Myth: All Marxisms are Created Equal (w/ Gabriel Rockhill)

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Too Black: Welcome to the Black Myths Podcast. Welcome to the Black Myths Podcast. I am your host, Too Black. All right, uh, today's myth is All Marxisms Are Created Equal. This is playing off the book of our guest, Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism. Essentially, the book itself deals with how Marxism and more broadly socialism was winning in the mid-20th century. It had just come out of the out of World War II, and there was a strong attempt, a political project by the West, particularly led by like the CIA, the State Department, to produce what is known as a compatible left—a left that might have critiques of capitalism, that might push back against many of its excesses, but ultimately aligns itself with the imperial project, tends to oppose actually existing projects that are. That oppose it, such as the Soviet Union or even sovereign projects. They may not be socialist, but they at least are anti-imperialist, like even contemporarily in the idea of an— or contemporarily like an Iran or something, right? So this is the case that he makes, and he talks about how a lot of the scholarship that gets produced under the guise of Marxism is pushed by the CIA, is promoted by it. Even if some of these scholars are doing this without knowing so, are doing things within what they believe to be their own agency, there's a system that's put in place to produce intellectual commodities that tend to favor imperialism. Now, one may ask, what does this have to do with Black people or anything like that? Well, We're in these spaces too, right? We're in spaces that claim to be radical or claim to be Marxist, or even in some cases Black nationalists or Pan-African, but there are compatible left-wing Black thoughts that get put out as well. And even though the book itself, I admit, doesn't cover that as closely, we do have a pretty good conversation about that. There's some—

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Too Black: People or some scholars that get named that I know some folks won't appreciate maybe the criticism, but I think it was worth keeping on record and considering how even Black thought particularly can fall under this guise of aligning itself with imperialism while seeming to be radical or seeming to be progressive or something of that nature. So this is not an accident that there's a lot of thought that comes out that way where Somebody can be an abolitionist, but somehow seems to align themselves with imperialism, or somebody can claim to be a radical, Black radical, blah, blah, blah, or Marxist or whatever. But we're mainly going to talk about Marxism, but more broadly, there's a way that the academy and the state produces these theories that seem radical on their face, but really don't have much to say about the real world. It's, you know, honestly. So, um, doesn't mean everyone has to be a Marxist or whatever. That's definitely not what we're pushing. But I think it is interesting history to, to consider. So, um, this is the conversation that we're having. Again, um, Gabriel Rockhill, for those who are not on the internet and are not caught up in some of the controversies that That have come around this book. Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic, and activist who publishes in French and English. His work is dedicated to materialist analysis of the social totality and has thus far focused primarily on 3 intertwining themes of history, politics, and culture. So he'll be here with us, and we'll also be joined by Kimberly Miller, who was with us on our America First episode, The Myth of America First. She's a very well-versed Marxist scholar, so she'll be here to catch any holes that myself or Ryan may not be able to catch. And also Ryan will be with us, longtime co-host that y'all already know. So that's about it. Just real quick, want to shout out the patrons. I've not done a great job, worse than usual, which is not— this is already bad, but I've not done a great job keeping everything updated. Just been very busy.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Too Black: But I do want to shout out the people who continue to support us. Pookamon, who was the last person to sign up, and Deep Teeth, who also signed up. Shout out to y'all. And people who can support, please support. I know prices are going up and things are getting more expensive, so definitely appreciate everybody who does support us, who does allow us to have some kind of material support, and definitely appreciate y'all for doing that. And we'll have more episodes this month, one related to data centers, another one related to the nonprofit sector, likely on that as well. So be on the lookout. Other than that, we're going to get into the episode. Again, the myth being all Marxisms are not created equal. And I think it's an interesting conversation just to hear how these things are set in motion. So without further ado, we'll get into it. Appreciate it. All right, all right. It's been a long trip to get this ready, but we got it now. We are here with Dr. Gabriel Rockhill. I do want to say something on a— this is a total aside. I've been calling you Rockwell for a long time, and then Ryan randomly corrected me. I don't know how I missed that. We were reading, we did an episode a long time, or last year we did a lot of stuff on like white power and everything, and Rockwell just kept coming up. So I apologize not to associate you with that. What's up?

Gabriel Rockhill: I appreciate you, Ryan, for correcting me.

Ryan: Hey, I got your back. It's all good.

Too Black: I was reading too much and I just did. I was like, oh, it's Rockhill. So anyway, If I had said Rockwell in any of our prior episodes, again, my apologies. All right, we're here with Dr. Gabriel Rockhill. Just again, we already gave the intro, but if you'd want to just introduce yourself just to give the audience a sense of who you are, then we'll get into the conversation.

Gabriel Rockhill: I'm a philosopher who believes that the purpose of thinking is not only to interpret the world, but to meaningfully change it and to struggle for equality and ecological sustainability. And I teach at the university. I run an educational nonprofit, the Critical Theory Workshop. I'm involved in a lot of collective projects organizing. The SPINE conference is coming up, Society for Peace, Internationalism, and Ecology, which I'm involved in. And so one of my main focal points, given my background, is political education and how we can mobilize its tools so that we can harness the power of the masses and move them in the right direction.

Kimberly Miller: All right.

Too Black: Thanks for being here. All right. So we just want to ground some terms to start out because the myth is all Marxisms are created equal. We would like to just ask you for, in simplest possible ways, to define Marxism because there's obviously lots of different adjectives that get put in front of it, Western Marxism, cultural Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, et cetera, et cetera. But so how are you—

Ryan: Yeah.

Too Black: within your work defining Marxism?

Gabriel Rockhill: I think the simplest definition is that Marxism is the most developed collective science of liberation from capitalism that we have, and that it's a living and innovative tradition whose primary objective is the practical transformation of reality that brings greater harmony to the human project and its relationship to the natural world.

Too Black: Thank you. Thank you. So with that being said, are there different types of Marxism that fall under that definition?

Gabriel Rockhill: We can get into a debate about how we'd want to define things. I think at the highest level, I would say no, in the sense that there is one core Marxist tradition that has been dedicated to scientifically elucidating reality and transforming it, but that through the complex history of capitalism, in particular in its imperialist phase, beginning at the end of the 19th century, we see the emergence of a kind of perverted form of Marxism that is largely the result of class formations within the imperial core, as well as the ideological war waged by the imperialists. And so at a simple level, I would say that while there is authentic or true Marxism, which is the tradition that runs from Marx and Lenin and Mao to and many, many others. But then there's also a kind of academic imperial version of Marxism that has its origins, you know, you could even go back to the Gotha Programme that Marx and Engels were critical of, or Kautsky that Lenin was critical of, but really came to full force, you know, through the course of the long 20th century. And it's a kind of academic version of Marxism that is very theoretically sophisticated, or at least it purports to be, while disconnected from the practical projects of transforming the world. So in that sense, you could say that there's the authentic Marxism, which has always been anti-imperialist, and then there's a perversion of it, which is an anti-anti-imperialist Marxism. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out what the negation of the negation means in this case. If you're against anti-imperialism, then you're pretty well in the camp of the imperialists. And so one, at least quick way of framing the history is that there's an authentic anti-imperialist tradition of Marxism, and then it's perversions within the imperial core that end up being at least accommodating towards imperialism, if not openly pro-imperialist.

Too Black: Okay. So when they're— just for— this is more for the audience. So when we hear things like Like socialism with Chinese characteristics, or we see it adapted differently under like a Cabral who talks about we're not interested in just ideas in our head. Or when— so when different leaders across the world have demonstrated a, like, a certain adaptation within their context, how are we distinguishing that from what you're calling more broadly, like this kind of Western Marxism or this adaptable Marxism to like imperialism. How do, how do we distinguish those, like the Chinese characteristics types, as is that a different type of Marxism or is that just an adaptation of it to a context? I guess that's the, that's a better question.

Gabriel Rockhill: In short, I would say the, the latter, that Marxism is, you know, people like Lukács, Walter Rodney have really insisted on this. At its core, it's a methodology. It's not like there's a blueprint for revolution. There's not some type of Bible that we all refer back to. These aren't sacred texts. They're people who are trying to figure the world out. And that world varies considerably based on where you're situated in it. And so if it be— I'm sorry, socialism with Chinese characteristics, or if it be what Thomas Sankara did in Burkina Faso, or many, many other examples that we could point to, everyone is trying to provide a concrete analysis of a concrete situation and draw on this rich international tradition in order to apply that method to their specific context. That's one of the reasons that this tradition is so incredibly innovative. One of the ways that the Western or imperial Marxists have tried to denigrate it is affiliate it with just bureaucratic apparatchiks who just apply a particular framework of thinking and assume that there is a dogma to it. But in fact, if you look at anyone from Cabral to Che to Mariátegui and millions of other examples that one could point to, these are all incredibly innovative thinkers. But they're innovative not because they're just making shit up in the abstract. They're innovative because they're drawing on a rich collective methodology, and they're trying to figure out how that comes to bear on their specific context. And so I have no problem with saying that they're all working within a broad Marxist tradition, but within that tradition, of course, it takes on various forms. And it's also important that the tradition of self-critique is very, very important to this. Uh, to this heritage because the goal is to fight and win. It's not to be correct on the sidelines of history. Therefore, some of the critiques have been absolutely, uh, far-reaching and quite profound. Uh, you could reference, you know, Cabral's analysis of class formations within Africa, and you could look at the way the Chinese, like the Vietnamese, were critical of what they referred to as a certain dogmatism within the Marxism-Leninism Right? So it's not facile or superficial forms of critique, but the goal is— and we could reference Fidel Castro in this regard— the goal is all of the innovation that we need within the revolution, right? Within the process of moving towards a revolutionary transformation. And what that means is that the ultimate arbiter will be practice. Right. And then we can look at socialism with Chinese characteristics. You can point to, and I think there are some valid criticisms of certain aspects, uh, Cheng Enfu's excellent book, uh, on this is a great example of it because it's also from within the Chinese perspective and it is not, you know, without its critical commentary. But at the same time, you look at the incredible, incredible wins on the part of the Chinese working class, and there I think it's undoubted that it has made major, major advances.

Too Black: Go ahead, Kim.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah, and I was just thinking specifically around that point about how then academia specifically reproduces this bourgeois knowledge that discards revolutionary praxis. I think that's one intervention your book excellently conveys because, for instance, Maurice Bishop, as you know, who was obviously influenced by Marxism-Leninism, For instance, just like in my field of understanding ecotourism, he has a very excellent analysis of tourism in the Caribbean and a more equitable distribution of tourism-based economies and what a real transformation of the tourism industry would look like in tourism-dependent islands like Grenada, for instance, and what that would look like within a socialist transformation and revolution of the New Jewel Movement. But yet we are never citing Maurice Bishop in tourism studies.

