was born on the moon Alicia was put into prison No trial or charge of conviction Her crime was living the one way there is nesting screaming to get the tape off your lips I came here to sing for tomorrow to not let today get away because the signs may have changed with the lines are the same and they're still blaming us for their shame they're still blaming us for their need for a culture of ecstatic grief

they still say what they said is not what they meant and it's our fault for listening My grandpa was a communist, they might have said a terrorist, and when someone looks at what I've done, I know songs won't seem like enough. Songs are for sure, not nearly enough, so it's right, Elise, You're at. Move, Elise, you move. I would be born equal, even if I was born on the moon. The two groups convicted of American sedition, Are the proud boys and the Puerto Ricans.

We share our Wikipedia page. So what else can you say? It's ticker tape accumulation, neoliberal sublimation, new precariet convinced that immigrants are corporations. Hold the phone, just be patient while we burn your poets pages while the doctor takes a medicine and tries to fuck the patients. Oh my God, they put her in a courtroom in Chicago. They bound her hands behind her back with tape across her mouth.

And when she screamed, the tape released, and she said what the world says. You cannot own a country, you do not own a country. And so two guards took her legs and held her to the floor, while another punched her in the face and gagged her like before. And she got 50 years and more, and they never said what for her. She was pardoned in 1999. She's been saying the same thing the whole time. She's saying it still.

And she's saying it now. And she's saying it still. now so it's fried Alicia right Moe Alicia Moe I would be born equal even if I was born

That was Song for Alicia by Haley Hendricks and Max Garcia Conover from their new album What of Our Nature? Now back to our conversation

with Gabriel Rockhill Okay So we've covered the why right, like why this intellectual world war needs to be waged. And now we've sort of set the foundation for understanding like how the how works, like how it works in practice, which we'll get into in a second. But I do think it was important for us to set this foundation

kind of on which this intellectual world war is taking place, how we can understand the way it works by analyzing the world in a materialist way, not trying to make this neat separation between the intellectuals and the people that are producing these ideas and their actual lives and the material conditions in which they exist. So hopefully we've set that foundation up enough for us to move forward into really talking about structurally how this all works. So I think a good place to start would be we recently did a mini-series with Jeff Shirky on how the CIA and the U.S. state. Department spent millions upon millions of dollars, countless resources in deep collaboration with the AFL-CIO, to strip labor movements abroad of their communist leadings and any kind of

radicalism within them. And I think that like reading your book right after that book, it was very complementary to that history. It's actually part of the exact same history, but focusing on sort of a different angle in which these entities. attempted to stamp out communism. And your book focuses particularly, of course, as we've been discussing, on the cultural and intellectual realm. And the parallels, though, were really fascinating, like when you think about the front unions created by the AFL-CIO, like the Free Trade Union Committee, and the use of these

terms associating freedom with the capitalist West, and then the similarities with the CCF, which you write about, which is the Congress for Cultural Freedom. So with that, maybe just tell us about this idea that you introduce in the book of Doctrinal Warfare and how and when the capitalist state first targeted and used what you call the compatible left in its intellectual world war against communism. Well, doctrinal warfare is a war to both show. up a positive doctrine and destroy a doctrine identified as negative. Doctrine needs to be understood here as the overall ideological framework within which one

apprehends the world. This was important because it was recognized that empirical data often contradicted ideologies, and so you wanted a solid enough doctrine or framework that even if it was contradicted by certain empirical occurrences, people would none the, none of the, less adhere to the doctrine. We see this today with even Christians who supported Trump, and yet there's all of this evidence that he's not leading a particular Christian lifestyle. Will they break with that doctrine or not? The dominant doctrines within the early Cold War were, of course, the free world versus the Soviet world or Eastern world. And the compatible left

discourse I've mainly seen within the early Cold War, although I haven't done it. archival research on the interwar period. Obviously, the repressive war was being waged very forcefully with things like the palmer raids and other things in the interwar period to just, you know, they illegally arrested and deported many radicals and didn't follow the law in doing so. Was there also a hegemonic war to try to get them on board and shore up a compatible left that would be compatible with capitalism and imperialism? I haven't seen evidence of that, but I also have not studied that particular time period. So that's either going to remain for other researchers or in my own future research. The other kind of question that you asked, I think,

is quite interesting because the war on global unions was in many ways the same war as this kind of broader intellectual war that I'm referring to, because ultimately the intellectual world war was a war on political organizing, on unions, on civic associations. It was aimed at full spectrum dominance. And so I only focus on the kind of, I lay out the architecture, but then in the second half of the book, I focus primarily on the kind of academic front, if you will, of that intellectual world war. But it's very important that the union struggle was at the core of this. Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown were major, major figures in all of this, working with the agency in order to try to take over the global union movement, and unfortunately very successfully did,

at least in many instances. Irving Brown, who worked for the CIA agent J. Lovestone, he was one of not only the chief union activists, but he worked hand in glove with the agency and then served on the Congress for Cultural Freedom Steering Committee. So these are literally the same worlds. In fact, if I can just quickly, I'll share with you one example to get a bit more granular, but so that people can see it, and then I'll turn it back over to you. There was a really interesting study that the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School, was hired to do in

