Paris 1968, French Theory and the Intellectual World War With Gabriel Rockhill

Jay: Welcome to Millennials are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this episode, we welcome Gabriel Rockhill to the podcast to discuss his latest piece, The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia, Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback, which is out this month in the June issue of Monthly Review and is currently available to read for free on monthlyreview.org. Gabriel Rockhill is the founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop, professor of philosophy at Villanova, and the author or editor of nine books, as well as numerous articles and essays. Many listeners have asked us to read and possibly have a discussion about Rockhill's recent work in particular, which has included critical articles on Foucault, Zizek, the Frankfurt School, and what Rockhill describes as the global theory industry within his work. In this conversation, we largely examine his most recent piece on the promotion of a certain sect of French intellectuals in the wake of the 1968 uprisings in Paris and strikes across France. Rockhill discusses the relationship or lack thereof that he sees between those thinkers who have been promoted as 68 thinkers and the actual activities of the period. the political decisions being made on the ground, and most urgently for Rockhill's concerns, the incredibly vibrant worker movement of the period and the possibility of taking power and building a socialist project in France. We hope folks enjoy this discussion which also examines the relationship between those who organize for socialism, grassroots uprisings, and the process through which publishers and media recuperate and commodify upheaval. freely associating it with thinkers that are compatible with the maintenance of the status quo that is being protested in the first place. Alongside this cultural project, there is also, of course, the violent repression of the state both overtly and through clandestine means, and we get into that a little bit with discussion of Operation Gladio as well. We will include links to some of the projects that Rock Hill mentions in the episode in the show notes, including the summer program at the Critical Theory Workshop. And of course, if you appreciate the work that we do here at Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, please become a patron of the show. Our show is only possible due to the contributions of listeners like you. For as little as a dollar a month or $10.80 per year, you can join all of the amazing folks who make this show possible by at patreon.com slash millennials are killing capitalism. All right. So Gabriel Rockhill, welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Before we get into this specific piece we're here to talk with you about today, I'd love if you'd just share a little bit about kind of how you come to this work, your own background with it, and a little bit of some of the work that you've been working on over the last couple of years with our audience to give folks a sense of this piece in relation to other interventions that you're making. Because with some of your recent pieces, it definitely feels like you're kind of working on a larger project that I think is an important one, and really useful for a lot of folks to try to make sense of different strands of, you know, kind of what we describe loosely as sort of left wing theory.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, so my background is mainly having been trained, at least intellectually, within France. I did my master's with Jacques Derrida and Moussa Rigoura. I did my PhD there with Alain Badiou, and Ekin Balibar was the president of the committee. I then went on and did a master's in social sciences with the Borghesean School in Paris and then a postdoc in political theory. And so I spent about 12 years within the kind of Parisian intellectual scene. And obviously I was involved with other things as well, like activism and my own autodidactic process of teaching myself the things that I wasn't being taught. But it's true that the experience there has led me to approach intellectual history in a way that inverts the way in which a lot of bourgeois history tends to narrate the way in which ideas are produced. Meaning instead of beginning with individuals and their cherished ideas and isolating them from historical context, and then fetishizing them as kind of cultural products within the bourgeois cultural world, I instead begin by analyzing the political economy of knowledge production and more specifically the dialectical relationship between the subjects who are the producers of knowledge and the objective systems within which they operate. Meaning that I am dedicated to an analysis of the social totality in the Marxist sense of the term that looks at all of the factors that have contributed to certain forms of knowledge production and so this particular piece that we're going to talk about i think in some detail is related to a larger project a book project entitled the intellectual world war marxism versus the global theory industry which is under contract with monthly review press and this book attempts a counter history of the western left intelligentsia focusing very specifically on the transatlantic relationship between the dominant imperial power of the post-World War II era, the United States, and the intelligentsia of Western Europe, more specifically the French and German intelligentsia, although I do develop some accounts of the Anglophone intelligentsia in Great Britain and also in the United States. And one of the things that I'm interested in is the way in which this theory has been promoted as the most radical theory on offer, and it's been globally promoted in that regard by the imperial forces of US institutions, While at the same time, one of the fundamental driving mechanisms behind these traditions of thought is an unending assault on Marxism and on the revolutionary tradition of theory and practice. And so this kind of counter history of the Western left intelligentsia is not just a negative project of critique, if you will, it is first and foremost, a positive project of foregrounding the most important science of human liberation that has been developed Thus far, at least, and that is Marxism and the historical and dialectical materialist tradition, which marshals the tools of science, but not for the purposes of obfuscation or for petty bourgeois careerism, but instead for the liberation of humanity and for that matter, the salvation of planet Earth.

