Ep 024 Managing Mindscapes: The War for Hearts and Minds (feat. Gabriel Rockhill)

Fox: So yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today because I feel like your work is incredible and um really unlocks um this specific um milieu the uh congress for cultural freedom and the frankfurt school which i think is the key to unlock so much uh that's going on today with this you know what seems like it seems like socialism is more popular than ever more mainstream than ever but um things keep going really badly um so it's like um a contradiction, I think, and in a lot of ways, I think it's undermining an actual socialist movement in the West, in the US specifically, because people think that socialism is this thing that it's not. It's that's being promoted by what our friend Caleb Maupin calls the synthetic left. And you write about this topic beautifully. The first the first thing the first reason I like contacted you is because somebody had sent me your, your work because a, I don't know if you've heard of bread tube. Have you heard of bread tube from your website. Yeah. So it's so funny that like there's some people who just haven't heard of it at all. It's like kind of a very online thing, but they also have a huge audience. They've been written about in the New York Times. New York Times wrote about a bunch of these YouTube creators that have millions of subscribers and they refer to them as socialists, Marxists. They also say that they're anarchists and follow Peter Kropotkin. So it's sort of this blend of just the left. But it echoes, I feel like, so much of what you talk about in this piece, too, where these two, Theodore Adorno and Horkheimer. What's Horkheimer's first name again?

Gabriel Rockhill: Max. Max Horkheimer.

Fox: Max Horkheimer. And it echoes so much of like what they were doing, where they were sort of becoming the official kind of spokespeople of the left and socialism, but doing like basically the ruling class approved version of it and misrepresenting what socialism and all that actually is.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that one of the major contributions on the part of the Frankfurt School was to intellectually consolidate a form of left anti-communism that is the lingua franca of the capitalist academy, right? Where you can be exposed within the university setting to many radical ideas of various sorts, but the, I think... fundamental limit to those radical ideas is whether or not there's any support whatsoever for actually existing socialism. And by support, I don't mean blind support, total support. I just mean some acknowledgement that maybe something that goes by the name of socialism that actually exists, not the idea of socialism, but some actually existing socialist project might be worthy of even critical or minor or mild support, that is largely anathema to the professional intelligentsia within the capitalist core. And given the Frankfurt School's prominence within not only the US academy, but the kind of globalized academy, I think they've really laid the foundation for a lot of the contemporary Western intelligentsia and the kind of globalized intelligentsia that really toes the same line. In fact, I think it was just after the piece that I wrote on the Frankfurt School came out, I saw that Slavoj Žižek, who is presented as being the greatest Marxist theorist, Elvis of cultural theory, etc., etc., published a piece in the Guardian where he basically called for, it's a State Department line. He took the State Department line of NATO expansion and any leftist worthy of their value would be basically 100% support for Ukraine, whatever that means. And it's, you know, he's pimping for imperialism is what he's doing. And so there's a deep continuity between the left anti-communist intelligentsia of today, and even just a few days ago, the article in The Guardian, and what was going on in the interwar period with the Frankfurt School. um because this is the type of work that's promoted right it's important for us not only to look at the thinkers and their ideas but to look at the entire system and the political economy of the system that produces these thinkers who produce the ideas that become famous and prominent and so part of my work is also a political economy of knowledge production And that's not something that we're trained to do in the academy. We're trained instead to usually think in terms of individuals and the commodities that they sell and then identification with various brand names. So you become an Adorno scholar, a Zizek scholar, etc.

Alex: You're listening to Space Commune. Today we have on Gabriel Rockhill, a philosopher, professor, author, writer, a lot of things. He just wrote a great article called The CIA and the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism in the Philosophical Salon of Los Angeles Review of Books. And Gabriel, welcome.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thanks for having me on.

Fox: So you bring up intellectual commodity fetishism, and there's a line where you say, whereas intellectual commodity fetishism is a principle feature of consumption within the theory industry, brand image management is the hallmark of production. And I thought this was like such a really important thing that you've established here is that the intellectual property, right? It's sort of a new frontier, especially as our economy and the world is interconnected and we're just producing more and more content, more and more intellectual commodities are coming out of this era. So I think that that's really interesting to look at how that stuff also replicates how things are produced in a way Um, you know, just the, the, the physical commodity market is that everything is geared towards, um, the ruling class interests. Right. Um, so why wouldn't ideas also be produced in that way?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, part of the framework for my analysis consists in subjecting cultural products of high culture. Right. These are the highfalutin philosophers who most people, when they read them, they can't understand them. And understandably so, because they write in a very esoteric language with tons of references to philosophic history and whatnot. And those types of products of high culture tend not to be analyzed from the point of view of the political economy of cultural production or from the point of view of kind of the forms of cultural criticism that low culture produces. is regularly subjected to so-called low culture, right? So a lot of people would be able to watch a Disney film and say, oh yeah, there are imperial motifs within Disney films, quite clearly. or recognize that Coca-Cola is a product of capitalist imperialism and whatnot. But as soon as it comes to high culture, particularly the guardians of high culture, they'll analyze low culture. They'll look at so-called low culture again, and they'll look at Hollywood movies and whatnot, but they won't reflexively apply the critique of consumer society that they use for low culture to themselves.

Fox: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: And so Adorno and Horkheimer, and I think importantly so in the dialectic of enlightenment, they use the concept of the culture industry to talk about how culture has been industrialized under consumer capitalism. It's packaged, it's funneled out to people, etc. Some of that analysis, I think, is quite spot on. I have problems with some of the details, but I can leave that aside. but why doesn't, why don't they subject their own writing to the same form of critical analysis and recognize that, well, they are actually part of the global theory industry. And this functions like an industry that produces stars that pedals products that promotes them for various reasons. And that does indulge in commodity fetishes where, you know, I, I have written an earlier piece that was a critique of Foucault and his politics, a French theorist from the latter half of the 20th century. And a number of people got bent out of shape about it. And the reason they got bent out of shape about it is because instead of treating the commodity fetish like a fetish, meaning that it's the sacred cow, all that you could do is pay homage to it, et cetera, et cetera, I was taking it and situating it in the larger objective world of global class struggle. And that's anathema to high bourgeois culture. High bourgeois culture wants to be above the fray and keep itself distinct from all of that.

Fox: They exist as the default.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. And there's another part of that, which is also that then those who are invested in the industry have a vested interest in the franchise. Right. So if you're an Adorno scholar and it comes out that Adorno was involved in not allowing Walter Benjamin to seek exile in the United States and basically put him in a situation where he ended up committing suicide. that makes Adorno look pretty bad, like a pretty unethical person and very bad politics to boot. But if you have made your career as an Adorno scholar and you find that out, it's much better to either ignore it, downplay it, try to claim that it was otherwise, or run smear campaigns against those heinous people who would be interested in material reality instead of just the pristine ideas of Adorno. And so there's a whole... there's a whole kind of social logic, if you will, to the preservation of the high commodities of the theory industry. And one of the conflicts that I've had is that I'm trained in that world, but I'm also describing it for what it is objectively. And people have been trained in that world and aren't interested in that objective critique.

