Episode 33 - Pt. 5 Fascism, Anti-Communism, the CIA and French Theory with Gabriel Rockhill

Jules Taylor: Today is Tuesday, July 6th. The year is 2021. This is No Easy Answers, and I'm your host, Jules Taylor. Today, like all days, I have no easy answers for you. Thank you for tuning in from wherever you happen to be listening. My name is Jules Taylor. This is No Easy Answers, and I am delighted to have you with us for today's episode. No Easy Answers is a podcast about politics, philosophy, and the human condition, and we are 100% listener supported. And so if you like what we do and you want to support us, the best way that you can do that is to subscribe at our Patreon page. That's at patreon.com forward slash no easy answers. Every little bit helps, and we can't thank our paid subscribers enough for all of their support. They keep this show going, and so thank you. We quite literally could not do this without you. And you know the subscribers who follow us on Patreon have been supporting us without any additional bonus content to this point. I mean, that is until recently. Because I've started releasing the interview portions of these episodes in advance on our Patreon account. So listeners that either wish to get the meat of the conversation without hearing my Patreon pitch or my monologues can receive that content on its own. And you know, a few days before we publish the actual episodes on the main feed. Patrons received the interview in today's episode last week, and so if you head to our Patreon page right now, you'll be able to listen to two different forthcoming interviews, one of which is with my friend and podcast colleague Craig from Acid Horizon. We had a free-form conversation about music, philosophy, and society. Fans of this show, I think, might enjoy the content over at Acid Horizon, so be sure to check those guys out. The other episode is a very long and unedited conversation with professor and author Nate Holdren about the history of injury employment law. That conversation is about two and a half hours long, and the episode itself that will contain the interview will be significantly shorter after it's edited. So if you want to listen to the entire unedited conversation and get a feel for what things are like behind the scenes a little bit here at No Easy Answers, there are two conversations available right now that you can unlock instantly by heading to our Patreon Okay, so enough about the Patreon and the forthcoming episodes. I have an interview for you today that I could not be more excited to bring to you. I got a chance to speak to Professor Gabriel Rockhill about fascism, the CIA's interest in French philosophy, and how America has always been fascist to its core. As you'll hear in our conversation, we broach a lot of different areas. And I think Professor Rockhill even said at one point that it might seem to listeners that our conversation is rather scattered, but it's important to have an analysis that considers the social totality. And this conversation is meant to be a sort of capstone on our series examining fascism. I say sort of a capstone because fascism seems like something we will have to continually examine, and I can't say that this is our very last episode on that topic. But the last four episodes have centered around fascism, as well as some of the political thinkers of the interwar period. Our last episode was on Carl Schmitt, the one before that was Heidegger, and the episode before that was an interview with Benjamin Teitelbaum about emerging neo-fascist movements and where they intersect in geopolitics. So, I could not think of a better guest to help us rein in a lot of those conversations and provide some clarity on the topic of fascism. Because as I think listeners of this show will know, fascism isn't just a swastika, it isn't just a Roman salute, a uniform, or any of those things in isolation. Fascism is a system of, at times, seemingly disparate yet interconnected working parts that aren't always easy to articulate. As you'll hear Professor Rockhill mention, there have been several books written that attempt to describe fascism, attempting to develop something called the generic concept of fascism. But no one's gotten the definition right, and so Professor Rockhill offers us some terms to use to form a materialist analysis of fascism. And I have to say those terms can really help us grapple with fascism and aspects of fascism as it occurs through different points in history. Professor Rockhill wrote a four-part series of articles entitled Fascism, A Counter-History, and we have links to those articles in the show notes. There was also a really great interview he did with Chris Hedges for Russia Today. I'll leave a link to that. And he sent me an article this afternoon. He mentioned this article during this interview. And he said it will be coming out soon, and it was just published today. And it's a deep dive into the planned fascist seizure of state power in the United States in 1934. In his message today when he sent it over, he said since it's published on the six-month anniversary of the storming of the Capitol... He hopes it will provide some historical perspective that allows us to better understand and fight against the complex machinations of the ruling class. I highly recommend you check out Professor Rockville's articles, follow him on Twitter, and also I want to send a listener shout out to Tusker2 on Twitter. They reached out over Twitter and recommended I interview Professor Rockhill. And so it was really cool to receive something like that from one of our listeners, especially to have the resultant interview fit so well within the overall arch of the podcast. And so that's super cool. Thank you, Tusker2. Okay, so here we go. Here's my interview with Professor Gabriel Rockhill.

Gabriel Rockhill: My name is Gabriel Rockhill. I'm a writer, philosopher, and activist. I've been working on themes coming out of kind of social and political philosophy and aesthetics for decades now. I spent about 10 years in France where I studied, did my PhD, worked with some of the well-known luminaries within the French theoretical circles. And in the evolution of my own work, though, given that it's driven by a materialist analysis of society, I've also identified some of the limitations of both the figures I studied with and some of the figures that I was studying, if it be Figures like Foucault or Derrida with whom I studied or Badiou and Balibar also with whom I studied. I think my own work has evolved in a slightly different direction, but I'm excited about having a conversation because I think we'll touch on a lot of these themes.

Jules Taylor: Yeah, I certainly hope so. I mean, I think I mentioned over Twitter when we were going back and forth that I was just really happy to have like a sprawling conversation with you about any number of things. But if I had to parse it down to a couple key topics, it would probably be fascism and some continental philosophy and things like that. But that's really interesting, man. You actually you studied with Derrida, right?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, yeah, originally I grew up in Kansas on a farm and I was looking for various ways to expand the horizons of my material existence and always enjoyed reading and philosophy and poetry and the arts. And so I was drawn, probably like a lot of young people who have intellectual interests, to what was identified as the most cutting edge form of theory and so learned French and then ended up going and studying there and was very immersed, I should say, within that particular community for a number of years. And I remember one particularly important event for me was September 11th, 2001 happened when I was in Paris studying with Derrida. And I was more than disappointed by both the lack of understanding of what was going on on the part of Derrida himself in the seminars, but also my own ignorance. I really had no clue regarding the state of global politics, U.S. imperialism, and everything else. And so that was one of the key moments that really... set me in motion to begin exploring the kind of broader material history of the world rather than doing an idealist textual analysis of the so-called history of Western metaphysics and the kind of canonical texts that have been established since, you know, the late 19th century, basically, as what people call philosophy. Right, right.

Jules Taylor: Can I ask how old you were when 9-11 happened?

Gabriel Rockhill: Good question. I was born in 72.

Jules Taylor: So if you're quicker at math than I am, um, so you were, you were over 30 at that point. It was just, okay. Yeah. Okay. No, I mean, I asked was, I mean, like I'm 37 and I, I was around graduating high school around the time when nine 11 happened. And, uh, I mean, for many folks in my generation, it was a, it was a seminal event. And, and I don't think that at least for me, like I was not, uh, initiated to leftist politics, we should say, at the time. I grew up in Texas in probably a rural setting like you did in Kansas. And so 9-11 kind of pushed me in the opposite direction. I damn near joined the fucking military at that point. No kidding. No kidding.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's an interesting polarizing moment, right? It really reveals how much one's own subjective orientation or ideology when it segues with objective social forces like an event such as that there can be massive massive changes uh but i'm glad to hear i take it that you've drifted away from oh yeah yeah definitely yeah i mean i got a sickle and hammer tattoo you know okay there we go yeah yeah figure things out then