Ryan: Right.

Kimberly Miller: You know, he's kind of written out as a serious thinker when it comes to how we think about what would ecotourism look like, or what would an ecologically based tourism look like where the profits are actually held in the host country. So I was curious, like, your thoughts on why aren't revolutionaries that have actually put theory into practice considered as serious kind of theorists on— and does that speak to the ways in which Western Marxism reproduces itself as something within the ivory tower, the ivory towers, rather than something that is felt materially for the working class.

Gabriel Rockhill: That's a really great point.

Kimberly Miller: Great point.

Gabriel Rockhill: Fantastic question. I think that the way that the history of empire has played itself out is that the material institutions produced by empire, like universities, publishing houses, the conference circuit, the broader culture industries, are policed in sometimes discreet and sometimes very indiscreet ways in order to filter what becomes prevalent within the kind of dominant so-called marketplace of ideas. And that the ideas that are filtered out are those that are the greatest threat to empire. And so at a certain level, it makes perfect sense. Why would imperial institutions teach the people how to overthrow empire? And Maurice Bishop, of course, who was killed for his dedication to the struggle, also was someone who very clearly identified the racial dynamics of the island and how threatening it was. Right. For Black people in the Caribbean to make a revolution and to communicate to Black people in the United States what that meant. And that this— there's a famous speech that he made in the United States, I think it was in New York City, was even a greater threat than Cuba, which of course Cuba has a very large African population and as well is a very mixed society. But he was pointing out the extent to which the racial struggle, when situated within the framework of a fight against imperialism, raises the stakes of what that struggle looks like, because it becomes a fight against the entire system that produces processes of racialization and subhumanization. And so Bishop, I think, is an extremely dangerous character Precisely for these and other reasons. And in that sense, one of the goals of my book is simply to apply Marxist methodology to the history of knowledge production and, for that matter, also the circulation of information within news and propaganda platforms, and to demonstrate that the dominant knowledge production that we have within the imperial core, and of course, this has far-reaching ramifications around the world through the kind of comprador networks that imperialism has set up, that dominant form of knowledge does not give us the tools to fight imperialism. On the contrary, it denigrates those who have been invested in practice of the Marxist sort as being old school, unsophisticated, lacking in innovation, basically not being true thinking beings. And so there's an elevation and a supervaluation, if you will, of theory over and against practice. So what really matters is some new sophisticated way of speaking or a neologism or some strange, you know, conglomeration of word games rather than people who have dedicated their lives to uplifting the most oppressed and exploited of the human race on planet Earth. And so all of this, I think, allows us to see how imperialism is not just a matter of economic, military, and political issues. It saturates and structures the entire world of knowledge and information.

Ryan: So in your book, I noticed you said culture tends to be understood as free from the realm of exploration, or as a free realm of exploration rather than a highly regimented material system of production, circulation, and consumption that is intimately bound up with material imperatives. You open your book demonstrating how the amount of infiltration conducted by entities such as the CIA and other agencies and how they influence the production of Marxism and the broader theory industry. Can you highlight some of those examples and What the overall goal of such activity, and why does your book name the activity Western Marxism specifically?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, the overall goal was to redefine the very nature of the left within the imperial core and beyond by identifying the non-compatible or disrespectful left as the communist left and shoring up and supporting what they refer to as compatible left, which is a left that can, and this is very It can be very critical of capitalism, particularly its consumer dynamics. But the red line, if you will, is to ultimately take a position that as bad as capitalism is, the alternative is worse. In that sense, the compatible left accommodates itself to capitalism and imperialism. And if you know the history of the last 150 years, and you can kind of chart this out, and it's very clear that even in the United States, the left of the '30s was not the left of the '60s, was not the left of the '90s, and is certainly not the left today. What you basically see, to put it simplistically, is a major drift to the right.

Too Black: Hmm.

Gabriel Rockhill: Because by shoring up the compatible left as the only left worthy of respect, the only one that's worthy of discussion, right, even within the intelligentsia or within the ecosystem of mainstream media, the only leftists are those who are progressive liberals, maybe anarchists, but at the end of the day, they're still going to line up on the most important issues. What that does is if you define the left as compatible, you shift— you not only divide the left, but then you shift it further to the right, and that gives greater latitude to the right to move further to the right. So the history that we're living through now with increasing rise of fascism is a material consequence, in part, of a redefinition of the left, moving it further and further to the right so that the right can really anchor itself. And the ultimate goal is to get rid of any left whatsoever, even if it's just a compatible left. And that's one of the reasons that they, of course, as a misnomer, label Biden a communist or Kamala Harris a communist or these other laughable things. Of course, for anyone in the know, this is completely ludicrous. But the reason they do that is because what they're telling us is the left that is the only left that is left after us purging The non-compatible left, we want to get rid of that left too. And so we call it communism because it's the history of how we refer to our enemies, or at least partial enemies. The Western, or what I prefer to call imperial Marxism that has arisen, is largely a consequence of the same overall operations in the sense that what we have is a version of Marxism that's compatible with capitalism and even imperialism. Right. And that form of compatible Marxism has, just like the socialist parties in Europe in the early Cold War, been supported and promoted by the capitalist ruling class through their foundations and by the US national security state, as well as by other intelligence services of the imperialist powers in Western Europe. What this shows us, and I try to bring that to the fore in the book, is that if you have a version of Marxism that is funded not once, not twice, but more or less systematically by the ruling class, in particular Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, what are referred to as the Big 3, 3 of the biggest capitalist ruling classes in the history of the United States, what we used to call the robber barons. If these robber barons are funding Marxism and the managers who oversee their foundations are highly trained, usually from elite institutions, the Ivy Leagues. Most of them come out of or have connections to the intelligence services. These are very smart people, not in the sense of, like, smart insofar as they could contribute to the collective science of liberation, which I was referring to earlier. They're very shrewd and clever, and they can figure out how to do things for the ruling class. Right. And so their goal is to fund and support, or has been historically— this has shifted over time— but to fund and support and to promote a version of Marxism that could function as a weapon of war against anti-imperialist Marxism. Now, the reason the ruling class did this is not because they wanted to. And that's very important for us to recognize. We always have to— one of the ways we need to understand a dialectical analysis is you look at every phenomenon as a multi-sided phenomenon. It's never just a simplistic, kind of one-sided reality. And in the case of the shoring up of a compatible left Marxism, the reason they did this is because the communists had defeated fascism, and they were at the vanguard of the anti-colonial struggle in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and for that matter, prior to that point in time. So what they identified in the Marxists were the leaders of the anti-fascist struggle, and the anti-colonial struggle. But in the wake of World War II, they had so much global credibility because they, you know, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: It wasn't the compatible left who did this. It wasn't all of the bourgeois governments in the West that had aided and abetted the rise of fascism. And so people around the world recognized that because it was just, you know, in their face. And so what the capitalist ruling class had to do Is they couldn't win an outright war on Marxism. They had to try to divide and conquer. And that's why they funded and supported to the tune of millions of dollars. And I outlined some of the, you know, we can get into the details if you want, a version of Marxism that was Marxist in theory. I put this in very big scare quotes and anti-communist in practice. But it's a a brilliant endeavor when you think of it. And I've been through, for instance, the files that the Rockefeller Foundation has on their Marxism-Leninism project, and they were funding an international network of research institutions and universities with professors, doctoral students working on translations, publishing, uh, critical editions, doing conferences, doing their own publications. All of this backed by the Rockefeller Foundation with one principal objective in mind, and that was to shore up compatible Marxism that could then become the lingua franca. So that when people like I—I went to college in the '90s—what was I exposed to? Was I taught you know the work of Maurice Bishop or Ernesto Che Guevara, or shockingly, I wasn't. You know, I was instead taught Adorno and Horkheimer and figures like this. Now, there's more to your question, Ryan, that I might have left out, but I'm going to leave it there and you can come back at me if I didn't cover it sufficiently.

Ryan: No, I think you did a great job covering everything because one of the things that stuck out to me is you said— Actually, it makes me want—

Kimberly Miller: oh, sorry.

Ryan: No, one of the things that stuck out to me was, like you said originally, the ruling class didn't want a compatible left, but also in your book, so they adopted that out of necessity, right? Because in your book you said the empire is going to create the conditions for his ideology to flourish. So it's kind of like they had to do that, correct?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. And we see the consequences for that now, right? Because if you read Project 2025, one of the principal enemies identified by the Trump administration is cultural Marxism. Now, some of those who haven't read my book or have engaged in the very low level of pseudo-intellectual conversation online have assumed that what I'm doing in my book is somehow a left-wing conspiracy theory that lines up with a right-wing conspiracy theory or serves the interests of the rights or of the right or things like this.

Too Black: Kind of super foreign theory.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's another, another version of that. And that completely misses the entire nature of the argument, which is a materialist account of how The ruling class and other factors. I mean, the entire imperial superstructure has been the primary force behind the promotion of this compatible left intelligentsia in general and Marxism more specifically. And that what we're seeing, and this goes back at least to the Reagan administration, right? It's not just with Trump, but there is a— as you move the left further and further to the right, it's not as if the right at some point is going to be like, okay, that's fine, job's done, we're good here. They keep moving it to the right. And so to put it simplistically, the war on the compatible left was waged, you know, from the '40s until— I'm sorry, the war on the, the communists in the name of shoring up a compatible left. This was the kind of long, long Cold War. And then once that compatible left has been shored up and it is the dominant left here, right? You talk to someone in the street and you're like, well, what's left politics? And they think in terms of the Democratic Party.

Too Black: Right.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Which is pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist. Like, this is so deeply ingrained in the United States that it's— people think you're insane for imagining that there might be a left outside of that dominant framework. And it's the same within the university, of course. It's the same within at least many organizing spaces, fortunately not all of them. And so what you have is now that that left has been shored up, now they can wage war on that and move things further to the right. And that's what we see happening.

Too Black: Kim?

Ryan: Definitely, definitely.

Too Black: Were you going to say something, Kim, before I go next?