Jay: Appreciate that. And definitely we look forward to that book. Hopefully as you release it, we would love to have another conversation with you on, you know, that in and whole. So another thing, because this piece deals directly with kind of the French intelligentsia around the events of May 1968, you know, I'd love if you would just give a sketch of that period, because obviously I think most people will be kind of, vaguely familiar, but some may not be that deeply familiar with it in the United States. And obviously, we have listeners around the world. And so, you know, obviously, there's too much going on for you to give some kind of in-depth or historical account of everything that goes on. And we understand that folks definitely should check out this piece that we're talking about today, which is from Monthly Review. It's called The Mythology of 1968 and the French Intelligentsia. But Just give folks a sketch, if you will, because I think it is important as we get into some of these intellectuals and talking about the relationship to these events of kind of understanding what the events were.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I think there are at least two things. One is the broader global context of class struggle in the 1960s was characterized by by the fact that at the end of World War II, you had the United States emerging as the dominant imperial power, and the former imperial powers of Western Europe were unable to hold onto their colonies. So you have an enormous struggle, of course, in the immediate post-war era for anti-colonial liberation, which was supported by the Soviet Union and by the socialist world with China going communist in 1949. And then, of course, the struggles in Korea, Vietnam, elsewhere. And one of the goals of the U.S. administration was to shore up Western Europe within the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist camp. to do that both, of course, economically through things like the Marshall Plan, but then also to do it culturally and intellectually. And that's one of the main focal points of my work. Within the more specific context of France, and that's the second element, France was, of course, war-torn by the fact that it was occupied at least half of the country by the Nazis during World War II. And then there was, of course, the conflict with the Western intervention within France during World War II. And in the wake of World War II, it was developing a more modernized capitalist economy that It was also a site of a kind of baby boom generation that meant that there was a very large generation of young people who were going to university. And there was the development of kind of a new left politics that segued with a kind of anti-imperialist politics. which overlaps, of course, with what I imagine a lot of your viewers and listeners know about the history of kind of 60s activism within the United States. Some of the elements of the new left were, of course, picking up on longstanding concerns within the Marxist heritage of the struggle for national liberation, struggle against racism, struggle for gender equality, for sexual equality and things like this. But there were also segments of the new left that were very dedicated to a kind of culturalist mode of politics in which they were actually taking anti-Marxist and anti-communist positions and claiming that they were dealing with things that were somehow new, which were race and gender and sexuality, and that the bad old Marxists had never dealt with this. This is, of course, absolutely false at so many levels. But within this context in France, what you have is then The development of 68 is usually connected to the emergence of the student movement. And the students were, for the most part, I think, very correctly frustrated by a series of university reforms that were aimed primarily at making students into cogs within the capitalist system and that had more and more restrictive freedom over the choice of the curriculum that they followed, the things that they were studying. And there was opposition to this on the part of the student movement. The students began organizing at the University of Nanterre, which is just to the west of Paris. Due to the extreme police violence that was unleashed by the Gaullist state at that point in time, Charles de Gaulle was the leader of France, the beginnings of the student movement quickly escalated and led to an occupation of the Sorbonne, which is in central Paris, barricades being set up in the Latin Quarter, which is right in the heart of Paris. This conflagration at the same time has to be linked to the second element, which is actually, I think, the most important element of 68, and that is the largest workers' strike in the history of Europe. Ten million people went on strike. All the major unions were supportive of the strike. The Communist Party of France was very involved within this organizing. And this means that there were really kind of two parts of 68, the historic workers' mobilization and then the student mobilization. The student mobilization is what has been largely retained by bourgeois history, meaning the barricades, the throwing of mock-up cocktails, the more kind of anarchist-inspired, libertarian, often liberal, you know, approach to politics. which was about resisting and rejecting, but didn't necessarily have a positive project for seizing power or developing power. The French Communist Party at that point in time took a position that the situation was not truly revolutionary, meaning that the extant play of forces was such that there was not the possibility of seizing state power. Retrospectively, we can look back on it and say, well, state power wasn't seized, so it seems like they were certainly on to something. While at the same time, the Communist Party of France was having a whole series of internal debates about how to relate to the student movement. They were very critical of what's called in French gauchisme. And gauchisme is closest in English to ultra leftism. But it really has a broader understanding in French because it refers to those who are kind of radically left, but don't really have a revolutionary strategy. They have a series of radical tactics of resistance and insurgency. but they don't have a coherent plan for how you actually develop, build power, and then seize power. And so the position of many communists at that point in time was that the student movement trafficked in a kind of anti-communist gauchisme that is to be rejected, while at the same time, given the massive mobilization on the part of students and the young against the police state in France, against certain elements of the capitalist class and for university reforms, that this spark on the part of the students should be taken seriously and should be used as a kind of leverage point for class struggle for the working class and for building revolutionary power And this did lead to the Grinnell Accords, which were one of the consequences of May 68, which meant that the minimum wage in France for all workers was raised by a stunning 35%. This is a major, major gain for workers. Moreover, there were other elements of these accords that included an engagement on the part of the government to reduce work time, an increase in union rights to organizing unions. There was also an agreement to pay for the strike days at the cost of 50%. And there were the important Accords de Varennes, which increased, it basically linked the agricultural minimum wage to the standard minimum wage and therefore led to an increase in the minimum wage of agricultural workers. So that's a kind of broader context. Maybe the last thing that I'll say is that there was a major outpouring of support for the Gaullist regime in the kind of final hours of some of the more insurgent activism within France. And there were elections that were called and the government wasn't toppled. And de Gaulle was able to hold on to power. And a year later, George Pompidou came into office. And so it was a kind of major moment of insurgent politics that led to some significant revolutionary gains for workers, but didn't lead to the toppling of the capitalist system or the overthrow of the Gaullist government.

Jay: Thank you for that context.

Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. So in the article, you're essentially countering this hegemonic narrative that credits petty bourgeois French intellectuals like Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Bordeaux, etc. as being major contributors to the political events of 1968. I mean, you talk about how these intellectuals, and I'm quoting here, that rose to global prominence as major contributors to the phenomenon known as tristory, were not only disconnected from and often ignored, dismissive of the historical workers' mobilization, they were also hostile to, or at least highly skeptical of, the student movement in both senses. They were anti-68 thinkers, or at minimum, theorists who were highly suspicious of the demonstrations. Their promotion by the global theory industry, which has marketed them as radical theorists of 68, has largely obliterated this historical fact." You also make the argument that, and I'm going here again, actually, the so-called structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers associated with French theory have come to be identified with the 68 movement by model historical amalgamation that serves very clear political ends, end quote. So what are some of these clear political ends in your opinion? And could you give folks a thumbnail sketch of what structuralism and post-structuralism are if they're unaware?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, regarding structuralism and post-structuralism, within the French context at the time, there wasn't a distinction, meaning that structuralism was the general term that was used to refer to authors who were later in the Anglophone world referred to as post-structuralists. So if we just deal with structuralism as a kind of general phenomenon, It is a form of non-Marxist analysis and in many ways anti-Marxist analysis within the bourgeois social sciences and humanities that focuses on an analysis of major structures that govern particular segments of existence. So Levi-Strauss focused on anthropology and a structuralist analysis of anthropological forms. Michel Foucault focused on major structures that he referred to as, you know, Foucault himself was slightly disingenuous because early on he used the term structure. Then he later stopped using the term structure, claimed that he wasn't, you know, a structuralist and things like this. But what you see in his work is the idea that there are structural patterns that are determine the near totality of discursive production within a particular timeframe. The classical age and the modern age are the main things that Foucault focused on. In the case of Barthes, he undertook a structuralist analysis of literature, looking at these dominant structures within the Western literary corpus. Lacan did the same in psychoanalysis, looking at how the unconscious is structured as a language. Borgia developed a genetic sociology that looks at society, but identifies fundamental structures within society. We could go on down the list, but the basic mechanism is that you bracket an analysis of the social totality in the Marxist sense, right? Notice that all of these thinkers are actually working within the disciplinary confines of specific social sciences or particular humanities. They do not engage in historical materialist analysis, and they often denigrate historical materials. And they do not, most importantly, center class struggle as the driving force of the history of the world. In that regard, the structures are often the static structures that are reified and appear as if out of nowhere and are often naturalized. The political goal then to address the first part of your question within the French context, it depends because some of the affiliation between 1968 and the so-called 68 thinkers, so identifying the structuralists as 68 thinkers, had to do with actually denigrating them as part of a kind of bygone era. And you see this in particular, there's a well-known book published by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaud that is in French. It's on the 68 thinkers. And Ferry and Renaud were both liberals. And what they're trying to do in the book, I think very unsuccessfully, is identify the structuralists as these kind of radical theorists who contribute to 68 and just as 68 failed, so did their theory fail. Therefore, we should all just be liberals today. This is a very common position taken within the French intellectual complex. Within the larger Anglophone world and the imperial context, insofar as the Anglophone world has tended to dominate the kind of capitalist world's understanding of the affiliation between 68 and this group of structuralist thinkers, it's actually the opposite. Meaning the way in which I was taught within the Anglophone world about French theory, and many people who encounter French theory for the first time are told that it's radical, like 68 was radical. And just as the students were occupying the Sorbonne, What the structuralists were doing is undertaking a kind of assault on the institutionalized forms of knowledge. Whereas actually, on the contrary, they were shoring up the bourgeois divisions of knowledge between the kind of logic of the social and human sciences as they've been inherited from bourgeois institutions. And they were undertaking an assault on Marxism, historical and dialectical materialism and the centrality of class struggle. And so in that regard, whether or not it's in order to promote the French theorists to somehow being radical or to denigrate them for being too radical and not liberal enough, the basic historiographical framework is misconstrued because both of these narratives miss the basic historical fact that the so-called 68 thinkers were, for the most part, hostile and opposed to 68, or at a very minimum, skeptical of it and regularly raised questions about the revolutionary uprising. If they're close to anything, it was to the student movement, like someone like Gilles Deleuze was somewhat supportive of the student movement, but they generally ignored, downplayed, and looked askance at the workers' movement, which was really the driving force behind 68.