Fox: Because there's no incentive to do that. Absolutely. The incentive is all there to basically like, if you've built your career, you've, if you have followers, if you have a following, if you have a Patreon and you're, you have a channel with a hundred thousand subscribers and all of a sudden the thing that you've built your, you know, your resume on is suddenly debunked or whatever, you have to commit to it. You have to commit and you have to go all the way. There's no room for scrutinizing yourself, your own stuff for other things. You have to just say, no, I'm committed to this ideology and I'm selling this sort of this framework to people. And it is, that's what it is. You're selling ideas to people.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, absolutely. You're part of this. You're the sales team. You really are. And we have to, so much of so-called high culture really likes to pretend as if these crass marketing mechanisms aren't part of it, right? Because it's this autonomous realm of ideas and the art world does a lot of this too, right? Yeah. And that's simply not the case. I mean, these are people who are, selling the, you know, they're involved in a process of the commodification of ideas and the distribution of those ideas and control over what ideas get distributed, where they get distributed, who has access to them. And this is, you know, in one sense, it is part of a broader intellectual battle over what ideas have legitimacy in the public realm and which do not. And this ties back into your kind of one of the things that you mentioned earlier on, and that is that if socialism is recognized as something that might be of value, this idea itself is anathema to the way in which high bourgeois culture tends to function. And we do not want major figures within those networks saying things like, oh, you know, China has run the largest poverty alleviation campaign in the history of humanity. maybe that's worth, you know, supporting because it's trash. Yeah, exactly. And that's what they do, right? They don't know anything about it. They don't investigate it and they just, uh, reduce it to trash, garbage, authoritarian nonsense, whatever.

Alex: When I read your article, what I was thinking of was that these people in the modern context, they simultaneously are fetishizing people in the third world, people in the global south, while ignoring the fact that these countries, these people stand with China, stand with Russia, especially when it comes to the Belt and Road Initiative. Yeah. You know, these countries are benefiting far more from the Belt and Road Initiative than from the G7, for example. And that's reflected, I feel like, you know, one modern thing that I've seen today. This year, there was a story that Congress authorized $500 million in negative propaganda about the Belt and Road Initiative. I don't know if you saw that. I didn't see that.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it's just utterly amazing how much- If you have sources for that, don't hesitate to share them with me because a lot of my work is on propaganda and that's not surprising at all, given the fact that we see it all the time. The anti-China propaganda is like, it's not a cottage industry. It's like a full scale, you know, full on industry.

Fox: The information war is like what we're subjected to, you know, we're not in the, in the battlefields. We're not, a lot of us aren't, aren't suffering. I mean, economically there's a lot of people suffering in our country and they don't see that as a, it is class warfare, but there's also that intellectual warfare that's, that's really keeping us from acting on that. And it's, it's, reached unbelievable heights, especially with like social media and whatnot. And your piece is like, that's why your piece is so important. And this work is so important for people to unlock like how all this stuff actually works because all the things that Horkheimer and Adorno and the Frankfurt School were doing is being repeated now to an even higher level. And, and what's great is that you connect in this piece, you connect it back to direct funding from like the CIA and the Ford foundation. And, um, that's literally what's pushing like the, the supposed left in our, you know, in our society, in our, in the West right now is, um, these, these NGOs and think tanks that are all funded by, by Soros, by Ford, by Buffett. And people don't realize they think that they're left it. They, they're like, I'm a leftist, but they're like a leftist TM. They're like, their opinions were crafted in like a lab and, and, and to speak to what you were saying before, it's like the, it almost feels like the, like a little bit conspiratorial when you see people who are kind of like, they call themselves communists or tankies or whatever on social media and they'll get boosted. The people with like anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-existing socialism, you know, opinions, those will get boosted. And you're like, wait a minute, why is this getting boosted? And you start to feel conspiratorial. But the thing is, there's so much evidence for those types of people who are pushing that kind of rhetoric to get boosted, to get signal boosted, to make it look like their opinion is the right one, the favorable one, the correct one.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it's interesting because in a lot of the research that I've done on the history of the U.S. national security state, it's important that like Ralph McGee, actually, he was a member of the CIA for 25 years. He said it very explicitly. He said the fundamental role of the agency is disinformation. That's what we do. We manage people's mindscapes. And most people, unfortunately, have an image of the CIA that is a product of CIA mind management. So they think of the CIA in terms of a Mission Impossible film or other such things, which the CIA is involved in the production of the Mission Impossible film. They're actually constructing their own image, circulating it. and then managing how they're understood. And the CIA also, I've seen in numerous internal documents where they say the most important war is the war for hearts and minds. It's actually an expensive war to kill people and slaughter them and run death squads and all the brutal and heinous crimes that the CIA is responsible for killing some six million people, six million people between 1947 and I believe 1987, when John Stockwell and 13 other former members of the CIA died. investigated and came up with that number, right? There's 14 former members of the CIA came up with a number of 6 million just within that timeframe. And that's also direct deaths, right? That's not all of the long-term consequences, the intergenerational trauma, the destruction of the biosphere, all of the other things that you'd have to add into that. And so they do that, right? That's part of their project. But a big part of their project, and arguably according to some documents, the even bigger part of their project is the war for the hearts and minds. And one of the most essential aspects of that has been, particularly since World War II, the attempt to redefine the left as what they call the compatible left. And the compatible left is a left that's compatible with capitalism. Because as radical as the critiques are, they can be super anarchist, super utopian socialist, really just vicious, vicious critiques of capitalism and how horrible it is. But the dividing line is you cannot have them say that socialism is the solution to how bad capitalism is and so what the cia has done historically and mi6 and there's been other agencies a lot of other agencies involved so we shouldn't actually get hung up on the cia though there's a number of agencies that are involved in doing this kind of work is to shore up and prop up the compatible left by funding socialists by funding and supporting anarchists in various ways yeah in order to make sure that that becomes defined as the left yeah not the communist left right and that and that's what the and that's what the right reacts to they say oh see socialism is terrible because they see the the compatible left and it is horrible the compatible left sucks Well, yeah. I mean, when you look in this country, especially within the heart of the U.S. empire, the spectrum of right and left is completely bizarre because both historically and internationally, it doesn't map onto the what the history of the right and the left has actually been. And that is that there's two socioeconomic systems. One is capitalism. And if you support that, then you want to conserve that system. And the other is socialism. And that means actually fighting for socialism, not socialism just as an idea or socialism as a mind experiment or other such things. And so the final thing that I wanted to get to, though, because you raised the issue of conspiracies, which I think is really important because There's the CIA has also been involved. In fact, there's really interesting internal documents that I've been looking at that came out in the wake of the Warren Commission that was set up to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And the CIA one internal document basically says that, well, anybody who calls into question the founding, the findings of the Warren Commission. And that was basically there's a lone gunman. There was no conspiracy. It was all just Oswald. And he was a nut. Anybody who calls that into question publicly should be slandered as a conspiracy theorist. And we should mobilize all of our press assets. And the CIA has an incredible reach in its press assets, like global reach. And we could go into some of the details of what Frank Wisner called the mighty Wurlitzer. He wanted a jukebox where he could be seated in Langley, Virginia, the CIA headquarters, press a button and have the same song play internationally in all of his press outlets. And they had press people in every major news outlet, every major capital, really highly orchestrated endeavor. And So the very label of conspiracy theory itself has been promoted by the Central Intelligence Agency in order to slander anyone who would begin to think that the capitalist ruling class, because conspiracies are fine, right? There is a communist conspiracy. We've heard about that, a lot about that. But people who would say that the capitalist ruling class and bourgeois states including their deep states, would be conspiring against the working and toiling masses. That is a no-no. So we can't actually look at some elements of a very real conspiracy, and that's the conspiracy of the parasitic class to destroy the lives of the masses and to make it look as if they're actually doing things that are beneficial for us. You know, when you think of the media representations of the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos of the world and things like this. And so there are very real conspiracies and there's also proven conspiracies. like very concretely proven conspiracies. Like there was a proven conspiracy to overthrow the US government, to overthrow FDR and set up a fascist dictatorship in 1934. There was a governmental commission that was established and the US government. claim there was a conspiracy to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And I've mapped this all out in an article that I happened to write on the subject matter. So around conspiracies, I think there's a lot to unpack. And we do have to recognize that the fundamental, I think, propaganda message is that the capitalist ruling class and the bourgeois states would never, ever conspire against the interests of the working masses. And our starting point should be, well, wait a minute. Isn't that how the whole system is set up that you get all the profits and we have to work all the time and aren't you actually, isn't capitalism itself a conspiratorial system in which you're conspiring to profit from us while using those profits to produce propaganda to convince us that you're not conspiring against us? But of course you're conspiring against us.