1944-45, and it was about anti-Semitism in American labor. Now, this is in a context where fascism had risen to power with the financial backing of the capitalist ruling class, yet the Frankfurt scholars were hired to focus on the purported anti-Semitism of U.S. workers, right, rather than the capitalist funders of fascism. And the, the, you know, actual Nazis. And they reached the conclusion that communist-run unions were the worst of all and that they thus had, quote, fascist tendencies. The members of these unions are less communist than fascist-minded was one of the conclusions that they reached. Now, interestingly, the study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee, and one of the JLC's leaders,

David Dubinsky had numerous ties to the CIA and was involved, along with the likes of the agency operatives I just mentioned, Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, in the agency's expansive campaign to take over organized labor and purge it of communists. In fact, the JLC served as one of the conduits by which CIA funds were channeled to the anti-communist free trade union committee, right? And so by identifying the communist unions as the most anti-Semitic and even fascist, the Frankfurt School appears to have provided some of the ideological justification for destroying the communist labor movement when ultimately they were in the pay of the Jewish Labor Committee that had all of these ties to the agency. So you see part of the kind of larger complex that is operative and the overlap as well between the anti-communist union movement and the anti-communist intellectual developments. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe tell us a little bit more about the Frankfurt School because they are the subject really of the second half of the book in each section you go through a specific thinker or intellectual within this school. And it really helps reveal how like the intermachinations of all of this work and how intellectuals who are seen as compatible, how their work. is elevated, how they're invited to the press junkets. I always, I kept thinking over and over as I was

reading this. And I'm not super familiar with the Frankfurt School, you know, I know a couple of Adorno quotes that have been shared with me over the years. I've never read any Adorno or Horkheimer or Marcusa, although I know their names. But for example, and of course, he's not a part of the Frankfurt School or anything like that. I'm just bringing him up because he's so relevant right now. there is a reason why I heard about and was actually introduced to a book by Noam Chomsky when I was 14 years old. You know what I mean? And not say Michael Parenti. And we'll get into that a little bit more, I think, in a bit.

But just for now, maybe just set the stage of like the Frankfurt School. What role did they play in this? And how are they sort of this like really fitting encapsulation of how the competition, of how the compatible left is elevated. And maybe if you could spend a little bit more time to really just giving us a sense of what the compatible left is and why the U.S. government and all the institutions and all of the ruling class associated with the U.S. government in what you talk about as like the financial state intellectual complex, like why they decided that they were going to elevate what

you referred to as a compatible left, and then who this compatible left was in the context of the Frankfurt School. So the Frankfurt School was funded by the capitalist Felix Vile to do research originally into why the German Revolution ultimately failed, as well as later exploring the kind of rise of fascism. And it brought together a number of intellectuals who became extremely prominent, but their prominence is largely due to the fact that they were exiled during World War II. Most of them went to the United States, if not, well, not all of them, but the ones who did leave Europe, I believe the majority of them ended up going to the United States. And what's interesting is that they were publishing in German, weren't really that

well known, and then seven of the Frankfurt Scholars were then directly employed by the U.S. government in propaganda organizations like the Office of War Information, Voice of America, intelligence agencies like the Office of Strategic Services, which is the predecessor to the CIA, as well as the State Department. In the wake of their work for the U.S. National Security State, where they spent a combined total of more than 50 years. So it wasn't just a few years during the war, when they were fighting fascisms, you know, or things like this. This was a real springboard to their intellectual career. So in the wake of the war, you have Frankfurt Scholars at some of the most prestigious institutions in the United States. You have them

at Stanford and Harvard and Columbia, etc. And you also have them connected to some of the most powerful intellectuals and state operators. This primed them for then moving more into a poll position within U.S. intellectual production. Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School at the time, also hired a public relations firm in order to promote their work. And they, They were doing a lot of research for the capitalist ruling class, and they received funding from ruling class establishment institutions, including in particular the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported them quite extensively, both with individual grants and with collective grants for the entire school.