Jules Taylor: Yeah, you know, we just did an episode on Carl Schmitt, and I started reading a little bit of Agamben at that point, and I think even with, I mean, even 20 years later, we're coming up on the 20-year anniversary, even 20 years later, at least in my own mind, I'm still putting 9-11 in perspective, like understanding the sort of state of exception, and um and the way that that sort of triggered what seems like i mean it's like we all in my generation saw 9-11 happen and nothing ever got better you know so there's been this this really steady decline and and And while I have, obviously, like I'm, you know, I identify as a communist, I'm Marxist-Leninist and all those things, you know, but it's amazing how you can look back and even with newer studies that you read, you can reframe and kind of re-cement the impact or re- sort of acquaint yourself with how impactful and what the fallout from a certain event was. So I think our conversation is really, like, this is basically like a capstone conversation to the last, like, four episodes this show has taken. We did one on Carl Schmitt before this. We did one on Heidegger before that. And before that, there was an interview with Benjamin Teitelbaum who wrote War for Eternity. I saw that. Yeah, so all of this being said, it's, you know, fascism, things have gotten kind of dark on this podcast. We've studied a lot of fascism at this point, a lot of, we got into stuff with like Julius Evola and some of the more darker things down that path. But I, you know, you wrote some articles that articulated some points that I think a lot of folks on the left understand, but maybe haven't put into words so much in the way that, like, the United States discreetly internationalized fascism. It was a brilliant article. A lot of my comrades shared that, and I think you were placing into words what a lot of us sort of felt and had learned, but maybe had not completely articulated. But the first question I had for you was like, Because I've heard you define fascism in previous interviews, and it's probably the most succinct definition of fascism that I've heard. So I wonder if you could, as a starting point, could you maybe define fascism for us and why the definition or the concept or the political idea is so difficult to define or why the definition is so evasive?

Gabriel Rockhill: Maybe just before defining it, I'll take a tiny philosophic detour because I think it's important to recognize that fascism isn't a brute fact of human existence or nature that has a set of fixed attributes like H2O. But it's also not the manifestation of a unified idea or doctrine with a series of essential features. Instead, it's a material social practice that is historical through and through. And that means that it's a process that takes on different forms and shapes at various points in time. And it therefore requires very precise materialist analysis and a dialectical approach that is attentive to all of these changes. And in that regard, I think it's helpful to juxtapose approaches to fascism that come out of either empiricism or idealism, right? The idea that it's a brute fact of existence or it's a doctrine or something like that to materialism. And that allows us really to identify what I consider to be the two major ideological poles that pull at the concept of fascism, because ultimately fascism is a concept in class struggle. So the bourgeois concept of fascism, on the one hand, which can take empiricist or idealist forms, and I'd be happy to return to that, largely singularizes it as an idiosyncratic phenomenon that as something exceptional that only occurred once in history, such as in Europe in the interwar period and perhaps only in Germany and Italy. So if there's not a swastika, it's not fascism, right? And this approach to fascism, as widespread as it is within bourgeois social science, within the bourgeois media, tends to focus moreover on surface phenomena and ideological elements, right? Politics of hate, certain personalities, rejection of science, and other such things. And it severs these ideological elements from the international political economy and global class warfare, right? So in that regard, the bourgeois approach is really preoccupied with epiphenomenal traits at the expense of the social totality and it's the latter the social totality that of course really gives its meaning to any of these traits if they exist and in that regard then The historical materialist approach, which I advocate for and defend and have tried to develop in various ways, proposes an analysis of the social totality and examines how particular ideologies are rooted in phases of capitalist accumulation, meaning specific historical moments of the history of capitalism and stages of class struggle. uh i'll mention i think we'll come back to this that this analysis should take place at different scales right so if you're looking at germany in 1933 or europe in the 30s or the united states in the 30s or the world system you're going to have a different apprehension of those material facts right or a different definition in many ways of what fascism is but if we begin with The common starting point, some people call it the classical concept of fascism, or what I would call the kind of conjunctural level of analysis, looking just at what happened in kind of Italy and Germany. I think that we can develop a working definition of fascism, meaning a definition of fascism that functions for a specific conjuncture and allows us to gain purchase over that. It has use value as a concept, right? It's not idealist, it's not empirical, but it's materially more than a specific situation. So all of that said, a working definition of interwar European fascism is that it is a reaction formation within the capitalist world to a dual crisis, an ideological crisis due to the historical emergence of a very real socialist alternative in the USSR beginning in 1917, as well as an infrastructural or an economic crisis due to the Great Depression that rocked the capitalist world, right? So this reaction formation is a political project funded by the capitalist ruling class and specifically, in that case, big industrial capital that seeks to mobilize sectors of civil society, particularly the petty bourgeoisie, around an ultra-nationalist, colonial, and anti-communist ideology of so-called radical rejuvenation in order to violently crush the communist movement and increase capitalist accumulation through a war economy and colonial wars of conquest. So that is distinct from traditional forms of conservatism or authoritarianism. Some forms of conservatism are less violently aggressive and militant, and often authoritarianism doesn't necessarily mobilize sectors of civil society, but instead uses the army or the police. Um, so in that regard, that's at least the beginning point, this kind of reaction formation to both an ideological and an economic crisis. But there are other features that we could add to this, of course.

Jules Taylor: Yeah, you know, there's a lot there, and thank you for that. I just want to ask, when we talk about the... I mean, it makes a lot of sense what you say about how, like, within the bourgeois conception of fascism, they're going to point to you to, like, 1930s Italy or, you know, the Germany, and if it's not a swastika, then it's not fascism. And so that makes a lot of sense because... And I want to ask... You know, I've heard people when talking about fascism free from that framework, they've pointed to things like post-Reconstruction in the United States with like the reaction from the KKK. Would you consider that likewise like an expression of fascism or is that kind of a unique situation unto its own?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, in the case of U.S. history, and this is one of the reasons that I mentioned that I think it's important from a materialist perspective to distinguish between heuristically, right? These aren't distinctions that actually exist in the real world, but they're distinctions that allow us to see something between this conjunctural level of analysis and a kind of structural level of analysis. And a third element in that is a systemic framework of analysis. So if we look structurally at What I mean by that is an analysis of a particular phase of capitalist accumulation, like the interwar period. What we find is that in every capitalist country in the wake of the Great Depression, there were fascist movements. They didn't always succeed in seizing state power, but they were present. And that's true as well in the United States. I'd be happy. I actually have an article coming out soon about the 1934 planned fascist coup d'etat. Well, it wasn't actually a coup d'etat. It was an overthrow of the government. That is a little-known event, but I could speak more about that in a moment if you'd like. But since you mentioned Reconstruction, I think that it's important to recognize that the conjunctural is situated within the structural. But the structural phases of capitalist accumulation are ultimately nested within the overall world system of capitalism. And if you look at the history of capitalism, one very clear thing is that it has spread and developed itself through colonial wars of conquest that have mobilized sectors of civil society in Paris state vigilante groups or vigilante groups that function in structures that are parallel to the state. that the state itself aids and abeds those structures in its project and often outsources forms of ultra-nationalist and, in the case of the KKK, white supremacist violence. And so when the fascisti came on the world historical stage in Italy, there's an innumerable number of newspaper articles in the United States that identify the fascisti as the Italian version of the KKK.

Jules Taylor: Oh, wow.

Gabriel Rockhill: That makes a lot of sense when you think about the orientation. It's pro-capitalist, anti-communist. white supremacists. Now, in the case of early Italy, it wasn't really a white supremacist project. They inherited that from the kind of Nazi anti-Semitism and whatnot. But the parallels are very, very clear. And as Aimé Césaire and Domenico Lussordo and others have pointed out, we shouldn't only identify kind of forms of fascistic or fascist or semi-fascist violence as violence that occurs when it takes place within the European context. But the history of colonial conquest and primitive accumulation shows certain traits that are very similar to, not identical to what happened in Germany and Italy, but very similar to them. And so that systemic level of analysis allows us to tease out the core forms of violence that are built into the capitalist world system. And they also demonstrate the fact that one cannot be anti-fascist without being anti-capitalist. Fascism is a symptom of capitalist social relations, and therefore the only way of abolishing it entirely is by getting rid of the capitalist system.