Fox: The CIA is literally like a conspiracy agency, right? And it almost seems like conspiracy theorists the label is sort of an anti-communist label. It's like kind of a anti-communist dog whistle, which is funny because that's literally the video I sent you from that bread tuber where all this conversation just kind of started from about the Congress for Cultural Freedom was from a bread tube personality who made a video called The Conspiracy Left. And lampooned a bunch of people who talk about dialectical marxist leninist you know historical materialism um people who are dedicated communists people like caleb maupin peter coffin these people who have gained followings and it's so interesting that these people these bread tube people are trying to um pin them as conspiracy theorists And so myself and these two other people, Caleb and Peter, we we actually did a live stream of going through the video and sort of criticizing some points by points. And I think the the biggest part of that video is where they try to talk about The Congress for Cultural Freedom was brought up by Caleb. He talks about it a lot. And they said, oh, no, this is actually cultural Marxism, the right wing conspiracy theory perpetuated by the LaRouche movement. And they try to say that these this is the Congress for cultural freedom is not a real thing. It's just a conspiracy theory. It's an anti-Semitic dog whistle, which is funny because you have that in your piece, too, where that that was sort of used to undermine the American labor movement, the communist labor movement. So all these things like connect back and it's it's like so on the nose that they did that, that they made this video and and were trying to attack the legitimacy or the reality that this thing exists, the controversial cultural freedom, and that it's admittedly was an operation by the CIA. They try to gloss that over. And I, you know, I posted a video where Caleb talks about that. And they actually had the video. I don't know. I don't have proof that they did this, but I'm pretty sure that they did this they mass reported it and got it sort of censored on Twitter they didn't get it taken down but it's like it has a warning so you have to like click on it to view it so it's like it's crazy to me it seems so obvious like even if these guys aren't literally accepting funding from the CIA. It is in the CIA or whatever, the ruling class. You're right, I shouldn't focus on the CIA. It's in the ruling class interests to promote these voices that are basically saying these narratives that are totally in favor of the ruling class and imperialist forces.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, like, as you said, regarding the Central Intelligence Agency, one of their fundamental rules is covert operations. So this is an agency whose function or one of the principal functions is to conspire. Yeah. Secretly.

Fox: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: In the interests of whom? Because the CIA, and that's one of the reasons it's important not to get hung up on it, because there's also... I could talk a lot about this, but I'll leave it aside. There's a lot of attempts to attach anyone who does research on the CIA to like crazy conspiracies about aliens occupying people's minds and supercomputers and like lots of just nonsense stuff. And they do that on purpose. So that serious scholarship on.

Fox: It's like QAnon.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a lot of different ways in which this operates, but. one of the principal ways is to make sure that people aren't doing materialist analyses of actually existing conspiracies and that the central intelligence agency has a covert operations branch of the U S government. This is their role. And so the Congress for cultural freedom was a reality. We have, you know, millions and millions of examples and evidence for why it was a reality. And the Central Intelligence Agency itself ended up admitting that it was a fraud. Right. That the CIA was funding it and that the CIA operative, Michael Jocelson, was running it in their headquarters in Paris. And they had this is an enormous operation, by the way. I mean, they had offices in 35 countries. They were running some dozens of prestige magazines, organizing enormous international conferences, concerts, art exhibits. And so this is an enormous international event. organization that was promoting freedom, promoting autonomy, inviting people like Horkheimer to their junkets, publishing people like Adorno in their journals, and generally promoting the compatible left intelligentsia and compatible left cultural producers internationally. And when it came out that it was a CIA front organization in 1966, they tried to quickly, first they denied it. They have basically a playbook for how these things happen. But then they eventually admitted it and then changed the funding structure so that it was just the Ford Foundation that was funding it. In order to prop it up, they changed the name of the organization as well. They rebranded. It's so laughable. Yeah, they did a rebranding campaign.

Fox: They got new colors, new logo.

Alex: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: But then it kind of stumbled along for a while and then didn't work out. But it's also important that the CCF, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, this is only one of the fronts that they were running, right? There are many, many others. In fact, the Information Research Department that was run out of MI6 in Great Britain, they had some 400 or 500 full-time propagandists who, including academics and journalists, who were constantly pumping out the most heinous disinformation about actually existing socialism. I mean, these are enormous operations whose goal is to misinform the general public, particularly within the Western core, capitalist core, but also internationally, so that everybody thinks that, you know, Cuba is a dictatorship and China is this horrible place where everyone's authoritarian and nobody's free and there's a genocide against the Uyghurs and like all the stuff that they come up with. But given their control of the larger cultural apparatus, so this whole system of cultural production, distribution, and consumption, they can really call the tune and they do with so many people and it's had an enormous impact on the left because you have a split that was largely orchestrated by you know these forces and there were others between uh a left that is supportive of socialism like real socialism not the idea and then the compatible left that tends to be unbelievably hostile to anyone who thinks there's any value in anything related to the material practice of socialism. And so that becomes the real dividing line. And at the end of the day, it's honestly not surprising because that's the dividing line of global class struggle is are you in support of an emergent socioeconomic system that is an alternative to capitalism or are you not?

Fox: Yeah. And, you know, a way, a shortcut that I have found that you kind of mentioned in your article is to sort of decipher what kind of person you're listening to, because it's hard for people to know, to take in all this information, is this idea of like a petty bourgeois melancholia, I think is what you called it. The politics of defeat and this sort of pessimism. I kind of think of it as like a Mark Fisher ism, you know, that guy, Mark Fisher, who wrote capitalist realism and said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And that's where I've kind of found myself is that, you know, there might be a lot of people with interesting ideas and critiques that resonate with me, but at the end of the day, if, if they're, outlook of humanity is one that is pessimistic um that there is no alternative that this is it um then they're really not they they might have this petty petty bourgeois melancholia right this like uh characteristic of I guess what the ruling class thinks, right? Is that there is no alternative. This is it.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it's an interesting point because it kind of depends as well on, a lot of it depends on class formation. So a lot of the professional managerial class, if they are the kind of radical recuperators or the people who want to appear radical but don't actually have any substance to their politics because they want to recuperate everything within the capitalist system, I think there's a lot of the politics of despair. In fact, even just recently, I was having a conversation with an academic who's very leftist for an academic who said, yeah, but what's the alternative? Don't talk to me about China. And I was like, well, what do you know about China? Have you studied it? Do you know anything about it? And I think it's really important that that kind of politics of despair tends to function very well within the professional managerial class because you can be super radical, really critical, but the takeaway when the student walks out of your class is, there's nothing to be done except for to embrace our uber intellectual despair. And that serves the interest of the ruling class, but I think there are also other affective ideologies, if you will, ideologies that are basically about how you feel about the world and what's possible. And so others are, you know, there are other forms of despair like, oh, we really need to change the system, but we can't. Like there's no way of changing this or they have too much power and there's no way of getting out of this system, right? But I think one of the central contributing factors to the assumption that there is no alternative, including people like Fisher and others who will present themselves as kind of Marxist or Marxian in some capacity is because there's no reckoning with the practical history of actually existing socialism. Instead, there's a complete ignorance and an unwillingness to take seriously any of these projects because they're just vilified to no end. And so and it's interesting because this connects back to what we were talking about earlier, because a lot of the vilification of actually existing socialism has been part of the propaganda that's been pumped out by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, by the Information Research Department and these other global propaganda organizations. And if you look, as I have at who are the major historians of the Soviet Union who have published the most widely respected books on the history of Stalin or the history of, well, They're all, or an unbelievable number of them, maybe not all of them, they're assets who have direct ties to the IRD in Great Britain, some of whom actually use IRD files in their books. So they just take the propaganda files and they publish them under their own name. The same for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One of the intellectual leaders of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was Raymond Aron, who, sorry, it's a hard name to pronounce in English, but A-R-O-N is the last name, Raymond Aron, I guess. And he was a friend of Kissinger, basically like had horrible politics. and then wrote all of these slanderous accounts of Marxism and of socialism. And his books were translated and circulated around the world. And so a lot of the assumptions that the professional managerial class and the intelligentsia has about actually existing socialism, and as well the more general public, these are themselves views that are the result of deep ongoing propaganda campaigns. And when you think about it for two seconds, because it sounds a little conspiratorial, like, do you mean to say that Herbert Marcuse's Soviet Marxism was a product of the US national security state? Well, I would say yes. And then I would substantiate that by looking at the acknowledgements page and the fact that he worked for the OSS, the predecessor organizations, the CIA, and that he wrote that book at Columbia and Harvard's Russian institutes, which themselves are CIA products. And so, yeah, there is a really, really direct connection between them. But then that information and so-called information, disinformation circulates more broadly within the public sphere and just becomes part of the overwhelming dogma within mainstream society. And so people end up just taking it as a given. Like when I went to when I was studying in university, I just kind of assumed that there was this thing called totalitarianism that was horrible and that I didn't need to study it because nobody ever references anybody.