Now, the positions that they ended up taking are very much in line with what's referred to as Western, or I kind of re-describe this as imperial Marxism within the book, and that is a version of Marxism that draw. draws on certain theoretical elements that are vaguely Marxist, you know, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the individual case, and often they self-describe as Marxist, but they gut Marxism of what Lenin referred to as its revolutionary core. They, for the most part, and with just a few minor exceptions, reject socialism as soon as it exists. Socialism for them is, you know, an idea of something that might be possible or a horizon that we should perhaps

still strive for, but has nothing whatsoever to do with what existed, for instance, in the Soviet Union because it was so prominent during their lifetime. And they also tend not to center and fully understand the primary contradiction of imperialism, meaning the way in which human life on planet Earth has been structured by a monopoly finance capitalist system in such a way to accumulate on a global scale by establishing a value flow from the periphery to the core. What this means is that they ultimately developed a form of Marxism that was Marxian in theory, but anti-communist in practice. And if you think back to the kind of contradiction that the capitalist ruling class in the United States was facing in the wake of World War II that I mentioned a moment

ago, they needed to advance imperialism, but they were dealing with levels of global consciousness that were anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and incredibly at a level that far surpasses the imagination today, if not supportive openly, then at least amenable to communism or socialism because it was recognized as the principal force that had defeated fascism and was waging a war against colonialism. Well, they recognized, particularly those within the intelligence services working for the psychological strategy board, the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies like this, that a hard cell was going to be nearly impossible. You couldn't make Marxist-leaning intellectuals into right-wing ideologues, but what you could do is engage in the soft-cell approach,

allowing them to hold onto their Marxism while making their Marxism compatible with the interests of capitalism and imperialism. And so this brings us to the category of the compatible left, which is useful for articulating how the U.S. National Security State, and other national security states of the imperialist powers decided to run the soft power operations. They wanted to split the left between the compatible left, meaning a left that was amenable to capitalism and even imperialism and the non-compatible, which is socialist or revolutionary.

So just by splitting the left, you diminish its power, but what they wanted to do as well is then use that compatible left to integrate people into a camp that was at least accommodating to capitalism, imperialism, if not vociferously in support of it. And so maybe the last thing I'd say to bring that together is it is true in the book as a way of conceptually mapping some of these relations. I tease out the financial state intellectual complex, which highlights the fact that these soft power operations weren't just run by the state and agencies like the CIA

and others, but they were also funded. by the major foundations. Ford and Rockefeller played a particularly important role in the early Cold War. These foundations worked hand in glove with the agency and with other elements from the state. They had liaisons directly to them. They corresponded. It's naive to think that somehow there's a private world of foundation and a public world of government and never the twain shall meet. It's the contrary of that. But that this relationship between the financial ruling class and the state mobilized and both used and created opportunities for intellectuals who are going to wage this war for them in various ways. And so that triangle of power between finance capital,

state forces, and the academy or intellectual power is important for understanding the overall kind of framework within which this intellectual world takes place, because ultimately it's not a war just being waged by individuals. It's a war being waged by material forces, and we have to mine down on and identify the primary driving forces, and that is the financial ruling class that owns and controls its state, because it's the state of the capitalist class, that then uses those agencies and those forces to mobilize and weaponize the intellectual sphere in order to advance its particular agenda. So one of the reasons that people like myself, when we were trained in Marxism in the

Imperial Corps, I studied in the United States and in France, I was trained in Western Marxism as the most cutting edge, sophisticated, developed form of Marxism that far surpasses all of these crass, reductivist, and simplistic forms of Marxism that are identified with, you know, anyone from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Che to whoever else you would like. and this was part of the overall psychological warfare operation to shore up a version of Marxism that could sit easily with the interests of imperialism. And I want to bring up a quote from the book where you're talking about Marcusa specifically whose philosophy is really one of the other things too, I think, a quick aside, like when you

read Foucault, when you read a lot of these theorists, it's so hard to understand. what they're talking about, that like immediately you are like put in a place or like not consciously, but like, oh, this is really, really high level stuff. And like this guy knows what he's talking about because this is so intellectually complex that I have to read this line eight times to really get it. But then when you do finally dig down, it's like, like Marcousa's idea of the great refusal. You know, it's kind of empty, right? Like there's not. There's not a whole lot there. And one part of the book that I thought was really interesting is how there's this like, you have these intellectuals in the Frankfurt School who have abandoned