Kimberly Miller: Yeah, because it just reminded me specifically, I know I had a question for you, but that just was a perfect segue into just my experience, I think, working within the framework of intersectionality theory, which is pushed a lot specifically as this kind of Rearticulation of triple oppression theory. But of course, we know triple oppression was theorized by a Black communist woman, Claudia Jones. But yet we get intersectionality, which was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was a legal, like within a legal historian framework that is about institutional recognition, like before bourgeois law. And then that becomes—

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Miller: This race-gender-class, you know, I'm being really reductive in how I'm framing intersectionality, but just the way in which the anti-imperialism, the centering of proletarian women, the class struggle gets erased from intersectionality. And now it's just about equality under the law, recognition, right? Rather than the specific internationalist communist origins of triple oppression that was specifically Rooted out of how we understand intersectionality today, where Dr. PPS, of course, as you know, will always say class is the most undertheorized within intersectionality theory. And you get Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is taking selfies with Kamala Harris during the height of a genocide, right, in Gaza. Just the way in which I, for instance, my work was pushed within an intersectional framing and the dialectical and historical materialism, as you say, DHM, is then Somehow missing from the research. And it's not even something that you think of consciously, but it's being, like you said, shoring up of this compatible left. It becomes something that is just happening. And I think that it's been hard to— a hard pill to swallow as an academic. I was in grad school for a very long time. It took me a while to finish. And I just— Seeing, like, it's like a self-censoring, like, wow, like, I know I have these radical politics, but yet my work, I'm not Saying what I want to say. And it's because of this kind of way in which academia strips you of your radicalism, you know, in terms of the work. And it's something that I'm consciously thinking of, but it's because the theories that you're given are not dialectical and historical materialism. It's intersectionality. It's, you know, biopower, you know, Foucault, but you're not going to get, you're not going to get that. And I was just wondering, I think your work really speaks to that really well.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah.

Kimberly Miller: So I just want to say thank you for putting in words what I felt for so long but couldn't articulate.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, I appreciate that, and I could definitely relate to your trials and tribulations because one of the ways that the intersectionality discourse functions is that it operates like a form of radical recuperation. So it sounds radical. You know, people are talking about class, they're talking about race, they're talking about gender. But they're recuperating a project that historically has been the project of the global socialist movement, and they're transforming it in very profound, yet at least for them, apparently subtle ways. So if you want to know who is at the vanguard of the struggle for national liberation, which is the terminology that historically the communists have used because they recognize that race Racism is a material reality, but there aren't people who are subhumans. There's just not. There's one family. There's one human family. And so the national question, who is fighting for the right of all peoples of this world to self-determination, who is at the forefront of the struggle for national, and if we put it in more contemporary terms, racial liberation? Right. It was the communists. Who was fighting for women's liberation? Going back to Engels' famous statement that the way in which we should evaluate the emancipation within any society is to look at the status of women. And you see this carried out through Zetkin and Lenin and so many others. And so what you have in intersectionality is on the one hand, you have to erase this history, right? People cannot know that the vanguard of the struggle for national, racial, gender, and of course class liberation has always been the global socialist movement, at least in the best forms that it's taken. Because we can't deny as well that, you know, people working within the Marxist tradition are also affected in various ways by capitalist ideologies, right? So it's not as if there's any kind of pure outside world that they could inhabit, but they're doing their best to deal with the inheritance of racism, misogyny, and class warfare. And so part of intersectionality wants to invisibilize that history and say that, well, Marxists have never thought about the woman question or about the national question. Well, no, only people who know nothing about history could possibly abide by that position. And then what they do is they establish a kind of relative equivalence between these 3 different vectors of analysis. Not recognizing that class is the material set of relations that constitute every aspect of human existence, and that class relations historically, if you look at how their material reality has played itself out, have always been racial and gender relations.

Too Black: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: And so therefore, it's not as if class is a separate category. And race and gender over here. This is what Marxists refer to as metaphysical thinking. It's the assumption that there's these kind of fixed entities that stand on their own, and there's not interpenetration, and for that matter, a process of development, transformation, contradictions that emerge, etc. And so what the intersectionalists are doing is they're trying to radically recuperate this discourse and turn it into something that is ultimately ineffectual, Because if the goal is simply to be attentive to the differing ways in which people are oppressed based on how they're situated, you evacuate the most important point, which is that you need a consolidated struggle against the material system that exploits and oppresses the peoples, in the plural, of this world. And you shift therefore from a kind of materialist politics of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism to a representational politics of recognition that can easily traffic in tokenism and kind of all of the other liberal games that we know. And in that sense, then you really do recuperate for a project that is that of the compatible left. And so we have to push back very hard against that. The very last thing that I would say, because I think it's important for critiques of identity politics and kind of wokeness and whatnot, I have lots of critiques of these politics, but the critiques always have to be dialectical. And I see, unfortunately, even on the left, one-sided critiques that just points out how bad they are. We are very well placed to know now that the goal of the current administration in the United States is not to get rid of identity politics. It's to get rid of any identity politics except for white identity politics.

Too Black: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Or the kind of politics that insulates the Epstein class from the rest of us. And in that sense, the goal should be to recognize that what these discourses— intersectionality, identity politics, etc.— they're recuperating discourses that are Marxist, and they're trying to defang them And sanitize them. Now, we have to call them out for doing that, but we can't then go so far as to say that, well, everything related to questions of race, gender, sexuality, trans politics, just go on down the list, disability, etc., etc., we just throw all that out as a bunch of woke liberal bullshit. And clearly there's plenty of that, you know, to be had. But the reason these discourses exist in the first place is because there's a long material history of the peoples of this world struggling to break the material chains of class relations that don't only exploit people, but they oppress them. And those are racial and gender and sexual bonds that need to be broken. Therefore, we have to see both sides of this and recuperate and return to and rejuvenate the dialectical and historical materialist analysis of race, gender, sexuality, as part of the overall class dynamic, if you will. I don't know if that makes sense, or Kim, if that speaks to your point.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I think there has been an intervention by some on the Black left to say identity reductionism, because we feel that there's been this obscuring around identity politics to imply that identity doesn't shape politics when it does. We know it does. We know that the reactionary Right. Had their own identity politic, right? Like you said, organizing around whiteness. So we have used identity reductionism and basically say, this is what liberals have done, right? Reducing everything to one's identities as if that alone is a class dynamic. And you're saying, no, it's not, right? And I think that that's been my issue with how it gets deployed. And I think by, like you said, rooting it in class struggle and understanding how race, disability, sexuality, how these all intersect and understanding capitalism organizes exploitation around these intersections, which is what triple oppression we're looking at specifically with proletarian Black women. I think that we could really have a liberatory politics. Thank you so much.

Gabriel Rockhill: For sure.

Too Black: Yeah. And I think I want to credit Ericka Caines for coining that term, one of our fellow comrades in BAP. But yeah, I think every, like, I mean, like you said, these are class relations, but they're often experienced through these like racialized, gendered ways in terms of, you know, how we come into contact with the material world. And I think that, so, so obviously people are going to form an identity around that. Like, they're obviously gonna have some kind of character that comes outta that, but there's a tendency to—

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Too Black: I mean, I know you're not doing this at all. I think I appreciate your answer, but there's a tendency to then try to reduce everybody to hardhat white workers kind of approach, right?

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Too Black: And then we're all just kind of in this mystical factory somewhere, and there's this working class that we're not talking to. I did notice there were some things in your book where you wanted to move to Black political thought, but there's some other stuff that came up. You talked about with With the Frankfurt School, there was some— can't remember the exact, like, numbers. I don't have the quotes in front of me, but you talked about how there was a tendency to fund questions about antisemitism among the working class. I think it was in the '40s, to study it among the working class as opposed to looking at broader class questions. And it's not— and I guess to kind of think about this, even when we're talking about race and such, It's not that there's not racism amongst the working class. It certainly is, or sexism and all of those things. But how sometimes, I guess, is that the way that gets split up where it's like, we're going to study these tendencies amongst the working class people, particularly amongst white people. Then that often, I think, accelerates the tensions that already exist. And we've seen this even with whatever people call wokeism, another term that's been misused. Understood. But we see how now the workers on the mid-level got to study, they got to talk about white privilege when they're on the ground floor, or they got to talk about sexual harassment when they're on the ground floor of the thing. Again, it's not that those things are not there, they definitely are, but that's not what the executives are necessarily having to deal with on that level of a company. That's not what the stockholders, they don't have to deal with that.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Too Black: I found that example interesting because I'd never seen it that far back, even with antisemitism being deployed all the way back to, you know, in the 1940s. So I don't know if you could speak about that. I think it was a Jewish union that you referred to. And then I wanted to get into some questions about Black political thought since Kim raised a great question on intersectionality.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I think what you're referring to is that the Frankfurt School was hired to investigate antisemitism, particularly within unions that were communist-leaning.

Too Black: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Right? And here we are in the— I mean, just think about this, right, for a second. Here we are in the 1940s, right? Humanity's just discovered what capitalism is capable of doing to its victims, which, of course, anybody who was paying attention knew this full well if they knew the history of colonialism or the victims of colonialism. But here you have in Europe concentration camps that were justified in part— of course, World War II was ultimately driven by class forces. It was an inter-imperialist rivalry. But the way in which it played itself out on the ground is by a kind of scapegoat politics targeting the Jews, because to a large extent, culturally, the Jews were affiliated with the peoples of the East. And more specifically with the Bolsheviks. And so the Judeo-Bolshevik threat to Western civilization was part of what was targeted. In this context, then, you would hire ostensible Marxists to investigate not the antisemitism of the fascists or of the liberals who had aided and abetted the fascists, but instead of the communist-leaning unions? Like, obviously, what you're looking to do is to try to—

Ryan: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: contribute in some way, shape, or form. And I don't know if the Frankfurt School was doing this intentionally or not, but those who hired them to do it most likely were doing it intentionally. And that is, you're aiming to divide and conquer the working class. And I think that if you look at things at the kind of highest level of concrete abstraction, like you were just saying that racism exists within the working class, misogyny exists, which is true.

Ryan: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: You do also have to then ask the question, well, where does that come from?