Alex: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Right. So you don't have a reference. I just knew it was awful. And so there's this construction of a bogeyman that is an impediment to thought and to critical analysis. And it'd be really interesting if instead in the capitalist academy, they said, socialism is so awful that we have to study it in remarkable detail. So let's look at the Cuban medical system and figure out how it works. Nobody ever did that in any class that I was signed up for, right? So there's a way that these propaganda endeavors have been so foundational and there's been so much institutional inertia over time that it now just kind of goes without saying that there is no alternative. And this is in a world where the Belt and Road Initiative is a very clear alternative, right? I think last time I checked, isn't there 141 countries? Is it that many? It seems like too many now that I'm saying it.

Alex: It sounds like a lot, but I think it's probably right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it sounds like too many, but it's a global developmental project that is not the underdevelopmental project of the IMF and the World Bank and the Washington Consensus and whatnot. And so we actually live in a world where it's not only... that there is an alternative, there's a very clear alternative that has been developing, taking on different forms in different places at different times, and is an incredible project of global human emancipation. So despair should not be part of the equation. It should instead be about, well, what is capitalist decay and demise going to look like? And can we contribute to having that happen in our lifetime?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I think about, uh, what is the Congress or culture, cultural freedom equivalent of today, I can't help, but think that, uh, anti-China stuff is probably the number one thing. Um, because as, as we live in the United States where, uh, the standard of living is going down, there's more precarity, uh, and our country continues to refuse to work with China rather than, um, they'd rather continue to market China as an enemy and to try to compete with China. But instead, we have the solutions right in front of us. We could be just treating countries like the BRICS countries.

Fox: Yeah, there's no reason to fight China, but you can tell that all the media, the narrative is ramping up to try to prepare us, say, go to war with China. I mean, the information war has been happening. with China. There's really no reason for us to be enemies in this globally connected world. We can actually work together and all of humanity can thrive.

Gabriel Rockhill: which China has been dedicated to, right? It's a very clear orientation for international peace and has regularly called out U.S. imperialism for what it is and has, last time I checked, only one military base outside of the Chinese mainland, whereas the United States has 800 to 1,000, you know, depending on the count that you look at.

Alex: We've got them surrounded.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, exactly. And I couldn't agree more that the principal focal point for the war for hearts and minds right now is China because China is I think rightly perceived as the the central force in the ongoing human project of developing socialism on planet Earth and it's proven itself to be so incredibly successful at so many levels that that the threat is like one of the things that's interesting about propaganda if we come back to the like the work of the cia and some of these other agencies is these people have to know the world in order to misinform us about it and these people know what's going on in china Some of them, at least, the people who really need to know. They know the developmental measures that demonstrate what the Chinese economy is doing, what the Belt and Road Initiative is doing, the fact that they're advocating for peace, the fact that they have to know all that stuff so that they can invert it and present it as the opposite of what it is. And that campaign has involved a very large number of academics, And, you know, intellectuals, I would put that in quotes, they're basically paid hacks for the propaganda industry. And so the work that I've done, like on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the IRD, or some of these organizations that really were dominant in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, in the kind of heart of what people call the Cold War, we have to recognize that there's been institutional changes and shifts over time, but that the same basic mechanisms are operative. They might have different names, they might have, you know, the organizations are different, etc. But just to hammer the point home. Like in 1975, the church committee found that the CIA admitted to working with thousands of academics at hundreds of institutions, right? That's part of the public record. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's conspiracy reality. The CIA is conspiring with thousands of academics. And in fact, it's even worse than that because the person who wrote that report for the church committee himself was CIA. And so this is what's called a limited hangout where the CIA kind of lets out some of the information in order to clamp down, stop the investigation and move on. And that's exactly what they did in the church committee because they found out the same thing with journalism. And they were like, oh, wow, there's a lot going on here. Lots of kids. Well, let's just wrap up the report and get it out. But there's a memo from 1991, the Gates memo from the CIA official that recognizes that the exact same thing was going on in the 90s. In fact, I think I have a quote, if I can find it real quick, where the Gates memo says that, let me see if I can find the exact line. Oh, I can't find the exact line, but it's basically saying that we have all of these journalist assets, all of these academic assets, and it is outlining the program that is... Okay, so it maintains a mailing list of 700 academicians who receive unclassified agency publications four times a year. So they're in regular correspondence with at least 700 academics within the United States. And this is sharing information back and forth. And so we have to be able to see the professional intelligentsia within the capitalist world is serving the function that it serves. And part of that function is to shore up the interests of the capitalist ruling class and U.S. imperialism.