the idea of international class struggle as the solution to the imisorations of capitalism. And what they replace it with is this really like abstract cultural sort of like psychosocial ways of rebelling. And, yeah I mean it's just so empty and I think about like how useful that is right that like defeatism and that like oh no no no no don't don't worry about the class struggle think about these like lofty philosophical idea and like the way that marcusa and and a lot of the people in the uh the Frankfurt school they felt like the solution to all of society's ills would come from academia and come from these like grand lofty ideas that they themselves had and that if enough people just like read their books then maybe you know incrementally change will will happen and yeah i mean it's just it's such a cheap replacement for something that as we've discussed previous times with you on this podcast and many many other guests like actually class struggle and what was laid in the foundations

of the work of Marx and Engels and Lenin, that really actually works. And you don't have to resort to this realm of ideas where you're depressed because you don't have a solution. And so you kind of just like retreat into the world of academia and thoughts and writing books. Like you don't have to do that. You can actually engage in class struggle and come out of it in a sense in a world where, you know, transformation does materially occur. So yeah, I don't know if I have a question there, but I was just, you know, there's a lot of that came up for me when I was reading specifically about Marcusa and having a little bit of a background in getting really enticed by thinkers like Foucault and postmodernism when I was in college. And what a dead end that really is. No, that was very rich and helpful. There is a phenomenon of intellectual distinction that is a form of class warfare that is operative in so many of these discourses where the very style and rhetoric that they use

is aimed at distinguishing them and those who can or purport to be able to understand them from the ignorant and uninformed masses. So they create a kind of insider discourse of the initiated that does take time to try to understand, and they traffic in obscurantism so that they elevate themselves above others. And this is a very clear, if they're aware of it or not, part of the project.

In fact, it's an interesting way in which bourgeois culture, bourgeois intellectual culture, grafts itself onto religious ideologies that were predominant, you know, even under feudalism, because you have the saintly genius-like figure whose ideas transcend what could possibly be understood in the material world of the here and now. We often need acolytes and translators who can take the message of the Messiah and deliver it to the masses because whatever the Messiah is saying is so complex and so sophisticated, that just normal mortals couldn't possibly understand it.

And there's an elevation, right, of these genius-like figures above everyone else. And the way that that's communicated to us is that if we don't understand these messages because they're obscurantist, then the onus is on us to become more intelligent. And you can't easily reverse that dynamic and say, no, actually, they're being willfully obscurantist in order to create this intellectual distinction, elevate themselves above us in a class distinction, and then try to make us feel inferior, ignorant, behind the curve, etc. When that is actually objectively what is going on. And given that I studied in this world and, you know, did my master's under Derry, my PhD underbed, you worked with AT&Bolibar and lots of

these other figures. Of course, as a young person, I suffered from this kind of inferiority complex in relationship to their obscurantism. But after going through it and studying it for years, then I realized, and I'm pretty well situated, having gone through it on the inside, to let everybody know who's ever felt insecure about any of these discourses that they should not feel insecure, because that is precisely the weaponized form of ideology that's operative in this intellectual distinction. It's trying to make you feel insecure. It's trying to make you feel insecure and make you think that these genius figures actually know something much deeper, much more profound than you do. But what they're actually doing is just engaged in a kind of,

their economy of knowledge production is rooted in exchange value. They want the symbolic value of sounding fancy, making bourgeois references, coming up with new ideas, having their own vocabulary. It's not grounded in use value. And so you should be able to tell a real intellectual based on whether or not What they're saying is useful because it can be connected to real world-class struggle. And granted, there can be use value that is, you know, very complex when you get into economic debates on unequal exchange and things like this. So it's not to say that, you know, just a layperson should be able to understand every single aspect of these debates, but you should identify that people are trying to clearly

communicate and share even if it's complex science in a way that makes sense to the majority of people. The other thing I wanted to say, though, and sorry for going on at length, I think it's just a really, really important point, is that what you're diagnosing in a lot of these figures needs to be kind of called out and systematically identified for what it is, and that is it's petty bourgeois radicalism. It's a very well-known ideology. These figures, these intellectuals, are situated within class struggle as parts of the professional managerial class stratum. So they are elevated above average workers within the domestic sphere. But internationally, they're actually the kind of imperial professional managerial class.

So they're also situated in an international spectrum at the kind of apex of the intellectual pyramid. Within that, there is a very well-developed Marxist critique of petty bourgeois radicalism. obviously Lenin's excellent work on left-wing communism and infantile disorder is one of the high watermarks, but there are many, many other examples that one could point to. A few features that I think really sum up some of the points that you are highlighting. One is a magical belief in third way politics, where many of these figures say, well, there's capitalism, there's the socialist alternative, socialism's a hellscape and worse than capitalism. I don't really like capitalism because it impinges on the type of lifestyle that I would like.