Jules Taylor: Right, right. I mean, it's such an amazing job articulating the necessity of an anti-capitalist line with the anti-fascist praxis, you know. I want to ask you a couple different things here, and I'm kind of drifting from our questions because you're giving me so... It's so generative what you're giving me here. So, one thing is that, um... Umberto Eco's essay, Ur-Fascism, he lists 14 different traits of fascism, and I think his effort in writing that essay was kind of similar to what the purpose of this conversation is, is to kind of parse down and bracket and really kind of cement what we're talking about with fascism, you know? And so I wonder, within the context of, like, Umberto Eco and the 14 Things, the first thing he listed on there was syncretism. And so... That, to me, was actually a really scary thought that inspired a lot of this research on fascism, because I find there's like an increasing number of people that are breaking with religious tradition and they are identifying as, you know, spiritual but not religious. But I but I. I've taken to labeling these folks as sort of slapdash syncretists in a way. Because they take a little bit of praying out of the Abrahamic religion. Maybe they take the yoga out of the Hindu tradition. And maybe they take some Thoreauvian notions of an oversoul and interconnectedness. And you end up with this spiritual but not religious sort of thing that Umberto Eco puts at the top of his list. And that's above traditionalism. That's above any other trait we could use. So I wonder if – because one of the last questions I had planned on asking you is if the age we're living in right now is similar to the interwar period in that we're seeing this resurgence of fascism, like this – This emergence or reemergence of fascist movements that are responding to capitalism in crisis. So I look at history and see some parallels with what's happening now. But the really scary thing is that syncretism is at the top of the list, and people breaking with religious traditions and inventing their own sort of individualist spirituality. That, to me, is really alarming. And so I wonder if you could speak to maybe some of the propensity of... maybe not necessarily syncretism, but maybe the propensity of society as it exists right now within that whole spiritual but not religious aspect. Could you maybe speak to how that is aiding, or at least maybe in some ways an ideological allies of fascism?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. It's been a while since I read the echo text, so it's not fresh in my mind. But one of the concerns that I have, at least with the one element that you highlighted from the echo text, is that there's often a tendency, particularly within liberal ideology, to approach fascism as first and foremost an ideology rather than a social practice generated out of an economic base, out of an infrastructure. And that, you know, the number of books that have tried to identify the key ideological components of fascism is incredible and no one has nailed it down. Right. There's never been a universal consensus on what some people call the generic concept of fascism. Now, one of the reasons for that, I take it, and I think this will lead us to the question of syncretism, is that ultimately it's a project that is driven by economic factors. And it will take on different forms, different adornments, if you will, depending on the situation. And that, I think... Links up quite well with what you were saying about a kind of syncretism of sorts. So in the case of both Italy and Germany, part of that syncretism was, of course, this idea of a spiritual rejuvenation of people who had lost so much in their material lives. Right. It was actually an ideological response to material consequences of the crisis of capitalism and the economic downturn in both Germany and Italy in the postwar era. That form of syncretism also pilfered symbols and modes of action from the revolutionary tradition, right, where they wanted to appear not just as traditional conservatives, not as authoritarians, but as young, dynamic action, you know, action based activists. You know, spiritual revival of sorts. And this created a lot of confusion. And it's a great weapon, if you will, a great ideological weapon to propose what is really one of the most reactionary forms of capitalist violence. as a modality of a spiritual rejuvenation of the masses, right? So I think that that links up quite well with this issue of syncretism, which you're, you know, correct in kind of bringing to the foreground. But then I guess more pointedly to your second question about the contemporary conjuncture, there's of course a lot that we could say about this.

Jules Taylor: Right, right.

Gabriel Rockhill: But if we understand the most recent phase of capitalist accumulation began in the 1970s, it's what people refer to as neoliberalism, and it reacted to the crisis of the 1970s, and it was also a counterinsurgency tactic against the organizing of the 60s, all the anti-systemic movements and anti-colonial movements of the 60s. And with neoliberalism, you have, of course, rampant privatization, dismantling of the welfare state, globalization of production chains, the financialization of the economy, the intensification of these practices also after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And that has given birth, the neoliberal era, to really specific ideologies, one of them being the vulgar multiculturalism and identity politics of the liberal era. you know, intelligentsia and beyond, a liberal professional managerial class. But it also gave birth to a very reactionary ideology that a researcher like Kathleen Bellew, I don't know exactly how to pronounce her name, but it's B-E-L-E-W, identifies as white power. And she has charted out the history of this white power ideology from the 1970s as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the consolidation of a very ultra-nationalist, militant, white supremacist ideology that was a reaction to the economic crises of neoliberalism. So all of that is to say that, of course, now with Trump or globally with Modi, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and so many others, There's a lot of discussion of the reemergence or the intensification of fascism and authoritarianism. But we have to see as well that there's a deeper history to this. And in the case of the United States, that history is the history of the white power movement, which included the shootings in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979, the Oklahoma City bombing, the You know, the Aryan nation and the order and all of their activities. And so all of that, I think, is an important context for understanding the contemporary manifestations thereof. Right. It's not just an ideology that's kind of sprung to the fore, but it's one that has been cultivated through decades and decades of right wing organizing with support, moreover, by certain elements from the state and particularly intelligence agencies, the FBI in particular. So there's more that we could go into here, but I'll stop there because I'm sure that you've plenty to jump in and share as well.

Jules Taylor: Well, you know, it's just fascinating talking to you. And when you're talking about pilfering symbols, I wonder, I mean, what came to mind was that Walter Benjamin thing about how fascism is an aesthetic first and foremost or something. And I think... You know, like, I've been researching a little bit of, like, D'Annunzio, and I didn't realize that, like, he had such an impact on Mussolini as far as the sort of taking on of aesthetics of war, of bombs, of planes, and the sort of things that D'Annunzio introduced that kind of gave the idea of fascism a flair or a sort of... And I wonder, you know, God, are we seeing the same thing through what we're going through in America within like, you know, the drain of color out of the American flag to where it's black and white, right? The Punisher stole being used by police officers. Things like, I mean, people wearing t-shirts that have helicopters on them saying, you know, stuff about Pinochet and shit like that. So the aesthetic part of that is interesting to me because I feel like You know, part of what gives me this feeling that we're seeing, and I say it's a feeling even though there's plenty of supporting materialist evidence of reemergence of fascism, there's stuff on the global stage, as you mentioned, with Modi and Erdogan, but I wonder if we're seeing something similar in terms of like... The effect D'Annunzio had on fascism, to give it that aesthetic, I wonder if we're seeing kind of stuff that's similar in the United States with things like the black and white American flag or the Punisher scroll or other sort of pilfering of symbols as you brought up.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's an excellent question. It reminds me of a great quote by Alex Crary, who said that the 20th century is characterized by three major events. One is the extension of democratic power through the franchise, more and more people having the vote. The second is the extraordinary growth in corporate and more specifically capitalist power. And the third is is the development of what some people call the propaganda public relations complex as a way for the capitalist ruling class to aesthetically manage the masses. And it's very clear in the history of fascism that one of the things it was able to do was mobilize modern forms of mass communication and technologies in order to bring the masses together in a kind of aesthetic pageantry of various sorts. Right. This can be the marches, the uniforms, the music, the architecture. You know, there's so much that goes into that. And that aestheticization of politics, right, which you referenced in Benjamin, is unbelievably important for bringing in people ideologically to the fascist struggle. And just as a side note, I'll mention that it's a great demonstration of the extent to which ideology is not just about ideas in people's minds. It's about the participation in particular worlds of sensemaking. that give them a sense of the world, right? And that the fascist project in Italy and Germany were extraordinarily good at doing that, and we've seen other manifestations thereof, right? Klaus Barbie, who was a Nazi, went to Bolivia and founded a death squad and then dressed them in uniforms that resembled the Nazis. Or in the case of the United States with the fascist coup that I'd referenced earlier in the 1930s, there's... a man by the name of Jackson Martindale, who was a wealthy financier and a Wall Street speculator who had traveled to Nazi Germany and then designed himself or had, I don't know if he worked with other people, paraphernalia for fascist organizations within the United States, right? And decided to replace the swastika by, I believe it was a it was a an eagle on a blue background with a v superimposed over it and the v standing for vigilante right so there's a deep history of the use of aesthetics to create various communities and i think that this overlaps with your earlier question about syncretism right where that those communities are forged often out of a mixing and mingling of different symbols. Memes and other such things would be another manifestation of that in contemporary culture, and of course digital technologies as opposed to the radio in the 1930s. And all of that, I think, should encourage us to think quite seriously about the ways in which culture and aesthetics is a really central site of class warfare.