Fox: Well, you could see how that's a reinforcing cycle on itself, where if I'm an intellectual who has some knowledge of socialism and whatnot, but I don't really believe, I don't think that capitalism will ever end, and I'm fatalistic about my outlook on humanity, right? I might as well sell some of my ideas to the ruling class, get my name out there. You know, there's that incentive. You know, the end of capitalism is never going to happen. Might as well make a little money on kind of critiquing it, knowing like what I know. And if people are going to pay me, then great. And they'll pay me more if I just cut this line out of this. And you can see how that would like compound on itself. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, you know, a really, I think, helpful way of thinking about this, because it's also something I've experienced myself, because I didn't, I'm not a red diaper baby. And in fact, I went to France to study with Jacques Derrida, who's very anti-communist, and a lot of other kind of so-called leading luminaries of French theory who were all left anti-communists, at best. Some of them are just right anti-communists. Yeah. And one way to think about it is that as subjects, we're situated within a larger objective world, of course. And if we think of that objective world in terms of the horizons that I was within the university system and the kind of intellectual apparatus, so the system of intellectual production, circulation, and reception, that if you're a subject within that system and you want to go to a good college and go to a graduate school and get a PhD and get a job as an academic. And you got to climb through that system. And the way the system functions is that it orchestrates a phenomenon of uplift. And uplift is like, if you've ever been in an open elevator shaft and there's wind that's blowing up, that's uplift. And if you catch the draft, then you can go up. And so the system has these kind of elevator shafts that allow for uplift. And anybody who's a good operator within the intellectual apparatus knows exactly how to do that. We know that today, Afro-pessimism is really trendy. Being a black communist is not really trendy. And so if you want to get an academic job, be an Afro-pessimist, don't be a communist organizer. I mean, at some level, it's very banal and everybody knows that. But the academy... operates under the illusion of the autonomy of spheres as if it's autonomous from the rest of the world and also the illusion of a meritocracy. So whereas there's uplift that exists and you can become a Fukuyama or a Hannah Arendt, if you basically are a complete reactionary imperialist, But if you're doing work that is serious and rigorous and actually contributing to people's struggles, then you're going to have doubt or whatever the uplift is, right? They're going to put you in a basement or they're going to exclude you in various ways. As we've seen with some of the greatest thinkers and activists in the U.S. context, Michael Parenti comes to mind, right? Yeah. Yeah. was never given a sustainable academic job and is probably one of the most brilliant political and historical analysts in 20th century United States. And one of the most beautiful and brilliant writers as well. That's how that system works. And so it's interesting to compare that system to a system of outright censorship. And because that type of institutional mechanism, it also functions in the cultural world in a very similar way. If you want to become the next leading artist, you better be like Jeff Koons and not like, you know, Bertolt Brecht or like others who have a real investment in, in socialism.

Fox: Well, survival of the fittest for like intellectual content and intelligentsia.

Alex: You know, I'm not, I'm not an academia, so I don't know, but Gabriel, when you share these kinds of opinions in those spheres, is there ever kind of the social backlash of like, well, you're just saying that because, you know, you just didn't, you're just not as successful as me or you're not, you're not good enough. Have you suffered? Do you get any backlash like that?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it's interesting because the psychological orientation of subjects looking for uplift is opportunism, meaning I'm here, I'm a graduate student, but I want to be a really famous philosopher. And so opportunism is that orientation. And my own personal self-critique, which for me was very important for my political consciousness and for my evolution, both as a person, as an intellectual, as an ethical being, has been to recognize that, yeah, there was an opportunism that was driving me in my early academic world. I mean, I grew up on a farm in Kansas and went to Paris to study with all these famous people and was a really, really driven academic. I was also always invested in radical organizing and always a materialist. So there was other things that were going on, but I recognize opportunism from the inside, I guess, because I've suffered from it myself, unfortunately. And so when other academics will kind of either accuse me of opportunism or see opportunism in what I'm doing, it kind of makes me chuckle a little bit because I think, no, you don't make a name in lights for yourself by going after the golden calves of the academy and situating them in relationship to global class struggle and supporting actually existing socialism. Like my former opportunist self knew how this shit was done. This guy's not doing it.

Alex: If you wanted to grift, you know exactly what you'd have to do.

Fox: Yeah, I giggle because I feel like I do the same thing where I'm like, if I wanted to have like, you know, thousands of subscribers, followers on YouTube, you know, I could just play into what these guys are doing. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh yeah. Yeah. And so what's interesting is often people who will criticize or like a backlash against me doing that. It's a classic case of psychological projection where the only way they could understand my critique of the Frankfurt school is by projecting their own subjective orientation onto me and being If you remember, and he's a much bigger name than myself, so I don't mean this comparison to be a parallel comparison, but I remember when the Edward Snowden revelations came out that one of the ways they smeared him in all the propaganda campaigns was to say that he was an opportunist. He just wanted his name in lights. He wanted to make a name for himself. It's like, oh, really? By having the U.S. imperialist state orchestrate a manhunt against him? That's a weird way of going about becoming super famous. Right. But that kind of orientation is also a lot of the professional managerial class. It resonates with them because they're like, yes, Snow's an opportunist because ultimately that's their own subjective orientation. That's how they got where they are in the first place. So it resonates with them. And I think that that's a big part or that goes a long way to explaining some of the psychosocial mechanisms that are that are operating in that way.

Alex: what do you think I've heard about? I've heard some people say this and use the word hangout before. What do you think about some of the people out there that believe that Snowden himself was kind of a hangout where they release some things, you know, To kind of control the narrative. I don't want you to come up with your own conspiracy theory, but what do you think about that idea?

Gabriel Rockhill: I haven't explored it in great enough detail to be able to say anything conclusive, but there is a logic within these agencies of a limited hangout where enough information is available in the public record. to conclusively say, for instance, the NSA is spying on all of us, or the CIA is running the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and they run a cover-up campaign, and they usually have a playbook that they go through, denial, denial, denial, and then if they can't, and then they also try to crush the journalistic outlets like Ramparts that broke the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But if they can't contain it, then they have to move on to a limited hangout. And so were the Snowden revelations a limited hangout? Is that a possibility? One of the most interesting things that I've read on these and related issues is the book entitled Security Valley. It's a play on Silicon Valley.

Alex: Surveillance Valley.

Gabriel Rockhill: Surveillance Valley. And who goes into the ways in which a lot of the platforms for alternative modes of communication that are often used by organizing communities Signal, WhatsApp, Tor, for that matter, etc. The way he lays it out is that a lot of the national security state has been involved in developing these technologies and it is that on the one hand, in certain instances, an opportunity for them to communicate secretly, but that there was also the recognition that then if they had all the people who wanted to communicate secretly communicating on their platform, then it makes life really easy. In fact, there was a revelation. There was a major cybersecurity platform that I believe was run out of Switzerland. This came out four or five years ago, so it's not fresh in my mind. And it basically came out that this was a US national security state front that was fronting as a private cybersecurity firm. And so a lot of governments were communicating on this cyber secure network that was actually a product of the US national security state. So there's a lot of stuff and I'm sure a lot more than we're aware of that goes on in that regard. but I couldn't weigh in on the snow revelations because I just haven't explored it in great detail.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And also there's that dynamic where they'll just release something. They'll just admit that they did something because it's this, the show of, of like how much they own us, how much power they have. Like, you know, there was that time magazine article where I think it was about like the the left-wing conspiracy to steal the election, something like that, like that described how a network, an unofficial network of left NGOs and labor organizations and kind of organizing groups nonprofits basically, you know, all conspired quote unquote to, to win the election for Biden and to, to make it impossible for Trump to win. So, I mean, there's just this.

Fox: And they like openly admitted that that's, and they were like kind of gloating about it. They're like, yes, this is what we did. We, we actively conspired. They might've even used that word too. Yeah. To like, you know, sort of this like phony grassroots thing, which is, I can't believe people still fall for this stuff because they've been doing this phony grassroots stuff for over a decade now with the Tea Party.

Gabriel Rockhill: For over a century.

Fox: Yeah, right. I know, like the new left movement. Yeah, that's why the Congress for Cultural Freedom is such... Everyone needs to learn about this because it really unlocks so much...

Alex: Yeah. You know, it's kind of the, I think it's the difference between telling people what to think and telling people, teaching people how to think. Right. Because the Congress of Cultural Freedom is so tied into media literacy and there's so much you can learn. Look at the evidence. There's so much you can learn from reading the Financial Times or Bloomberg or the New York Times because it's still, you know, it's like, why are they writing this? And you can like read into that and understand what is actually going on. Yeah. Whereas just taking it at face value and saying any deviation from this, questioning this is a conspiracy theory.