But there's this other way. And when they try to articulate the third way, they try to remove themselves from the actual material world and come up with some other way of socialism, some new way of living, thinking, speaking, having sex, because there's a lot of things as well, particularly in Marcoza that are about the kind of erotics of daily life and whatnot. But they're all magical because they're not based on a real materialist analysis in the fact that we live in a world in which there are two camps. It's not up to us to decide. It's an objective fact. There are the importance. imperialists and those supporting imperialism, and then there are those who are fighting against imperialism. There's also a way in which so many of them rely on idealism, because given their position in the middle layer, so many intellectuals become convinced that it's ideas that drive the world, because in their real world, that is their experience. They, you know, make certain claims or proclamations, and they expect other people to execute and do the labor that would follow from those proclamations. And there's also a very widespread defeatism on the part of petty bourgeois radicalism

where they bemoan the fact that nobody's following their magical third way and that the world is mired in, you know, class struggle and conflict. And that's another dimension of it. But the final thing that I'd say is that it's very important to diagnose petty bourgeois radicalism as an ideology that's driven by the socioeconomic base. And that radicalism is identified, on the left fringe of the imperial petty bourgeois class stratum. It's those who want to identify with the people, be on the side of the struggle. And some of that identification we should actually, I think, support because it's good if people at least subjectively want to at some level identify with the struggle of the most oppressed and exploited of the working class.

But ultimately, this layer is materially positioned in such a way where those intellectuals benefit from the structures of imperialism. And so they have no vested interest whatsoever in actually supporting the forms of class struggle that would change those structures. And so petty bourgeois radicalism allows the left fringe of the imperial professional managerial class stratum to pose as leftists while proffering illusory solutions to class struggle in order to ultimately maintain the system that keeps them in the material position that they're in. So when you analyze it from a dialectical and historical materialist vantage point, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense that they would take these positions because they're not actually individual positions. They're not

actually thinking for themselves. They're not exercising real intellectual agency. They're performing an ideology that is remarkably consistent and very widespread. And their agency is primarily about the chameleonic aspects to ideology in which they give a new name to it, they come up with a new idea for it. But the great refusal on the part of Marcuse, you find a million other examples of that and other petty bourgeois radicals. It's just his idiosyncratic way of packaging his petty bourgeois radicalism. Yeah, thank you so much. All of that is so important. and it makes sense that like how we see how this compatible left is so useful, right? Like you can just imagine the state department or CIA man sitting there with a cigar in his mouth thinking like we have Marxism.

It exists. People identify with it and what it reveals. They agree with it. That's not going to change. So what do we do? Let's hollow it out. Let's remove its revolutionary spirit and make it into something else. And oh, wow, look, there's already these people that are kind of.

of doing that. Let's fund them. And of course, there's a spectrum of like consciousness, right? There's like, there's intellectuals. And you, you do a really good job of sort of massaging this out in the, in the book of like, it's not that like all of the people that are being used by the CIA or the state department are conscious. Some of them are, maybe to some degree or another. It's not that they're evil. It's not that we should throw out every single thing they have ever said. Again, it's just looking at the conditions in which these ideas come out and having that context to be able to understand how we should receive this information, at least to some degree. And another thing to that I really love that you got into was like the dialectical relationship between subjectivity, the subjective

and the objective and agency. And it actually really, really, as I was reading that passage, I was preparing for an interview that we did with Alina Zanophantos on the issues going on in Iran, specifically talking about the sanctions but also touching on the protests, and understanding that agency doesn't happen in a vacuum. And when we talk about someone's agency, we're talking about the way that they operate in a material context that has been constructed outside of their agency, right? And so I really want to thank you for helping me kind of like refine my thoughts on that

in that specific contest in the protests in Iran. So let's come back around to the Epstein files, unless there's anything you wanted to add. So as we all know very well by now, Nome Chomsky was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein's. He wrote him emails. He decried his poor treatment after being classified as a sex offender, Epstein was, and much more.

So tell us about Chomsky what he reveals about the compatible left academia, the deep state, and anti-communism as intellectual warfare. Well, Chomsky's an excellent example of the compatible left intellectual, and in many ways, given the incredible platform that he's been given by the bourgeois cultural apparatus, he is arguably the kind of epitome, if you will, of precisely the things that we're talking about. And this book, you know, was thrown in the trash bin when I wrote the French edition. But now in the English edition, because I did so much more research for it, it has been divided into a trilogy. And in the third part, which focuses more on the contemporary moment, there's a section on Chomsky that just got a lot longer due to the release of these files.