Too Black: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: And how are these ideologies perpetuated? And one of the sources of those ideologies is that the capitalist ruling class owns and controls all of the institutions of social reproduction, all of the schools, the universities, the— I mean, the entire fabric of society. And the ruling class has a vested interest in dividing and conquering the working class. And one of the best tools for doing that is to get the working class to fight itself. And racism is fantastic at doing that, right? When you have white workers in the United States who think that the greatest threat to them is not their own ruling class, but people from Latin America who are fleeing, uh, US imperialism and trying to make a living, Like, why would those workers be their greatest enemies? You know? And misogyny plays much the same role. Instead of men and women having solidarity because they have a common enemy, instead they're pitted against one another. And so the ruling class, through their institutions and their mind managers, all of the people in the middle layer who tell people what to think, they train them and they teach them day in and day out. And all the cultural producers who do this, They want to foment racism. Racism is fantastic for capitalism, just like misogyny, because it divides the working class and gets them to fight among themselves.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Now, what does class do in relationship to that? If you understand how class operates, class is a social relation. And what do all of these races and all of these genders and all of these sexualities— and we could go on down the list— what do they all share? The overwhelming majority of them are forced to work for a wage if they're going to survive. They're proletarians. And so the greatest threat of a class politics is the unification transracially, across gender boundaries, across all boundaries of the global working class. And it's very important that it be global, right? Because it's not just a national working class, it's a global working class. That's what Maurice Bishop ultimately represented. And one of the other reasons he was seen as a major threat Yeah. Is a class-based analysis doesn't mean that you then ignore gender, race, or these other categories. It means that you materially situate them and understand how they function as a weapon of war against class unity. And what we need is class unity, because it's with that unity that we can fight and win, because the numbers are clearly on our side. Like, if the working class wasn't fighting itself, The ruling class would have either just been completely expropriated at this point in time or definitely be very, very far back on their heels.

Too Black: Yeah, I think there are collaborators within the working class. Like Gerald Horne talks about white class cross-collaboration, and that's broadly what he says the United States is. It's a settler project, but it's a project of cross-class collaboration too, right? Under the of whiteness. I did want to read that quote just so I get it on record. You said in the book, the study in question was commissioned by the Jewish Labor Committee. One of the JLC's leaders, David Dubinsky, had numerous ties to CIA and was involved, along with the likes of the agency operatives and Jay Lovestone— that's a whole other conversation— and Irving Brown in terms of their ties. So It's important, you know, you're not— these aren't conspiracies for people listening. He has the evidence. Like, this was— this kind of thing was fomented by the CIA. Next question, I guess, to shift a little bit, but I guess to come back to the question of intersectionality. You don't deal with this as much specifically in your book, but I did— we did want to ask some of these questions. How do you— because you did have a quote in there. You said, finally, some of the most cutting-edge forms of theory, including postcolonial theories, subaltern studies, decolonial theory, Afro-pessimism, liberal queer theory, et cetera, have branded themselves in an implicit theology as more profoundly political or deeply critical than anything that has preceded them. You had kind of gotten at this a little bit earlier. I guess I'm curious more so how you would apply this to What impact do you think that this kind of imperial theory industry has had on Black political thought and what maybe even qualifies as Black radical, as what would qualify as a compatible Black radical or Black Marxist thought? Because I know we, I don't know if you deal with that as much in your book, but I'm curious of your thoughts on that because I see the spaces that we're in, we see the compatible left very much so not through like Because I don't really like Foucault, really a lot of people in my space don't like Foucault, but you'll see some of these other more Black theorists that I think become a compatible left operation as well. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that? Are there versions of that in Black thought or Black political thought as well?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, for sure. Cedric Robinson comes to mind. I mean, he wrote a book called Black Marxism that would be better titled Black Anti-Marxism that was not only just very, very poor scholarship at so many levels, but also mischaracterized the entire history of Marxism by strawperson arguments and then tried to shore up some version of, I guess, Black radical tradition that I find highly eclectic and thoroughly problematic. I mean, he's just one example, but he's of course had an enormous impact on so many, at least within the academy. But above and beyond the academy, I think that some of the histories that we're talking about, you can see clearly in terms of the historical legacy of some of the radical movements that, of course, go back to the '30s. But the forms of like Black studies, ethnic studies that were set up in the latter part of the 20th century, Many of them were reactions to the radical organizing of the '60s and the early '70s, and that there was also an attempt to divide and conquer and shore up a compatible version of some of the radical organizing that was done at that point in time. Robert L. Allen has an excellent book called Racial Awakening in Capitalist America. I don't know if any of you have come across it.

Too Black: Black Awakening.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, Black Awakening. That's right. Yeah. Black Awakening in Capitalist America. And so you've read it. You might be then familiar with—

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: He actually goes into some of the ways in which the Ford Foundation, which people should know works hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency, because the state is the bourgeois state, right? It's the state of the ruling class. It's not the people's state. The people who are in power are all millionaires, and they're put there because of their connections to the financial ruling class. And so the Ford Foundation was involved in funding many of the operations that the CIA was involved with, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other organizations like this. And Allan points out that Ford was funding what, you know, I would refer to as this kind of more compatible left, or at least leaning in that direction. parts of the organizing movement. He highlights the CORE, which was the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Urban League, the NAACP. These were organizations that were receiving Ford money, and the goal of Ford was to shore up what some call the Black misleadership class so that you could then have a version of so-called Black politics that was culturalist, identitarian, reformist, and kind of modeled on corporate liberalism. And that this was very explicitly in order to counter the revolutionary politics that you had, of course, in the '60s and '70s, but goes back much further than that. And so I think that you see the same basic lines of demarcation operative within these traditions that you have in others, because you see it also in different fields of ethnic studies. If you know the history of the Chicano movement, for instance, you also have that operative. You also have it within the more revolutionary organizing around the woman question, where the goal of the financial ruling class is to shore up a version of kind of corporate feminism that segues Yeah. What's that?

Too Black: Boss girl feminism kind of.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so these are the forms of division that ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class because they divide the forces that should be unified on a class basis, but understanding class, of course, as gendered and racialized and all the things that I was saying before, and that has been a very powerful tool. So that now if you go to the university or in many, many organizing spaces and you're interested in things like racial liberation or gender liberation, you're very quickly, you know, driven in this direction of a kind of— it's a— there are different versions of it, but it amounts to a kind of race-first analysis or an acceptance Exceptionalist analysis or culturalism that basically puts class not only on the back burner, it often just puts class or tries to transform class into an identity category instead of a social relation. And so it obfuscates the set of relations that people are, you know, that people need to be attentive to. I'll give a shout out to the great work of Adolph Reed Jr. If you know the work of Cedric Johnson, Barbara and Karen Fields, for that matter. And there are many others who have, I think, very pointedly called out the ways in which there is a project of class warfare on the— what we can call— I mean, there's debates about the usefulness of this term, but for the purposes of this discussion, a kind of Black radical tradition, that war on it has been to try to shore up, to divide it, and then to shore up a compatible left version. And so I think it follows the same pattern that we've been talking about to a large extent.

Too Black: Yeah, you're going to get us in trouble with the Cedric Robinson reference, but—

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Kim. Yeah, it is. I know there's lots of fans out there.

Too Black: Yeah, yeah. Go ahead, Kim.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah. I just kind of— this goes along with, I think, the Black radical question, but around Indigenous studies relate to decolonial Theory. I know that Bikrum Gill had also kind of discussed the ways in which a lot of decolonial theory is weak on anti-imperialism. And I guess my question to you is, he had attributed to that, and I don't want to, I'm paraphrasing, but discussed the ways in which looking at the trajectory of decolonial theory in the early, I guess, 2000s and 2010s, how they looked at it in terms of, in the postcolonial kind of thinking, in the post-independent, the ways in which those projects for sovereignty, state sovereignty, were seen as failures, if you will, without theorizing the impact of imperial sabotage. And because of that, it became a focus on the culturism aspect, as you're saying, that you see decolonization is not a metaphor, but yet within that footnote, Oh, and China is also settler colonial, or, you know, so then it just becomes, oh, well, are the Soviet Union also settler colonial? So then it is this flattening, right? And all projects of state sovereignty are also settler colonialism. And there just seems to be this kind of obscuring around like, what does sovereignty mean? What does indigenous sovereignty mean? US imperialism somehow is absent when we know that imperialism is the primary contradiction that structures indigenous sovereignty globally, right? So, and then you have cases like Iran right now, who that is decolonization in practice, yet the decolonial scholars, somehow Iran is, we can't support Iran because it's a state and states are bad, right? So I was curious your thoughts on this. Kind of gets to my question around Bolivia right now, and you're seeing indigenous resistance, but yet when it came to Evo Morales, there was this constant, oh, he's extractivist. That was what was coming out a lot of times within how Western scholars that were citing Latin Americanists in Latin America around extractive policies, but still extractivism was just seen as this moral category that was necessarily bad, even denying the fact that, oh, well, what about within a state project that tries to keep sovereignty over resources? It doesn't matter. It's still the state. So I was curious your thoughts on that. Again, why in academia there's this negativity around sovereign state projects. And why that leads into, like I said, decolonial theory being, again, removed from imperialism as an animating force eroding indigenous sovereignty. So if you had any thoughts on that, sorry, I was kind of rambling, but—

Gabriel Rockhill: No, no, no. That was a great question and series of comments because I do think that decolonial theory has to be made distinct from anti-colonial theory of the dialectical and historical materialist tradition, right? The intellectual tradition that, in my opinion, and I think I can back this up, with factual proof, has made the broadest and deepest contribution to anti-colonial liberation, not of thought, not of discourse, but of human beings, land, and natural resources. It's the Marxist tradition. And so what decolonial theory historically has done, following on the heels of postcolonial theory, which did much the same thing, is it's tried to invisibilize that history and say that, for instance, Marxism is just the result of a European epistemology and Marxist ways of thinking or white thought or things like this, and it has no application whatsoever to peoples around the world. Walter Rodney, I think, had the greatest response to this, and he said, well, if Marxism had a race, it would probably be yellow because there are 100 million members of the Chinese Communist Party. Or wherever, whatever the number was when he was writing this, right? Marxism has proven itself to be a universal science because it's been applicable around the world by all peoples. And an epistemology is not defined by where it first emerged, right? So you wouldn't— there's another point that Rodney makes. He said, well, you wouldn't work, you know, say, I'm not going to use electricity because, like, Edison invented that, and that's like white electricity or some shit like that.

Too Black: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: It's like science is science, right?

Kimberly Miller: Mm-hmm.