Jay: Thank you. So as you've just kind of alluded to, a good bit of this article does go through demonstrating through, you know, kind of stories from each one and looking at each one, how little these thinkers actually had to do with the events themselves of 1968. And also, as you mentioned, demonstrating that many of them were, in fact, very opposed to sort of everything that was going on in the period, the student movement, the worker movement. I know there's too much to go into too much detail there. But could you share a couple of examples of this just to kind of demonstrate what you're talking about, just so folks can see the kind of material relationship that you're drawing in the article between these thinkers and or maybe the lack of a material relationship, but what they were doing at the period?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. And this also speaks to my method in general, which is that I'm interested in an analysis of theoretical practices that situates them within the social totality. Right. So although I'm trained in French theory, as we just mentioned, and have read, you know, Foucault's entire corpus to take that example in the original French and have written extensively on him in French, I think that that's actually a limitation to only read somebody's entire corpus. I've also read all of his biographies and have read extensively on the historical context in order to situate him in this regard. And so that's important to highlight because a lot of the people who have been trained in French theory are actually trained in a very limited way that makes it such that they can't actually seriously engage with some of my research because all they do is read the words of Foucault and they don't understand basic facts about his biographical existence and his theoretical practice. For instance, Foucault was widely recognized as a violent anti-communist. That's a quote, violent anti-communist, from his leading French biographer, Didier Eribon. This was also corroborated by many of his closest allies and those who collaborated with him. In 68, he had actually been part of a Gaullist academic counter-reform referred to as the Fouché reforms, which were the principal trigger for the student movement. meaning that he was involved in precisely the type of transformation of the capitalist university to further make students into cogs in the system and reduce their freedom in curricular choices. And it's precisely for that reason that he did not express his solidarity with the movement. He was in Tunisia for a large part of the movement, but he also came back to France. He did attend as a kind of spectator one of the mobilizations. I believe it was in one of the stadiums at the point in time, but he didn't express support for the movement. So he was in many ways an anti-68 thinker who was on the opposite side of the barricades. He would also in interviews later, because in the wake of 68, it was very trendy to be a 68er, and I hope that we're going to talk about this in a little bit, the way in which movements that are radical movements are recuperated And then everybody wants to lay claim to their symbolic power. And so one of the things that Foucault disingenuously did is propose that the work that he had done in mildly supporting some of the Marxist student activists in Tunisia in 1967 and 1968, was somehow more revolutionary than what was going on in France at that point in time. And in fact, some of his biographers point out how disingenuous this was on his part, although he did support some of the students. It is true in 67 and 68 in Tunisia and was surprised by how galvanized they were around a kind of Marxist modality of organizing. A few of the other figures that are often affiliated with 68, I'll just go through this really quickly, someone like Jacques Derrida. Derrida himself was withdrawn and reserved about the main aspects of the 68 movement. He did march with the students on May 13th, and he organized a general assembly at one of the most prestigious schools in France. But he regularly described himself as not being on the side of the workers and students. His heart was not on the barricades, he said. He was against spontaneism. as well as against workerism and pauperism. He even expressed the fact that he didn't believe that social class existed or that you could formulate coherent sentences with social class. Jacques Lacan was often referred to, particularly in the wake of 68, as the stern father who adamantly declared that revolutions always fail because of the inability of revolutions to free subjects from their desire for servitude. And in that regard, he was heckled by the student movement. He also, for that matter, responded, this was in personal correspondence, but it's Elizabeth Rudonesco recounts this in her book, that when he was approached for supporting students The gauche prolétarienne, which was one of the Maoist movements that was quite prevalent, particularly in the wake of 68, Lacan apparently responded, the revolution is me. I don't see why I should subsidize you, meaning a Maoist student-led group. You are making my revolution impossible and taking away my disciples. So you see the kind of rank opportunist careerism on the part of Lacan. There are many other examples, but maybe I'll just leave it at that for the time being.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. And you offer an explanation for why this miscrediting has been so widely assumed in readings of the political struggles of 68, which you note there has been an unearned projection of political and ethical radicality to what gets marked as French theory and its disciples. He also write, and I'm quoting here again, rather than engaging in the hard labor of materialist history of actually existing social relations and practices, they indulge in an uncountable idealist history based on conceptual abstractions, freewheeling, correlations, and extensive use of model verbs, all of which are purportedly justified by some nebulous generational spirit of the 60s. They therefore focus almost exclusively on what has been said about 68 instead of on what had been actually been done and they purported to distill from first theory in the activism of May to June 68, a common essence of logic, end quote. Really appreciate that intervention. So if you can talk a bit about the problematics of this historical methodology that has led to vast misreadings and understandings of the period.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think what you see in the general misunderstanding of the relationship between the French intelligentsia and 68 is a clear manifestation of the logics of bourgeois knowledge production. And bourgeois knowledge has done a number of things in a way in which it's been institutionalized in the capitalist world. One thing that it does is it severs the natural sciences from the purported social and human sciences as if there were a natural world that were simply absolutely separate from the world in which human beings operate, right? So the nature human being distinction is constitutive of the way in which bourgeois knowledge production operates. But then even within the bourgeois human and social sciences, you have this distinction between different social sciences that are basically modeled off of liberal ideology. So you have political science that just focuses on the political sphere. You have sociology that just focuses on society. You have economics that focuses on the economic sphere, as if these three spheres were somehow distinct and separate. And you also have baked into bourgeois social science the colonial dynamics in which anthropology and what was formerly called Orientalism and has now evolved in various ways, including disciplines like various forms of area studies, where the peoples of the world who are outside of Europe are allocated a different discipline as if they weren't part of the human species. In that regard, all of this kind of carving up of human knowledge within bourgeois knowledge production means that those who approach the question of the French intelligentsia and the political uprisings of 68 often do it in a way in which they only have this very canalized logic of analysis. So they simply read the French theorists, for instance, in what they say about 68. And if you read Deleuze and Foucault, they'll often phrase 68 as a kind of turning point in their work, and that it made possible their later work in the case of Foucault on discipline and punish and on sexuality and things like this. And it's