Description: Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and ideology. Author Gabriel Rockhill demonstrates the explanatory and transformative superiority of a dialectical and historical materialist approach, while elucidating how the world of ideas is a crucial site of class struggle. He then engages in a meticulous counter-history of the Frankfurt School--which made a foundational contribution to Western Marxism--by situating it within the global relations of class struggle and the imperialist war on actually existing socialism. With the explicit and direct backing of powerful elements in the capitalist ruling class and the world's leading imperialist state, the Frankfurt School developed a widely promoted form of compatible critical theory as an ersatz for dialectical and historical materialism. The volume concludes by bringing to the fore the positive project that serves as the guiding methodological framework for the work as a whole: a thoroughly anticolonial and anti-imperialist Marxism dedicated to building socialism in the real world. Drawing on extensive archival research to pull back the curtain on ruling class machinations, Rockhill's book elucidates how the intellectual world war on the socialist alternative has sought to shore up and promote a "compatible left" intelligentsia while misrepresenting, maligning, and trying to destroy the revolutionary left.
Brief description: Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher and cultural critic who has published thirteen books, including Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? He is the founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy and Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University.
Review Quotes: "Few on the left will not have been uneasily aware, whether from textual disingenuousness or from rumors about capitalist or secret service gravy trains, that there was something fishy about some Western Marxists' claims to be Marxists or socialists. Few will not have wondered how deeply and broadly this problem extends. Well, wonder no more. In this first book of a planned trilogy, Gabriel Rockhill begins his sensational root and branch exposé. He investigates the political pathology of the 'theory industry' dominating Western Marxism in terms of the 'international relations of intellectual production.' What emerges is a many-layered apparatus of intellectual counterrevolution. The state and its clandestine agencies such as the CIA or MI6 are its apex and they work through the big capitalist 'philanthropic' (really misanthropic) foundations, to wage it in universities, publishing houses, newspapers and magazines by recruiting thousands of scribblers, journalists, scholars, and academics to their service. For decades they have worked to hide the natural alliance of capitalism and fascism, to erase imperialism, to dismiss actually existing socialism and to discredit actually existing socialism and anti-imperialism with dishonest discourses that mislead those seeking ways out of an increasingly decrepit, desperate and destructive capitalism and its imperialism. This first volume deals with the Frankfurt School with volumes on French theory and twenty-first century developments to come. Rockhill must be commended for the sheer scale of his ambition, for taking on not just this book or that argument or the other thinker, but the entire universe of bourgeois 'Theory' in Marxist drag. It helps that the book, though it soberly sticks to the facts and arguments, nevertheless ends up, as it must, reading like an extended and particularly salacious gossip column. You won't be able to put it down!!!"--Radhika Desai, author of "Capitalism, Coronavirus and War"