Episode 208 - The Western Court Jester Left (Ft. Gabriel Rockhill)

Hakim: Actually, you know what? There's one little bit of banter I was telling the guys, the boys about earlier. I was joking that I'm no longer solely a mental laborer because of my daytime job. I have started making a table with my wife, a wooden table that I'm sanding down and staining and lacquering, I think is the word. But the difference is that we have to completely rely. She is much more handy than I am. But we have to completely rely on my father and her dad for the knowledge and the how-to. Where did the fall-off for male technical skills like this, which age cut off this happen? Because I completely lack this.

Yugopnik: Access to commodity, bro. I don't think I would be able to survive. Okay, in the wild, funnily enough, yes. I don't know why that's like a Balkan thing that they still teach you. But I need, I genuinely, I have been waiting for a month and a half for a guy to come and take a plank of wood. and drill it into another plank of wood without it falling over. Right now, I have four nails, like rusty nails, coming out of the thing, out of the drawer where I keep all my spoons and forks and so on, because it used to have that plank in front of it. The plank fell. I can't put a plank on that thing. And no handyman wants to, like, come and do something. That's a tiny job, yeah. Tiny job. So he told me, oh, I will come in one month and a half. And I've been waiting for a month. I literally have the date saved. I'm like, finally, the risk of getting, of needing to get tetanus shots is going to lower in half a month. But yes.

Hakim: It's the eternal socialist experience, Habibi. Oh, yeah, the plumber's coming in 10 years, on the morning or the evening. It's stupid.

Gabriel Rockhill: My favorite is making me feel good about how I grew up. I grew up with my, my dad's a construction worker and he also, he does architecture and design, but I was, you know, my earliest memories are basically with a hammer in my hand. So, uh, I didn't enjoy it when I was doing it because it's pretty grueling labor. But now that I'm an adult, I'm like, damn, I actually know how to do a lot of stuff. And it's, uh, really helpful, you know, in the long run. Cause then Once you have a basic skill set and you know how stuff works, if it be woodworking or masonry or electrical or anything else, you can figure out the rest. You know, it's like, I don't know, like anything, you got the basics down, like, you know, the grammar of a language and then you just add vocabulary, you know, and add new phrases. So I guess I'm a lucky guy for having grown up just working a shit ton of manual labor.

JT: Builds character, yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, that's what my dad always used to say, and I was like, I'd rather be reading books. Very fair. Well, you got to it, and you got to the books eventually, right? Yeah, and actually I built a bookcase. Oh, there you go. Not the one behind us, but the one in the other room. We moved into an old house about two years ago. It was built in 1888, and so it's basically... I hadn't had worked on it in 25 years, and so I had a lot of structural things, but then one of the things I really enjoyed building was a bookcase, a really big bookcase.

Hakim: That's super cool.

Gabriel Rockhill: I can't tour you now. Sorry, we're all plugged in here.

Hakim: No, no, it's all right. It's all right. But in the future, I would very much enjoy the handmade bookcase because then it means that that will smoothly lead into the book reviews because you're going to have – He'd be like, oh, this one and that one.

JT: Oh, my God. Hakeem's going to have to send us pictures of his finished table for your judgment to make sure it's structurally sound.

Gabriel Rockhill: If you need any tips, actually, my whole family's in construction. My brother runs a design build firm, so does my brother-in-law. Wow. It's like the family business. I love it. Fortunately, my dad didn't shove it down my throat. He was like, do whatever you want. And I thought to myself, well, manual labor I've done. I mean, I still do it, of course, but it can be tough. So the intellectual labor, I find like I have endless patience for it because I'm like, well, I'm not pulling nails in 105 degree weather in rural Kansas. So it can't be that bad. What about you, JT? Do you do construction work at all?

JT: No, my dad was also in construction for a while. He did a lot of jobs. He also did demolition in the Arctic Circle, like taking apart old oil rigs and stuff, which is fascinating. That's such a dad thing. He never talks about it. He's like, yeah, I did that for a while. Well, tell me about it. That's sick.

Yugopnik: But ironically, you have the ultimate, like what will be considered the ultimate dad job in like 30, in 20 years. Like he was on YouTube when it was not a hologram or whatever the fuck it's going to be. Please, sorry for interrupting.

JT: No, you're good. I dabbled in woodworking in Texas back when we had more space. We're in South Carolina now, and I didn't bring any of my equipment. I've kept my little Japanese joinery saws and stuff. I did some woodworking, a little bit of attempted furniture stuff. I just don't have the patience for it. I'm like, man, this is taking a really long time to sand this one piece, and I would rather do many things. He's a car mechanic guy.

Yugopnik: I like cars.

JT: He's a car mechanic guy.

Yugopnik: He can take everything apart to the smallest detail. Let me glaze you. It's impossible to be friends with these people. Also, Hakim, when I come to your house one day, I know it's going to be perfect, but I'm going to be taking my dinner or lunch on the coffee table that you bought. Something that you didn't build.

Gabriel Rockhill: That is not going to be...

Hakim: crushing my tiny tiny toes yeah no don't you worry i'll make sure to take apart the screws right before right before you like gabriel i made this the mistake of thinking that when i decided to when i chose medicine i was like oh well you know i enjoy the the the the scientific aspect of it i want to help people all the other cliche reasons the reasons But I always assumed it would be, you know, the stereotypical idea of what being a doctor is like. You sit behind a desk, you have the glasses that you kind of look over, you pull them onto your nose bridge and you look over very seriously at your patient and you maybe write a few notes down. And it was not that because I went into emergency medicine and... I have never had to lift more things or people in my life. I have never almost been crushed. The stories you've told us. At some points, I mean, right now, it's gotten a little bit better. But at some points in my earlier career in emergency medicine, I would have to, because we were always so short-staffed, we would have to push the patients around after we do, like bring them to, for example, take them up to CT or to radiology departments. whatever or help them from room to room and of course an elderly overweight old person who's limited in their mobility is not gonna have the most ease going up a bed and I have like 18 other patients I need to get to so of course my dumb ass decides to try to help them up and on several occasions I felt the tension force my lower back almost Almost snapped me in two. At one time, I had to call for help. Normally, it's several people that help the patients. We even have a special little crane for certain patients. But one time, I saw my...

Yugopnik: I'm pretty sure you dropped a grandmother or two.

Hakim: Yeah, because she rolled off of it and onto me. And if there wasn't five other people there to stop it, I would have split it too. So yeah, don't make my mistake. For anybody listening... Don't go into medicine.

Gabriel Rockhill: I thought becoming a professor, I would just be like chilling, reading books all the time, writing whatever I want, you know, be a really relaxed lifestyle. And then I realized, no, I'm just like a professional bureaucrat. Like they just constantly want you filling out forms and evaluating people and evaluating students and applying for grants and bringing money in. And it's basically like. a full-time bureaucratic job. And then, of course, increasingly they offload a lot of the labor, right? So they get rid of certain forms of, you know, secretarial and administrative assistance, and then they just, you know, they put it on you like they do everywhere. And so, yeah, going into the professoriate, although that said, there are other aspects of my job that I really love, like connecting with young people is probably the single best thing about it. But the bureaucracy of it is just insane. It gets worse year in, year out. But yeah, I'm not carrying people around. So I guess that's going to be fine.

Hakim: The bureaucracy of it is worse, I'm sure. The applying for grants thing, it must be the absolute worst. In my life, if somebody says, oh, yeah, well, you know what? You have to motivate why you need this. Yeah, no, thank you.

JT: There's always the family business if you get fed up. Going back to construction. There you go.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I don't know if that ship has sailed. I mean, my old man body, like as soon as, because I do a lot of work around the house. But yeah, now I don't know, Hakeem, if you have this, but I got the back brace, you know, I got the new braces. I stopped running. I started swimming. Like I'm kind of... I figure I'm going to age gracefully by just, like, trying to act older than I am because I know this stuff is right around the corner. So, yeah, I don't think I have – I don't have the energy I used to have. Like, as a kid, I could, you know, sleep six hours and just go nonstop. Now it's – yeah, it's a different thing. Aging is real, you know. Surprise, surprise.

Yugopnik: Yeah. Turns out that one happens.

Hakim: I love it. And no one knows this best than JT with his – several iterations of curl care before he convinced his infant son. Leave me alone.

JT: He's just jealous.

Gabriel Rockhill: Did you throw your back out getting the bad curls in?

JT: Like you wouldn't believe. Last night I got out the robot massager thing.

Hakim: Hello everybody and welcome back to the D program. Today we have a fantastic episode planned for you and it is with the one and only Gabriel Rockhill who is the executive director of the Critical Theory Workshop and is also a professor of philosophy at Villanova University. in Pennsylvania. He has, I believe, five completed books under his belt and a sixth on the way, I believe, which we'll get into in a second, amongst many other also fantastic articles, which also we'll get into in a second. It is an absolute pleasure to have you with us. Gabriel, please introduce yourself, let people know where they can find you or anything else you might want to shout out.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, thanks for having me on. It's a real honor and pleasure. And I was thinking about how to introduce myself, and there's a lot of different ways of doing it, but I think that the label of philosopher I'm actually going to fully embrace, not just because I was trained that way, but because... Philosophy is something that increasingly in our day and age has just been taken over by a lot of forces that are, let's just say, uninteresting. And that I'm also a philosopher who thinks that there might just be a tiny bit of value in something called Marxism and even in actually existing socialism. And there's not a ton of us out there. So I'm a philosopher with those kinds of interests. I'm involved in a ton of collective projects, the Critical Theory Workshops, an educational nonprofit that I'm involved in. We have a book series, the Anti-Imperialist Marxism book series. I'm one of the chief editors of the World Marxist Review. So if people check out the criticaltheoryworkshop.com, it kind of is a portal to a lot of these different activities. And then I have a book that's coming out soon that I've been working on for... really a decade, but it goes back to even further than that, which is called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. And it's a kind of deep dive into the dominant form of Marxism in the Western world, but it's also been internationalized thanks to cultural imperialism. And that's what people call Western or cultural Marxism, which I'm sure we'll get into and talk about. It's in short, the trendy Marxism that is kind of Marxist in theory and anti-communist in practice, if you were to put it very succinctly. So that's a quick intro. I love that.

Hakim: Thank you so much for that. And also, yes, I heavily recommend everybody check the link out. We're going to have it in the show notes, plus a bunch of other links that lead to Gabriel's stuff. But before we get into more of the nitty-gritty, especially of this latest work that will be published in December of this year, hopefully... I have a much more important question. It's that you've done quite a bit over your illustrious career, but you're a Marxist in a very specific cultural context, particularly that of the United States. And I'm wondering what brought you to Marxism as a young man or possibly even earlier or possibly later?