certainly true that they were reacting to 68 in various ways. But my approach, unlike the approach that I just highlighted, is a Marxist approach that foregrounds the primacy of practice. You have to look at what people are actually doing and how their theoretical practice is nested within a series of material institutions and power structures that tend to favor certain types of theoretical practice and promote them in various ways. And so in my own research, I've worked through biographies and histories, and I want to understand the state of the world within which these theoretical practices are situated. In that regard, then, a lot of the correlations that have been developed between 68 and revolutionary politics, since they're not based on historical reality, are simply founded on free association and a set of assumptions that end up being repeated over time, so much so that they become naturalized. And I give a series of examples of this in the article that we're discussing because I think it's important to highlight that, in fact, many of the ways in which these correlations have been developed over time are not only not based on a scientific analysis, they're simply based on the repetition of things that people have heard before. We've all heard, or at least I've certainly heard numerous people allude to this correlation between the thinkers of the 60s and the political events of the 60s. And so what these claims do is they're actually at times not structurally false or incorrect because they're just simply free associating two things and they're not mining down into the actual material relations between the theoretical practice of a set of intellectuals and the actual material revolutionary practices of those engaged in struggles on the ground. And so part of the goal of this article is which is related to the larger book project that I just mentioned, is to understand theoretical practice from the point of view of historical and dialectical materialists, not from the point of view of those who have been had their kind of minds addled by the bourgeois approach to knowledge production or who would simply content themselves to do what's called internal analysis. where you read what people say about 68 rather than actually looking at what they did or did not do in the case of 68. This is why it's important to point out, as I mentioned just a moment ago, that Foucault was on the opposite side of the barricades because he was an administrator within the French government working on the reforms that the students were rejecting. In that regard, you see it very clear, regardless of what Foucault says about 68. Let's look at what he did and what he did says a lot more than what he said, because, of course, also one of the other important elements, particularly in the French intelligentsia that we're talking about, meaning that segment of anti-Marxist French intelligentsia, is that there's a tendency to. engage in a form of rank opportunism that means that they will say and unsay and resay and reformulate just about everything and its opposite if it's able to increase their visibility within the French and the larger imperial intellectual scene.

Speaker 3: For sure. It's something we, well, I really appreciate it specifically about this article. It's something we have discussed quite often here on this pod. And they're not putting me and Jay's personal interpersonal conversations. It's the need for like a grassroots intellectualism. Not that it does not. And having that, I've always existed in some form, of course, because of course it does. But there often seems to be a strict dichotomy between intellectuals versus those actually materially involved and struggle intellectuals. And historically, or even presently, those are not always separable, or at least they shouldn't be. But on the contrary, theorization and intellectual struggle should actively coincide with material struggle. And the world-making and those who push history forward are seldom institutionalized intellectuals. Yet, that is often kind of how bourgeois historians are articulated, of course. So you make this point towards the middle of the article where you write that, and I'm quoting here, those involved in the struggle were the real thinkers and actors of 68, while the major French theoreticians reacting to them were the anti-68 thinkers or at the very least the theoretical skeptics of 68. So I'd love to just hear your expanded thoughts on this.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I mean, I follow the great Antonio Gramsci on the question of intellectuals in two senses. One is that we're all intellectuals. We all have philosophies in the sense that we have worldviews and systems of value and understandings of history and ideas of what the future could or could not hold. And those philosophies take generally two different forms. And this is the second point that I think Gramsci made more powerfully than just about anyone else, of course, drawing on the Marxist-Leninist tradition within which he was working. And that is that there's a difference between common sense and good sense. Common sense philosophy is the one that you inherit from the culture, the society, the class formation within which you come up. And these are the things that are the unquestionables because it's simply the way people within your class segment, within your particular society, tend to understand the world, their worldview. There can be certain elements of common sense that are correct, but the overall framing of common sense is incorrect. And one of the things that common sense does is it weaves together a whole series of different elements in such a way that the overall system of common explanation is itself profoundly incorrect. And so Gramsci juxtaposes common sense to good sense. And good sense is cultivated by testing the claims of common sense through rigorous scientific analysis to see what stands up to scrutiny and what doesn't. And intellectuals who do engage in good sense are by no means reducible to what we could refer to as academics, meaning intellectuals who have received credentials from the dominant bourgeois institutions that regulate, oversee, and attempt to control the very nature of knowledge production. So the conflation between intellectuals and academics is an attempt to reduce the human struggle for good sense in this Gramscian sense of the term to those who have subordinated themselves to bourgeois institutions of credentialization. In that regard, I think that when we look at an event like 68, what we have to foreground is that the intellectuals in question are not simply the academics and where they stood on a particular issue, but the people who were providing concrete analysis of a concrete situation and attempting to move things in the direction of increased equality, human liberation, emancipation of colonies, and other such things. In that regard, the true intellectuals of 68 were the activists on the ground who were doing that important work. That being said, I do think that there's, you know, as long as we have this expansive notion of intellectuals, it is also important to look at the class struggle within the context of 68, And the fact that one of the most significant intellectual class struggles in this broad sense of the term that was going on was between on the one hand, and the great Domenico de Sordo has spoken and written poignantly on this precisely in his book, Western Marxism, which is coming out hopefully soon in English because I've been involved in the translation and wrote the introduction to the book, but also elsewhere. that there's a segment of the intelligentsia that's invested in a kind of insurgent populism that embraces spontaneous uprisings that does not have a coherent strategy for building working class power in order to move in the direction of socialism. And so a lot of the theorists affiliated with 68 and for that matter, those who have later worked in that tradition. So we could go back to Deleuze and Lacan and Derrida, but we could include within that Hart and Negri or Badiou and Zizek or other contemporary thinkers of their ilk are those who tend to fetishize insurgency and uprisings and confrontations and spontaneity. while at the same time being more or less systematically, and there are some exceptions to this that I'd be happy to talk about, but more or less systematically hostile to political organizing that is structured, that focuses on developing platforms for political parties that themselves are aimed at seizing state power. So this kind of