Gabriel Rockhill: And so that, I think, is a very important point. And what decolonial theory is, is it's one more manifestation of these ideological discourses of radical recuperation. So they're reacting to the very real fact that some of the aspirations of the anti-colonial movement weren't fully realized. And therefore, you need an account of why it is that colonialism persists in a purportedly post-colonial situation, and they pretend to have an explanation for that. And pay attention to where their explanation comes from. It's not at the level of the material set of socioeconomic relations between the imperial forces and the periphery. It's instead at the superstructural or ideological level. It's ways of thinking. It's epistemologies. It's a very nebulous coloniality of power. Very Foucauldian, very much about ways of thinking, ways of speaking, discourses, etc., as if we could just come up with a new way of thinking and a new way of speaking, and that would help us end colonialism. Now, I don't know if anybody's tried fighting colonialism with words alone, but last I checked, that doesn't work. What it does is it reveals the class standing of the people who proffer these ideologies. Who would it be who would think that we could just change the world by uttering certain phrases or thinking in certain ways? It's the professional managerial class stratum that doesn't—

Too Black: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: That is not directly involved in the productive segment of the economy, and that is used to giving orders to the workers who are beneath them, who are the ones who execute and actually do things. So the illusion that just words or ideas would change the world is rooted itself in a class position, and that class position itself is an imperial class position because it's a professional managerial class of the imperial core. So if we then tie this more specifically to what it was that you were saying, what decolonial theory does is it identifies a correct problem, colonialism persists, and it tries to propose a false solution to that as, well, we need new ways of thinking. We have to get out of Western epistemologies, etc. Notice as well that they usually rely on Western epistemologies to do that because they'll apply— they'll appeal to people like Emmanuel Levinas, which, sorry, I know this is kind of dark, but I have a dark sense of humor. Levinas was pro-colonial. He was a Zionist. How are you going to decolonize your thoughts by drawing on a Zionist? Like, just think about it for 2 hot seconds and it doesn't work out. But what they do is then they shift the horizons to symbolic politics and to epistemologies. And ultimately then they don't give us the tools necessary for fighting and winning against colonialism. And part of that also is shoring up one of the predominant ideologies of the left intelligentsia, is that is not only being against states, which Kim, I think, is absolutely spot on, but it's also being against the party form. And usually against organized politics in any resolute form whatsoever, because organized politics are hierarchical, they're authoritarian, they can lead to abuses. Somebody might call me by the wrong name or something like this. And all of that is in order to take away from the left its primary methodological, practical tools for changing the world. Because if you can't get organized politically, Mm-hmm. You can't have a party, and you're not going to seize state power. All that you're going to do is think and talk differently. It doesn't take a genius to figure out, well, what are the consequences of decolonial theory going to be? We can look and know what the consequences of the New Jewel movement was, right? At least insofar as they had a phase in which they succeeded before the US military decided to intervene, as well as all of the forces of empire. But they had enormous successes within a certain finite amount of time. Where is the revolution that the decolonial theorists have made? It's what the French would call a revolution in a teacup. It doesn't— it's a little— it's a tea party. This doesn't exist. And that's one of the reasons that they proffer these discourses is precisely to drive people in the wrong direction.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: The last thing that I'd say is Jennifer Ponce de León is writing a book precisely on this topic. And one of the ways that she frames the critique of decolonial theory, which she's spoken on on some webinars and also has some writings on, is in terms of we always need a dialectical critique that doesn't just point out the negatives operative in discourses like this, but situates those negative critiques within the overall positive project.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: This is what the Western Marxists can never do. You're like, okay, there's all these problems. What do we do about it? You know, like, what's the solution? Come on, you're supposed to be smart guys. Like, tell us something, please. Oh no, read poetry, you know, you know, listen to Schoenberg, whatever. They don't have— they don't have a concrete solution. And so the solution to the problem of colonialism is the anti-imperialist Marxist tradition. And so ultimately, decolonial theory, the social function that it's playing by obscuring that tradition, is it's shoring up directly or indirectly the structural patterns of imperialism. Therefore, it is complicit in the knowledge structures of empire. Therefore, I think that it needs to be soundly criticized as being not only woefully insufficient, but even dangerous because it's driving people in the wrong direction.

Too Black: Yeah, thanks. Um, real, just real quick of a, off the beaten path question, but, um, this again, I'm more so thinking for the audience and the critics and, you know, there's been some bad, um, there's been some bad reviews written on your book.

Gabriel Rockhill: Um, I haven't seen any really.

Too Black: But I'm curious, just for people, just to ground it for— I made a joke about the Robinson thing, and I know about some of the other, even postcolonial theory. Can you clarify what you're saying overall? Because I think some people might hear it that you're saying that all these people are involved. I don't think this is what you're saying, but I just want this You lay this out more explicitly, that people are involved in this kind of conspiracy to dilute struggle or to do anything, and they're CIA stooges or something like that. And you lay out, you try to, in your book, you do try to get to this question so your work's not taken that way. But for those who may have not read it or aren't catching everything, it might come off that way. So can you Clarify that a bit more in terms of, are you saying that anything that's not Marxism is supporting of imperialism, right? Or anything that's not like— anything that is critical of these things is supportive of imperialism? And is that people are doing that because they're on payroll from the CIA? Like, how do we wrestle with the fact that some people actually do read texts And they agree with it on its own merit. It's not because they were, you know, like, not, at least not directly, nobody told them to believe this or whatever. Like, how are you situating what might feel very organic for people in terms of they have arrived at these conclusions on their own, not because of anybody pulling their strings or anything? How do we wrestle with that, you know, in comparison to, like, what you're saying is actually existing socialism and anti-imperialism?

Gabriel Rockhill: I appreciate that question because it's very important to clarify, and I'm glad as well that you highlighted it. I go through this in some detail in the book because I was anticipating some of the reactions by people who wouldn't read it and wouldn't take it seriously. But the overall framework at its simplest level is the following, that is that the way knowledge is produced, is in terms of a material system of knowledge production that includes universities and publishing houses and the finances and the backers for it and all of that. But the system of knowledge production is part of a larger kind of social and political system. So we don't have an ivory tower in the United States. We have a university that has very strong ties to the US state and to the financial ruling class. And so there's this overall kind of material system, but within that overall material system, there are subjects, like someone like Cedric Robinson or Walter Mignolo or other figures like this. And those subjects aren't fully determined by the system to just act as cogs within the system and do whatever they're told to do.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: They have agency, but that agency is also conditioned by the nature of the system within which they operate. And anyone who spent any time within the US academy, for instance, Knows full well that if, if you're here in the academy and you want to move up within this material system of knowledge production, then a good way to do that would be to write positively on Cedric Robinson, not on Maurice Bishop.

Kimberly Miller: Hmm.

Gabriel Rockhill: For instance, just to take a simple example. What that means is that if you want uplift within the system, You— it's an acquired disposition. Like, you practically learn what the system wants, and then you make decisions based on this, right? You can resist what the system wants, and there are different degrees of resistance. Some people say, well, fuck you, I'm gonna, I don't know, move to Cuba and not deal with you at all. Some people are like, well, I'm gonna push back hard, or I'm gonna make certain compromises, Or some people just swim downstream as quickly as they can to give to the system exactly what it wants. And what my book tries to do is detail the complex variability of the ways that all of these different agents relate to the system within which they operate. So I'm trying to give a dialectical account, if you will, of the relationship between a system and the subjects operating within that system, knowing full well that that system also, it changes over time. It has different parts that have different effects on different groups of people and things like this. And so all of that does not lead to an idea that there's a puppet master and a bunch of strings and just intellectuals doing what they're told, or people being forced to do certain things. I mean, this does happen at certain times, But the way it mainly functions is in terms of a material system of rewards and punishments that encourages certain types of behavior and demotes others. And that system, when you think about it from the point of the ruling class, is a much better system because then it can just function on its own. You don't need CIA intervention. You don't need the ruling class to come in forcefully with grants if the system of knowledge production just reproduces the types of intellectuals that serve the interests of empire. And so a lot of what passes in the US academy doesn't need to go through these— and I insist on this in the book— external forms of, you know, manipulation.

Too Black: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Usually it just functions the way it's supposed to function, right? Like the mass media system functions or like the culture industries function. The people who rise to the top and became the dominant musicians usually are doing the type of work and taking the political lines that coalesce with the interests of the music industry. It's kind of a basic point, really. But it is also true that there are nefarious forces that make sure that that happens if the system doesn't function the way it's supposed to. Maybe the last thing that I would say is that I also think it's always important to engage in a fine-grained analysis. So I was being critical of decolonial theory a moment ago. Grossfogel is a big name within decolonial theory. Grossfogel has taken a step to the left significantly and embraced certain versions of Marxism. I still don't think it's quite far enough. He's defended Venezuela's right to sovereignty. That's, that's important. Like, I don't think we should just take all decolonial theory and say it's all trash and throw it out. Like, that's never my position on any of these traditions. conditions. Uh, Cedric Robinson, was he wrong about everything? That's a pretty tall order. I don't think so. I think he was very wrong about some extremely important points, but he was also extremely erudite, well-read, you know. And so we have to be able to give a variegated analysis of anything that we're engaging in and bring to the fore the elements that we think are strong and point out those that we think we should be critical of. The same is true within the Marxist tradition, right? Like, these people make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes.

Ryan: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: So it's not as if, like, there's a golden calf out there and you say, like, oh, it's Lenin. He could have never made a mistake. Lenin himself admitted that he made mistakes. Like, that's, that's just part of the material reality that we're involved in, is a subject can't perfectly intercede in material reality to change it the way they want and always succeed. Right? Because reality's too complex to apprehend. So we also have to be self-critical in a relationship to the positions that we take, I think, as well.

Too Black: Yeah, you had said, you only feel a leash if you run far enough from your owner. And I'll just leave it at that in terms of—

Ryan: That was a dope quote.

Too Black: Yeah, it was a dope quote.

Ryan: That was a dope quote. But to piggyback off of Black's question, showing how the world of academia sets those parameters on what you're allowed to think, The leash on your neck, you don't feel it until you keep going. Showing how the world of academia is so steeped into the empire superstructure. And you also said, and I think on one of the Bad Faith podcasts, that the world of academia is still a site of struggle in which we shouldn't give up on. And for our audience, why is it important to continue that fight on that side of struggle? And if we do fight on that front, what are the ways in which we can effectively fight on that front? And what exactly are we fighting for on that front?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, I think that every site of struggle needs to be taken advantage of. This is one of the great points that Lenin always made. He said, well, don't only go out when the working class is angry about lower wages or longer working hours? Like, what about when one of the national minorities beat up by the cops, you know, or, uh, women are suffering unique forms of oppression? Like, we've got to mobilize around everything because we've also got to meet the working class where they're at and demonstrate that we're on their side, uh, whatever they consider to be the most important struggles. It's true that the university is a site of knowledge production, and it is extremely important to be able to give people tools to orient them in history and situate them in the broader struggle. Because— and I say this from the point of view of my own self-criticism— I know full well that in my own organizing life, I have operated within theoretical horizons in which I was being counterproductive. I was not getting to the place that I thought I was trying to get precisely because the theoretical framework that I had was incorrect and the way I understood the world was, was just wrong. And so theory is incredibly important for situating us, but of course it really takes on force, as Marx often said, when it comes to grip the Right? So it's not just about having theory for the select few. It's about the theoretical horizons that we can collectively share. The question of how to most effectively do this within universities is a complex and difficult one. But I think in our current context in the United States, where the university functions in a very unique way, I would say that one of the primary goals needs to be the democratization of knowledge.