Fox: Well, it's the difference between analyzing evidence and consuming a narrative. And we're just taught to consume narratives all the time, listen to stories and think about our feelings, how that makes us feel. And we're always discouraged from looking at the evidence and analyzing and like analyzing looking for hard facts and like, you know, doing like reading and finding the receipts and it's painted as conspiratorial or you're being, you know, a weirdo or something for wanting to actually learn for yourself, like, and not just take things for granted that you've heard and say, Oh no, China is bad. You know, actually, is it bad? Why, why is it bad? You know, and who's saying it's bad and what are their incentives to say that it's bad?

Alex: Yeah. I mean, one of the, yeah. And one of the, one of the biggest ways I feel like this is all, um, crystallized has been just the use of the words like fascism and Nazi for the last decade where people in what would be the modern new left have been screaming about fascism and Nazis for a long time. And then when Sometimes even just a few years ago, they were saying, oh, why are we sending money to neo-Nazis in Ukraine? And then when the conflict kind of happened, everything just flipped.

Gabriel Rockhill: It was like, oh, that's not a concern whatsoever.

Alex: Those patches, those insignias, there's nothing to that. Don't think about it. It's mind-blowing how quickly that can happen.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, it's interesting because in the case of, like, fascism is a really interesting case because you see how powerful the propaganda mechanism is. And just to pick up on the comments that you made right before that, I do think that the cultivation of critical media literacy is one of the most important skills. And it's interesting that we're not taught that. I was never taught that in any of the schools, including at the university. And even in communications classes, like, there are limits to... what that literacy entails. So you might learn like the New York Times is the left and the Washington Post or things like this, but it's absurd.

Alex: Or to bring it back to your article where you mentioned analyzing Disney movies for secret dog whistles and stuff like that. I think that's what people think of as like media literacy. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. But there's also, and I think packed into that is the assumption that, well, you just have to find out what the correct media sources are. And then you're done with asking any questions about where those media sources come from. And a lot of that also has to do with, yeah. Not raising fundamental questions like what's the source of this information, who pays for it and who does it benefit?

Fox: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Always ask those questions about whatever. It doesn't matter. It's a book. It's an article. It's a blog.

Alex: Except about the Space Commune podcast. Funded by listeners like you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Also to find those sources, because I think that there's great investigative journalism. There's really important movement-based journalism that is... on the ground telling us what's going on, you know, and plugged into real information. And so to be able to make those distinctions is unbelievably important. And I know in my own political consciousness, being able to distinguish like, okay, democracy now will have a kind of rad lib line that will kind of give some things that are true, but for the most part, they're basically just in bed with the foundation mechanism. And they're terrible on so many fronts. And the anti-China stuff is constant. But bringing it back to fascism, it's quite interesting because I've done a lot of work on just the history of fascism and it's fascinating that When the Nazis rose to power in Italy, there were a lot of people in the United States who were like, that's cool, fantastic. A lot of the capitalist ruling class, Ford and others, they were funding them, they were supporting them. And there was a recognition that they were running a form of fascism that was much like what the KKK was doing in the United States. Like, oh, you got vigilantes who are beating up workers in order to discipline labor and support pro-capitalist interests and shore up a racial ideology. Hey, you're doing what we're doing. And so there's continuities here. And in the history of US propaganda, it would be fascinating, just as a side note, to do like a history of the long 20th century, like 100 years ago to today, and just look at how the US propaganda apparatus has totally shifted. the nature of what fascism is. Identifying communism and fascism, which fought a world war against one another and 27 million Soviets gave their lives defeating the Nazi war machine, but then the US propaganda machine within a few years is able to convince so many people that fascism and communism are the same thing, which is absurd. right and then you look at the situation in ukraine this is a a fascist an international fascist bastion and has been for years i did a long investigative piece where i looked into the history of the u.s support for fascism within ukraine as a proxy war against the soviet union of course in its early forms with the internationalists and whatnot but then it continues to today and now they've just rebranded the azov battalion and the other fascists as basically being freedom fighters So they do this stuff all the time. The people who are fighting the war for imperialism and capitalism are freedom fighters and our enemies, the real enemies, are the fascists. And so it's a kind of a fascinating and very confusing and very convoluted way of constantly rewriting history. history.

Fox: Well, and they like to say the Azov Battalion is like LGBTQ friendly and things like that. And, you know, you look at, you bring up how fascism was like sort of, or the Nazis were sort of supported in the beginning. And I try to think about like people in those times, this was a new thing. They didn't have a reference point for it. So they were like, Oh, actually, that's kind of interesting. And I try to bring that to today and think like, well, are people people don't recognize they think fascism is going to return and look exactly like it looked back then. And the problem is that it's absolutely not. It's going to have this veneer of being progressive and left wing and and things like that. And people are going to be in faith. Yes, and people are going to be in favor of it the same way people were in favor of the Nazis back then because they didn't have a reference point of saying, oh, Nazis are actually bad because it hadn't happened yet. Yeah, yeah. So I think about that a lot. It's like people... they're supporting like a new form of fascism. And they're the same people who say are afraid of the return of fascism because they don't recognize what it looks like. They think it's an aesthetic quality and not a relationship and literally just fighting communism.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, that's also the big difference between a historical materialist approach to fascism versus a liberal approach to fascism, where liberals tend to identify fascism as a really stable and fixed set of ideas. And they look at the ideology of fascism, more specifically the white supremacist orientation of the kind of Aryan ideology of the Nazis, which, by the way, was modeled on the United States and the legal policies that were signed into law by the Nazis were the result of having studied the racial apartheid system in the US and using America explicitly as a model. Hitler himself pointed this out in Mein Kampf that the United States had made the greatest advances in the direction of the Third Reich of any other country in the world, which people should be aware of. But of course, fascism is not just an ideology. It doesn't just function at the level of a set of ideas and particularly not ideas that would just be a set of really specific things like jackboots and swastikas and whatnot. It is instead, from a historical materialist perspective, it is a materialist ideology. So a set of practices that are rooted in the capitalist system, how it functions and And particularly, depending on the particular forms of fascism that one is looking at, how it functions when it's in moments of extreme crisis. And so there were fascist movements in every capitalist country in the wake of the Great Depression. Every capitalist country. Why? Well, because one of the other core elements of fascism is that these fascism is astroturfed to reference what you're saying earlier. So it's fake grassroots activism. The way Mussolini and Hitler rose to power, Hitler said it himself very explicitly. He was like, we could never have gotten the party together if we didn't have the money to have 10,000 lectures and everybody on the circuit and all of the the. enormous pageantry that went into the Nazi kind of propaganda apparatus. So they had enormous funding from the capitalist ruling class because the capitalist ruling class recognizes that when capitalism is under crisis, what you need to do is shore up capitalist profits and identify an enemy that you can go after and crush. And the enemy is the world communist movement. And that's what the Italians did. That's what the Germans did. That's what the Japanese were doing as well on the other side of the planet. And so fascism has to be recognized as a form of capitalist class warfare that's driven by the capitalist ruling class. And then that then mobilizes significant sectors of usually the somewhat disenfranchised and disempowered or downwardly mobile, even if it's only in thought, downwardly mobile, elements of the working class, in particular the petty bourgeoisie, but also a lot of the unemployed and the lumpenproletariat will be brought into these movements. So you look at what happened on January 6th, for instance, and a lot of the people who stormed the Capitol, these are property owners, these are small business owners, these are members of the petty bourgeoisie. They're not just poor people who can take off work in the middle of the week and go to DC. They got jobs. And so that phenomenon of the capitalist ruling class funding petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat elements in a moment at which they want to consolidate their class power and move politics in the direction of increased capitalist accumulation through war and colonialism and the war on communism, there are patterns there that we really need to identify. And we can't identify them if we're just looking for swastikas and jackboots. That's not how this stuff works. In fact, Dmitriyov wrote this great piece where he says that fascism in America should be immediately identifiable. I think that's a paraphrase on my part, but the rest is what he said. He said it should be immediately identifiable because American fascism comes in the form of patriotism. in a form of America first, in a form of flag wave, right? And that's exactly what we see as well. There's not, I mean, there are swastikas. There's plenty of swastikas and plenty of Proud Boys and stuff like this, but there's also a lot of jingoist, nationalist and ultra-nationalist American style fascism, right?