anti-party, anti-state, anti-organization ideology has saturated so much of the Western left intelligentsia at the expense of the historical and dialectical materialist tradition that recognizes that if you don't want to simply have an insurgency that's crushed by the state, the capitalist state, then you need to find ways of organizing that build power over time and link tactics to strategy, right? Tactic would be a short-term undertaking in order to advance your struggle in certain ways, whereas a strategy would be the final end goal, like the building of socialism and the abolition of capitalism. In order to have a coherent plan, you have to work through different tactics over time that are nested within one another in order to get to the strategy. And at times, those tactics will contradict one another. This is one of the elements of the dialectics of socialism that people in the Western left have often not understood. If you're a newly emergent socialist country that has been able to seize state power and wrench your country out of the chains of global imperialism and capitalist accumulation, you need to develop the productive forces as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you will be crushed by the forces of imperialism. That means that that tactic has often been heightened in moments of time at which other things have been sacrificed along the way, like the ecological footprint at times in certain instances has been sacrificed in order to develop the productive forces. Should we immediately withdraw in horror and say that, well, socialism is dedicated to ecological degradation? No, that's not true. Look at the extent record and the incredible, incredible developments and gains on the part of socialists and recognize as well the dialectics of socialism in which there are certain contradictions that often emerge. But to come back to the point that we were talking about more specifically, I think that it's important to recognize that then against this kind of fetishization of insurgency on the part of a certain Western intelligentsia, you have another struggle for intellectual hegemony within France at that point in time, and I would say more generally within the imperialist core, And those are the intellectuals who put first and foremost the struggle against imperialism as the principal struggle and the principal class struggle in our day and age, meaning that class struggle is not only class struggle with an individual nation state, but it's the class struggle between nations within the imperial chains of capitalist accumulation. And so in that regard, we should both recognize that intellectuals are not reducible to academics. But within the intellectuals involved in 68, there was a very important class struggle between the Marxists who were dedicated to developing a strategy of revolutionary transformation and building workers' power on the one hand. and those who were embracing a kind of fetishized insurgency that were often rabidly anti-communist in and of themselves. Daniel Combendi is one of the good examples of this, who is one of the leaders of the student movement, one of the most outspoken students, one of the most prevalent figures in the media at that point in time, was a resolute anti-communist, and his career since then has spelled that out quite clearly, but he was also transparent at that moment in time. And so the principled positions that many communists took in 68, which was that, yes, we should take the student movement as a spark, but that we shouldn't collapse our strategy into an insurgent tactic of simply occupying and violently confronting you know the police through barricades and things like this but that we should develop workers power over time so that we could actually see state power that class struggle is extraordinarily important and unfortunately those who took the position of the communists are often given short shrift in the favor of those kind of insurgents who ultimately embraced I mean, what they do is it's a politics of failure that they embrace, that what is glorious is for someone to resist the power structures and to not be able to develop a political party and state power at the level that they could truly resist the juggernaut of imperialism. And so this fetishization of insurgency is also a fetishization of failure. And that's one of the enormous problems with some of the Western left intelligentsia as it's played itself out. And this is the final thing that I'll say is that it's also not surprising then that you would have this kind of cult of the 68 intelligentsia because it traffics in this very same idea that somehow Derrida, Deleuze and McCann were supportive of these forms of insurgency. It's never that they were supportive of the worker struggle or this struggle on the part of communist intellectuals. It's on the contrary, that they were somehow on the side of those throwing mild health cocktails and occupying the civil world.

Jay: Thank you for the breakdown of that. You take the Marxist term commodity fetishism and elaborate from that a term that you call historical commodity fetishism. I'm going to ask a longer question, but in it, I would also love for you if you could just to lay out a little bit for folks who may not have come across that term before, like kind of what Marx is talking about when he talks about commodity fetishism. But in this piece, you write of your term historical commodity fetishism that in this case, The only thing that remains of the historical event itself is its symbolic value, which is detached from material practice in order to function as a free-floating signifier that can be used to promote or denigrate a product of the global theory industry." So yeah, I would love for you to talk a little bit about how that process works. I think it's something that's still very prevalent and common, maybe even more so, right? And that Josh and I experienced this, obviously, because we talk about a lot of books, and we're always trying to think about which books that we want to talk about, which ones we don't, you know, and Many books that are promoted on the backs of social movements are products that have very little to do with the actual struggle in the streets or the ideas that are really coming out and animating those struggles, the decisions people are making at levels of tactics and strategies by the folks that are often the organic intellectuals of those movements themselves. For better or worse. Right. And so, yeah, if you could just remind folks again, like kind of what commodity fetishism and talk about this, this idea that you're working on there.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I'll say first and foremost, I really love this question because it connects some of what I'm doing in this article to a really central aspect of contemporary class struggles around major social movements. So I'll get to this in a moment with the uprisings around anti-racist police terror in the United States, the Occupy movement and other things. But first and foremost... the idea of commodity fetishism which mark spells out in the first volume of capital is that commodities take on within a capitalist society a kind of magical quality in which they're fetishized in and of themselves in such a way that they render invisible the social relations of production that manufactured the commodity in the first place and so if people are enamored by the latest iphone or the latest macbook or the latest you know sneaker or t-shirt or name your product and they don't think to themselves well where were these minerals and resources mined What were the labor conditions in which this mining was taking place? Who was actually assembling these products? What were all the sweatshops that were involved and all of the kind of very exploitative labor relations that were involved? Then one is trafficking in commodity fetishism, right? You're fetishizing the commodity at the expense of their labor relations that produce the commodity. Using Marx's term and extending it to historical commodity fetishism, what I meant by that is very specifically that in moments of revolutionary uprising, or at least radical uprising, as in the case of 68, there is a tendency to attempt to transform the events themselves into a set of symbols and to devoid them of any substance, thereby doing the same thing with historical events that Marx says is done with commodities under capitalism. More specifically, what this means in 68 is instead of seeing the social relations that produced the radical uprising in 68, all