Gabriel Rockhill: You know, it was likely at least two things. One is that, as we were just talking about a moment ago, I grew up on a farm in rural Kansas working construction. And that gave me an understanding of exploitation before I knew the word or the concept. And I mainly wanted to pursue intellectual concerns because I wanted to reprieve from manual labor. But then I also want to understand it and figure out like why is there so much grueling manual labor and how can you change the system that produces exploitation? But then I went to college in the U.S. in the 90s, which was, you know, the twilight years of socialist consciousness, especially in the West. And I was looking for radical literature. But what they had on offer was, for the most part, Western Marxism that we'll kind of get into. And then French theory was really big, all the Pomo theory stuff. And so I thought that was radical because I was outclassed by my peers and was playing catch up at college because I just went to a rural high school, didn't really have any serious formal training or things like that. And so when I first read Marxism, I read people like Samira Min and I thought, wow, this really makes sense. It's so much clearer, right? He's actually explaining something. But it was a bit of a zigzag, you know, because at the same time, that literature was always shunned in college and even in graduate school as somehow being too simplistic, being naive. not understanding how complex the world actually is. And so it was a long process. I read a lot of Marxism in college and in graduate school, but a lot of the Marxism I was exposed to was this Western Marxist stuff. So it was very Pomo itself, and it was not that clear on what socialism looks like in the real world. And so at that point in time, I didn't, you know, I didn't self-describe as a Marxist. I thought I was like a radical, you know, and definitely influenced as I think a lot of people are by anarchism without even maybe knowing the extent to which I was influenced by it. And then it was later through both a lot more reading, self-education, everything I learned about Marxism was outside of the academy. It's all self-taught, of course. And then also a lot of activism and just being connected to people interested in changing the world and realizing that, well, there's ways of doing that successfully. And there's ways of doing that that make you look radical, but really don't lead anywhere other than to self-aggrandizement at best. And so that's... the long and short of it. And so when I got hired originally like 25 years ago, I got hired because I studied with a lot of kind of prominent French theorists in Paris, and that gave me credibility as a French theory guy. But I wasn't really even doing French theory at that point in time. I was doing materialist analysis. So that has come to the forum a lot more clearly, I think, in most of the recent work that I've been doing over the last few years.

Hakim: Beautiful. It's very interesting to note that or to see the trajectory. And we tend to ask this question of many of our guests of what eventually would led them to Marxism. Cause it's always, an interestingly unique path that leads there. It's not so uniform. And much more interesting is the fact that it's almost always exactly how you describe something that exists kind of outside the academy, something self-taught, at least what passes for legitimate Marxist theory and understanding and not what you mentioned, you know, Pomo, you know, oh, linguistic criticism from a Marxian lens, like that kind of stuff, right? But that is the commonality always that... brings people to to a more legitimate understand that that's how it was for me um i think i mean yugo coming from uh a nation that is a post-socialist uh deconstruction um it's in the milieus in the walls literally it's in the walls everybody still lives in socialists but his university background you you can talk about it how um marxism was almost taken as a Not even a bygone. It was just like this mistake that happened. And then, okay, now we move on. This was completely naive. By the way, imagine you're on an island and you have two people and one of them trades coconuts for crabs. That's the silliness of the theory because they don't have the mirror to see themselves. And of course, as Americans, as you two, I mean, you and JT, I'm so sorry that I'm calling you an American.

Gabriel Rockhill: Are you part French or... I am Franco-American at the level of legal documentation because I was naturalized as a French citizen. But I was born in the U.S., brought up in the U.S., indoctrinated in the U.S. and therefore share in, you know, what Michael Parenti refers to as the national religion of anti-communism everywhere throughout my education. Yeah. anti-communism with a lack of education because yeah yeah i'd be fine if if it was as horrible as they say it is and the facts lined up with their like moral judgments then yeah great but they don't even teach you the facts like give me the facts and then let me judge it yeah you know clearly so that that actually leads into something uh you mentioned parenti and you mentioned the civic religion of the united states being anti-communism that leads into

Hakim: One of my favorite articles that you've written, and I think it was the first one that I'm reading, it's one that you published a couple of years ago, titled Liberalism and Fascism Partners in Crime. And this was published in Counterpunch, if I remember right. And there it was... Very Perenti-esque, the overview you delivered, the relationship between liberalism and fascism, very reminiscent, actually, particularly not in content, because it was unique the way you delivered, but how hard-hitting it was. So the first time you read Perenti, it's black shirts and reds, and you're like, oh, who is this guy? Where is this guy? But you summarize this false antagonism between liberalism and fascism. And at the end of the article, you have this little bit that was just so brilliant. I want to read it out to the audience. where you mentioned that the false antagonism serves multiple purposes, and you list four. It establishes the primary front of struggle as one between rival positions within the capitalist camp. That's the first point. Second, you write, it channels people's energy into fighting over the best methods for managing capitalist rule rather than abolishing it. The third, you write, it eradicates the true lines of demarcation of global class struggle. And the fourth... It attempts to simply take the communist option off the table by removing it entirely from the field of struggle or disingenuously presenting it as a form of totalitarianism. This is such a beautifully complete encapsulation of this false dichotomy that they have. And the question that I have for you is how do you see this – because you wrote this a couple of years ago and also the references that you looked at were like 20th century making its way into the 21st. How do you see this playing out in the modern day, this false dichotomy between liberalism and liberalism? And more importantly, because, of course, it evolves, the bedrock, liberalism evolves, but the bedrock of it is still this right to property defense that everybody should have, you know, this is what true liberty is and freedom and whatnot. But the propaganda of it, of liberalism being the, you know, shining city of the hill against the barbarity of fascism, and they're supposedly at a complete odds situation. Has this propaganda become more sophisticated, especially when we're looking at, like, Ukraine and Palestine? And when a bomb goes off in Ukraine, everybody's like, oh, well, how bad. We need to send all this money and weapons and we need to sanction the Russians. But a bomb goes off in Palestine and killing Palestinian civilians or even people who have the full right to resist, they're occupiers. And the response is, well, you know, another 20 billion to Israel. It should be fairly good. How do you see the liberalism-fascism connection? I want to just speak your brain about it.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Well, I'm honored by the comparison to Michael Parenti, which I think you might be overstating the case. I mean, that guy's a titan, right? I mean, the contribution that that man has made is really, everyone should just stop listening and go read Michael Parenti. I mean, the guy is really, and listen to him too, an incredible speaker, right? Really, really captivating. And so I am definitely inspired in my own work by Parenti, both at the level of content and form, because he's an incredible communicator. The guy really, really knows how to bring people in. And he can operate at different registers. That's what I love about him, too. He can talk to somebody in the street who's completely uneducated in any formal sense, but he can also write very sophisticated, very erudite historical analyses. So, yeah, if I can be proximate to the work that he's done in any way, then I feel greatly honored. But to get to the point of your question, I do think that liberalism and fascism, there's a few things. One is you have to approach this dialectically, right? A lot of liberals think, oh, fascism is this big, bad bogeyman that's other than this liberal order that we have. Fascism and liberalism come in different forms, and they're also different degrees, right? The final solution was at the end of the Nazi reign of terror. But early on, they didn't have the final solution. They put the communists and the Jews and the queers and people like that into work camps, and then they started killing them. And so there's a degree of fascization that one has to be attentive to. And the other thing that's important is that there are ways in which both liberalism and fascism operate as forms of political management for capitalism, right? In short, liberalism allows them to rule by consent, rule through hegemony. And fascism is when that's not working out and they need to rule by more direct repression. So I have another piece that I wrote in a series because that article is becoming part of a book on fascism. And I refer to liberalism as the good cop of fascism is going to bring you a coffee, say you can make a phone call there on your side, et cetera, which is true, right? In the sense that the liberals do tend to act like, uh, They want to be able to rule in a consensual manner. But if that doesn't work out, then they bring out the bad cop and the bad cop will rough you up and beat you up. And and then the good cop is going to come back in. And what's really important to see is you got to see through that interrogation tactic. Right. The good cop and the bad cop are working together to the same end. They work for the same masters. And that is King Capital, who's behind both of them. And once you begin to see that, then you can understand the history of liberalism and fascism, I think, a lot better. I mean, fascism in its classical sense in Germany and Italy, it rose through bourgeois parliamentary mechanisms. Now, there were some changes that occurred with you know, appointments with the king making decisions in Italy. But for the most part, the structures of parliamentarianism were in place. And it was the astroturfing, meaning the funding by the capitalist ruling class of the fascists that helped bring them to power within those mechanisms. And liberalism often wants to have, it doesn't often, it does maintain fascism. because it needs to keep that option on call at all times. And your question made me think about something that I've actually been working on a lot lately, and that is the specificity of US empire building. Because when the US really took over the helm of global imperialism at the close of World War II, What it decided to do is it took over an empire on its heels, right? When you think about this historically, the Red Army had just liberated Auschwitz and had liberated Eastern Europe from authoritarianism and fascism for the most part. Czechoslovakia might be a minor exception, but for the most part. and you have globally an enormous amount of credibility on the side of the Reds because they just defeated fascism, right? 35 million Soviets and some 35 million Chinese are, I think, the most recent and correct estimates of the death toll, gave their lives defeating fascism. So fascism had been discredited just globally, but the anti-fascist struggle continued because the uprisings across the colonies. I mean, May 8th, 1945 should be a date that everybody knows because it was victory day when the German Nazis signed their surrender papers. And the same day in Algeria, the Algerians rose up and said, we want liberation from fascism too. We want the French out of Algeria. And what did the French do? They armed the civilian population, the French civilian colonial population, They bombed and they ran terror campaigns that killed as many as 45,000 people in Algeria. The message then at this point in time was fascism is over in Europe, but it's alive and well in the third world and across the tri-continent. And at the same time, the socialist project was advancing between 45 and at least the late 80s, and more and more countries were going socialist. So the US inherits imperialism on its heels due to the massive anti-colonial uprising and the ongoing fight against fascism. Fascism had just been completely discredited as a political management tool due to its affiliation with the gas chambers and everything else. And socialism was expanding across the world with China and Korea and Vietnam and Cuba and all the other examples that one could point to. And so it's very important to recognize that U.S. imperialism in its first decades was imperialism on its heels, needing to rejuvenate itself, when the global consciousness was generally looking at socialism and communism as something favorable, was anti-fascist, and generally anti-colonial. All of this meant, and sorry for a little bit of a historical interlude, it all meant that U.S. empire building had to do it in a very unique way. They couldn't do old-style empire building like they'd been doing and just saying, we're racial supremacists, we're going to genocidally eliminate the indigenous population, we're going to engage in chattel slavery, and we don't care about women, and this is the way it's going to be. They couldn't do it anymore. because global class struggle forced them to do it otherwise. What did they do? They packaged themselves as a kind of invisible empire where they projected an image of liberal democracy and the promotion of human rights and they funneled a lot of money and resources into doing precisely that they needed to create the image of a beneficent empire that wasn't even an empire it's so beneficent that it wasn't even an empire it's just a force of moral good in the world but at the same time and this is the contradiction that the us empire was facing at that point in time they had to advance capitalism and imperialism they had to beat back the socialist threat How do you do that? Well, you need to run covert operations, proxy wars, neocolonialism, hybrid warfare, psychological warfare, propaganda on a grand scale so that you can actually advance imperialism by making it look like you don't advance imperialism. You need liberalism. running cover for what many people refer to, including former CIA agents, as a global fascist international. They integrated fascists from across Europe, from Japan, and they were running death squads across the Third World and doing all of these heinous things. And so I think that The best way of understanding the dominant model of U.S. imperialism is we'll maintain liberalism for a certain section of the working class within the United States. But we will unleash fascistic fascism. And these are all differences of degrees, so people don't have to get bent out of shape. They did have concentration camps when they rounded up the Japanese and put 120,000 in concentration camps. That's what they called them. But they weren't gassing people, although they did have potential plans to do that. And that's in the sense that they had... They have counterinsurgency plans, always very well spelled out. But the liberalism that they used for a certain class segment was juxtaposed to fascistic forms of violence unleashed against the racialized, most oppressed and exploited members of the working class domestically, as well as internationally. And so in that regard, the US case is, I think, clearly one in which the greatest promoter of global fascism since at least 45 has been the United States. I think that the record is very, very clear on that front. And so just to bring this up to today, and I'll be a bit shorter on this, and sorry for going into a little bit more detail than I anticipated. Really today, I think what you see is that US imperialism, there was the heyday of the neoliberal era There was the massive dismantling of kind of Soviet style socialism and a lot of other socialist countries in the late 80s, early 90s. And we could get into why that happened and how complex all that is. But in short, U.S. imperialism was on the offensive, right? It was making advances and very serious advances at the cost of people power around the world. But that has run into very serious problems in the 21st century, at least beginning with 2008 and the financial crisis that, of course, is ongoing. But then increasingly with the rise of the multipolar world, the consistent rise of China, they're not able to leverage the super profits of imperialism like they were before. able to do during the heyday of neoliberalism. And now we're seeing a increasing move towards fascism within the U.S. context, a de-democratization, if you will, which is not, again, just jumping from liberalism to fascism. It's a dialectical process in which there are different degrees of a process of fascistization, of moving into fascism. And clearly you have a consolidation of state power, an increasing reliance on, you know, ICE forces, National Guard forces, the release of all these people from prison who are in these parastate organizations like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters. Proud Boys, etc., that are clearly aligned on a very reactionary political agenda with, of course, extrajudicial killings and the ongoing onslaught of U.S.-style imperialism. But the liberal cover is being lifted in a way that is quite important. Let's just put it that way. in the sense that the Trump administration is revealing, in certain ways, the lack of US ability to maintain the liberal imperialist dreamscape that has been really the bread and butter of US imperialism for a long time. Although, of course, from Reagan to the Bushes and others, there have been other moments of real intense turn toward more fascistic forms of violence. But what I see now is really that increasing authoritarianism and move away from democratic rights, even the very limited ones that have been maintained for certain sectors of the population, is a sign of declining empire. And it also means that there's an enormous opportunity to take advantage of that for demonstrating that the power projection doesn't map onto reality. These aren't people who win wars. There are people who make wars and who destroy lives and destroy, you know, the environment and infrastructure. But it's the chaos, you know, it's the strategy of chaos is really what is overseeing the U.S. empire. And increasingly the Monroe Doctrine, right, with the doubling back now more and more on the or what some people call the Donrow Doctrine, right, with Donald being the leader of it here.