Jules Taylor: You know, and then, and just in listening to you here, like everything you're saying is so generative, man. I mean, I think of, uh, you're right. Like during, during the thirties and the early forties, I mean, I'm a musician and an audio engineer. So like, I, uh, I love recording technology history and a lot of that intersects with like, uh, 1930s Germany, uh, and Adolf Hitler, uh, basically forwarding the research or financing the research that developed things like, uh, analog tape and microphones and so any of these black and white speeches where he's yelling into a giant microphone, those were all made by German companies like Telefunken and Neumann, Geffel, other companies that were around during that time. And so I look at the parallels, and going back to this, like, are we living in a time that's similar to the 30s? You know, in the same way that, you know, analog tape and these... clear sounding microphones were developed in recording technology to where Hitler could broadcast and be heard in multiple places simultaneously. The world had not experienced that prior to that point. And so I look at the emergence of maybe social media now as a parallel to that and revolutionizing the way that we communicate. And I guess you and I could go back and forth all day about some of the parallels to the interwar period to now as it relates to the reemergence of fascism. You know, so there's a lot there. And so I guess I'm going to just ask the question that was next on the list. I know we deviated quite a bit. And I do want to hear about your article about 1934 with Jackson Martindale. And I think we'll get to that. at some point here. But you wrote a four-part series of articles entitled Fascism, A Counter-History. And I got to read three out of four of those, which are, you know, just outstanding, wonderful work, man. Like I said, I think you were articulating a lot of things that my comrades and I were feeling but had not quite placed into words. But in your first installment... You spoke about defining fascism in ways that we've already mentioned here, but they're conjunctural, structural, and systemic. And so, just so that we're all clear on the definitions here, I think it's really important that we kind of spell that out a little bit more for listeners. Because I think even if you are a listener that feels like you have a good handle on what fascism is and its definition and what it looks like and all that stuff, I think fascism thinking of fascism within the three terms that you've offered I mean it really helps place some brackets around key aspects of the totality of fascism yeah absolutely the

Gabriel Rockhill: But widespread kind of bourgeois conceptualization of fascism, as I mentioned briefly earlier, usually consists in looking at the ideologies operative in Germany or in Italy and then setting up a series of boxes to tick. Right. When you look at other such cases, this is. bad science because it's not the particular that defines the universal or the general. Right. And so the difference between these levels of analysis are just for historical material. It's not as if, Our concepts carve nature at the joints. Concepts are tools. And I grew up working construction and still work construction. And what's unique about a tool is that the most important thing is its use value. And so you can have a screwdriver that is a kind of universal screwdriver that will work in tons of different screws, right? But if you want to do electronics or if you're working on bridges or something like that, you're going to need a different set of screwdrivers. In that spirit, then, I think that as historical materialists mine down into specific situations and a conjuncture is simply a unique space time like Germany in 1933. Our tools of analysis and our definition of fascism is going to be slightly different than if you toggle out or zoom out, so to speak, and look at the structural level, which would be the world, or at least I should say the capitalist world in the 1930s, or you zoom way out and look at the capitalist system in its entirety, right, since its emergence in more or less the 17th century and consolidation in the 19th century. And that allows us not to get hung up on an idealist approach to fascism, which would presume that it's just one thing. No, social phenomena are always situated in space time. And as historical materialists, we have to be able to zoom in and zoom out without getting hung up on the rigidity of our concepts, right? Lenin said that class struggle is so infinitely complex that our concepts will never be able to capture it. That's a quintessential point for all historical materialists to understand. That doesn't mean then we go down some Pomo road in which no concepts, you know, everything goes or there's no way of saying anything. On the contrary, it is our duty then to try to refine our concepts, and that's what I've tried to do with distinguishing between conjunctural, structural, and systemic levels of analysis. Does that help elucidate things a little bit?

Jules Taylor: No, it totally does, in that conjunctural is just like the particular time period it happens in. Structural would be the... Well, conjunctural would be space and time. Space and time, right? And then structural would be like the defining characteristics that are consistent across fascist movements, which are, of course, conjunctural.

Gabriel Rockhill: Go ahead, go ahead. Well, it would be more that, because the point of view is ultimately from a materialist analysis of the political economy. And so, whereas conjunctural analysis would look at specific space-times, structural analysis would look at structural phases of capitalist accumulation, meaning specific time periods within the history of capitalism.

Jules Taylor: I like how you're never untethering fascism from capitalism in general. And obviously because that's what leads to it, you know? But I like how you're careful to correct. You're like, no, no, no, you have to mention capitalism in this because even just at the structural level, it's enough to understand and tie that to it and not want to separate that. And so I totally get that. And then systemic... The broadest sense of how fascism manifests, which would just be capitalism in general, I think would be, okay, great. Yeah, I mean, I think that really helps. And I, you know, once I... It took me a second to kind of absorb that when reading your stuff. And then once I understood the sort of terms you were offering, it... It kind of made me think of it in a more organized sense, to a definition that greatly needs a more organized thought analysis with it, because like I said, it's so evasive to define, and we can list characteristics of it, we can look at the bourgeois concept of it that points to it as like an idiosyncratic sort of epiphenomenal sort of societal event or something that happens. So, Thank you for that. And I guess, you know, the other thing is that you... Okay, so the article that I saw shared most widely from your stuff, man, and that I thought most of my comrades picked up on and really enjoyed the most was the third one in your series where you make the case in your title, you say, like, the United States did not defeat fascism in World War II. It just discreetly internationalized it. So I... I do want you to maybe lead us through some of that. But I wonder, because in the same article, you mentioned something that I had never heard of, and it really fascinated me. But you speak about how the CIA collaborated with MI6 to set up kind of secret anti-communist stay-behind armies in countries in Western Europe. And so while you take us through your article, and I don't expect you to recite the whole thing. There's quite a bit in that article, you know. But as you take us through your article about how the United States internationalized fascism, maybe you could speak to the stay behind armies concept within that.