of the 10 million workers who were involved in the struggle, all the students, all the intellectuals that we were talking about a moment ago, instead what is seen is the kind of symbol of revolt, where you have a few photographs and a few slogans, mainly taken from the students and the activities in Paris, the occupations, the barricades and things like this. And that then this is disconnected from the larger workers movement, a larger struggle, while at the same time, it just becomes then a kind of point to use in order to brand French theory as somehow radical. And so you're operating at a purely symbolic level that really obfuscates the material relations of revolutionary struggle at the time. If we were to relate this then to more contemporary developments, I think that one of the things that you clearly see in radical and revolutionary organizing is an attempt on the part of the capitalist ruling class and the propaganda apparatus that they control and oversee is an attempt to do two things at once. It's repression and hegemony, to echo back to Antonio Gramsci, whom we were talking about earlier. Repression that targets the revolutionary intellectuals who were the most outspoken leaders of a particular revolutionary movement. while at the same time trying to shore up hegemony, meaning making ample opportunities to promote the work of leaders that I would refer to as the radical recuperators, meaning those who posture as radical, but ultimately serve the purpose of recuperating any of the more revolutionary elements of a movement within the kind of pro-capitalist fold. And there are many examples that one could point to. Malcolm X's critiques of the March on Washington are very telling in this regard, where he says, look, this was basically controlled and overseen on the part of Washington that chose who was going to speak, chose how long they were going to speak, and basically segmented the movement to try to cut off the so-called civil rights movement from the very radical movement for Black liberation within this country. and make it into a liberal issue of rights and representation and what would become later kind of multiculturalism and identity politics. You could look at the great book by Robert L. Allen called Black Awakening in Capitalist America, where he points out that the Ford Foundation was directly invested in doing precisely this type of work, funding Black organizers who were doing work that was easily recuperated within the liberal fold, while at the same time, we have COINTELPRO going on and the heinous attack on Black revolutionaries, such that according to Ward Churchill's account, There were 29 members of the Black Panther Party who were assassinated directly or indirectly by the U.S. state FBI police force and the various forces, including organized crime that they work with in operations like COINTELPRO. So, right, you have a repression for the revolutionary intellectuals and you have hegemonic promotion for those intellectuals who might have a foot in the movement in various ways, but allow us to move the movement in the direction of liberal recuperation. The example of Occupy Wall Street, which was very important for my generation within the US context, is really telling because you had all of these intellectuals who were going to Zuccotti Park in order to make kind of platitudinous statements on YouTube that were being very widely broadcast as somehow then being intellectuals of the movement. You had Zizek making some, you know, grandiose statements, you had Judith Butler going and making some grand eloquent declarations, all of whom were completely disconnected from the movement and traffic in precisely this form of insurgent anti-communist politics that is so widespread within the Western left. And so you see clearly a kind of bifurcation of the The movement between those intellectuals were really grounded in the movement. You know, people like Huey Newton, George Jackson, in the case of the struggle for Black liberation that we were talking about earlier. There were others who were more organically embedded within the Occupy movement. I was involved with, you know, Angela Davis has evolved in various ways, some of which I quite disagree with, but she was very supportive of Occupy Philly, and that was an important moment for us in organizing here in Philadelphia. But then to bring it up to the present, right, you also have in the protests against the racist police terror that were ultimately linked in many cases. I was very involved in Philadelphia, directly linked to the history of capitalism and to the ways in which capitalism has used racism in order to target certain populations for super exploitation, for imperialist destruction. And that whole kind of moment of organizing, which wasn't only reducible to racism and the kind of more liberal understanding of racism, you saw the same thing going on, an attempt to repress the more revolutionary voices and uplift those like the Movement for Black Lives, the major foundation, which, of course, many people have spoken out against because so much of the money that was contributed to that movement. Organization was then used to buy mansions for the families of those who were leaders of this basically kind of liberal, radical recuperating group that was garnering kind of symbolic street cred from what was going on in the street, while at the same time recuperating it for their own career ends. And so the other thing that you see in these dynamics is that it is very revealing in relationship to whether or not intellectuals situate themselves as organically rooted in working class struggles or whether or not they traffic in and engage in right opportunism of individual careers, because what the capitalist class has on offer is they control the means of communication. And so if you're going to be on CNN or ABC or any other major Fox News, any other major platform, then they're going to bet who's on that platform. And if there are intellectuals who are engaged in a movement who are willing to give to that platform what it wants, meaning the radical recuperation. in various ways, right, this can be more liberal, more conservative, or even more reactionary, then they're going to be, they're going to have a good career move, meaning that they're going to be promoted by those who control the means of communication. And so a phenomenon that's operative within this demarcation between the repression of the true revolutionary intellectuals and hegemonic promotion of the others is that of uplift. An uplift is the way in which an objective system like the bourgeois cultural apparatus, meaning the entire system of production, circulation, and consumption of ideas, including the media, but including the intelligentsia, including universities, think tanks, et cetera, will provide uplift for those intellectuals who are doing the work that the capitalist ruling class wants, which is radically recuperating insurgent movements and turning them into something that is palatable for the capitalist class. you could turn to the work of, you know, Adolph Reed Jr., you could, Norman Finkelstein has announced some quite critical comments, I think, particularly in his most recent book, that really targets a lot of these intellectuals who are, you know, they're basically, they're court stenographers at this point, they're doing the work of the capitalist ruling class. And so for people like us, it's really important both to identify how that work is being done, and also to develop alternative means of communication, like the platform that you've launched and are continuing to develop, in order to get out a very different message, a message about the importance of worker solidarity and about the centrality of situating ourselves clearly in the position of supporting revolutionary struggles with very clear strategies.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I appreciate that. And yeah, so the uprisings of 1968 did not necessarily reorganize French civil society in a revolutionary fashion, as you mentioned earlier, but it did win some reformist concessions for workers. You write that the uprising did, in fact, create more space for the emergence of a petty bourgeois class stratum in this consumerist aspirations. And you connect this to the project of U.S. financial and cultural imperialism and the development of a new middle-class layer of consumers prone to ideologically support the capitalist system because it allows them to indulge in a U.S. American-inspired market of desire with its requisite French twist. So can you expand on this connection, if you will?