Hakim: on on empire's backyard as the real kind of focal point for for some of this very beautifully put the thing with with that i find a bit disingenuous with liberal media particularly american or even european media when it comes to the presentation what's going on for example in the states right now the declining you know hegemon capitalist hegemon um that is having to see Not because it wants to, but because it has to, is being forced to see a retreat of its ability to project power internationally, economically, diplomatically, militarily. That doesn't mean that they're not still very powerful. But this is, regardless, a retreat that they are being forced into. And then this... impotent attempt at trying to re-extend themselves by the Donroth doctrine, for example, or the stuff they're trying to do with Venezuela, because they can't do what they used to do with Iraq or Afghanistan anymore, or Vietnam, for example. And likewise, to quote Malcolm X, it's the chickens coming home to roost with the increased levels of... political violence, even state violence by various forms of repressive agencies in the States against their domestic populations. Sadly, it affects mostly the internal peripheries of the United States, meaning black and brown people people who are quote unquote illegal immigrants despite the fact that they work jobs and they contribute in all sorts of ways without being able to take out of the system because they are not allowed to because they're undocumented amongst many other things what the thing that annoys me with the liberal uh phrasing of all this or presentation is that oh this is just trump this is the fact that trump's in power as if it's something as if it's not a historical tendency for the united states to be reactionary and for these forces to become more explicit when the class struggle heightens uh it's no it's a single guy is that metaphysical again the inability to have any form of correct materialist analysis Why is the United States going down this road economically, politically and whatnot? It isn't because of these forces that are taking place. It isn't because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall being shown before our eyes. It isn't because of the inability of capital to continue to expand markets, particularly the largest market on earth, that being the market of the People's Republic of China, because they are the ones who are playing the game better than the capitalists themselves. In some ways, of course, we... This podcast is a China Stan podcast. We support President Xi on this podcast. But that's the most annoying thing, the framing of it all. Because if Donald Trump goes away tomorrow, all of a sudden, oh, no, it's going to be another happy-go-lucky, oh, Biden with his dog. Oh, give them chocolate chip. Good cop. Exactly.

Yugopnik: The good cop. Exactly.

Hakim: And that's what I want to loop it into. More importantly, though, another phenomenon which we are sadly all too familiar with is the fact that No matter how bad things get, no matter what form neoliberalism leading into the kind of modern capitals that we have today, late-stage capitals that we have today, there's always certain, quote-unquote, radical voices that exist within the Western left. We're going to get into what we mean by Western left or what you specifically mean because you've defined it in such a beautiful way. We'll get into that in a second. In one specific article, you kind of look behind the superficial and I would say artificial, mostly artificial support for these quote unquote radical voices in modern theory spaces of the West. Those are the few of them that are present, that are publicized. The ones that have the speaking engagements and the published books with complete ease, like everything they write immediately within two months has four different publishers lined up begging to put it out, despite the fact that, for example, despite being some kind of brand of Marxist, supposedly, but... The juxtaposition there is Lacerdo, the late Lacerdo, who was a giant of our era, he did not have this ease, despite being such a significant intellect and contributed to the body of theory that we have today, and just general human knowledge. His book on Stalin, I remember, he approached... Verso books for, and they absolutely and categorically refused, based on bullshit political grounds, right? Like the personal grudge or personal opinion of the reviewer of the manuscript. And that's Lacerdo. Like, okay, the guy just passed, or he passed away recently. That's significant. And then you have, on the other hand, I'm sure that this is a term that everybody loves, the rock star philosopher. The PR-engineered nonsense term, with this particular example being Žižek. And you said something that I really liked. You said you increasingly saw his provocative antics as a poor esatz for historical and materialist analysis in the article that you wrote on Žižek, which I highly recommend everybody read. It's on Counterpatch. It's titled Capitalism's Core to Jester, Slavoj Žižek. And my question that I'm getting to here is... Could you tell us a little bit more about what Zizek, and not specifically him as a guy, I mean, just what he represents, how his example is this prototype of the performative, consumable version of radical politics without action or praxis?

Yugopnik: And before you do, if I could just say one very small thing. I had read your article, but I was still in my self-denial phase when it comes to Zizek, because throughout my, you know, let's say... era of developing basic class consciousness and then moving into exploring Marxian theory fully and properly giving myself to him, to Marx and Engels and so on. Zizek was kind of one of my first stepping stones. So I kept him through a lens of a very, very, very, very strong subjectivity. It's kind of like a darling in my backpack. And that led me to cope very intensely, even though all the signs were on the wall that he's doing what... I'm not going to steal your words. You're going to explain much better than I ever could. But the reason I interrupted is I remember specifically reading your article. And unironically, I think the kids now call it, even though people would call me a kid, but still, I am a proud unk. I got unironically triggered by it. triggered from the pure sense of anti-intellectual subjectivity. Like I was being, I was seeing truth being like thrown as sand in my eyes. And I was like, no, but he's my boy. He's my denial. Absolutely. Continuous denial. And it wasn't even three or four weeks after I had read your article a while back that I watched some, some of his interviews where I was watching the, the, contentless blubber that's only intended to get clicks and views so that, I don't know, you get invited to some, he gets invited to some speech or whatever. As I was watching it, I was going through your article, like automatically, my mind was going through your article and the points you were making previously. And I sat by myself in the room and I was like, Holy mother of God, am I about to kill a hero? Yeah, I'm about to, and you gave me the bullets and you gave me the bullets. So thank you for the bullets. Uh, yeah, please.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thank you for the, uh, the modesty and the humility, because I think it's one of the biggest hangups that people have is they have a little troll in their backpack, like their buddy Zizek and they've read his books and they defend his arguments and they find them entertaining. And then to give up on that and recognize that, you know, he's a charlatan. He's an opportunist charlatan and a court jester in a really specific sense because he also has a very, very lucrative career making a mockery out of Marxism. That's who this guy is. And so I also, though, Hugo, went through a process of being not necessarily infatuated, but quite enthralled with the sexy language, the references to popular culture, the jokes, the playfulness. On violence.

Yugopnik: And you're like, whoa, these are radical points. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, totally. Exactly. All the Lacanianism, which is also just, it's just provocative. You know, just talk about sex all the time, basically. You talk about your libido and all the foul things that you look at online all of a sudden become part of your academic discourse. And that's exciting for young people, particularly people who are generally uneducated in various ways. And so I totally identify with, as I often say to people, my critiques of some of these, most of these intellectuals is, began as a self critique, because they are intellectuals I took quite seriously. And then, you know, to put it bluntly, I grew up. I realized that I was quite ignorant and too seduced, I guess, by their type of work. And Zizek is definitely just a product of the theory industry. And I would say the same of Trump. But just to echo what Hakim was saying earlier, Trump is a symptom of a system of financial oligarchic rule. And if it wasn't Trump, it would be JD Vance or somebody else. But the cogs in the system are less important than the system. So don't get hung up on the cogs. Understand how the system itself works. And Zizek is an interesting symptom of the broader system that I'd refer to as the imperial theory industry. It's the theory industry that the empire promotes around the world and tells everybody, this is the trendy stuff. This is what everybody should read. If you want to be a serious intellectual, if you want to engage in high-level debates, then you have to know something about Zizek. You have to know something about Michael Hard and Antonio Negri and all these other people that people will reference. But in actual fact, when you look into their work and dig down into it, and that's what a lot of my scholarship has been about recently because I spent plenty of years reading all of their work, I realized that there's a lot of ideological consistency. that actually these people, all of them say that they're different. You know, they have their different idiosyncratic vocabulary. It's empire and multitude. It's the new idea of communism. It's the real of Lacan, but rethought through Hegel, for Zizek. And they all have very fancy ways of promoting their brand because that's what they're doing within the theory industry. But when you dig down into the political positions that they take, the consistency is remarkable. They are almost all across the board with only the rarest of exceptions, the most vocal and outspoken anti-communists. They say it again and again and again. And they tend to even be— It's almost like they're being paid to say it. Sorry. Yeah.