Gabriel Rockhill: For sure. The research for that article really comes out of a slow and steady discovery of things that I had been blind to, right? So I grew up in the United States with the constant Kool-Aid of the ideological state apparatus of the school system, as well as the mass media. And I had assumed like a lot of people that the United States entered the war, defeated fascism, and then set up a liberal order of rights. Of course, over time, I discovered, lo and behold, that the U.S. has been involved in imperial endeavors around the world. And in fact, this starts with the founding of the United States because it's a settler colony. But in relationship to the discussion of fascism, the United States was involved in the capitalist invasion of the soviet union with 13 other countries in order to strangle the red babe in its crib as winston churchill said and so it's not even just the cold war that we have to rethink we have to recognize as michael parenti said the cold war is the old war and so the united states has always positioned itself for the u.s government as the kind of vanguard of the capitalist world system and the mortal enemy of communism The situation then in World War II was actually very different than that. We know that the US was loath to enter the war, that Some of the leading political figures in the U.S., including in the intelligence establishment like Allen Dulles, favored going to war against the Soviet Union instead against the Germans. There was an attempt on the part of the U.S., and particularly Allen Dulles, to negotiate a deal with the Nazis so that they'd sign a peace treaty in the West and be able to unleash the full force of the Nazi war machine in the East. All of this then should clue us into a more complex relationship between a purported bourgeois democracy and liberal system and fascism. So in a nutshell, and again I won't rehearse all the elements in this article because it comes out of years of research on the U.S. national security state, I just try to give a very succinct summary of many different dimensions of this. uh for instance 1600 nazi scientists were brought to the united states under operation uh paperclip often given jobs at universities research centers and whatnot these were hitler's angels of death uh thousands of others four thousand according to eric lichlau were integrated into the intelligence services in germany which were overseen by Reinhard Galen, who was a Nazi general in charge of intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. So as soon as you begin to look into what's referred to as denazification or anti-fascism on the part of the U.S. government in the post-war era, you recognize that actually what they did is discreetly redeploy. You know, there were the Nuremberg trials, which were largely show trials, a bit of a sham. There were just a few people who were actually tried and convicted in various ways. But the CIA and other organizations were integral to making sure many people weren't tried in Nuremberg, and then many were redeployed and hired in the war that was always the war, which is the war against communism, right? And that's why the continuity between the intervention in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Russian Revolution and what was going on in World War II and post-World War II is important context for that. One extremely important dimension to that then getting to Operation Gladio is that the CIA and MI6, MI6 is just the kind of CIA equivalent in the UK, recruited a very large number of highly trained militant fascists and Nazis. in underground armies that were, in principle, going to function as a stay-behind army if the Soviet Union marched west. So one of the reasons that the U.S. got involved in the war in the first place is that they thought the Red Army was going to be crushed by the Nazis. And lo and behold, the Soviet Union was able to do what was considered impossible on the world capitalist stage, and 27 million communists in the Soviet Union gave their lives to defeating fascism, and the Red Army started marching west. That was terrifying to the capitalist world order, and they wanted to make sure they shored up that capitalist world order, intervening in the war and then taking over as much as they could of Western Europe. And so the stay behind armies were a project overseeing NATO was involved as well that set up the secret armies in every country in Europe, including the neutral countries or all of the NATO countries, I should say. And these included in certain cases, you know, several hundred militants and up to a few thousand in certain cases per country. that were not overseen by the government in those countries, but were instead controlled by their handlers, which was the CIA and the MI6. And their role was supposed to be that if the Soviet Union decided to march further west, they were going to stay behind enemy lines and then undertake acts of sabotage, exfiltration, and other such things in the war against the Soviet Union that was being anticipated by the United States and the UK. And in a very interesting twist, I would send your auditors to both Daniel Ganser's book called NATO's Stay Behind Armies, as well as the BBC documentary called Operation Gladio that's actually available on YouTube. Very poor quality, but you get the gist from the YouTube clips. is that they were activated. The stay-behind armies were activated in the 1960s and 1970s in a series of terrorist attacks against the civilian population by fascists and Nazis that were blamed on communist organizers in order to do at least two things. One was to mobilize the general population around a law and order platform so that they would support right-wing candidates for office, and secondly, allow justification for those law and order governments to crush the communists and socialist movement. This was so extreme in the case of Italy. It was like an open civil war. There were some almost 15,000 politically motivated acts of violence in Italy between 1969 and 1987. And we have testimonies. from some of the fascist actors involved. In fact, one of the gentlemen, Vincenzo Vincigera, who's now in prison, I believe he's still alive. You can listen to his entire set of interviews with him again on YouTube, where he explains in Italian what it was that he was doing. And that was committing the most heinous forms of terrorist crimes against the civilian population, targeting in particular women and children. so that they would then be blamed on communists. And this, I should just note for your readers, in case people are unfortunately hoodwinked by the ideology of so-called conspiracy theories, this has been validated by the Italian Parliamentary Commission that undertook an investigation of the state behind armies in Italy. They reached the conclusion in 2000 that there was a conspiracy. That included elements from the U.S. national security state. And there was also a European resolution on the stay behind orders. So it's not only validated by the actors themselves and by the paper trail that you have from the national security state. It's also been investigated very explicitly by both the this Italian parliamentary commission and by agencies within the European Union.

Jules Taylor: Jesus Christ, man. I had no idea that the... I mean, the concept of stay-behind armies was enough to raise my eyebrow to where I wanted to ask you about them, but I had no idea that they were actually activated in order to commit acts of terrorism, to be blamed on communists, to create a sort of problem-solution-reaction thing, have people in the area embrace conservative politics, law and order stuff. It goes back to some of the more... Schmittian sort of states of exception, things like, you know, if you allow the government to break the rules during a state of exception, it will create states of exception for it to be able to break the rules sort of thing. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I do want to ask you. One question, and I don't want to frame this as a pushback, and it's not even a criticism of the USSR. You mentioned Operation Paperclip, and that was like 1,600 Nazi scientists that were absorbed into the rocket program thing. I've heard somebody say, I don't remember who said it, but they were like, you know, we basically just scraped the swastikas off the sides of the rockets and had a rocket program at that point. Oh, totally.

Gabriel Rockhill: There are memes you can find where you have pictures of the Nazi generals in their uniforms and then in their U.S. uniforms or business suits hanging out at the Kennedy Space Center and other things.

Jules Taylor: Oh, my God. So as it pertains to the rocket program, the space race, and of course the USSR almost won the damn space race despite all this stuff, but I wonder if you are familiar with something known as And I don't even know if I'm going to pronounce this correctly. Operation Osoviakim. That is something that, I mean, in going back and forth with people online, I've been like, you know, Operation Paperclip, man, the U.S. absorbed Nazi scientists. And the only response I've gotten out of that was something to the end of like, well, you know, the USSR did that too. And then they show me a Wikipedia link to this thing. Operation Osoviakin, in which the Soviet army removed more than, like, 2,200 German specialists at that point. Now, obviously, like, you know, they weren't absorbed into a fascist system. They were absorbed into a communist workers' economy, and their intellectual property was probably... you know, leveraged at that point and help them with the space race. Um, so I don't think that the degree of, uh, culpability is, is the same apples to apples comparison in this sense. But I'm wondering if you, uh, if, if any of, uh, if I'm saying it correctly, operationals of I am, if I'm butchering the name of that. Um, but I wonder if you've come across that in your research.

Gabriel Rockhill: I haven't looked into it specifically, but I'm glad that you brought it up because there's a very rampant ideology of false equivalences where one assumes, largely due to the propaganda campaigns that have been developed around this, that when the Soviet Union becomes aware of what the United States is doing and then does everything in its power to protect itself, that somehow it is doing an equivalent thing. And given the fact that the United States was hell-bent on destroying the Soviet Union by any means necessary and had almost succeeded in doing so, as I mentioned, with these 13 other capitalist countries, it makes perfect sense that in the name of socialist self-defense and the defense of the masses of humanity who had been torn out of feudal social relations and extremely barbaric forms of super exploitation and oppression, that one of the drives of the Soviet Union as the first successful state-based socialist project was to be able to develop itself from a feudal society to a society that would basically be almost winning the space race. And to do that, of course, they needed to bring in all of the technology and expertise and everything else that they could possibly do. And they were not involved in imperialist wars of conquest like the United States was. And the other thing that I should note is that one of the reasons that the Soviet Union wanted these scientists, the same is true with other socialist countries, is the need to develop technologies that are at least comparable to, if not surpassing the United States, because of the weaponization of those technologies on the part of the U.S. So to be able to fight germ warfare, biological warfare, chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, all of these other things, of course, those societies need to develop those technologies. If they do not, then they'll be subjected to them and either crushed or suffer severe consequences. Right.

Jules Taylor: Yeah, I mean, what else would you do when you've just lost 27 million people? You know, like, you have to defend yourself, like you said, but, like, I mean, at that point, you've just lost 27 million people, the war is won, and yet this... you know, they're still hell-bent on destroying your country at that point. So, yeah, I mean, socialist self-defense, as you mentioned. And thank you for, you know, I know that wasn't part of the questions, and it's something I thought of, you know... No, no, it's all good.

Gabriel Rockhill: I prefer organic conversations, and I think there's two of us that prefer them, so it's all good.