Kimberly Miller: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: We have to be able to engage in debates that are open about what, from our vantage point, the people on this call, I think would be very simple things, but in the university, it's actually a fight. Like, being able to call something a genocide or describe it as apartheid.

Ryan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Or analyze imperialism. Or one of the most difficult things is let's get researchers together to analyze China's poverty alleviation program and their reforestation and ecological civilization programs. But let's do that not within the blinders of imperial propaganda. Let's try to do it where we put knowledge above politics. Now, of course, I recognize full well that you can't fully disarticulate them, but this is at least the liberal myth that we can just have pure knowledge. Well, then stop polluting our knowledge with your politics And let's look at sovereign socialist projects democratically and have an open debate. And Black, actually, this kind of reminds me of something that you referenced earlier. Apparently, there were a few critical comments made about my book, and one of the ones that I've seen is a kind of assumption that simply because I say if anyone who's read the book can confirm this, I don't even marshal a defense of actually existing socialism. I say very explicitly, the book's written for people who might be open to the idea that socialism in the real world could be of some value. And here's some evidence about, you know, literacy rates, healthcare, education that suggests that, you know, maybe, just maybe, millions of people have been brought out of, you know, deplorable situations. That alone has been enough for people to accuse me of being an unreconstructed Stalinoid crybaby and things like this. So how is it that they police these spaces? Right? I'm not saying let's have a debate about Stalin. It's not even a book about Stalin. I barely even reference him. But yet it becomes about that because what they're trying to do is de-democratize the world of knowledge so that we can't have a sane, open, rational debate. I'd love to have that about Stalin or anyone else, but let's just have it about socialism in general. Right? Right now, the US empire is trying to strangle and kill Cuba. Why are they trying to do that? What has the Cuban government done for its people? And why is that considered a threat? Can we just look at that with open eyes, not forms of knowledge that have been mediated by the propaganda apparatus. I think that's particularly important in the current context because we are in a situation of rising fascism and increasing totalitarian control of culture. And we have to recognize that fascism manifests itself in cultural forms as well. And one of the things that they're doing is they're waging a war on the university and on the culture industries more generally because they want more control over them. To fight back against that, we have to wave the banner of democracy because ultimately we are in favor of democracy in the real sense, substantive democracy. And therefore we should have the democratic right to open up the aperture and examine the gains that have been made by actually existing socialism. Those are— that's just one example. I realize we could Yeah. Go on at quite length about this, quite some length.

Too Black: Yeah. There was something Kim and I were talking about when we were preparing for this interview. And Kim, if I'm not phrasing it right, you can fill it in. But to your point about defending these things and defending democracy, but there is this tendency sometimes, I think, that we become guilty of, of we start defending the things that you would name as compatible. Those are the things that get defended, even though those are the very things that in many ways got us to this point. Those are the things that moved us further right. Those are the things that laundered a lot of real shit down to nothing. Those are the things that have watered things down. So I even talk about this in my own book. We end up defending the very bribes that we were given.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Ryan: Right.

Too Black: Like, we get in that position. So how do we defend the right to— obviously, we just did an episode last month about the myth of Black voting power, because I'm like, there's not any voting power. There's the right to vote, but that's not voting power. Voting power, if you have voting power, you wouldn't be in the position where they can just revoke it like that. But that doesn't mean You don't defend the right to vote, right? Like, when— that's not a good trajectory to erase entire Black districts. We all would agree with that. But we also know that those politicians in a lot of those Black districts, particularly across the South, were, you know, were not— were some of the most— even within the Democratic Party frame, some of the most moderate corporate Democrats, because they could just kind of get off on being, we're a Black Democrat, or whatever. So dialectically, how do we deal with that, where—

Ryan: Yeah.

Too Black: There's an attack on things that we know have been in some ways used to water things down, but we also know that that attack is not helpful. And if Kim has more to add, but that's kind of how we're thinking about it.

Kimberly Miller: Right, because I was just saying in the context of Florida where I'm at, as you know, our governor, he's had a war on Marxism. A war on the CCP, a war on wokeness, right? And to the point where in my dissertation, I had to take out things that were considered too woke. So I had to add in some of the quote unquote natural sciences. I took out a lot of the stuff related to sexuality and gender because that was considered too woke. And I, you know, that's obviously, I would argue, a fascist attack, right? It's anti-intellectual, and Florida is leading the charge in anti-intellectualism along with Texas.

Too Black: Yeah.

Kimberly Miller: But I think Too Black raised an excellent point, which is that that doesn't mean that post-structural and critical race theory intersectionality is inherently radical. It just means that these are basically becoming the terrains of our struggle, which are already moving the Overton window to the right. But I think Too Black made an excellent point, which is that because of the ability to follow, become reactive in that sense, it opens the space up for more of these attacks to become— make us more vulnerable, I guess, to these kind of fascist attacks because we haven't addressed the root of the problem, which is that liberalism will never be a strong antidote to fascism because it constantly is in reaction. It's not really going to solve the problem. So that doesn't mean we cheer on the attacks like we're accelerationists, but it does. So that's kind of the contradiction I was kind of wrestling with as a Floridian academic that just, they basically banned my discipline, which is sociology, but it doesn't mean that the kind of fields we're operating in are radical. So that's what we were kind of discussing and how your work is also helpful in that context.

Gabriel Rockhill: I really appreciate those questions and comments because it's so important from the perspective of organizing. To be able to identify the dialectical and materialist relationship between tactics and strategy. The strategy is the overall goal. The overall goal has to be an anti-colonial form of revolutionary transformation of society that puts an end to imperialism and ultimately to capitalism itself, and thereby Fascism will be eliminated as well. But in order to get there, you always have to ask yourself the question of where you are and what the extant play of forces is, and what are the series of tactics, meaning the small stepping stones that you need to use in order to get closer to that strategy. And one of the problems with ultra-leftism, there's a number of problems, but one of them, and I say this again as a personal critique because I've suffered from this in my early years, is that you want to collapse strategy and tactics. So you say, I want the revolution right now. It's got to be pure. It's got to be like this. And nobody who is not aligned on my politics, they be damned. The revolution's happening today. Now, there is a fervor and a passion within ultra-leftists that is nice because it has an incandescent flame to it that far surpasses that of reformists or dogmatists or things like this. But it's extremely dangerous because you don't recognize that if you want to get to your strategy, you have to be very wise about how to get there because you don't get to choose your one subject in a world of subjects and in a larger material world. And therefore, you have to be extremely clever in choosing your tactical steps to get to that strategy. Otherwise, you're going to burn out and you're going to fail. You're destined to fail. Therefore, in a context like the United States, which has arguably one of the most reactionary political cultures of any society in the world, has its dominant religion being anti-communism. It is such that the left that has any real weight in broader politics is a compatible left. What do you do in that situation? I think practically speaking, what you need to do is very much along the lines of what Lenin argued for or Mao in The New Democracy. You look at the extant play of forces and you know full well That if you just stand out to the far left and say, well, I'm right, everybody else is wrong, you alienate yourself from any possible base and power politics, and you're easier to eliminate. If you can tactically find ways of supporting the fight for democracy, the fight for a defense of certain things that we would be critical of, like compatible left positions, while recognizing that the goal isn't to shore up compatible left discourses or practices. The goal is ultimately to create more space in general for a harder left politics. This is the kind of— the set of tactical sacrifices that I think are necessary to be effective within the US context. It's a hard pill to swallow, a very hard pill to swallow. It's much easier to, at least subjectively, to say, no, I want it all now. I'm a purist and that's it.

Ryan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: You've got to study what the people have done who have fought and won. And the way they've done it is, Lenin says it again and again and again, you're not going to win if you don't know how to sacrifice. Compromises are of the essence. You have to work with the most reactionary unions, the most backward political parties. These have to be institutions that we build power within and we move in our direction. Right. So those are very difficult things to deal with because it's, you know, it's just easier at a subjective level to fall back on moralism, where you say, I'm right, I've got pure morals, everybody else is wrong. Moralism is a subjective, very low level of socialist consciousness. Much higher than that is an objective analysis of the play of forces that we're facing and how you fight and win against them. Mao very clearly said We need the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the working class, and the peasantry all to be allied against the imperialists. Right? You say that to most Marxists today, or not most, but some, and they would be like, "Whoa! You're going to ally with the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie? What are you crazy? This isn't a class politics. We need a class politics." Like Mao knew how to fight and win. Because he analyzed the objective play of forces and recognized that even the bourgeoisie didn't have what they wanted under the structural relations of imperialism. Therefore, they were allies that weren't strategic allies; they were tactical allies. So I think a big lesson on the left has to be: How can you identify tactical allies who have power, who have weight, but have very bad politics, sometimes even reactionary politics? And how can you work with them while also potentially recruiting from them without ever losing sight of the strategy?

Too Black: Yeah, that raises a question I had. I think it's on here, but I'm going to kind of muck it together with something else on the question of funding, because this is a question If you do waste your time during the day like I do and get on Twitter, this is the question that, and I always try to keep our show away from Twitter discourse, but it often trickles elsewhere into the real world. But if you do get on there, there's these— There was actually recently, to use an example that was on Twitter, was Boots Riley. And I'm I really need to work on my name dropping, but it is what it is. He put it out there. So he just put out this recent film. Ryan, what was it called?

Ryan: I Love Boosters or something like that.