Yugopnik: Well, I mean— Indirectly stimulated by the money. Yeah. That's what I mean. Well, that's the thing.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's a good point because a lot of my work looks at the political economy of knowledge production. Because if you want to understand what knowledge is produced and what knowledge is circulated, it's not a free and open marketplace of ideas like the liberals say. It's a political system that is driven by economic forces. And those economic forces include all of the corporations involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge. So universities and think tanks and publishing houses and media platforms and universities. All of that is part of the broader imperial theory industry. And the work that it promotes is work that aligns on the interests of imperialism. So the most prominent intellectuals in our world today, of course, are going to be the right-wing intellectuals like Samuel Huntington and Fukuyama and people like this. But then there's another phenomenon, these left-fringe characters who... pose as radicals sometimes they go on at great length about how they're the most radical people ever they're the real communists they have a new idea that is better than any idea that anybody's ever had before but they are marxists in theory and anti-communists in practice and that's precisely why their work is promoted by the imperial theory industry it's actually a really basic point Empire does not promote work that is inimical to its interest. That's it. It demotes that work. Michael Parenti, who we were talking about a moment ago, never secured a full-time academic form of employment. He had to depend on the lecture circuit and the sale of his books to garner enough revenue to do the intellectual work that he was doing. He was unhirable at a university. Domenico Lasorda was a university professor, but as you said, he ran into a lot of problems, particularly with Verso Books, who are well-known gatekeepers on that front, because they want to be able to define upstream, upstream, what counts as valid intellectual work. Why don't you put the work out there and let people democratically decide whether or not it's valid, particularly when it's the case of someone... with the intellectual caliber of a Domenico Lo Sordo. And now that the book is out and widely available, I think most people recognize the Stalin book is worth being published and worth reading. The last thing that I'd say, just to cycle back to Žižek in person, people should really know, and I spell it out in the article, he's an anti-communist dissident from Yugoslavia. That's what he is. He's an anti-communist, pro-Western, pro-postmodern dissident from Yugoslavia. That's how he got his start. He reinvented himself. as a Marxist after he, and he brags about this, he brags about personally contributing to the demolition of socialism in Yugoslavia, and he then co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party, ran on the presidential ticket, and advocated for pro-capitalist reforms within Yugoslavia. Practically speaking, the guy is a pro-capitalist, pro-liberal, anti-communist, And then he reinvented himself as a Marxist for basic careerist reasons to capitalize on his exposure to Marxism because, and I know Hugo could speak to this better than others, within socialist countries, including post-socialist countries, there's the socialization of knowledge that is in the walls, as you were saying earlier, it's part of the broader culture. And so you're educated in it, even kind of in spite of yourself. He wanted to capitalize on that socialized knowledge and then rebrand himself as a Marxist. And now if you follow out his career, I mean, the guy is an apologist for fascism. He is an outright supporter of NATO, of the war in Ukraine, of the European Union. He calls China fascist. He endorsed Donald Trump. Presidential campaign on and on and on. I mean, the guy's off the rails. So hopefully he's not only getting the salary from, you know, all of the book sales and the movie deals and and all of the lucrative lectures and junkets. Hopefully he's getting paid even more because he's doing the very explicit work of empire. He really is.

Yugopnik: I ironically literally heard a Slovenian friend say the start of his political theory was saying Yugoslavia is not socialist enough, therefore we must destroy it. Then Slovenia rose out of those ashes. And he was introduced to what living in real liberal capitalism is. And then he said, oh, no, maybe the socialists had a point. And then people asked him, oh, which socialists? And Zizek answered, none except me. Meaning like, OK, give me an example of which socialism you kind of low key fuck with. And his answer is unironically, no, it actually never worked. Absolutely ever worked. So you have this figure and he's, as you beautifully put, a representation of many other figures. I like to call them intellectual masturbators. But jokes aside, I think my Slovenian friend's quotation is very specific. It's very truthful, not in the core of its analysis, but in the more basic compartments of it. What do I mean specifically is... When somebody is doing a grind set, as the kids like to say, it's very obvious. These types of people are sometimes in a very specific type of situation, very specific material conditions, if you want to call them. And then they're like, okay, what can I sell right now? Then those material conditions and that system in the case of these exchanges, okay, what can I sell now? Then as decades and decades progress, they constantly treat Intellectual work, philosophical work as a grind, as the continuous chase of a new product, pitch, or service to sell to some sort of market of book buyers or conference attendees or empire itself, sometimes very gladly just putting a couple of bucks in your coat pocket. That's all I wanted to say.

Hakim: Something that, and this is also very interesting, because you really see this amongst quote-unquote right-wing intellectuals, if there is such a thing, really, and that is the tendency to kind of go where the political winds blow when it comes to your opinions, or at least how you present them. You might give them your own personal spin. And Zizek was one of those characters, because I remember seeing one of his interviews a long time ago, and he talks about how, at the same time, this was in the early 80s in Yugoslavia, where he was studying both English as well as Russian. And the reason that he was doing both is because he didn't know which side was going to win out, quote unquote. So he was hedging his bets, basically. And in a parallel, much better world to the one that we currently live in, where the Soviet Union was the one that emerged victorious in that struggle, despite all odds against it. There is a Zizek who's giving a Lacanian twist, a Lacanian-Hegelian twist on support for the next five-year plan of the Soviet Union 2025 to 2030, which is interesting to think about.

Yugopnik: Socialism's court jester.

Hakim: Exactly right. It reminds me of the term that Lenin used for Trotsky, and this is not an anti-sex work thing, it's just a term that I always find funny, it's polititsky prostitutka, which is political prost. That's what he called it. And that's the term that always comes to mind.

Yugopnik: Both of us are throwing shade on people that in no way deserve it. Masturbators and prostitutes. Exactly right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Let him call them an opportunist, too, which is a perfect term for Zizek. Exactly right. There's no doubt.

Hakim: And I want to just add one more little thing. It's something you see also amongst... quote-unquote well-meaning, like the new brand of leftist, I don't want to say intellectual, but like speakers or particularly online sphere, right? Ones who have not properly engaged with Marxism or choose not to for particular reasons, usually because it means the reach gets way wider, means that you get more clicks and views and all that kind of stuff. simplistic answers for right-wing audiences and simplistic answers for like center-left liberal audiences go far further than describing the intricacies of like, you know, CIA, PSYOPs, that not in like a controversy way, not in a conspiracy way, excuse me, or the nuances of unequal exchange. When you tell people like, okay, why is the Congo poor despite being the richest by, sheer amount of natural resources and whatnot and you have to sit there and be like okay well there's a concept called the labor theory of value like you have to start with a brick and let's rewind 200 years yeah you have to yeah generally you have to build so high i was like okay there's this guy named leopold ii all right he found something called the congo free state And then you have to go through the hand-cutting. You have to draw such a long line just to make somebody understand why Congolese cobalt is so important and is the hot commodity nowadays. But Congo is only ever poorer year by year. Oh, by the way, don't look at which investments Swiss banks are making for Canadian mining operations who are doing this illegally. It's just – it gets – tiring uh to see you know no actually it's because um we're more hard working in the west but that means we should send more aid you know like that's the center left answer and the right wing answer is oh they're you know physiologically inferior they're less human but all this disgusting nonsense And GJ kind of falls on the next level up, which is how can I grift left-wing terms as much as I can while eating up that audience? I don't like to believe in controlled opposition, but sometimes you see this kind of stuff and you're like, God damn, it's really hard not to believe in controlled opposition.

JT: Well, the result is the same regardless of whether it is or not.

Gabriel Rockhill: In fact, it's even better if... A lot of people ask me... Because I've done a lot of research into the Central Intelligence Agency, and a lot of people ask me about, oh, did so-and-so get paid? They have this kind of image of the CI being a puppet master and just having people on strings. But the way these operations work are much more sophisticated than that, because if there are strings, people can see them. But if you own the puppet theater, then the marionettes can come of their own free accord. And so it's much smarter to control the institutions and the institutional apparatus and ideally just intercede to keep it on track, because the institutions of empire are going to do that work anyway. And so a lot of what agency work has been over the years, at least in certain aspects, has been to just make sure that the institutions of empire do the job that they're set out to do. And so the idea that Zizek would be in the pay of the CIA or something like that, he doesn't need to be. Why? Why would you risk that opportunity? Anyway, because you have somebody who is given an enormous platform by the institutions of empire to broadcast an image of Marxism that is incorrect and make a mockery of it. And I think one of his real social functions is he's a radical recuperator in the sense that he poses as a radical. He brings in a lot of young people who are interested in radical ideas, but then he recuperates them for the compatible left, or even now it's more just a right-wing project. It's like Red-Brown Alliance kind of stuff. And that recuperation is really important. And there's lots of figures historically who've operated like that. They kind of police the left border of critique. They hang out there being really radical. And then... Anything to the left of them in the substantive sense of that term is considered beyond the pale. And so a lot of the left, Western left intelligentsia, the most radical versions that you'll get are these radical recuperators who are really policing the left border of critique. And if you actually study them and look at what they say, at the end of the day, they all have these statements. Like, this is one from Zizek. Zizek said that 20th century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, was maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social, and so on, catastrophe in the history of humanity. Badiou says something similar. You know, Hart and Negri have similar statements. Ranciere is an anarchist and says similar things like these are the radical recuperators who are really sending the message that the best thing that we can do is be critical of certain elements of capitalism. But since there isn't a real alternative. they end up being capitalist accommodationists.

Hakim: And at the end, it's like this. It's neither Washington or Moscow, but really Washington. This leads into actually another article. And it's so hard not to love you because of just the fantastic, not only the amazing work that you do, but also the amazing work, the amazing people you get into contact with. I'm going to get into this as well. Again, this man worked with Lizardo. I need it on the record. But before we get into that. You had a very interesting interview that you carried out, the article interview, and you conducted with Zhao Dingqi, if I remember correctly, who is a researcher at the Institute of Marxism, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. And it was published in the Journal of... World Socialism Studies, I believe, in Chinese, and a monthly review did a kind of translation and cleaning up of the interview, and it's titled Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia from Anti-Communism Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism. very beautifully leading into this bit that we discussed. And in here specifically, you discuss this ideology of the Western left and the Western left, quote, unquote, intelligentsia, and specifically those who are seemingly willing participants in this. When you spoke with him as a chinese perspective uh what was because we got your perspective right now and also how it is in the west but how is it for the other side looking in for marxists that are outside of course i me and you go are on the imperial periphery of this um looking in as well and we see it kind of for the farce that it is maybe much more easily than somebody who's in the belly of the beast but somebody who's from the institute of study of marxism In China, that's a different beast.