Alex: And we have to be able to- Oh yeah, bourgeois patriotism.

Fox: Yeah, I think Parenti writes on super patriotism, right? But he also differentiates because this is kind of an online discourse right now between- Proletarian patriotism. Proletarian patriotism, which we're in favor of and distinguishing that between sort of a chauvinistic, nationalistic patriotism that has been. And I think what's interesting is that this sort of anti-patriotism can also be a form of chauvinism that's reactionary and sort of like third worldist where it's like death to America, KKK. Which is abhorrent and disgusting to normal people. So I think that kind of goes to this idea that you're right. The political spectrum in our country is totally screwed up because there's, it's almost like two consumer categories, right? Where there's like the ultra left-wing and the ultra right-wing people are all sort of supporting the, the capitalist state in their own way, where one is sort of the, sort of the bratty America KKK anarchists. And then you have the the super patriot kind of national chauvinistic types. They're only united in their hatred of Russia and of China. But we try to weave through or thread the needle, I should say, and talk about... socialist patriotism, which is like a love of your people and your country, because we don't want to burn down the country. We have a love of the American working class and we want to save our country for us. And that's what the country should be for. And that's sort of this... This discourse that's sort of in the moment online, it's like this patriotism versus anti-patriotism.

Alex: Well, if I were to say, Alex, what are the modern manifestations of the Congress for Cultural Freedom? I think this is one of those issues where they want to get people... to to hate to hate the country to hate america and also hate china yeah and just be and just kind of be like okay well now i just you know they don't outright say it but by default then you're just like well i just support i just support capital i just support open societies uh you know um Right.

Fox: Abolish every state and every nation and just have sort of like this, that anarchist skip to the end of like classless.

Alex: States are by default authoritarian and therefore China is also bad, just as bad as America, you know, that kind of stuff.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I do think that whole issue of how the extant nation states that we have relate to the goals of liberated societies is fascinating and complex because if you look, for instance, in the history of the Soviet Union and how they dealt with the national question, I think it's quite interesting because they recognize that nation states and nations are the result of complex historical forces, but that that has been bled into within the modern capitalist era bourgeois nationalism, right? The nation state project is a result of the 19th century, the long 19th century of consolidating what were originally provinces and small regions into nation states, centralizing the language and the education and the working class and all of that, and then industrializing those nation states and then using them as the springboard for the colonial endeavors abroad and then setting up nations abroad. And so the nation state itself is a bourgeois project. But given that we've all been subjected to living in a world of nations, that is a material reality. We have shared history, shared languages, shared cultures and things like this. And so how do you move from that world to an international world akin to kind of what you were jokingly saying about anarchists, where they're like, well, just get rid of all states and all of this? Yeah, communism is at least in the ways in which people have kind of outlined it, because, you know, we'll see if when we get there, exactly what form it's going to take, but that the state wouldn't be a central element because states have generally functioned in the interest of capital. But between where we are now with bourgeois nationalism and nation states on the one hand, and the endeavor to establish a world in which there is actually an international of workers and we share the world and we don't have to show passports when we cross borders and we don't have detention centers and all this other crazy stuff that we have, then to get from there to here, you need a dialectical analysis. And that's what I think is so brilliant about a lot of the practical and theoretical work in the Soviet Union is that they had precisely that. We're in fits and starts and complications and nuance and all of this that we could add, but basically that you have to hold on to the internationalism as the strategy. We have to recognize we are all workers and therefore let's unite as workers. It doesn't matter if you're in Vietnam or in China or in Cuba or in the US, wherever you are, you're part of the struggle. But at the same time, we're workers who are formatted within particular nation states. And so we have to do the work within our particular socio-historical conjuncture and our particular nation states to leverage the power that we need in that direction of internationalism. And we can't leap out of the system. So we have to set up states as the beginning point for pushing back against the capitalist world so we can carve out space for socialism in its infant stage. And that's what we're dealing with. Right. Socialism is only about 100 years old. Capitalism is four or 500 years old. Right. So it's just the beginning stage in which there's this kind of incubator phase. But the incubator has been, you know, subjected to flamethrowers and bombs thrown at it and all this other stuff because all of the imperialist attempts to crush socialism. But we need to carve out those states, not in the interest, I think, of ultimately just having a world of socialist states, but instead something like what the USSR was trying to do and successfully did to some extent. And that is that you would have a federation, a group of different autonomous nations that would have their own languages and cultures and practices and whatnot, but it would be internationally linked. so that the nation-state formation itself dissolves. And so that dialectical relationship between the nation-state in its contemporary form and the strategy or the final goal of internationalism I think really needs to be combined. Otherwise you slip into

Alex: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Or, or utopian anarchism where you say all states are bad. We just have to get rid of them. Like, I don't know a single anarchist who's ever answered the question. How are you going to do that?

Fox: How do you get there? That's the main question. Cause you, you can't, you have to use, that's the thing too that I see is we want to progress past it. We don't want to like say it's bad, abolish it in reverse, but, backwards into yeah that's i mean that's reactionary right and like when these people say you know abolish capitalism they're anti-capitalist you know a lot of people a lot of the ruling class can say sure we're anti-capitalist we'll go we'll regress into something even worse than capitalism we should look at it as like capitalism was kind of a necessary step to get us to the next thing and we're not capitalism is not going to be forever it's and i that's like the myth right is that it's the end of history That there is nothing after capitalism.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's self-destructive.

Fox: Right, exactly.

Gabriel Rockhill: Look at COVID in the capitalist world. Look at the contemporary capitalist economy. It's pretty obvious. Look at global socioeconomic inequality. The most severe socioeconomic inequality on planet Earth in the history of planet Earth. That's where capitalism has brought us, right? So the contradictions of capitalism cannot be maintained. And just add to that the decimation of the biosphere, right? And the complete and utter decimation of the biosphere means that capitalism doesn't only have contradictions in relationship to human life, but to life in its entirety. And so in that regard, that system is unsustainable. It's proven itself to be unsustainable because it's a self-destructive system. And all that it can do, and that's one of the reasons it needs propaganda. because it needs to try to convince people that that's not what's going on. We're not living in a system that's destroying itself and destroying humans and the biosphere at the same time. We're instead at the end of history in which everybody's free and democratic and you can work 13 jobs and live the American dream or whatnot. In that regard, I think one of the most important things for people who are more on the progressive end of the political spectrum is to recognize that the system is unsustainable and therefore to identify what the structural mechanisms are that are already operative within capitalism that are birthing an alternative system. And honestly, like Marx and Engels already outlined a lot of this stuff quite clearly. And so there is, as you were saying just a moment ago, capitalism has done some like awesome things in both the positive and negative sense of the term. There's been awesome industrial development. And I don't think that we should just get rid of all of these forms of technological or industrial development No, we need to transform the economic mode of production within which they operate so that they are socialized and serving the social good, not serving private interests.

Fox: Exactly.