Too Black: Yeah, yeah, I Love Boosters. And apparently the money to— he got like $20 million from a Zionist to do the film. And I heard so far it's not even that great of a movie, but putting that aside, he's like, he needs to struggle with this contradiction to get his message out to the masses, which I think sometimes there's a case for that, sometimes there's not. And there are even organizations who take money that even I admittedly have worked with that take money from some of these foundations. Maybe, I mean, foundations have gotten much broader in today's context. Like you named the big 3, there's like way more now because now you have the Mellon Foundation and you have all these other ones that have popped up. Since those big 3. And, you know, you have organizations that are take— that do take money from those. And I'm not here really to defend it or disperse it. I'm more so just curious how we work through it. So when you— to your point about tactical versus strategic, how do we navigate that question when a lot of the nonprofit industrial complex is just all-encompassing in ways that it wasn't even During a lot of the time period you're discussing, there's not a lot of— and there's also just way more in this financialized economy. There's just way more money just floating around that goes even beyond the CIA maybe being directly involved, even though I'm sure they have relationships. And there's just been a merging even more, I would say, amongst these different big foundations and the state and things of that nature. Yeah. And then also, just adding more to the question, these are also foundations that Trump administration has been threatening to target, to strip away their nonprofit status and things of that nature. So how do we work through the question of— and I'm more so interested specifically on the question of funding for the movements that we have, because I think this is a complicated question. That often does lead to dogmatism and moralism and ultra-leftism and/or just capitulation. So I'm curious, how do we work through that dialectically too and arrive at a position that actually makes sense?

Gabriel Rockhill: It's a difficult question and of course depends on the specific instance because I don't think that a strong organization or a cultural producer like Boots Riley who takes money one time from a particular funder, this means that they're forever compromised. Or it depends, it depends a lot on the situation, the precise nature of the the org, where they're getting the money from, and it is clearly the case that we need the material resources to survive, produce content, do intellectual work, or or make films for that matter. And it begs the question of well, if you're living in a capitalist society and you're producing anti-capitalist culture, how do you do it? And that contradiction, I don't think, can be easily solved in the sense of there being a kind of one-size-fits-all solution to it. But I fully recognize that on the part of the ruling class, one of their advantages is that they have limited— I'm sorry, unlimited resources.

Kimberly Miller: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: And so they can marshal those funds through NGOs, through their foundation complex, to get a lot of things to drift in the direction that they want them to drift in. And it's very easy to convince people to take the money and, like, preserve their politics or whatever. And there are a million and one examples, and I'm sure we all know, of people purportedly doing that when in fact the opportunism got the best of them and they really were in it for the money. And so that's a, you know, it's a It's a difficult thing to figure out. It also depends on the nature of what it is that you're doing. One of the criticisms that I have of certain forms of organizing within the US is a very large dedication to spectacle politics. And this is what the NGOs and the ruling class tends to fund, right? They want the spectacles, they want the hits, they want the likes, they want the Twitter stuff and all of that. And so that That is quite different than a grassroots, ground-up, labor organizing-oriented kind of politics that doesn't usually need a ton of resources to do because it's just the muscle of organizing. And so you can do a lot also with very little. And so, unfortunately, I don't have a perfect solution to this. You have to be very vigilant with the money because that's how the capitalists class dopes us into getting on board with their projects. But at the same time, you need to figure out how to get your resources. I did see I Love Boosters by Boots Riley, and I think he's an interesting cultural producer within the United States, given the nature of the political spectrum here. I don't know the story of his funding, but it's interesting within the movie. It's like his earlier movie and his TV show, they're kind of centered on labor politics, and that's his forte. But there is the risk of kind of plateauing at what Lenin referred to as trade union consciousness, where you're not as much focused on party building and state building. And that means that you focus on a labor politics that's about workers coming together in order to get more of what they deserve, which is great.

Too Black: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: But that can't be the end goal because ultimately then you can, or at least you run the risk of encouraging workers just to look out for their own economic and social benefits at the expense of other workers or at the expense particularly of workers in the periphery. So you have imperialist versions of this where you're like, well, my union will not make any concessions unless Unless it consists in loading arms to be sent to Israel, and then we'll line up with the imperialists, just to take one example.

Too Black: That's the real union. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I'll leave it there though. I mean, they're complicated questions.

Too Black: Yeah, I think it is. And I mean, it's not something that can be fully figured out on a podcast. I do think if you have a clear project and you have the actual revolutionary discipline, there are cases where You can take money from certain entities and make that work for something more than just maybe what its intention is. But I also think at the same time, there's a tendency for everybody to think that they're that disciplined.

Gabriel Rockhill: So yeah.

Too Black: You know, and that's often not true, even in my own experience. I mean, if your nonprofit is paying everybody 6 figures, then You know, you're going to work to keep that, to make sure your staff gets 6 figures, right? Even if it doesn't actually make sense for the program, as opposed to everybody taking a half a cut or something like that. And then now you're fundraising to pay staff and you're not fundraising for the projects because you have such a big budget for your staff.

Ryan: Yeah.

Too Black: Like, these are the kind of things you find yourself in just pragmatically, even if you're not looking to sell out, quote unquote, But then there are other times where having staff is helpful versus people who have to go to a 9 to 5, then clock out, then do something after the fact. They only have so much energy and time. Don't let them have family and children, right? It becomes complicated. So if that's someone's job, theoretically you would think that would work, or hypothetically you think it would work. And then, but you hear that stuff in nonprofit of, I'm supposed to work myself out of a job. You often hear that's thrown around as another way to cover for doing nothing.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah.

Too Black: So I guess another thing, me and Kim were also talking about this, that I think we see even in our organizing spaces, not so much in BAP, at least in my case, but more so when we're doing broader coalition work, is these things come into the stuff we've been talking about, these tendencies to reject actually existing socialism, To be murky on imperialism. I don't like the war in Iran, but Iran is terrible. These kind of positions, these spectacle, like you talked about, all these different things, they work their way from the disastrous social media space into a meeting, into an actual strategy session, into day-to-day work, and it becomes difficult sometimes to work through it. The identitarian stuff works its way into it and all kinds of these different things, and they really mess up the organizing. That's why when I read the book, that was what stood out for me. I was like, this actually doesn't just— these aren't just intellectual questions. These things actually create a lot of dysfunction in how we work together.

Ryan: Yeah.

Too Black: So I know there's not one answer, like, how do we work through that? But Curious more, maybe you say you have organizing experience. How have you seen that show up, these different tendencies that you name in your book, and what has been your experience working through them as opposed to trying to ask you to answer it for everybody? How have you worked through these things?

Gabriel Rockhill: I mean, it depends at the different levels and different projects, but definitely the identitarian culturalism is very rampant. And so You know, often there'll be more interest in talking about, you know, who's excluded or whose voice is not included instead of like, well, what do we collectively share and what can we do with the people here now? And there's a kind of divisiveness that gets introduced and, and exceptionalism too, where people become the spokesperson for X identity category or, you know, Y form of oppression. And that's not to belittle or, you know, downplay anybody's experience, but the subjective experiential approach to organizing combined with the rank individualism and opportunism that you get in a society like the United States really just ends up splintering and fragmenting things, and the collective sense of dedication becomes really secondary. So I know you were maybe looking for the kind of more critical response to this, but I'd just highlight something very positive, and that is some of the best people that I've worked with in organizations are the people who, like, they want to just— they'll do the work of cleaning out the lavatory and, like, being invisible and doing the prep work for a rally and not being in the front and not holding the banner and not being the spokesperson. And they're just like— you feel that they're just in it. You know, some of them need to lay low for various reasons, but there's a lot of people who are just the kind of— they embrace anonymity because it's not about them. And I think that's really important, and we need more of that, where people are just fine with contributing to a collective struggle and playing that role instead of needing to kind of manifest how special they are or what their unique experience is or how we should be attentive to their concerns. And that individualism, I think, really steers things often in the wrong direction. That's at least the first— Yeah, go ahead.

Ryan: No, I was just saying, yeah, I was agreeing with you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. I guess the other thing is that there is a way that the strategic thinking is another thing that I think is so important to develop. Because often when you're thinking in these more subjective or experiential terms, it's about the immediacy of some type of recognition or something like this, but not— you're not thinking in terms of, like, what's my 5-year plan? Like, what's my 10-year plan?

Kimberly Miller: Hmm.

Gabriel Rockhill: What do I want the world to look like in 15 years? And we need that level of strategic organizing, and I see a dearth of it in the US. You know, there is some of it going on, but the horizon of our struggle can't just be, you know, the cycle of kind of social movements that will explode due to the fact that there is ongoing police violence or ongoing war on the indigenous communities or other things like that. But they also need to have a kind of strategic horizon that's, you know, not unlike what many praise the Chinese for, which is, you know, they're thinking in terms not of years or decades, decades, but centuries. And that is an even higher level of kind of anonymity, where it's not even just about my lifetime. You know, this is about the lifetime of humanity. And that is something that I think also through our cultural work and political education is— it's a quality that we need to both aspire to, but then also educate people in. And it cuts against the grain of the kind of dominant cultural tendency that we have in society that of course then permeate organizing spaces.

Too Black: Yeah. To your point— go ahead, Ryan.

Ryan: Okay. To your point about these dominant traits that kind of just run rampant within our society and within organizing spaces, you talk about opportunism, you talk about individualism, you also talk about the empires. propensity to lean towards spectacle politics and everything. And I was just thinking about this, how certain scholars, certain scholars end up becoming put on a pedestal, you know, um, within the world of academia. Um, I know within our time, you know, being the millennial, we've seen a lot of, uh, celebrity scholars, you know, scholars become very well renowned within, um, their fields and everything. And I was wondering if you want to, uh, speak to How these, uh, is there a certain tendency or certain drive that certain scholars end up being more provocative or obscure their positions in order to advance their careers? And how does this tendency like set in or set in motion? And, um, I want to know if you want to speak onto that, speak to that more broadly.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I mean, I think that the way that bourgeois knowledge functions is that there's a premium put on individual intellectual production because it's a process of branding. And if you look at the most prominent intellectuals, what have they developed? They develop a brand. If it be Žižek or Michael Hardt or Judith Butler or, sorry to say it again, but Cedric Robinson or others like this, I mean, they have a certain unique brand that they have put forth. This is very different than I think how it's important to understand what contributing intellectually to the dialectical and historical materialist tradition Mm-hmm. Means, and that is actually being part of something that's much bigger than you, where you recognize how much you've learned from everybody who's gone before and is currently doing the hard work, and that your goal is not to make yourself distinct with some kind of hand-waving new set of neologisms or trendy terms, but instead to push the analysis forward. And that kind of collective ethos in which you insist on the use value of knowledge to the peoples of this world is the mirror opposite of the exchange value that is the principal reference point, if you will, for many of those invested in the prominence of trying to be part of that star industry. The other thing that I'd say is that a lot of the way bourgeois knowledge functions is it's based on intellectual commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is the way that a commodity will be severed from its social relations of production. Right? So you see the beautiful new iPhone, but you don't see the slave labor in Africa that was in the mines getting the minerals necessary for the iPhone. That's, you know, a simple example. The same thing happens in the intellectual world, where you have these great ideas by these figures who are purportedly, you know, thinking at a level that transcends humanity, and yet the social relations within which they operate are cut off. And those social relations are the imperial system of knowledge production that's promoted them. And so part of my work is also a work of desacralization, right? Of course, I went to these institutions, went to prominent institutions, studied with famous people and all of this. They were all presented to me as sacred cows. You couldn't possibly criticize them unless you studied all of their work and all of the secondary literature and learned all of the languages and read everything that they read. And then your critique should be limited to a tiny little footnote saying maybe they should have thought a little bit more about, you know, X, and that's it. And that insulates them from situating them within the social relations of production, knowledge production, so that we can hold them accountable. And we can say things like, well, the positions you're taking are pro-imperial, and that's why the empire is promoting you. And so your stardom Isn't the result of your individual genius. It's because you have used your agency as an intellectual to give to an imperial system of knowledge production precisely what it wants to hear. That's why someone like Žižek, who's been going around now saying that China's fascist, is so prominent, right? Because he's saying the exact same thing as the U.S. State Department. He's just doing it in this, you know, translated into. Lacanese or whatever. You know, he's giving this sophisticated veneer to what is ultimately just the ideology of empire. And so the sacred cows are sacred because we can't call them into question, because in doing so, we would question the imperial hierarchies of knowledge. And that's what's verboten.