Gabriel Rockhill: How did that? I just want to hear your perspective. Well, it's an interesting question. I've been to China four times and spent a significant amount of time there, at least three of the times I was there for a number of weeks. So I have a general sense of what's going on there. And obviously, I've studied it quite a bit on my own. I don't speak Chinese. And so I'm not really plugged in at the level that some people are. I do know, though, that a lot of this Western theory is extremely widespread in China. You know, Zizek's translated. A lot of these people are translated because a lot of the Chinese model has been also to not only integrate global capitalism, but also to integrate across the intellectual field and culture. You know, there's there's reasons for doing that to get knowledge transfer and technology transfer and things like that. But there are certain universities that are, you know, maintain positions and have a lot of faculty who are much more Western oriented. And so it depends on the university and the intellectuals that you're in dialogue with. Obviously, with someone like Zhao Dinqi, he... is more dedicated to a critique of these particular figures because of the pernicious role that they've played internationally, but they also do play that role to some extent in China, which is interesting. Of course, class struggle continues to go on within different projects, including the socialist project in China. A place like Cuba would be interesting to compare it to because I think there there's a lot more... sussing out of the real nature of the Western left intelligentsia is much more widespread.

Hakim: Siege mentality also kind of forces this because you don't have the same wiggle room that you have as the largest economic power on earth as China versus Cuba being besieged for the past 60 years. Please go on.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. And also the specific nature of cultural class struggle in a country like Cuba that is invested a lot in institution building and having an entire superstructure, you know, an entire network of institutions that support and promote socialist culture, including socialist intellectual research. And so... Yeah. But then again, you know, I'm still looking at these projects as a as a outsider. And so I don't know them as well from the inside. But I would like to add one other thing. And this is more and sorry, I'm twisting your your question back around to the perspective that I can speak to about it more directly. And that is that a lot of the Western left intelligence, you also have to analyze. Right. These are people who occupy a kind of the upper crust of the intellectual labor aristocracy. They're not only some of the most well-paid university professors in the world, but they are. showered with junkets, with book deals, with media appearances and other things. So they make a significant amount of money and they benefit directly and indirectly in many different ways from the structures of imperialism. And they have their work promoted around the world as being the most important work. And they're going to go down in bourgeois history as the leading luminaries of our day. So these people have no material or ideological interest whatsoever in actually dismantling imperialism. And this goes a long way to explaining why it is that they take the positions that they take. And again, we have to recognize that subjects are situated in a system, and it's really the system and the class forces of that system that is driving and conditioning, not determining in a rigorous sense, but it's driving and conditioning the way in which they think about the world. And when you're at the very top of these intellectual labor pyramids, you don't want that to go away. And so the anti-communism is largely also a product of the way they're positioned within global class struggle, within the global class pyramid.

Hakim: Exactly right. And that's so important. It's such a sharp point that it is the, of course, class background of these people that are there. class uh milieu that they find themselves in that drives their particular perspectives and positions um labor aristocrats or people who belong into a system beneficial to the labor aristocracy aren't against for example currently existing socialism or attempts at socialism or calls for or organizing or organizing towards revolution Because they're against the idea it's because it goes against their direct material interests and that's kind of like Reflects the large largely more failed attempts rather than positive successful attempts at organizing in most of the imperial core um it almost almost always falls along the lines of you know impotent social democratic reform or demands uh less you know let's just stop all the walls no let's stop the wars so we can put that money into health care right um it's sometimes even not that sometimes even not that like you can

Yugopnik: I ironically see the development of a particular market that sometimes never even existed before kind of set up in front of you. Something as random as what we do, right? Like I think Hakeem was, quote unquote, in the game before anyone else. Oh, I'm going to make a YouTube channel. I'm going to start talking about socialism, blah, blah, blah. because I care about the cause. I'm going to give my particular opinions. I'm going to analyze different historical contexts and so on. And then a lot of people start listening. But a lot of people that are listening are also telling themselves, oh, this guy seems to be doing good. Let me set up a channel. Then another guy sets up a channel. Another guy sets up a channel. And sure, 90% of them are true brothers, sisters, enbies in arms. They really want to just do agitation on the internet. But there's 10%, 20% growing, 30% of individuals that are almost exclusively in it for what? Because they see a new market forming right in front of them that can create a certain, we can call it subclass of growth. of quote-unquote intellectuals in our case content creators that just you know want to make make money out of this particular thing and how do you continue making money from a particular thing if you are truly educating them down the path of class consciousness and further and further so-called radicalization you cannot because the whole point is for somebody to stop listening to you or stop reading you and actually go out there and organize and be a principal socialist etc etc So those of us that are in it for the cause first, and of course, sure, we all admit it. It's good to have some bread in our mouth as well, but cause first. We want to see people organizing and going out there. But the other ones, they see this market formed in front of them, and they want to keep them in, to keep them in, to keep them in, and not let them continue. Because the market is the most important thing to them, and not the cause. The cause isn't even number 55. listeners or readers or whatever as uh as clients not necessarily potential future comrades and that's what what as uh as our lovely guest has explained many many times in many many different forms that's what traps so many people from not being able to evolve

Hakim: Exactly right. And that's kind of like the online... Hugo's point is really very, very important because, I mean, Gabriel, you work in a professional sphere, in academia and whatnot. You have a lot to do. You probably aren't as involved with the internet side of things, seeing how political commentating goes on. But it's very interesting that over the past... 10 years, less 15, more 10 years, and particularly the past five years, this new explosion of a market where people will just continue the outrage in the circus of electoral politics, discussing to the left end of the Democrats, this kind of nonsense, and they want to just keep them there. Because the more you continue into this outrage, oh, did you see what they said? The latest saniteering or whatever, right? And then you just zzz it up a little bit with the graphics and a little comedy and whatnot. And you keep that discussion there within the frames of maintaining the capitalist system, within the dual system of the two parties that exist in the States. In Great American Extravagance, there's two of them. Yes. But this also leads into something that you... I've been quoting you all day. It's because you have so many of these bangers. And here's yet another one of them. You're talking specifically about Western Marxism. And you say, Western Marxism is not equivalent to Marxism in the West. Instead, it is a particular version of Marxism that... for material reasons developed in the imperial core where there is significant ideological pressure to conform to its dictates. Now, this was from an overview, also a monthly review, of the work that you edited for Lucerto titled Western Marxism, How It Was Born, How It Died, and How It Can Be Reborn. Now, before we actually get into the question, you worked with Lacerdo and that, oh my God, how was it working with Lacerdo?

Gabriel Rockhill: I want to know. Well, with Lacerdo, actually, I didn't work directly with him in a kind of academic capacity, but But I invited him to the Critical Theory Workshop, an educational nonprofit that I run. We have a summer school in Paris that takes place online simultaneously. And so I invited him as a speaker there. And that was the first time that I met him. And... When you meet someone like that, I think that one thing that's really important to me is, even just at a personal level, is I know a lot of people who can be socialists in principle and talk a good game and say all the right things. But occasionally, I mean, it's very rare, but occasionally they're kind of horrible people. You don't want to be around them because they just talk about themselves all the time or they you just know they're not really invested in a collective project. Like they're kind of in it for themselves. And what was astounding about Lasorda, because he has everything in his academic career to be a complete diva, is a real ethics in the positive sense of that term. Like he was a man of the people who wanted to connect, talk to people, a collective ethos, very generous, very honest, uh, very humble and just the kind of like exactly how you'd like him to be. He reminds me of, I never met Eduardo Galeano, but I've watched, watched a lot of his videos because I think I might have, you know how people have father figure issues. I have a grandfather figure issue with Galeano. I always wish that that guy had been my granddad, you know? So I just been sitting there and instead of like, you know, I mean, my grandparents were, were wonderful people or at least one of them was, but he just watched sports all the time. But with Galeano, you just sit there and like he could tell you stories and like educate you at the same time. And Lesorto very much had that kind of ethos. So I think that in spite of the fact that so much of what is valued both in the academic world and the political world is your ability to perform certain tasks. I do think the human aspect really matters because it's about connecting to people who they are and you get a sense of, hey, this person is really part of the collective struggle. So that said, I also learned an enormous amount from him. And I remember him correcting me in a very important point that I still think back on this moment where we did a discussion around his book, A Counter History. And I was kind of an ultra leftist at that point in time, meaning that I kind of thought, you know, that ultra leftist in the sense of a subject who's so dedicated to radical change that I don't care what the objective situation is. I'm just going to make the change happen. And so you lack strategic thinking. You don't analyze the situation. You're just like, let's change it now. And there's some value in that. And I like the kind of, you know, the fervor, if you will. But it's misguided because you're not going to be able to succeed unless you analyze the objective situation and know it. And he said to me in kind of my ultra leftist critiques of liberalism, he said something important. He said, you know, it's all we have. You know, that's actually the dominant political discourse is a discourse that all people are created equal and everybody's free. And what we need to do is not burn that and throw it out and get rid of it in this kind of anarchist way. What we need to do is we take those principles and we universalize them. Like who doesn't want all people to be free and all people to be equal? But to make that happen, of course, you have to change the socioeconomic base and you have to have broader changes. But it really opened my mind up to discarding this kind of ultra-leftist critique of liberalism and thinking his book on class struggle is excellent on that front. Where he says, you know what? Marxists aren't these economic reductionists who are just about class in the liberal sense of that term. They understand that class struggle is the struggle between nations. It's a struggle between sexes. It's a struggle between racialized groups. And that if you're a real Marxist dedicated to equality, then you want all of those class struggles to succeed. And that means recognizing the full human dignity of everyone. And that needs to be a very big part of all of the conversations and all of the organizing that we're doing. Not the sectarianism stuff. Criticize identity politics. It needs to be completely blown out of the water. But identity politics has its roots in this liberal universalist project. Let's take that and actually universalize it. And so anyway, I also just learned some very important personal lessons in conversing with him, for sure.

Hakim: I love that. I love that for you. I'm so glad that you had this experience. One of them, because Lacerdo, I started reading a bit later on. Parenti was much more of an immediate exposure when I first became a Marxist. And he was already, when I began martial arts, he was already fairly old. But now he's in his 90s. And we've always thought about how nice would it be to have him on and whatnot. But the man has cognitively declined somewhat to do his old age and frail condition. But that's kind of the experience. I could imagine having that I would not have. So I have such a joy in my heart that you got to have that experience, especially with somebody of that caliber of intellect. And also, not to glaze you a little too much, we're kind of having a moment like that with you. I wanted to say that.

Gabriel Rockhill: I've been a fanboy of the work that you've been doing for a very, very long time. The feeling is mutual.

Hakim: Oh, you're too sweet. I have a little add-on to this question. You specifically, because in the phrase, I really like it. You specifically write, it's a particular version of Marxism that for material reasons developed in the imperial core where there's significant ideological pressure to conform to its dictates. And you say pressure to conform to its dictates. Could you explain what this means more materially, like in organizing spaces or maybe also in the academy where you've experienced it? How do you...