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I think it's important to situate this within the larger context of post-war Western Europe, in which the former imperial powers became the junior partners in the imperial project of the United States. And that part of that had to do with the U.S. using elements like the Marshall Plan in order to keep Western Europe within the capitalist fold. But at the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was siphoning off money from the Marshall Fund in order to support cultural projects and intellectual projects aimed at shoring up what the company calls the compatible left or the respectable left. The compatible or respectable left is the anti-communist left that is compatible with capitalism and imperialism. And so in... Doing this work of using the Marshall Plan and what some people call the Marshall Plan for intellectuals or for the intelligentsia, one of the goals was to shore up what we could refer to as a kind of compradore petty bourgeoisie. The term compradore bourgeoisie is, of course, used within colonial contexts in which you have a local ruling elite. that does the bidding of the global elite or of the bourgeoisie within the imperialist core. So they're members of the local society, but they work for the imperial core. Within France, what you have developing in the post-war era is something along the lines of a kind of, and it's a different dynamic, right? Because France is a capitalist country. It wasn't colonized by the United States, but it becomes a junior partner in imperialism. And that means that its status shifts and that the professional managerial class stratum, right, which is composed of intellectuals who work at the university, but also journalists and engineers and architects and people of this particular stratum who tend to make more than the working class. and tend to work for developing the modes of hegemonic control on the part of the capitalist class. And within France in the post-war era, this petty bourgeoisie, this petty bourgeois stratum is given and aspires to, in many cases, uplift from the imperial court, from the United States. I remember in my time in France, one of the, and I still teach there and go back at least once a year, one of the things that's very clear is that one of the goals of most French professors is to get a gig in the United States, to get invited to give lectures, to get a visiting professorship. This is like the highest point of their career. And they often relate to me as someone who might be able to facilitate that, which is a pretty bad idea on their part, given the evolution of my own political orientation. What this means then is that there is a kind of compradore petty bourgeoisie within the French context that aspires to imperial uplift in the belly of the beast in the United States, and they're given consumerist rewards for that. Because what you're given in return, and here I'm drawing on the work of Michel Kluska, who I cite in the piece, Kluska highlighted that what happens in post-World War II France is the development of this petty bourgeois stratum that is given the freedom to indulge in consumerism in an unbridled fashion. meaning that they're the ones who have the resources and the time to buy all of the consumer goods and not only consumer goods in the kind of banal sense of consumer products that one would buy as like clothing or things like this, but high cultural consumer products like art and books and movies and things like this. And then at the same time, what's going on in France is unbridled repression against the working class. So it's libertarian consumerism for the lucky few who are part of the petty bourgeois stratum and repression for the many who are part of the working class. In that regard, you have a kind of class dynamic that develops in post-World War II France, in which there's imperial uplift for the competitive bourgeoisie that's doing the work that the United States wants, while repression is allocated to the workers. The references to the kind of American-inspired market of desire is taking from Kluskar some of his work on this front. And one of the things that I'd like to add to this is that it's sometimes difficult to see this in the way in which consumer economies function, because there are consumer objects that are allocated to different class strata. And so if you're talking about books published by Jacques Derrida, this is obviously not the same thing as like Nike tennis shoes. That would be something, a kind of consumer product that many people within different class strata would aspire to. But at the same time, we have to be able to see through this different kind of class allocation of consumer products. Jennifer Ponce de Leon is someone who's done excellent work on this front. And she points out regularly that a consumer product is a consumer product regardless of what class it is targeting. If we have that understanding, then we have to recognize that one of the things that the French theory affiliated with 68 has developed is a whole series of consumer products that were marketed as very sexy, very desirable, trendy, cutting edge, unorthodox, and that were marketed through a whole series of publishing houses that made an enormous amount of money and continue to make an enormous amount of money off of doing precisely this work. Semiotext and Stanford University Press and Verso Books is a great example of it, right? These are publishing houses that have profited handsomely. from these consumer products, the very same consumer products that are widely distributed and widely consumed within this particular class segment. And so we have to be able to see that the way in which French theory is marketed is not very different than the way in which French perfume is marketed or French champagne is marketed. The simple fact that it's an intellectual product as opposed to a product that others might aspire to should not invisibilize the class dynamics, the consumer dynamics that are operative behind them. That's one of the reasons that I refer to the work of French theorists as part of the global theory industry. Just as we have a global consumer industry of perfume and champagne, We have a global theory industry, and there's a remarkable amount of similarity in their products. If you spend your time tasting French champagne, you can probably distinguish between many different types of champagne. But at the end of the day, it's all going to taste like champagne. The same thing could be said for so much of what is promoted as French theory. Of course, someone like myself could make endless distinctions between Deleuze and Lacan and Derrida and Foucault. Well, at the same time, if you're able to concretely abstract in order to see these as different products, then what you recognize is that there's a philosophy of difference and an imperial sophistry that saturates all of this work. And that one of the things that all of these individual intellectuals were doing were competing to develop more and more radical forms of difference to distinguish their brand philosophy from other brand philosophies in order to market them better in this kind of marketplace of desire. In that regard, we need a lot more materialist analysis of the consumer dynamics that are actually operative within traditions like those of French theory, that again, due to the kind of not just historical commodity fetishism, but in this case, just pure commodity fetishism, all gets invisibilized because one looks simply at the product and analyzes the product internally, fetishizing the books by Foucault and what Foucault said, rather than understanding that these books and the fact that he produced them in the first place is part of a larger global theory industry that is aiming to have certain types of products developed. These are very fancy products that have a lot of rhetoric, that traffic in obscurantism, and that often have an endless multiplication of bourgeois cultural references that communicate to the reader that if you don't understand what's going on it's because you're stupid you're ignorant and you haven't read as many books as someone like derrida or these other people who are part of the leisure class and have an enormous amount of time to consume bourgeois cultural products So I've gone a little bit further afield than the immediate question, but I wanted to highlight the importance of understanding consumerism as a central dynamic within the French theory that I'm quite critical of.