Gabriel Rockhill: And so a lot of the kind of either anarchist back to nature stuff, or we're just going to destroy civilization. And like, why would you, why would you do that? Can't we, repurpose what we have because we have these awesome tools and actually use them. I mean, look at the technological development, China, right? This is what's going on, right? This is using technological development also for, for socialist ends. And I think in the coming five to 10 years, it's going to be really interesting. What China does is it becomes the global leader in, in, you know, sustainable or ecological development. forms of industry because they put that very hard on the table now. And when they set the agenda to do something, they are very good at executing or achieving their goals. So that will be a fascinating thing, not only to watch, but hopefully to support as it comes to fruition.

Alex: Well, to bring it back to the Belt and Road Initiative too, I mean, you mentioned the destruction of the biosphere. I mean, it's simply a fact that in the developing world that the beneficiary of the Belt and Road Initiative. They are building power plants. They need cement. They need to build infrastructure. They're going to expand the number of vehicles and cars they have. And in order for them to be able to live, in order for them to have longer lives, they have to burn fossil fuels and China's going to help them do that. But that's also going to enable them to survive climate change. Like the people that can survive climate change are the people that have houses to live in, have some form of air conditioning or climate control inside. And that's what's very interesting about China and the Belt and Road Initiative is that they're helping countries develop, whereas I feel like the World Bank or the IMF want to keep countries underdeveloped. in order to continue extracting resources from them. And those people will not get to survive climate change the way that we will get to.

Fox: Which is how like the environmental movement is weaponized in favor of fascism, basically. And I think the popular environmental movement that we have in the West is basically a form of fascism in that they want to reduce the population. They want to reduce consumption. It's, you know, it's, Malthusian and it's it's rhetoric and its roots. They like to deny it that it is, but it's not. So that's like this new frontier, I think, of like well-meaning, left-leaning, tender-hearted people who say, we have to save the planet, and in order to do so, we have to live like peasants again. That's something that we're up against right now.

Gabriel Rockhill: The other thing that is really important in the debates around developmentalism and Marxism, which of course are really expansive and there's a lot going on there, is that if you actually want to develop a system that's sustainable. And obviously one of the reasons that capitalism is not sustainable is because profit maximization is the driving principle and human and non-human life is completely unimportant in that project and never will be. So if you want a system in which you center the value of human and non-human life, then you have to be able to get there. And to get there, you have to do it in a world where the profit-driven system has developed the most expansive military complex and intelligence services in the history of the world. How are you going to do that? Are you going to do that with a home garden? Are you going to do that with bows and arrows? That's not going to happen. And if you look at how some of those projects have evolved, It's been in many instances, unfortunately, and often not due to the choice of those involved in those revolutions, it's a result of armed struggle because they had, there's no choice. The choice is imposed upon them because it's the only way that they can liberate themselves as colonized subjects, as people subjected to capitalist social relations. And so if you need to be able to have a society that is developed enough that it can ward off the most powerful mercenary armies in the history of the world, then, yeah, you're going to have to have a form of industrial development that corresponds to the most advanced forms of industrial development within capitalism. And those forms are based on fossil fuels. They're based on extraction. They're based on other things. Does that mean that extractivism and fossil fuels are the strategy, like the final goal? No, it is a tactic that is imposed upon the socialist world building project by the evolution of capitalism and its development as a kind of industrialized system that puts profit over everything else. That's the stake of the struggle. Socialists didn't choose that. Right. If we had some clean slate in some anarchist utopia and you could simply say, how are we going to bring about the new society? Well, let's imagine a society in which there weren't fossil fuels and this, that and the other. We didn't make those choices, but that's the hand that has been dealt to us. And if we want to develop as China has been developing to such an extent that we can leapfrog over, get beyond the capitalist stranglehold. Unfortunately, that's part of the path, which is not to say and not to deny at all that in all of the socialist countries that I've explored in some detail, environmentalism is central. It's unbelievably important. And so there's a clear global socialist consciousness that, yes, we need to develop as a tactic for developing our power beyond society. the capitalists, but at the same time, we have to start implementing ways of development that are more attuned with a sustainable world. You look at the wind farms that China's been invested in. You look at all of the way that Cuba deals with hurricanes. I mean, there's lots of good examples, Nicaragua for that matter. There's lots of good examples of actually existing socialist states that have made environmentalism really core to what it is that they're doing. But they understand that they can't just sacrifice all development in the name of some type of anarchist pipe dream, in short.

Alex: Right. I think overall, it's just the word rational is important. That in a rational economy, you have to balance having an environment for people to live in that's bearable, that looks nice, that smells good, that you can breathe the air. But also you need development. You need jobs. You need jobs.

Fox: know productive forces and you you need uh the the different uh tools and uh security to keep your your country going so well we're we already have the technology that's superior to fossil fuels which is nuclear and we're develop you know nuclear is being developed even further to things like breeder reactors and you know fusion and whatnot, which are basically like a mission free and they're cheap, abundant sources of energy, which is why the, you know, the capitalist class poses these things because abundance always kind of ruins their plans. But yeah, I mean, yeah it's very it's very hard to argue for environmentalism here because it's it is weaponized so hard but um i mean yeah we want to live in like a world with like trees and stuff i think everyone's kind of in agreement with that um everyone likes trees and animals and most most people like those things so yeah no 100 and i'm one thing i did want to say about that is that

Gabriel Rockhill: I think it's very, very clear that if you are a serious environmentalist, and by serious I mean somebody who wants to understand the real sources of the environmental crisis and the cure to that disease, then you need to be anti-capitalist and in support of actually existing socialism, because that's the path. And fortunately, there are I think there are environmentalists who are precisely that and who recognize that that is the path forward. And just as you know, one of the great slogans from the protests in 2020 was that racism is the disease. No, racism is the symptom. Capitalism is the disease. Socialism is the cure. And you could say something very similar about the end of the world, about the destruction of the environment, that this is a symptom, right? And it's a symptom that doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a disease. And that disease is putting profit above people and nature. And that disease has a name. It's capitalism. And therefore, if you want to be really serious about solving that problem and dealing with that disease, then you need to be focused on the cure. And the cure is developing a socialist world that can fend off the imperialist invaders and begin constructing a world that's more sustainable for not only all of us, but for everyone. hopefully what will be a very diverse and complex and interesting and constantly evolving biosphere.

Fox: Yeah. And the disease is not humanity. It's not humanity. No, not at all. You've been listening to the Space Commune Podcast. I'm Fox and my co-host is Alex. And today we've been talking to Gabriel Rockhill. Thank you so much for being with us here today, Gabriel. His article that just came out in the Philosophical Salon is called The CIA and the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism. It's a really in-depth article. Go read it. It's got everything in it. It's amazing. Gabriel, do you want to plug anything else while you're here? Sure.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, I think I'll just take the opportunity to plug the world socialist movement and to say that if you're not familiar with it, I'm sure a lot of your listeners and viewers are. Get plugged in. Study the history of socialism. Study actually existing socialism. And perhaps most importantly, get connected to organizations, to parties that are doing solid work, that are educating people, that are connected to the working and toiling masses. Get plugged in because it's the global struggle, because it's You know, as I guess I can also reference the Mark Fisher in some capacity, because it's the end of capitalism or the end of us. And the only way to get to the end of capitalism is by working collectively and setting up, establishing, working within really solid organizations and parties and supporting the movement for a world that's based on equality and human kindness and human development, but also not only respect for, but the complete, you know, fruitful development of the natural world as well and so in that regard i think the greatest plug would be part of the movement that i'm part of uh get connected to it if you aren't already and thank you for the work that you're doing i think it's a really important contribution and it's been uh it's been great to connect with you and to have the conversation awesome likewise thank you awesome yeah i hope we can stay in touch um and yeah thank you so much