Gabriel Rockhill: live that how do you experience it and for the listeners to be able to contextualize yeah yeah there are many ways that this happens at a material level the dominant forms of knowledge production and dissemination are controlled by, obviously, the capitalist ruling class at the highest level. But given that Marxism has such broad public appeal, they have had to make concessions. And therefore, they have a project, and some of this I map out in my book that's coming out, And one of the concessions has been to allow Marxism a certain space, but then to control the version of Marxism that is available. And that version of Marxism is anti-communist, at a minimum capitalist accommodationist, meaning if there's no real alternative, then I guess capitalism is all we have and we can complain about it until we're blue in the face, but there's nothing else that we can do. So therefore, we remain within the capitalist fold, if not imperialist accommodationist. And the people who have made very lucrative careers off of this type of Marxism or other radical theories that present themselves as post-Marxist or more radical than Marxist or whatever, they control a lot of these institutions, publishing houses, the conference circuit. many institutional spaces as well for organized political organizing. There's a lot of Trotskyism. There's a lot of social democracy. There's a lot of libertarian socialism. And these people sometimes will be the most brutal gatekeepers imaginable because they want to be the leftists in the room. They want to define what Marxism is. And they don't want to have any problems with the people who say that there might be some value in having socialism be something more than an idea. They don't want to deal with the actual history of real struggles to build socialism. And they certainly don't want to be put in a situation where there are organizing endeavors that are not about sectarianism, opportunism, social democratic concessions, revisionism, et cetera, but actually about aligning on the global anti-imperialist struggle to build socialism. And so I could go into individual examples, but they might get kind of, I know your MO is a little bit more like airing some dirty laundry. So I guess I can share at least one story. And that is that the book that I just completed called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? It was originally one book that I wrote in French, and I actually wrote it entirely, and so it was completed. I had a book contract with La Fabrique, which is the French equivalent to Verso Books. They work very closely with Sebastian Budgin and the Verso crew. And after having interceded in the manuscript repeatedly, literally every single sentence... while admitting that they didn't know anything about the evidentiary basis that I was drawing on. They said, we don't know what it is that you've read, but we have to make these changes. At the last second, when we finally were able to, in a tug of war, kind of figure out a manuscript that kind of worked, but ultimately I wasn't very satisfied with, They pulled the plug on it entirely, broke the contract and threw it in the trash. And so that's a good example of how the gatekeepers work. When push comes to shove, I thought quite naively that as a radical publisher known for doing Marxist work and other kind of work that was, you know, pushing the envelope to some extent, because Verso has done some good books. La Fabrique has done some good books. They've also done some crap. Like, quite honestly, it's just crap. If you, like, look at it objectively, I don't think there'd be much doubt on the part of most people. But the fact that you would intercede at a gatekeeper level like that demonstrates what these people are capable of. And the main grudge that they had is that I had spoken negatively about Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno... And these were people who at the end of the day are left intellectuals who are part of, you know, the team that we're on. It was kind of the team mentality. And what I'd said about Adorno and Arendt wasn't even a kind of personal subjective formulation of an opinion about them. I was sharing things that are part of the historical record and could only be doubted if you are a dogmatic defender of the icon's And the golden calves of the imperial theory industry. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism was written with support of the foreign office from the UK. She has ties to British intelligence. She was supported by the capitalist ruling class and given access to the Rockefeller Villa in Italy. These are part of the historical record. She talks about it herself in the Rockefeller Villa.

Yugopnik: But even if you didn't, it's simplistic. It's so fucking simplistic.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, the origins of totalitarianism. It's interesting because the first part of the book has some value. Then it's just, I mean, it really is very, very bad later on. And so the impact of the foreign office is palpable, I think, within the book. And then Adorno, I spell this out in my forthcoming book. I mean, the guy had multiple ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was, you know, he supported the Zionist settler colonial project. in West Asia. He was an outright anti-communist and a direct supporter of imperialism in various forms. And he worked with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which is a CIA front organization. And even with the point person, who is a CIA agent, Melvin Lasky in Germany. Again, it's all part of the public record. And so one of the problems with these gatekeepers is they don't want democratic debate. And all the things that they accuse people of us of doing, being authoritarian, right? Being totalitarian, trying to control everything. It's like, we don't have power. How can we possibly do that? They actually do it themselves, being anti-democratic. Like, just open up the spectrum of analysis. Let us into the room so that we can also share some evidence that might be helpful for the rest of the people. And so that's just one example, but there are many others. Apparently I'm on a list that has made me, that communicates to people on the inside that I shall not be invited to certain conferences. So a blacklist. It's an internal blacklist.

Hakim: You know, there's two. When you get on the academic blacklist and do not get called for conferences, that's your badge of sincerity as a Marxist. When you get the CIA prize for great achievement in journalism… As a journalist, it's the two bullets in the back of the head as it's deemed a suicide. So there are worse ways for it to... But yeah, it shows your sincerity. That's my point. When you're being locked out of these spaces. Because these spaces, as you mentioned, are... Not to quote a cliche of Luxembourg, but those who do not move do not notice their chains. It's one of those where they allow you to move, but they put the room in a very specific setup where you hit the walls very quickly. If you try to break through them, well, then the chains are no longer necessary. They just continue with the execution. That's the idea that they have there. And my favorite thing about Verso, and this is just... A particular dislike. This is not the Verse of Hating episode, but I just haven't liked them for a long time. I have not written a book. I'm not trying to get published or anything. But when I would look through their stuff, I would always find it very interesting the choice of authors they would have. And you specifically mentioned Adorno. and Arendt, and it's these two people were, I mean Adorno later in his life, but Arendt her entire life, are raging Zionists. Arendt is also very, very racist, like disgustingly, so things that she's written about Algerians, basically, um dog whistling about racial inferiority compared to the french amongst other things um and these people completely okay no nothing not even like a little um disclaimer next to their name right uh but not a single classic of like Alba Szymanski, who's now long dead, he's been dead since the 80s, but his fantastic works, not a single republishing, despite the monumental efforts that he's had. His work on imperialism, for example, which is the most relevant to today, of course, there's historical interest to, is the red flag still flying in human rights in the Soviet Union, and his book on Poland. But that other work, specifically on imperialism, on imperialism is kind of like a foundational work for modern Marxist analysis it's 600 something pages and nothing not a single what's it called the reprint that you find online the one where it's not just a scan like it's the actual text in my last year or my second to last year of med school I'm the guy who sat there and OCR'd it and fucking retyped it and then put it on the archive because there was nowhere to find it and you can't control F anything

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, thanks, because that's the version I read, actually.

Hakim: I'm so glad. Hey, see, we have a connection.

Gabriel Rockhill: Socialization of production.

Hakim: Exactly right. It's me in this mind of a dude, the guy who has all the archive... I sent it to him, I think, also at the time.

Gabriel Rockhill: Just one quick note is that with Verso and other publishers like this, the reason that they're such gatekeepers too is, again, you just follow the money. It's the political economy of knowledge production. Their market niche is the radical theory industry. The imperial theory industry is actually the term that I prefer. And that's how they've made their money and that's what they're going to continue to promote. And occasionally there are contradictions within that because they did do some Lasorda books, but they made sure that they, you know, chose those sort of books as best they could to make sure that they filtered out any of the Leninism because that's what they're doing. But a lot of the other things that they publish are perfectly in line with all, I mean, Zizek, of course, and all the radical democracy stuff. And the goal is really the pushing of commodities and their market niche. So they don't want somebody who would be critical of that or just raise a question like, you say you're Marxist. What's the political economy of your knowledge production and why is it that you're selling us these commodities? Like, why can't we ask that question? Yeah. Is it too hard hitting for you? Are we going to hurt your feelings, you know? Or is it actually about the forces that are driving the type of ideological production that you're doing? And are we touching, to make a Zizekian joke, are we touching the real, right? Are we touching your bottom line? And is that why, in the case of La Fabrique, that's why they canceled my contract, because I was touching their bottom line. They didn't want a book out there saying, don't buy the rest of the books by La Fabrique, because they have intelligence connections and are radical recuperators who are actually rabid anti-communists. That's what they didn't want, right? Sorry for the rant on that front, but it was important to connect.

Hakim: Yeah, and so we'd love to hear it. Also, you have a bit of an inside look into this. At the end of the day, we can draw the materialist analysis of the background and we make assumptions, but when you see it with your own eyes, it's different. Moving away from the opportunist form of publishing and into something actually truly contributory to our revolutionary knowledge, the AIM, the Anti-Imperialist Marxism series. The last I checked was when the Torkel Laussen book came out, which we also had him on the show. by the way. Yeah, I heard that.

Gabriel Rockhill: That was great.

Hakim: Yeah, and he's fantastic. But I also saw that Ali Qadri is coming with a new book in the series. Lawson has yet another book, this time on Unequal Exchange, coming out. Does that man sleep? I don't know. He's putting them out, and they're so good. I've been recently pestering the boys to look into his most... I mean, now it's not the most recent book. but he's had so many, the global perspective was fantastic, but the long transition, which is most recent one, which came out in 2024, long transition towards socialism and the end of capitalism, which is fantastic, published in Instagram, books I highly recommend everybody read it. My question here is, First of all, your efforts and those of your colleagues and many others are at the forefront of modern English language Marxist theory. If it wasn't for these works that you guys are putting out and the incredible body of intellectual power that you assembled to review these, to look at manuscripts, to help with the publishing and editing and whatnot, There would be no way of getting this in English. There's stuff going on in Chinese and in the various intersting languages and Arabic and in Portuguese, but there is very little in English. Um, so this is genuinely a, a manuals and analysis for entirely new generation of Marxist, something that was previously reserved, possibly only to monthly review for the most part, which also is absolutely fantastic. Um, Could you tell us a little about how did this come about? What are your plans going to the future with it? If you can give us a few teasers, what's coming past 2025? I'm just, I'm interested.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, maybe the first thing that I'll say is that all four of us are involved in cultural class struggle, right? Like that's one of the main things that we do. And when you do that, it's important to not only do it as an individual, you have to work collectively. And then you have to always think about building institutions and organizational forms that that allow for you to be much more effective and bring other people in. And so part of my own intellectual class struggle is not only my theoretical writings and the other work that I do, but also building up structures that allow for the collectivization of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge. And the specific book series, AIM, Anti-Imperialist Marxism, is run with Emmanuel Ness and Jennifer Ponce de Leon. We work with Iskra Books, who's fantastic. And we have a number of projects coming forth. We have two, potentially three, Lusordo translations, but we're probably going to roll them out one a year. The Communist Question, his last book, which is fantastic. The Absent Left, which deals as well with questions of the spectacle and propaganda. And we also got the rights to his last Gramsci book. And so we'd like to become basically a... The place you go to for Lesorto's work, we also have, we've been working on translations of authors from across the global south because one of the things that we really lack in the Anglophone world, but arguably also in a lot of other languages, is enough access to global south Marxism that is both the historical work, meaning the kind of classics, people like Fernanda Zeretamar from Cuba or others like that, to contemporary scholars who are doing really important work today. So we have a number. None of those projects have signed contracts on them yet, so I won't announce them, but they're in the works, and so people should definitely check them out. I'll also just mention we have another sister series called Studies in Anti-Imperialist Marxism that is with de Gruyter and Brill, and the goal with this is precisely in order to push back against the level of criticism controlled opposition within even the publishing industry and other academic platforms, we want there to be the opportunity for academic scholars who need to work with academic presses to be able to publish work that isn't controlled by those types of gatekeepers. And so DeGroeter and Brill, of course, are academic publishers. And so people could get credit basically for their universities for that or for their CVs. But then the paperbacks will be published most likely with ISCRA. And so they'll still be available as cheap. Exactly right, not something for $800 for a hard pack. Exactly. That's been the problem with a lot of Ali Qadri's work or other people. We're in Springer and Palgrave Macmillan and they're $100 and nobody buys them because their budgetary model is they just sell to research institutions, to libraries at research institutions. And so they sell the 300 books, they're always guaranteed, but then the book doesn't actually circulate. So our goal is we want books that circulate and so we can get them in people's hands. Absolutely. uh i'll also give a shout out if people are interested on friday we're doing a book launch for john bellamy foster's most recent book on epicurus and marx which is excellent and it's on friday at 11 30 a.m uh eastern standard time say the date say the date saturday the 15th november 15th 11 30 a.m est check out the critical theory workshop and there's plenty of info on there about that and other activities I love it.