Jules Taylor: Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. So I... Like I said, I guess I don't know how to gracefully guide this over into something that's more philosophical than political, but I want to ask you about the projects of Marx and Foucault and their reconcilability, I suppose, because I get the feeling that a lot of comrades are upset with Foucault or resent him or dismiss his work entirely because he took the sort of Marxist framework of a singularity of of oppression and power contained within the bourgeoisie. And, and some comrades feel like he kind of diffused this whole thing. And, uh, you know, it's, I was, uh, reading recently a, um, I think it was, uh, Boudriard who, uh, He had criticized both Gilles Deleuze and Foucault in saying that their stuff wasn't really revolutionary. You're just mirroring capital and the way that capital is everywhere and nowhere and the sort of Mark Fisher capitalist realism. It's in your thoughts. You can't have a thought that doesn't have some capitalist presupposition sort of thing. So... you know, since a lot of comrades have dismissed the work of Foucault, or don't acknowledge it, or don't study it, or don't find value in it, because they're upset that he sort of diffused the power, and maybe that's ideologically useful to the opponents of Marxism. You know, and we had Professor Todd May on the show back in January. Actually, it was funny. It was like I interviewed him on January 6th, and And so that shit was going down, like, as I was talking to Todd, and we were both like, oh, yeah, there's people at the Capitol, yeah. I wonder what that's all about, you know? But so I'm just wondering, because, I mean, Todd May basically was like, yo, you need to read Ron Sierra, is what he told me, and about how, you know, things can coexist because of a fundamental animating character, like the fundamental animating character of those who would... find value in Foucault, find value in the project of Marx, would be that it's egalitarianism ultimately at the core that drives both of these figures, and so I think, you know, Todd offered a bit of like a way to reconcile those things, and I've looked at that and examined that, although I haven't read Ranciere yet, but But I wonder what your take on that is. I'm of the opinion I think you can find value in both, and I think that it's important that we examine the project of Foucault and there's real value in his project in examining the structures and systems that we ultimately are embedded within. But what's your take on the reconciliation or the reconciliability of Marx and Foucault?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, I think actually as a kind of bridge, I might just point out that since we were talking about the U.S. national security state earlier, the CIA identified Foucault as an asset. And I've written on that in a piece called The CIA Reads French Theory. And that's a very interesting thing, right? It doesn't... That would, you know, we'd have to take some time to unpack why that is the case. But I do think it's important to maybe start by distinguishing between two different modalities of comparison. One would be idealist. And that would consist in saying, here's a set of ideas that Foucault generated or a set of discourses. Here's a set of ideas that Marx or other Marxists generated. Let's compare and contrast, see where they overlap, see where they depart or see where Foucault talks about Marx and other such things. That type of academic idealism might in certain instances, you know, be mildly useful to some people. But what it does, unfortunately, is it evacuates some fundamental questions that from a materialist perspective are very important. And that is, what is your intellectual practice and how is it embedded within material social relations? And if we analyze and look at Foucault from that point of view, then we found out some pretty remarkable things. For instance, you know, when the French intelligentsia in the post-war era was largely communist, Foucault had a reputation as being a violent anti-communist. He did briefly join the French Communist Party under the influence of Althusser, but he referred to his Marxism at that point in time as a Nietzschean Marxism. And anyone who's read Nietzsche or, for instance, Dominique Lussardo's excellent book on Nietzsche says, They should know that Nietzsche was an aristocratic radical who was not only anti-socialist and anti-communist, but he was generally against any egalitarian project whatsoever and believed in the natural superiority of the master race. And so Foucault, in identifying as a kind of Nietzschean Marxist, is also putting his cards on the table and revealing the idealism that haunts a lot of his projects. Right. Because to suggest that one could just merge together a reactionary right wing position and a communist position is misrecognizing the fact that certain things are incompatible. They might be compatible in an idealist mindset, but they're incompatible at the level of material practice. So Foucault not only had a reputation of being anti-communist and moreover a Gaullist technocrat and a denier of human agency, but when he published The Order of Things in 1966, for which he became famous, it was a very anti-Marxist text. He went so far as affirming that Marxism was dead, that it was like a fish in water in the 19th century, but everywhere else it stops breathing. So he throws out the entire actually existing socialist project. And he returns to this in an interview in 1977, where he claims explicitly the entire socialist project, and he names names, Vietnam, Cuba, China, etc., is to be condemned. Those are his own words. But again, it's not just his words. It's his material social practice that we should be looking at. But the words, of course, reveal quite a bit when they're coming from the horse's mouth, so to speak. So his own material practice, was he interested in international class struggle? Did he align himself on an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial political project? Was he dedicated to anti-racist and anti-racist politics and political organizing? Was he driven by a theoretical practice that was overcoming or intent on overcoming gender oppression and gender super exploitation?

Jules Taylor: No.

Gabriel Rockhill: He blissfully ignored the colonial struggles for emancipation that were happening on his doorstep, right, in North Africa and particularly the battle in Algeria. Now, it is true that in the wake of 1968, which Foucault not only did not participate in, he attended one event when he was in Paris very, very briefly, just more as a kind of, you know, spectator or a voyeur. But In 1968, he was actually part of the governmental commission that had established the educational reforms that the students were mobilizing against. And in that regard, in the material context of 68, if he was on any side of the barricades, he was on the Gaullist side of the barricade and the Gaullist orientation. I mean, he was a defender of the Gaul in any case at that point in time. Pariente actually said, and she was Foucault's assistant from 1962 to 1966, she's on record as saying, Uh, cause Foucault kind of turned to the left in the wake of 68 because he saw the weather vane was turning. Right. And so he began to engage more with Maoists and anarchists and, and other movements. She said she never really believed his turn to the left. Right. And this is someone who worked intimately with him for four years. Wow. And there's more that could be said about this. Maybe one final thing, and we can drill down deeper into this, because the reason I'm sharing this is also because I worked diligently through Foucault's entire corpus, and in many ways, it was never a Foucaultian, but I was always close to what I identified in Foucault as a kind of materialist sensibility to the analysis of history and a preoccupation with politics and power to some extent. But Foucault's own trajectory After a mild left swerve between about 1968 and 1972, he went back hard right. And it's very easy to see for people who are familiar with the Francophone context, because he defended historians like François Furet, right-wing reactionary anti-communist, if ever there was one. as well as André Glucksmann, who is the same, I mean, extreme right-wing ideologue. Foucault not only had a friendship with André Glucksmann, but he was one of his closest political collaborators, and he took on board with Glucksmann the project of criticizing so-called totalitarianism, an ideological concept if ever there was one, As well as embracing so-called dissident politics, right, where the U.S. national security state was always interested in having people from the Soviet bloc who were writers or artists or intellectuals who had come to the West, develop lucrative careers by speaking out against what was going on in the East. Um, so the dead scene is one of them, but there's many other examples. And Foucault was very much on board with that project and, um, defended this kind of dissident politics over and against all of the revolutionary socialist movements that were going on at his, you know, during his lifetime. So, sorry, that's a little bit of a long-winded response. It's in part because, and I could, uh, You know, you could share this in the show notes if you want. I did publish a little bit of an incendiary article called Foucault the Faux Radical, where I take a very specific position on this. And that is that ultimately Foucault's intellectual practice is not only incompatible with historical materialism, but largely driven by an attempt to develop a mode of historical analysis that is anathema to historical materialism and is anti-socialist through and through. Wow. Yeah. There's more that could be said here, but no, I mean, that should probably spark it.