Ryan: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: That's one of the people that there's been— that's one of the reasons there's been a hate campaign waged against me, is because I'm doing a very basic thing. I'm like, well, let's see what they say, and let's see how it's played out in relationship to the struggle for human liberation and the natural world. And if they're all supporting— I mean, many of them support capitalism, imperialist interventions. The Frankfurt School integrated fascists into leadership positions. Like, really? These are the luminaries that we're supposed to bow down to and can't possibly criticize? Why is it that they're all Zionists? You know, why isn't that people didn't point this out when I was an undergraduate and say, well, you should read Adorno because he supported the Zionist project in West Asia? Like, none of this makes any sense when you start to frame it in terms of the forces that are pushing it. And the reason that they're sacred cows is because they want to keep the kind of holy writ of imperialism insulated from critique. And those who don't want those forms of critique are showing their hand, and they're demonstrating that at the end of the day, they want to preserve the stars of the imperial theory industry because they implicitly or explicitly support the system that is pushing and promoting them. And they're also usually making a lot of money off of them in the process because they're running publishing houses or other such things. So they do happen to have a buy-in and an interest in their market niche within this, of course.

Too Black: Very directly, usually. Yeah. I mean, it was even interesting, we brought up Crenshaw, but Crenshaw was at Columbia when all of the students were being beaten up by the police and kicked out of school, and there was no public words that ever came out. When Trump gets nominated, or as Trump gets elected, I should say, There's— and there's this attack on critical race theory, DEI, more on a federal level. All of a sudden, you know, people such as her are on a tour trying to defend that. And that was like, even to our earlier question, like, to how we work through that, because you have people who, when their cash cow is, you know, attacked, then they're all on the front lines. Like, you know, this is— but the thing about all these folks, they never— they're very, like you said earlier, they're shrewd. So they never— Yeah. Couch their defense in just that attack on them. They always come back with, this is an attack on Black liberation, or this is an attack on this group, this is an attack on us as a community. They always try to make sure that we all feel like it's impacting us the same way when we're not going to get any of the speaking gig money that comes from this or being canon and being cited and referenced and brought to conferences. That's not going to have any real impact on us. For the most part, but they will couch it in that way. Like, this is an attack on us. You see scholars do this all the time, or celebrities do this. A lot of petty bourgeois folks do this generally whenever they have a following. Like, this is an attack on everybody, and we all need to rally around you and save you from the attack, as if it's saving us. It's kind of trickle-down theory or something.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah.

Too Black: So I guess it's like, I know we gotta close out soon, but I'm thinking, you know, we had talked about these kind of, the kind of dialectics of purity and the kind of dialectics of like ultra-leftism versus like capitulation. And I think that's a, that's a tension that will continue, you know, moving forward. But when it comes to it actually, I guess when it comes to actually supporting real projects, like you talked about actually existing socialism, What does that really look like, you know, from an intellectual standpoint, since that's primarily what your book deals with? What does that actually look like? Does that, like, how can that be articulated?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, one of the things that I realized in doing the research for this book that goes back a very, very long time is the extent to which all of these sacred cows of the imperial theory industry, they all agree on the basics. And there's only a tiny set of exceptions, all of which are explainable. And the basics are that imperialism doesn't really exist in the way that materialists understand imperialism existing, meaning that they obscure— and there's a million ways of doing this— but they obscure the primary contradiction. And then the alternative to capitalism is worse than capitalism itself. And so they are— there are a few exceptions to this, again, but in general hostile to any form of actually existing socialism. And these are the leading luminaries of the Western left intelligentsia. And so part of this struggle needs to be to shore up an intelligentsia that examines actually existing socialism and studies it as a real phenomenon, not mediated by the dominant ideologies of empire. Right. There. So I cite the study that was done in 1984 by Waitzkin and Sarasoto that shows that according to the Physical Quality of Life Index— life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and literacy rates, all as an index of the overall health of a society— socialist countries almost systematically outperform capitalist countries, particularly at the lowest levels of social development, meaning that socialism has proved itself in the real world world. So much so that after this study was done, the World Bank, upon which the study is based, because it wanted to make sure that it drew on data that couldn't be, you know, questioned as cooked up by the Chinese Communist Party or something else along these lines, they changed the way in which they were collecting data so that this study couldn't be repeated. I think it's of the utmost importance for intellectuals to, you know, peel the scales from their eyes and look at the world afresh and examine what the gains have been under socialism versus under capitalism, particularly in our day and age. We are very well positioned to understand the difference. You know, you have a country like Cuba that basically made the entire island literate in a single year and has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, even now, in spite of the ongoing strangulation. Has developed you know what it developed was it three or five vaccines that it distributed free of charge during COVID I mean, it's really it's breaking records also at the ecological level, and is according to at least one major study the only sustainable society on planet Earth. Like this is what socialism does not in its developed stage, not when it's super advanced, but socialism under constant draconian imperialistic. Siege, which is another important factor that we always have to take into account. We've never seen socialism set free. We've never seen it allowed to develop on its own. We've only seen it attacked by the most powerful forces on planet Earth with all their military weight, their cultural warfare, their propaganda and everything else. And yet nonetheless, they've made incredible, incredible gains. And so I think that the intellectual world has to develop a lot more rigorous scientific analyses of actually existing socialism in order to come to terms with its powers in comparison to the alternative. And the alternative is leading to the end not only of humanity, but perhaps of all life on planet Earth. That's kind of what we're faced with. And so I know I'm speaking at a kind of more general level, but one of the things that I'm trying to do with the critical theory workshop, which we were on educational projects, and then we're also involved in a number of publishing ventures with Iskra Books and with De Gruyter Brill, is to open up the spectrum so that we can have these types of analysis available so that scholars can study them seriously and also engage in public debate. I'm sure all of you can relate to this. I unfortunately have to waste a lot of my brainpower debating if reality exists. exists. I can't actually have the debates that I want to have.

Ryan: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: I have to be like, no, imperialism exists. It really does. Here's how it works. It's been proven again and again and again and again. And the debates I want to have and the debates that we're trying to foster within the Critical Theory Workshop and other projects I'm involved in are the real debates, like the questions that Too Black was asking earlier. These are really difficult questions. They're not the questions of whether or not reality exists. It's okay, reality exists, And within it, how can we best organize ourselves to transform it in a meaningful way? What can we learn from past struggles? What can we learn from current struggles, etc.? And part of the project needs to be reconnecting the red thread to the deep history of the intellectual production from the socialist world, both historically and internationally. And so we have a lot of translation projects. Of kind of Global South Marxism that we're working on, because we need that knowledge base, right? If we're invested in collective knowledge, we also have to recognize that the vanguard of intellectual liberation isn't in the theory industry, and it's not the star complex of the theory industry. They're distracting us. They're getting us off the right course. We need to learn from people like Maurice Bishop. We need to learn from people like Thomas Sankara and a very rich and broad tradition. And we have to make that accessible to people in English or in other languages so that we have the resources necessary to carry this tradition forth. Because part of the way that cultural fascism works, there's a lot of different aspects to it. Part of it's just the totalitarian control and the definition of the political limitations of what can be said and is acceptable within kind of, you know, public discourse. But another way is just by completely decimating access to the broader tradition, the intellectual and practical tradition of dialectical and historical materialism. I'll just give you one example and close with this. It blows my mind that the complete prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci aren't available in English.

Too Black: Hmm.

Gabriel Rockhill: This is 100 years in. Right? Like, we've had plenty of time to do that. And we got to Notebook 8, and then the project has thus far been stalled. And, you know, there's plans to rejuvenate it, or hopes. There's a work by Lukács that we're publishing. It's never been published before. Michael Parenti's early books, they're out of print. We're putting one of them back in print. There's so much Cuban literature not available, so much Marxism from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Can't find it, right? We want to become an outlet for that work because there's so much that we all need to learn from it.

Too Black: No, thank you. Thank you. I don't have any more questions. Did y'all have any final questions y'all wanted to ask before we wrap this up?

Ryan: Yeah, I think I asked every question that I wanted to ask.

Kimberly Miller: All right. Same here. This was excellent. I really appreciate it, and thank you so much for taking the time to answer everything fully. I feel very replenished and hopeful.

Gabriel Rockhill: Hopefully we recharged our batteries a little bit. Community building and camaraderie is extremely important in an isolated environment like the one that we're in. And I appreciate the work that all of you are doing, and I hope that we'll be able to collaborate in other ways, shapes, and forms in the future, for sure.

Too Black: For sure, for sure.

Kimberly Miller: Definitely, definitely.

Too Black: Yeah, thank you for coming through. We're going to wrap this up. Y'all can send your criticisms and hate to us if you want, if you got beef with anything that was said today.

Gabriel Rockhill: Don't send it to me. I won't respond. I'm sorry. I got too much hate coming at me already. I wouldn't know how to filter it.

Too Black: But no, seriously, thanks for being on here, and peace out, everybody.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thanks, bro.

Ryan: Peace.

Kimberly Miller: Hey, y'all. And if you have any comments or just thoughts on episodes to come, feel free to just leave us a review and rate the show and tell us how you feel about it.