Hakim: We'll be, of course, sure to leave all these links and whatnot. I was going to say, by the way, Ali Qadri is one of those people who, like you, is somebody who I've always wanted to have on. Who's that? Ali Qadri. I've been meaning to get him on. I've never actually reached out because every single time I feel like reaching out, I realize he's working on something new.

Gabriel Rockhill: you see it on his academia page same like with you thank god you reached out like yeah we're always like mentioning you but like i don't want to bother this guy oh you know this is the this is the moment when i'm reminded about the one thing i wanted to make sure that i said on your show and that is a big shout out to luke because luke is the person who said i should reach out to all of you Nice work, Luke. Thank you, Luke. What's up, Luke?

Hakim: Incredibly based of you. We appreciate that. And the reason is because maybe, I don't know if you've worked with him or not. He's, I mean, in a peripheral, a tertiary sphere close by. But Roland Boer, he is so incredible. But I think I've messaged him on two different occasions before. And both times he replies so politely and so nicely with all the good wishes, but he just mentions like, I just, I have too much work to do. I have this and this project going on. I would love to come on, but I just am too strapped for time. So maybe at a future point. And after the second time I wrote, I'm like, then I just get embarrassed. Like, I can't just keep going. pestering the guy. And since then, all of the academic sphere that I want to reach out to, I'm like, I think I have better things to do than to hop on our stupid podcast.

Gabriel Rockhill: The thing that you're doing is also you're making accessible a lot of this theory to a kind of broader audience and in a different form. And so I can't remember what episode I listened to with you guys, but I thought it was quite interesting because it reminded me a lot of Brecht. And Bertolt Brecht does a lot of work on form. And form is, OK, got all these great ideas. What form do you give them to connect them to the people? Right. And that's a big part of what we all have to do. And so being able to connect with academics or scholars who are doing important work in their own, you know, regard. But then translating into a form that reaches a broader audience and different types of publics is really significant. So I can definitely hit up Roland and Ali, both of whom I know, and encourage them to come on.

Hakim: You, that would be the greatest. Genuinely, the best favor we've ever gotten from any guest would be you helping us get those two on the podcast. Usually the best we get is a retweet. Yeah, exactly right.

Yugopnik: Oh, that's difficult as well. Yeah, sometimes. Lately, very difficult. Could you, like, I have a very, like, low-key niche question, but it really, I think, connects to your analysis of specifically gatekeeping, non-pacified Western anti-communist Marxism. Yeah. Can you try – I'm trying to put myself in the position of like a very normal viewer that is not that connected to the entire conversation that we're having. Can you try and put us in the headspace of, for example, somebody working for a publishing house since that was a big piece of the topics that we were covering? So, somebody working for a publishing house that gets a manuscript, is that how you call it? Sorry. Yeah. A manuscript in front of them that happens to be, for example, very openly revolutionary or in its historical analysis, very supportive of what in mainstream Western quasi-intellectual circles would be deemed as controversial, et cetera, et cetera. I'm overcomplicating it. Somebody gets a manuscript in front of them. They're just, you know, one of the 20 people that, yeah, bureaucrats in the particular corporate structure of, for example, a publishing house that read through those. How do they have the capacity of seeing, like, oh, my God, this is crazy, evil, anti-capitalist Marxism, and, like, spot it and be like, oh, no, we're sending back this manuscript. Example one or example two, oh, it moved through the multiple stages, and now we have to, for example, do very, very particular editing to pacify it for our audience so that it's not something to both terrifying people from the market perspective, but also not too terrifying for very often, as you, as you put it, you know, deep pockets that, that, uh, keep lights on in our publishing house that would no longer be on if somebody, you know, was like, why the fuck did you publish this? So to make it as, as human as possible, like, how do you think, how do you view this, this entire process of active self-censoring, if we can call it, uh, that happening on the, on the field itself, please.

Gabriel Rockhill: so with publishing houses usually there is the acquisition editor who oversees what they're going to acquire in the manuscripts that they're going to publish and a lot of that vetting goes on through kind of professional networks to start with so you know the ivy leagues have privileged access to certain publishers and there's all these different hierarchies and connections and things like that so often there are systems that are set up so those manuscripts don't even get through in the first place But then I think that the gold standard within the majority of the publishing industry is that there are just certain things that are beyond the pale. And that usually has to do with the defense of actually existing socialism. So that's a thing. Like that's a thing. It's a thing that is often not even conscious ideologically because it's so deeply ingrained at an unconscious level. Like literally, so I, prior to becoming educated, I studied for a very long time in imperial institutions. And I worked through the writings of some of the most famous contemporary philosophers. and it's systematic they all talk about totalitarianism and how bad everything is in actually existing socialist countries they compare them to fascist countries it's just constant and so there's so much of the professional managerial class stratum in the imperial core that has it as ideological bedrock that all that socialism has represented in the world is death and destruction and gulags and this, that, and the other thing, all the kind of horror stories that one could imagine. And so as soon as that crops up in a manuscript, it's flagged as, well, this is great. It's ideological. Right. It's ideological because it breaks out of the dominant ideology. But you don't know that the dominant ideology is an ideology because you think it's reality. And therefore, when something that's real confronts your ideology, you think that it's actually just ideological. So it's a funny way that that happens. And so a lot of the things that have been published by people like Roland Bohr, Ali Qadri or some of these other people, it's the really big publishers. They're just in it for the money, and they know that the books are only going to circulate – usually the print runs are like 300, 400 copies, and they just go to libraries. And so they kind of get lost to some extent, but they make their money off of it by selling it to libraries. So if you can capitalize on it and it doesn't have broad – public effects, then why not? I mean, the capitalists will shoot themselves in the foot to make a dime. We know that. That's like how they roll. They'd shoot a lot of other people in the foot. So that's the short answer.

Hakim: I was going to say something that you said that I found very nice is that the point on ideology is like, oh, this is ideology because in their ideological perspective, which they consider to be reality, it stands against what they currently believe, so it must be. And it's the same thing where when you're in the part of a particular racial group in a… particular socioeconomic setup within the hegemon um nothing's political until it's something that stands against you like unless it's a black man kneeling in a football game why did he have to make it political but all the rest of it all of life is political but because it serves their interests there's and it's not considered to be uh very nice

Yugopnik: You could even be a person whose pinnacle of his career is to talk about ideology and to introduce people to conceptualizing what ideology is as, I don't know, the subjective notion through which we see the world in form, the material conditions and so on. And you can literally grow your career on that and then at the same time reach some sort of plateau where like, oh yeah, everything is ideology, everything to an extent is subjective. except their perspective to the Asian hordes and everything east of Moscow. Who am I quoting here to an extent? Everybody knows who I'm quoting.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's such an important point, though, too, because there's the slander terms that they use all of the time to refer to Marxists who think that maybe changing the world would be better than just misinterpreting it. are terms like dogmatism, right? Who's actually being dogmatic when you refuse to look at any of the evidence, you refuse to study it seriously, and you just have a knee-jerk response and say, oh, it was just all horrors and it was all awful. It's thoroughly, thoroughly dogmatic. Everybody knows that statement. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you don't even have to make an argument. What's funny is a lot of the figures in the Western left, when they make all of these horrendous and incorrect statements about actually existing socialism, watch their citational practice because in general they won't cite anyone because they don't have to because what they're doing is they're just repeating the dominant ideology. Right. They're genuflecting to the kind of bona fides of anti-communism and therefore they don't have to cite anyone. And if they do cite someone, then it actually usually gets even worse because they tend to cite like people have connections to the Central Intelligence Agency, like well-known propagandists, you know, bourgeois historians.

JT: You're giving them a lot of credits, usually Ayn Rand. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Or Arthur Koestler. He's another one. Arthur Koestler is like a... He was deep in the deep state and then is sometimes a reference to somebody who knew something about actually existing socialism, which is ridiculous. It was big in my university. Koestler was, yeah.

Hakim: Timothy Snyder is the worst culprit of this thing which you mentioned. I've had the displeasure of checking some of his sources because I'm interested to see sometimes what they write. And then you look at their sourcing, this like tiny, tiny size six print, right? And you look at it and it's like – it's two things. It's two common examples. Number one, it's like a half-fabricated source or it doesn't really say what they're trying to say it is. Or it's just like attributions or what's it called? Hearsay, things like that. Like not first, not high level evidence. Or circular, what's it called? Citations where it's like anti-communist number one cites known anti-communist number two who cites anti-communist number three who is affiliated with an intelligence agency like Conquest. And Conquest cites either a fabricated source Or a source that is also hearsay or something. It's genuinely, once you look past, like you pull back the curtain, you realize how much of it is nonsense. And the problem is that so many people have so many things going on in their life, nobody can sit there. No one will dig three levels deep to see what is nonsense.

Gabriel Rockhill: And then when you're at Yale and you have the credentials and you publish, I don't know who he publishes with, or I guess he was at Yale, right? Yeah. Then you publish with the leading publishers, and then you're hyped as being the leading historian of X, and you're off to the races. That's ridiculous. There's no stopping you in your propaganda, basically.

JT: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. I mean, basically what a lot of them do is they academically launder state propaganda. Yeah. which was the propaganda department run in Great Britain. And so he was doing direct propaganda work. It wasn't indirect. And there's a lot of other... If you go through the leading historians of the Soviet Union in the early Cold War, try to find one that wasn't intelligence and let me know who that was.

Yugopnik: Because...

Gabriel Rockhill: Sovietology, Sovietology, particularly U.S. Sovietology, but obviously British and other versions of it, it is an intelligence product. I mean, the first think tanks that they set up, the first area studies programs that they set up in the U.S., one was at Columbia and then one was at Harvard. These were literally direct U.S. national security state cutouts. And they relocated the Soviet Bureau of the OSS, the predecessor organization of the CIA, to Morningside Heights, and it became part of Columbia University. So in this case, they weren't academically laundering state propaganda. They were relocating state actors and giving them university cover. And that's the start to the early Cold War Sovietology. So if you want to understand the Soviet Union and you're reading this stuff, then you lack basic media literacy skills. You should know who pays for it, where it came from, and who these people are, and why they're writing the things that they're writing.