Jules Taylor: No, but that's like, it's so, yeah. I mean that, When you look at his mode of analyzing history as something distinct from historical materialism that would be in some ways like completely fundamentally sort of incompatible with historical materialism, it can take on a deceptively anti-socialist air to it. And I don't think that I've ever thought of it in that way. So I do appreciate your response on that question because it There's a lot of food for thought, though, in that. I mean, another thing that I kind of got out of what you were mentioning is I'm picking up on a very keen sensibility that you have of like just parsing out what is idealist and what is materialist, you know, and so that you've mentioned that difference a couple of times in this conversation. Yeah. You know, the thing that comes up for me as regards to Foucault and stuff, obviously, he was like friends with Gilles Deleuze. And, you know, Deleuze's disvalue, like it wasn't exploitation or racism, it was boredom. You know, he was, like, looking for, like, the new, the useful, the interesting. And so, to me, it's like, as much as I love reading Anti-Oedipus, or as much as I admire the metaphysics of Deleuze, I'm starting to pick up that a lot of that shit is really, I mean, for lack of a better term, maybe it falls way more into the idealist category, even though, I mean, people would make a pretty strong argument for Deleuze being a materialist. So, thank you for bringing all that to my attention. The other thing I wanted to say is that I had no idea that Dominic Lacerdo had written a book on Nietzsche. You know, like, we just did an interview with Roderick Day of RedSales.org recently who turned me on to Dominic. I mean, it's funny, this guy, he's a Marxist-Leninist, but the very last thing he said at the end of that interview was like, What I want to tell your listeners is go read Dominic Lacerdo. Or Domenico Lacerdo, I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing his name. I'm butchering everyone's name today. But he was like, yeah, go read Domenico Lacerdo, man. And he gave me an article which was a pretty long read, but fascinating. It was something about the politics of pessimism or something like that. Or how communists shouldn't like... you know we can't just uh criticize ourself into like into a corner with uh things that have happened upon the world stage basically um but so now i have to i gotta read that uh lucerto book on stalin and i gotta read the book on nietzsche now because uh fascinating stuff coming from there um But yeah, that's probably the best counter-narrative to anyone who's offered a way to reconcile Marx and Foucault. That's probably the best counter-retort I've ever heard as far as why the Foucaultian project would be at odds and incompatible with the project of Marx. So thank you for that. Could I quickly say something?

Gabriel Rockhill: Two things very quickly. One is that the opposition between idealism and materialism is so important because it manifests class struggle in theory, which Althusser not only theorized but also practiced in various ways. And so there is an idealist form of materialism. New materialism is a clear manifestation of that. Whereas historical materialism is not an idealist position. It's using our concepts to best try to map for the complexities of the world and intervene in those complexities in order to transform them. But the second thing that I wanted to mention is that since I touched on the fact that the CIA thought that Foucault was an asset, that's because they identified the structuralists in general in France, other figures like Levi Strauss, etc., as well as the annal school of brodel and company as being essential for driving a wedge between marxist analyses and bourgeois you know what would be what is a manifestation of bourgeois social science right so foucault's material practice as an intellectual also contributed in the francophone scene but also more generally because of his fame to a denigration of Marxism by the construction of straw person versions of Marxism, right? Foucault knew little to nothing about, you know, I don't know, anyone from Lenin and Stalin to Mao and Che and Thomas Sankara and Claudia Jones, and you could, you know, go on with the list. And so it's a big problem, I think, in the things that he has to say himself about that Marxism or actually existing socialism.

Jules Taylor: Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think Foucault also said near the end of his life when they asked him, you know, why don't you ever mention Marx? And he had said something like some influencers like you just can't mention, like they're just so big of an influence that you they're just kind of ubiquitous and you don't mention them because it would be too on. I mean, did you have any recollection of that at all?

Gabriel Rockhill: I don't remember that off the top of my head. I do remember Deleuze saying that about Spinoza. And Foucault, it might have been someone like Nietzsche. I would be very surprised if he had said it about Marx. And if you find the reference, I'd be interested to look at it. Because what he did say, and he's on record in the 1970s, is saying, I never want to hear the word Marx again. I'm through with that guy. Jesus Christ, man. And at the end of his life, he was so dedicated to this kind of anti-Marxist orientation that there are other manifestations of that, like his definition of critique. I've always found in the very final writings in 1983, 1984, he establishes a tradition of critique that includes figures like Kant... Um, and Heidegger and a self about, you know, fascist who was never apologetic for his Nazism, but excludes Marx. But to the tradition of critique with which Foucault himself identified at the end of his life excluded Marx.

Jules Taylor: So I'm getting... So in this discussion and this absolutely, like, sort of scathing thing about Foucault here, man, can you... Are there any other, like, fitters that you have similar scathing sort of points of view on? Like, I wonder if you... Because I, you know, I wonder why we hold Hannah Arendt in such high regard. You know, because I know that... Maybe... vj prashard was the only guy that i i heard say something about how you know she kind of forwarded horseshoe theory you know and and um and and so and then recently i in doing some research on heidegger i discovered that they had like a lifelong love affair which it's like what kind of a leftist is going to have a love affair with a member of the nazi party you know so i um i So I wonder, I mean, do you have any sort of scathing stuff as far as it pertains to Hannah Arendt or any other prominent leftist figures that maybe we're all holding in a higher regard than we should?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, actually, if I could say, because it might sound to your auditors like I have a bit of a scorched earth policy. But the reason for that, if there is indeed that, is because I was subjected, like many of my generation, to the idea that the most left wing theory and the most radical thought imaginable was composed of French theory, German critical theory, and then a few other figures like Arendt. That polices the left border of critique. I wasn't taught Lenin, of course, in school. I wasn't taught Che Guevara. I wasn't taught any of these. In fact, I was never even taught Marxism. And that is not just the result of idiosyncratic individual choices on the part of these thinkers. It's because there were material forces like the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies that had a vested interest in Driving a wedge between communism and the anti-communist left and supporting the anti-communist left against the communists. This is a project that Thomas Braden oversaw for the CIA in Europe. It's been extremely well documented. And a lot of these thinkers are part of precisely that, right? French theories arrival in the United States. Many people date from 1966 at Johns Hopkins University when there was a conference organized there funded with millions of dollars from the Ford Foundation. Ford Foundation is so intimately tied to the U.S. national security state that they have a representative from the Ford Foundation who's the CIA representative. And many of the people on the board are national security state officers. You know, they just move back and forth. And no Marxists, with the partial exception of perhaps Lucien Goldman, were invited because communists were persona non grata. Right. So Althusser, a structuralist Marxist, wasn't part of that conference. And so all of the promotion of the most critical forms of critical theory within the United States is actually a deep material project of policing the left border of critique and shoring up an image of these thinkers as really radical. That's why I grew up interested in radical thought, reading all of them in great detail. It's one of the reasons I learned French. In the case of Hannah Arendt, then, her book, Origins of Totalitarianism, was supported by the foreign office in the United Kingdom. So the national security state in the United Kingdom recognized Hannah Arendt as an asset, supported her research, because it was developing further from some earlier publications that were done directly by U.S. national security state operatives, this logic of totalitarianism. And her views on colonialism and history are just, I think Eric Hobsbawm said at one point in time, Hannah Arendt's work, particularly her book on revolution is like, you know, when you compare it to historical materialism is like comparing astrology to astronomy. One is just made-up nonsense and superstition, and the other is based on scientific analysis. And in the book on revolution, particularly in the German version of that book, Arendt actually justifies slavery, because slavery is the condition of possibility of providing for a leisure class In brackets, we can say white male property owners who can have time to pursue politics, discussing the political issues of the day unmoored from material constraints. We know her views on Little Rock, right? She was against desegregation in that regard. She's an extremely reactionary political figure, and she's an interesting persona in the intellectual field in that regard, because there are so many self-proclaimed leftists who are Aurentians. And in my book, when you look at the material practice of Arendt and the Arendtians, you cannot be hoodwinked by what it is that they're doing. They're contributing to precisely the types of projects that are in the interest of the U.S. national security state. Absolutely.