So there will be a forthcoming, more kind of developed account of Chomsky. but in short, what I would say is that Chomsky takes radical left positions within the framework of U.S. politics, right? They're not actually radically left if you understand the kind of global international politics. And that's important because one of the things that's very clear in internal documents

is that the way these operations are run is that they are overseen by very sophisticated people who understand that those who see the hand of the U.S. state at work within particular operations are going to be dubious concerning those operations and skeptical of their content, their funders, etc. And so it's extremely useful. You see this in the journals that the CIA published. They always wanted just a little bit of anti-Americanism, just enough so that people would get the sense that this couldn't possibly be a project funded by or supported by the CIA.

In fact, the CIA in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, I tell this story in the second volume, decided to launch a second journal in Latin America that actually supported elements of the Cuban Revolution, but their mantra was Fidelism sin Fidel. They wanted, you know, Fidel-style philosophy, but without Fidel. So let's support the Cuban Revolution, but let's call it authoritarian and try to overthrow it and assassinate, you know, its leader. These are the kind of degrees of sophistication, if you will, in some of the world. these operations. And so the fact that you'd have a kind of leftist like Chomsky who would be a radical in calling out U.S. foreign policy for the way in which it contradicts what the United

States claims it is doing fits at a certain level within this. And it's not to say then that everything he's written is wrong or that we should throw it in the trash or these other things that you were mentioning before. He has provided a critical diagnosis of certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy from which you can learn things and which are helpful within a very specific framework. And so this leads to the second point that I wanted to highlight is that this radical left position that Chomsky took simultaneously policed the left border of critique and it policed the most important borders while also attempting to radically recuperate more potentially insurgent elements of society within a particular.

fold. So his anti-communism was not subdued, it wasn't secondary, it was rabid. He referred to Lenin as a counter-revolutionary. He celebrated the destruction of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as this great moment of human freedom when we know, in fact, that it was one of the worst economic collapses that led to the deaths of millions and millions of people and was one of the most cataclysmic kind of just apocalyptic moments in modern human history. If you look at things like life expectancy, just quality of life indexes across the board. And so that rabid anti-communism was essential to his position because he also then basically said, well, whatever problems we have with capitalism, we know that socialism is a lot worse. Therefore, he ended up being capitalist

accommodationist because there's no magical third way in the world that we live in. And if you don't recognize that there might be some superior elements within actually existing socialism, you're ultimately driving people to a capitalist camp. And there are plenty of statements where Chomsky says things like, you know, the United States is one of the greatest nations. It has its faults. It has its problems, but basically if we can live up to its principles, then it could be even better. A second point that's really important is that he always refused, he not only refused to investigate the conspiratorial activities of the state and the ruling class, he often took very strong public positions against any investigation whatsoever. This could be the Kennedy

assassination, it could be 9-11 or other examples like this. You know, and speaking with some friends about this, one of the jokes going around is, well, now we know why he didn't want anybody to look into conspiracies because, well, he was at least late in life pretty deeply involved in one himself with major intelligence operatives who have extremely serious connections to the Zionist entity and to the U.S. Imperial Machine. A third point that's worth highlighting is his opposition to boycott divestment and sanctions movement, right? And as well, his relationship to Zionism is quite complex, but we know that early on, you know, he spent Tom and a cabots. He was, you know, involved in what he referred to as a kind of libertarian socialist version of Zionism and then

defended at other times, a kind of two-state solution. Let's just put it to, you know, cut to the chase that he didn't have the position of the PFLP, for instance, or of others who recognize that the project of the settler colony is, you know, part of the broader imperialist war on peoples of this world and that what we need is a liberation from that imperialism and that settler colonial project. So this also put him very much in line with some of the broader interests, even though, of course, he was very critical of certain aspects of Israeli politics. He spoke out quite forthrightly about it. So what you see is a kind of radicalism that at the same time is policing very important lines of demarcation. The last one

I would point to is he never was capable of really centering the primary contradiction of imperialism and understanding it in materialist terms. He was kind of anti-corporate without being anti-imperialist, if you will. He was against big business without understanding the forces of monopoly finance capital that were ultimately driving big business. And so the end result of a lot of his political philosophy consisted in saying, well, wouldn't it be great if the U.S. Empire could live up to its espoused ideals without recognizing that if you come back to our earlier conversation, the reason they espoused those ideals is because that's the spectacle that is covering the imperial development.