Hakim: And the worst part is when you go into academia, there are professionals, like professors and academics who are paid and who also believe this nonsense themselves to teach you to not develop the academic literacy or the literacy required to be able to stay through the ideology of it. Instead, it's to just kind of like unquestionably internalize it. It is generally fascinating. You think like, I mean, JT studied, if I remember, journalism and communications. Hugo did political science. Gabriel, you've lived your life across various academic disciplines. I'm in medicine. This is not supposed to be an ideological. I mean, of course, we know everything is ideological, but it's not supposed to be ideological. The amount of anti-communism. In my medical school, I went to a very, quote unquote, prestigious med school. It's only on the name, I would say. The quality was nothing different from any of my colleagues I've studied. But the sheer weight of random and completely irrelevant. When you were speaking, it reminded me, we were sitting in a... Like in a clinical physiology class, which is you're looking at like electrolytes differences in the blood. That's what you're looking at. And they all of a sudden start talking about Lenin almost having – like, oh, maybe he had syphilis and Lenin was a very evil man. I'm like, what the – What does this have to do with anything? Why is this in my textbook? It's just incredibly strange. Gabriel, we've taken so much of your time. We really genuinely thank you for the fantastic... First of all, your time to be here with us, your amazing answers, your great recommendations, the fantastic work you put out, all the initiatives you're a part of. Genuinely, it is such a refreshing...

Yugopnik: presence to have to balance this out no i i hated gabriel the whole time we gotta we gotta keep on the self-criticism all right he's an opportunist social democrat might be an agent exactly right yeah yeah No, the criticism we should be doing to you, obviously, in context of your writings is, what was it? Oh, yeah. Unrealistic. Dogmatic.

Gabriel Rockhill: Far too simplistic.

Yugopnik: Dogmatic. Naive, actually.

Gabriel Rockhill: Productivist. Yeah.

Yugopnik: Accepting of the negatives of actually existing socialism.

Gabriel Rockhill: The one I love is conspiratorial. This one cracks me up. It's so funny.

Hakim: They admitted to it. No, that's conspiratorial. They can bring receipts still.

Gabriel Rockhill: Raquel cites a CIA agent who says, I did this. Raquel's conspiratorial about what that guy said he did.

JT: What more do you want?

Hakim: I was going to throw the questions also back at you. I was going to say, when we had our little dialogue, or we had your dialogue with Hugo, you said you had some questions for us. How about we round off? What was it that you're wondering about this incredible project?

Yugopnik: Yep.

JT: Hmm.

Hakim: JTU, this is all yours.

JT: Sure. Well, I guess I'll start. So I reached out to the boys, geez, five years ago now?

Hakim: A billion years ago. Something like that?

JT: No, three. God damn it. Seven to ten years ago, I reached out to the boys. Because we're all aware of each other and we had collaborated a little bit in the past. And I was like, you know, I want to start a podcast, but I am one, boring. And two, I know I won't keep myself diligent enough to do this alone. Would you guys like to do a podcast with me? I liked the idea of podcasts. There were, you know, just a couple that I listened to that I thought were entertaining enough. Like Blowback was great, very entertaining podcast. But we saw that there was not a lefty podcast that was genuinely radical, that was also not incredibly boring or dry or just too dense.

Yugopnik: Just Americans. Yeah, exactly. The contextualization of Gabriel. It's a good point.

JT: Yeah, and that's... And maybe we were expecting too little of our audience because a lot of people are like, yeah, we love the shitposting episodes, but can we get something a little bit meatier, which is why people love episodes like this one or with Ben Norton, who we had last time. But that's what we wanted. We wanted to start out where people could listen to something that was not depressing, that they weren't going to come away from our show feeling worse than when they went in about the state of the world, about our chances at a better future. And we just wanted to have a little bit of fun because we all do this for a living. We all know what the problems are. We all know that it's an uphill battle. We all know how shitty the CIA is and all that, you know, everything we're up against. And we have to get that across because it's so important. But we also don't want to get people to, like, bury their heads in the sand and be like, you know what? It's useless. I'm just going to go play video games, whatever, and blackpilled the end. Mm-hmm. Um, so we really do try to strike a balance there where we are educating people, but we're doing it in a way that is fun and it doesn't feel like we are giving them a quest that is just completely unwinnable. Um, we will always advocate for people to get involved IRL, but not if it's going to make them kill themselves, you know, that sort of thing. That's, that is, I think where we shine is we, people, um, will tune in and they will smile for an hour and feel like there are lefties out there who are educated, but who are not boring or depressed, or if they are, they hide it really well. That's the type of thing. That was the overview, our show in a nutshell, at least for me. But you guys tell me what you think.

Hakim: The intersection of ours, and this is what we've always kind of... stro for, striven for, I don't know what the correct English is. This is not my any language. I barely speak it. The intersections of it is we want to have a balance of the comedy and the humor and people are enjoying listening to us. But also at the same time, the sometimes academic angle where it's like heavy hitting. We had a fantastic guest on one time, a young economist who really sat down and in words broke down, um, like the, the current formulations of the labor theory of value and how it, uh, in comparison to, you know, more subjectivist or the, the, the nonsense economy, uh, what passes for, uh, the derivatives of neoclassical economics and even Austrian economics, uh, nowadays. And he really broke it down in such a beautiful way. That is like the academic angle we tried to get in. Sometimes we have people who do more like culture analysis. Sometimes we have people who like explain meta, uh, concepts, um, And a lot of time it's also just like, oh, what's going on in the news now? Let's look at this from a class and material base.

Yugopnik: We're actually non-sectarian, but like actually anybody can come after some vetting, of course.

Hakim: But at the end of it, and this is because Hugo, one of the most profound people I've ever met. I love this man. He gave us or he gave me the example that I always like to use because I couldn't formulate it into words before. It's what we do is the equivalent of the people who put up posters during revolutionary periods. in earlier times. I'm talking about like the early 20th century and whatnot. The point of us is not to be like some sort of thought leader. The point of us is to have some sort of formula or like an idea that we put forward to help this agitation and education process. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like something you walk across the street, you see the poster, you read it, you internalize it. Hopefully you understand the complexities that sit behind it. And then you continue with your day to some more proactive or productive, excuse me, form of organizational experience or action. That's the thing. Like, yeah, street artists and the people who put up the posters is what we like to imagine ourselves as.

Yugopnik: Pretty much. I have nothing to add. I have a whole video on YouTube called the Online Left Pipeline where I go deep into details about how I believe it actually functions and so on, but both of the boys covered it pretty well. The only thing that I constantly, constantly, constantly, constantly feel like people should be reminded about is the main difference between somebody creating content just for the sake of content or to relate to the conversation we had today, somebody generating, you know, somebody, for example, writing an article just for the sake of that article being published and then potentially generating the money or somebody just doing live streams for the sake of live streams or doing podcasts for the sake of podcasts or publishing short form documentaries for the sake of short form documentaries versus actually trying to utilize whatever medium at their disposal they have to contribute to the cause is whether they want you to actually move further down said pipeline. The second somebody wants to keep you there means he is treating you like a client, like a customer that he wants to milk as much cash out of in the long term and that is immediately fine. Maybe it's a big word, but it's immediately reactionary. That's how we like to see it. And I'm pretty sure most people trying to agitate for the idea also see it in whatever form it might be. And obviously some are flippant. 7 billion times more sophisticated. I would never even dare to compare. And some are very simple and are sometimes even literal posters on the street. But that's what differentiates it. That's the dialectics of the whole fucking conversation.

Gabriel Rockhill: the result yeah and you're good at connecting with young people from what i understand too right which is a niche that the right is very good at working so it's nice to see i don't know if you have any secrets for how you do it other than being entertaining and engaging in a kind of different level but you're reaching the youth in a fascinating way

JT: It's too kind, but yeah. I don't know that we do have a secret. I think we had an unfair advantage in that we all have existing platforms, and we were able to just kind of suck people from those to here. Yeah, right.

Hakim: And then help continue to develop the... Yeah. Every single one of us had been working in this, like producing content in the sphere for years before we started. Like if this was from the ground up, just three random people would have been much more difficult. Right. But that's how it always is. We stand on shoulders of giants in different ways. Everybody contributes. And I always like to think about it. Maybe this is a bit like Larpy, but Guevara said that if he were to perish, as long as his defiant cry were to reach somebody else and encourage them to pick up the gun in his concept of focus and whatnot, then he knows that he has succeeded. Then he's glad to give up his life for a cause.

Yugopnik: That's the whole fucking point.

Hakim: Yeah, and that's how I always felt in a much less dramatic way, I guess, about us. Of course. This is a blip in the vast sea of content that's produced, but somebody listening to this at some point will eventually be inspired to go and create a platform far larger than the one that we currently have. to develop and propagate these ideas in different unique ways and fun ways to people of all ages in a far more dynamic way. And this will just continue, hopefully, to snowball until the glorious sunrise of socialism will be cast. In your countries as well as ours, hopefully. But I'm sorry to say your country will have to be balkanized first. No, there you go. We disagree. It feels to me with such joy.

Yugopnik: We do not deny having reactionary sentences here. I do, I know I do, but that's the point.

Hakim: first things first i'm reclaiming oklahoma for the great uh nation of texas yeah there you go exactly right the the the emirate of texas will be quite um but we'll let you go now we've had such a great time today um we we genuinely appreciate all your effort uh academically as well as the the knowledge that you've uh helped what's the word in english not shower us is that provide yeah provided yes showering i don't know why that there's a bit of discomfort in the background you want to shower with the professor that's a classic oh my god no don't don't embarrass me now all right so uh please let the people who are the fine people listening to us uh know where they can find you again

Gabriel Rockhill: I've got a website that I try to keep updated, although it needs a serious update itself. So gabrielrockhill.com. Thecriticaltheoryworkshop.com has a lot of information about its activities and then all the other book and journal and a few other projects. So those two websites would probably be the go-to. And... Other than that, yeah, I have this book that's coming out. I don't have it right here, but it literally just came out physically. And apparently people are already able to get copies of it, even though it's listed as December 1 as the release date. So that's called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Monthly Review Press. Nice.

Hakim: In the description. Absolutely. Where I'm at, I can't get a copy of it until December. So by the time this episode goes out for wide release, it should be like a week away for anybody listening to be able to purchase the books. Hey, think about a nice little Christmas gift or holiday gift for your loved ones. All right, then this has been the D program. Thanks to everybody for listening. I am Hakeem.

Gabriel Rockhill: I'm JT. I'm Yugopnik. I am Gabriel Rockhill. And I thought I would leave you with a quote, which is attributed to Mark Twain, although apparently he didn't say it. It's that it's easier to fool someone than convince them that they've been fooled. Banger. Absolute banger. Thank you.