Jules Taylor: Jeez, man. Thank you for that. Yeah, I it's always kind of, you know, I was always been a little apprehensive to voice any sort of criticism towards rent. But I it's very it's interesting what you're telling me. And I would love to learn more about all that stuff because I. uh, wow. I mean, I had no idea that she had, um, justified slavery in a book or, um, was identified as an asset. I mean, all that is news to me. And, and so thank you for, you know, all of that stuff. Um, we're getting kind of close to the end of time here. So I don't know if, uh, if we'll have a whole lot of time for this, uh, maybe a loaded long question. Um, But you recently had a conversation with Chris Hedges, which was a wonderful interview, and we'll list that in the show notes. And you basically made the case that America has always been a fascist nation. And I know for me, it's taken a couple radicalizing moments to understand this fundamental truth about this country. And it's taken a lot of studying and reading and asking questions. But I don't think I would... I don't think I would have come to side with you and your assertions had it not been for my curiosity that drove me to find answers to really difficult questions. So, as... in whatever time we have available left, could you maybe detail or make the case of why America has always been a fascist nation? And for those listeners out there who maybe aren't ready to fully side or belly up to that assertion that America is a fascistic nation, do you have anywhere to point them? Any sort of critical reading they could do that could prove that point? Maybe something that you've done yourself? You know, because I... I don't know, man. I mean, part of this podcast is trying to reach those who are maybe not ready, but I don't want to say they're unreachable. So maybe there's something you could point people to to read up on that sort of thing. And as you tell us, like why America is basically a fascist nation is fascist down to its bones.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I should perhaps begin by qualifying that. description. It's true that with the Chris Hedges interview, there's a title given to it that suggests that my argument is that fascism is just what the US is. But my actual argument is just slightly different than that. And I do think that the difference is important. It's that one of the dominant approaches in bourgeois social science to fascism is the assumption that It's what I refer to as the one state, one government paradigm, so that each state, like the US or France or Algeria or wherever, has one mode of governance, and that's it. So it's either a liberal democracy or it's fascist, and it can't be both, or there can't be elements of both. This is very integral to a dominant liberal ideology in which fascism is often depicted as a menacing threat, something that might appear in the future, other such things. Against that, I advocate for a multiple modes of governance paradigm, which breaks with the liberal myth that there is one form of government for all within a nation state, as long as there's not an internal civil war that liberals would recognize as a civil war, because there actually is a civil war. It's a class war. um in that regard then what my research on the history of the united states has brought to the fore is the extent to which there have been fascist modes of governance that have been baked into the history of the united states and are integral to the u.s empire i'll just identify three very quickly one is that as i mentioned earlier from the point of view of a systemic mode of analysis Some people might not want to call this fascism or fascism proper. We might use other terms like semi-fascist or fascistic. But people like Césaire and Lasorda are very clear that the mobilization of vigilante bands by the state itself in order to violently destroy insurgent populations or populations that they want to have be removed is part of one of the core aspects of fascism, right? So when the Ohio militia that was killing the indigenous population was integrated into the U.S. Army, that's a sign of the kind of confluence between these parastate you know, operators and then state power that looks a lot like what happens under fascist regimes. So the entire imperial history of colonial expansion that is the United States has at a minimum fascistic elements or elements that we should analyze from that point of view. But secondly, particularly with the racialized and colonial subjects within the United States, you would be hard-pressed to prove to anyone that That someone like Emmett Till, who was, you know, brutally beaten and killed when he was 14 years old in the white supremacist South and then had his murderers, you know, let off scot-free and then they themselves admitted what they did in public and told their story in the news. That particular situation is such that you would be hard pressed to say that Emmett Till was living under a liberal democracy. And so particularly racialized colonial subjects in the United States have been subject to extreme fascist or semi-fascist modes of governance, and they continue to be. Look at the U.S. police state and its targeting of colonial subjects and racialized and forced subjects in general. But then a third aspect that we have to be attentive to is you can't analyze particularly a country like the United States without looking at its foreign policy. So the fact that the United States has overthrown some 50 foreign governments since World War II, the majority of which were democratically elected, that it is the driving force behind world imperialism, and has backed up in innumerable numbers of juntas and dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, death squads, et cetera, should allow us to peel the scales from our eyes and recognize that there are at least these three different fascistic modes of governance operative in the history of the United States, right? The colonial violence of the history of the United States the uh racial violence of organizations like the kkk the silver legion and many others there's a lot of them uh proud boys today the oath keepers and other such organizations right so this continues unabated but then also u.s foreign policy i don't know if that's enough for no i mean the time being or if you want to no that's quite a bit i mean uh

Jules Taylor: I mean, I lost one of my thoughts that I had there. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense that like, I mean, within the Second Amendment of like a well-regulated militia, these sort of parastate operators are built in and even mentioned in the initial doctrines of governments, you know. Yeah. So the well-regulated militia thing, even the forms of racial violence that have always taken place, I mean, all this stuff adds up to – I mean, such a powerful point you make, though, that it's hard to argue that Emmett Till lived in a liberal democracy. I've never quite heard it placed that way, and you're right. I mean, you can't really argue that. And, and yet we're not that separated from that point in history as well. When, you know, Fred Hampton's mother used to babysit Emmett Till, if I understand that correctly, which is, you know, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure I have that, that right. I mean, it was something that I had, I'd heard in passing that was like, wait a second, that's, That is a wild sort of linkage to a not-so-distant past that really places right up front how close we are and not so far beyond that point. So... So this conversation has been wonderful and fascinating, and I want to have you back on the show again in the future. I think it's, you know, interesting points, scorched earth opinions about Foucault, man. You know, all of this has been really wonderful. But before we let you go, can you tell us about a couple of the books you've written and what your current projects are?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, so I've written a number of books. The ones that come to mind, I guess, that kind of overlap with some of the discussion is Counter History of the Present. It attempts to kind of reframe some of the issues around globalization, technology, and democracy and develop a kind of counter history of the standard narrative that we're living in a globalized technological era in which democracy is the only game in town. And so some of the research I shared with you comes out In particular of the third chapter that dismantles the myth that the United States was or is a democracy It wasn't founded as one the founding fathers were anti-democratic. They said it themselves. They acted accordingly. Yeah another book radical history in the politics of art is more focused on some of the aesthetic issues that we talked about and So I guess I would mention maybe those two books my current projects are One of them is a book on fascism. And the four articles that you mentioned are the kind of seeds of that project, as well as an article that will be coming out on July 6th on the fascist coup d'etat. It wasn't really a coup d'etat, the fascist overthrow of the government that was planned in 1934. So that's one of my main book projects. But then I've also been working on a book entitled The Intellectual World War Project. that looks much more specifically at the role of the US national security state and the corporatocracy in waging a global war against not only the practice, but the very idea of communism and all of their involvement behind the scenes with the world of intellectual production, including the journalistic world and other such things. So my comments on Arendt and on Foucault come out of that research. And the last project that I'm co-authoring with Jennifer Ponce de Leon, who just published an excellent book called Another Aesthetics is Possible, is a book on aesthetics entitled Revolutionizing Aesthetics that attempts to open up the parameter of analysis beyond just the bourgeois practice and concept of art. to the understanding of aesthetics that is how we collectively compose a world and looking at how socialist countries have done that with their cultural policies and examining other ways of organizing society so that culture is not just used as a kind of hollywood weapon against our minds but can be a tool that's put in the hands of the masses to build real power real understanding and ultimately also community and an egalitarian community it's fascinating man the uh the the commentary on aesthetics is i mean i i think recently i i heard that the the political right tends to uh

Jules Taylor: aestheticize politics, whereas it's our duty on the left to politicize the aesthetics. So, I'd be really curious about that book you're co-authoring on aesthetics. It's really interesting. I can't thank you enough for hanging out and talking to us. And, you know, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I'm kind of spinning from all this stuff. I'd like to I'll probably follow this up with an email after I re-listen to this conversation a few times. Because I'm sure there's more that will come to mind as I edit this. And everything you've said is so generative that there's a ton there. And I would encourage listeners to head into the show notes and check out all the links I'm going to share with this article. And... Thank you again. I really, really appreciate it. It was a wonderful conversation.

Gabriel Rockhill: No, thank you. Honestly, the opportunity, it might appear to some of your listeners, is quite eclectic because we bounced around touching on a lot of different topics. But one of the things that I really appreciate both about your questions and just our conversation in general is an interest in engaging with the social totality. And so that requires talking about fascism, talking about the U.S. national security state, talking talking about the theory industry. And so if it did appear like we were jumping around, actually all of these are linked together in a very tight-knit web, and that's the web of the social totality. So I really appreciate that kind of historical materialist perspective that you bring to things because it's so essential to our understandings.

Speaker 3: As time went by, what could it mean? And I didn't mind, oh I couldn't sleep Above my head and under my feet As time went by, oh I couldn't sleep I didn't mind, oh I couldn't see. Above my head, under my feet. It's time we're back, oh I couldn't leave.