They can't live up to those ideals. They never had any intent on living up to those ideals. They're there as cover. And so the best thing you can take away from his kind of political recommendations is a very naive belief in a magical world in which suddenly the financial ruling class would just decide, well, all people are free and equal, and therefore we should treat them that way, meaning he leads us down a kind of magical road to nowhere while taking the socialist alternative off the table. And in that regard, he leaves people kind of bereft of a political

solution. And this is precisely one of the roles of the radical recuperators, because if there's not a political solution to the horrors of imperialism, then you end up being accommodationist. As critical as you might be, right? You can be very, very critical of all the horrors of imperialism. But if at the end of the day, there's no other option, then what you're leaving people with is the kind of hand-wringing liberal response of, this is horrible, but how could anything possibly be better? I don't know. We can just try to imagine some other thing. But the real-world struggle of the most oppressed and exploited workers of the world to develop an alternative world is just authoritarian and should be criticized. In fact, the very last thing that I'll say is I hope

everyone saw the letter where Chomsky and Epstein were communicating about the fact that Venezuela is not socialist. It is basically an authoritarian regime, which suggests basically that, you know, they would be in support, obviously Epstein would, but it seems like Chomsky would as well in destroying these forms of political organizing because they don't live up to some type of a imaginary ideal. Yeah, it's remarkable how much the popular left, let's call it that, or like the more mainstream left in the United States, maps on so closely to a lot of Chomsky and sort of that world's worldview. And again, it just feels like it's not an accident that we were all exposed to Chomsky so early and that his ideas were so much more readily evasive. And it, again, it just feels like it's not an accident that we were all exposed to Chomsky

so early and that his ideas were so much more readily available. He was kind of the like, oh yeah, he's that intellectual who's anti-American. And then you as a teenager, whatever age, you know, when you're first coming into these ideas of like, wait, something's wrong here. That's what you get, right? And then right off the bat, the well is poisoned against communism. And so I think it would be maybe a fitting way to conclude our, conversation, especially just because he just sadly passed away this month. And he, I know that you included him in many of your footnotes. Michael Parenti is what I've always thought of as the alternative to Noam Chomsky, who I wish I had been exposed to earlier. Maybe we could just conclude by

talking a little bit about Parenti, how his work differs from those like, let's say, Marcuse or Chomsky, the compatible left, what he faced because of that, because of his like proud pro-communism. And yeah, anything else that you'd want to say as we conclude. I do think that you're absolutely right that one of the things that the Chomsky phenomenon reveals is the extent to which the material system of intellectual production and distribution has an overwhelming impact on the nature of ideas that one is exposed to. That's one of the reasons that the intelligence services, the foundations go on at great length about the need to produce and disseminate intellectual work.

They understand this so that anyone who's getting radicalized goes into a bookstore, online shopping or whatever, and they have Chomsky put in their hands instead of the great Titan Michael Parenti, this will allow the leftist leanings to be recuperated within the anti-communist fold, and therefore he ultimately serves, wittingly or not, the interests of empire. Parenti, of course, did a lot of work that overlapped significantly with the fields of research of Noam Chomsky because he has analyses of the propaganda complex, of psychological warfare, of the mass media, but he also has a lot of analyses of U.S. foreign policy and domestic policy.

Their bodies of work cover a lot of the same terrain, but what you get in Parenti is all of the richness, depth, sophistication, clear communication of the dialectical and historical materialist tradition. So you get the real deal. And this is one of the reasons why Parenti was never able to secure stable academic employment, whereas Chomsky was working at a military lab at MIT, and in the 1960s, 90% of the funding of MIT came from the Pentagon. And it's basically a kind of state academic cutout, if you will. Parenty also took political positions and made arguments that supported actually existing socialist states and that defended a real concrete materialist analysis thereof, as well as a materialist analysis of the gangster state and its

involvement in a whole series of conspiracies that have been proven to be true. Chomsky, on the flip side of that, you know, took the opposite positions. And what Chomsky received from that is his opportunism segued with uplift from the system and now uplift also from, you know, intelligence connected, if not direct intelligence operatives like Epstein and others, and put him in the world of the super elite so that he was whined and dined by them, you know, went to and stayed at Epstein's apartment, also his apartment in Paris, you know, he was, had his hotel paid for him. He had a $20,000 Chomsky linguistic challenge that was funded directly by Epstein, right? So he also had,

promotional financial perks, if you will, directly from him. Parenti, meanwhile, had to scrape together the material conditions to do the work that he was doing by giving lectures, going on tour, trying to sell books, doing new editions of his book, democracy for the field, all these types of things, all the while, of course, never having the material conditions of intellectual production anywhere, anywhere akin to what Chomsky had. I assure you that the amount of money generated by his books and by his speaking, tours and by his films and everything else far surpassed anything. Parenti had access to, meaning that Parenti had to work twice as hard, three times as hard, five times as hard,

and didn't come from the elite, right? He talks often very movingly about the deep class scars that come from the way in which he was raised, the world that he came out of, and the world that he was struggling to improve. And so there's also, in the case of Parenti, a deep humanity, a fundamental integrity. You don't have to search the Epstein files to see if Parenti was in it. everybody knows that he wasn't. And then if you do, you'll have that confirmed in any case. Because he was a man of the people. He was the people's professor. He was on the side of global humanity. And so at this point in time, and I'm really glad that you highlighted this, we not only have to call out the compatible left intelligentsia and the exemplar of Chomsky for what he is and what

the broader intelligentsia is, but we also have to uplift the incredible legacy of a man of the struggle, who taught us all so much, who kept the red thread alive in some of the darkest periods of anti-communist revanchism within the United States, and who is an incredible resource and will forever remain in power as such. The last thing that I'd like to highlight is something just a little bit different because there's another point of comparison that's really helpful for Chomsky. Chomsky's given this kind of genius status, which now people are shocked and surprised by because they clearly didn't do a materialist analysis of how he was situated earlier. I was not shocked. I was surprised. I understood who Chomsky was years ago in spite of the fact that since I was a teenager,

of course, like you, I was exposed to him and brought in early on and definitely went through some kind of anarchist-leaning elements in my own political formation. But consider him in comparison to another figure who was elevated to the genius status in the mid-20th century, and then you'll see how far things have moved. Albert Einstein, right? It's someone who in the mid-20th century, most people recognize is perhaps the, you know, most intelligent human being on planet Earth.

I don't believe in this kind of genius mythology. People are always products of their world, and they make, you know, great or more subtle contributions. But in any case, that was his status socially. But Einstein directly supported the struggle for socialism because he recognized that it was overcoming the predatory phase of humanity, the phase in which the financial ruling class literally feeds off of the global, oppressed, and working masses like a predator and is destroying the conditions of possibility

of life, and therefore what we have to do is support socialism. A few decades later, the titan of and even elevated as a scientist, because we haven't talked about as linguistics, which are shot through with problems, anti-dialectical, he refuses history, questions, evolution, has really fundamental problems. And you have someone like Chomsky, who's taking the exact opposite position of Einstein, which reveals also the kind of temporal vector of the bourgeois cultural apparatus in which Einstein, of course, was subjected to very heinous treatment for some of the positions that he took. But by the time you get to, you know, the Chomsky era, things have clearly moved further

to the right, and this is part of the way in which this material system of intellectual production tries to shift things so that then it just naturalizes what that left border is. And if 1945, it was Einstein, by the time you get to the 80s or something like that, you know, we're dealing with the Chomsky left. All right. Well, we have come to time, I think. Thank you so much for such an amazing book. I'm really looking forward to parts two and three. And yeah, I think this conversation went into some depth, but there's still so much more in the book. Like, we breezed over the whole Markuza, Horkeheimer-Dorneau chapters, which themselves are so revealing and also just really repugnant in a lot of ways, reading about some of the

things that specifically, I think it was Horkeheimer did in terms of throwing his colleagues under the bus with the Nazis and all kinds of stuff. There's all kinds of stuff that we didn't get to. So highly encouraged people to pick up a copy of the book, really, really stoked. for the next part coming out next year. We're definitely going to invite you back on for that. So yeah, thank you so much for another amazing conversation. Well, thank you. Thank you for all the great work that you're doing. And the intellectual world war cuts both ways. And we have to not only fight back, but develop the institutional

power by which to fight and make significant gains. So thank you for all the work that you've been doing in popular education. It's extremely important. And so kudos to you for doing it. I know a lot of the times it can be thankless, but I know that a lot of people out there really appreciated. So let's keep pushing in this direction, which is ultimately in the direction of greater democratic access to knowledge so that people can become informed and decide for themselves and also figure out the type of world that they want to live in. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Gabriel Rockin, author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Gabriel is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist teaching philosophy and global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University. He runs an educational non-profit called the Critical Theory Workshop and is the editor of multiple books, including Western Marxism, How It Was Born, How It Died, and How It Can Be Reborn, by the Italian Marxist Domenico Lucerne. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Haley Hendricks and Max Garcia-Conover for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie.

Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We could not keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep Upstreams, sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts

are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And for more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on social media for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five our rating and review. This really helps to get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you.