Jay: No, I appreciate that. I mean, we actually, in interest of time, we had a question about the global theory industry that I think we nixed, but you got into it there. So I appreciate that. And this next question kind of gives you a chance to talk a little bit about how this, you know, kind of develops historically. So you know that many credit a Johns Hopkins University conference in 1966 where Really, as you've already laid out in the initial discussion of the period at a very potentially revolutionary and in many cases revolutionary historical conjuncture and a series of follow up events as helping to promote French theory and help it gain global prominence as a commodity, essentially. And this conference was sponsored by the Ford Foundation, who, as you note, has very close historical ties with the Central Intelligence Agency. And you add that in this period, it was under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, who We've come across him a few times on doing the show because he's a very interesting figure, but was a part of, I believe, the Kennedy administration as a national security advisor and, you know, obviously involved in various war crimes and imperialist machinations. So. What do you see as some of the possible reasons behind, I mean, you've kind of laid some of them out in this discussion, but talk a little bit about some of the reasons behind the promotion of French theory in this way. And what do you see as some of the consequences of this, thinking about some things you talk about in the piece as the move from practice to discourse and in the promotion of sort of anti-revolutionary and anti-party political positions?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, the first thing that I would say is that In order to understand the intellectual world war that we've been talking about, it's incredibly significant that the Central Intelligence Agency has worked hand in glove with the major capitalist powers, in particular, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, and others, in order to in a sub-rosa fashion, so also often clandestinely, promote as much as possible the compatible or so-called respectable left over and against the communist left. And that they have funneled an inordinate, or I should say just an incredible amount of money into these endeavors, some of which I spell out briefly in this article, but others in the book project and some of the other articles that I've written on this topic. In the case of the Johns Hopkins conference, this is often one that is pointed out in people who do the kind of history of French theory. They say, well, French theory arrived in the United States in 1966 because all of these French structuralists were invited to the United States for the first time. And Derrida met Lacan there. It was an enormous moment. And then it was followed up by additional seminars, publications, invited speakers, etc., And so this launching moment of French structuralism, which would become French theory within the US context, is quite significant. One of the things that is often rarely pointed out or if it is pointed out, it's done more in a kind of liberal vein. And it's just kind of mentioned in passing that the Ford Foundation provided the funding for this. The funding was to the tune of thirty six thousand dollars. Now, if you were at a contemporary university, like I teach at Villanova University, and I was told I had $36,000 to organize a conference, I think, wow, this is fantastic. Like, we're not only going to have an enormous junket and be able to wine and dine people with fine French champagne. But we're also going to be able to invite people and pay them enormous honoraria and things like this. But $36,000 in 1966 is the equivalent of $332,000. That's over a quarter of a million dollars. This is unprecedented. I've organized academic conferences for probably 30 years, it seems like. And I've never heard of a conference being funded to the tune of over a quarter of a million dollars. The Ford Foundation was also present at the 1966 conference, as well as a representative of the Carnegie Foundation. And no Marxist intellectuals, with the possible exception of Lucien Goldman, were invited to this conference. And so it was an opportunity for the Ford Foundation to continue doing the work of cultural warfare that they'd been doing, working hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency, in fact, In 1966, it was the year that it was publicly revealed finally that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a central intelligence agency front. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was an enormous international organization headquartered in Paris, but with offices in some 35 countries around the world that was running some of the most prestigious magazines around the world that were the dominant intellectual magazines of the time, like Encounter Magazine, Tiempo presente, Preuve in France, and many, many others. And what the Ford Foundation did when it was revealed, because they were co-funding the CIA and the Ford Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, is an attempt to save face on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Ford Foundation, the same year as they were funding this conference in Baltimore, just took over the complete funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. So we have to be able to see that the Central Intelligence Agency and these corporations work hand in glove. The Central Intelligence Agency is a disinformation agency. It's also an agency that has been responsible for an endless number of death squads, targeted assassinations, coup d'etat around the world, killing people. on the count of some 14 former members of the Central Intelligence Agency, 6 million people globally between 1947 and 1987. So this is what the Central Intelligence Agency does, but it does that for a very specific purpose. And that is the internationalization of capitalist social relations. And so the reason that they work with the corporatocracy is because they're on the same team. They're promoting capitalism internationally. And so the promotion of French theory within the US context is the promotion of anti-communist theory that is promoted as being cutting edge, unorthodox. Everybody needs to read it. It's doing something that's radically new. It's promoted as a cultural consumer product. And those thinkers are involved in the tradition of French theory are the quote-unquote anti-totalitarian thinkers. Someone like Jacques Derrida, who was in Baltimore and gave one of the most widely recognized lectures at that point in time, was involved in the Jan Hus Foundation, which was an anti-communist subversion campaign against Czechoslovakia, the socialist country of Czechoslovakia, that received funding from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and other foundations, including the National Endowment for Democracy, which is widely recognized, including on the part of one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy as a central intelligence agency cutout. So these intellectuals are doing the bidding of the imperialists, They are promoting work that is anti-party, anti-state, and they clearly say in their writings at numerous points in time, there is no alternative, which is Margaret Thatcher's mantra for neoliberal capitalism. Now, granted, many of them, people like Deleuze and Lyotard, for instance, will say capitalism is very bad. But when you get to the point of the alternative, they'll start talking about bureaucracy and state capitalism and all of these evil things that the socialists do. And it becomes very, very clear that the socialists are ultimately, at least those who have state power, worse than the capitalists. The case of McGeorge Bundy is quite interesting in this regard. I'll let people read the article, but it's highly revealing because of his involvement in the Bay of Pigs, the escalation of the war in Vietnam. And I think it's important is the last thing that I'll say is that one of the metaphors that Frank Wisner, who was one of the top in command of the Central Intelligence Agency, used to refer to his development of an international propaganda apparatus was the mighty Wurlitzer. A Wurlitzer is like a jukebox. And what Frank Wisner wanted and the Central Intelligence Agency wanted and built was a global mighty Wurlitzer in which in Langley, Virginia, at the headquarters of the CIA, they could press one button and have whatever story they wanted to be played globally and be presented in Bangkok, in South Africa, in Argentina, everywhere in the world. That mighty world, which they have built up over time and is extremely powerful and still very, very operative today. You see it across the way in which they control YouTube, social media, big tech and things like this. also always went hand in hand with what I would call the bloody Wurlitzer. And the bloody Wurlitzer was the destruction, not only, as I was mentioning earlier, of all of the intellectuals who actually supported actually existing socialism, but also all, or at least the attempt at destroying any of those who develop means of communication that break the stranglehold of the capitalist means of communication and the mighty Wurlitzer. In that regard, the work that they're doing with the Ford Foundation in order to shore up the French intelligentsia is really promoting this anti-communist message globally, while at the same time, they were running death squads, doing targeted assassinations, and doing everything in their power in order to repress the development of communist organizing. In fact, and actually I said it was going to be the last thing I'm going to say, I'll just mention that there were also a whole series of bombings that rocked Paris in the 1950s. There were three communist bookstores that were bombed. in paris that were linked to an organization that actually has ties to the u.s administration surprise surprise one of the people who was involved in developing it was oss which is the predecessor organization the cia and was most likely cia and so it's not just that they were kind of doing hegemonic struggle meaning trying to promote the compatible left within the imperial court and keeping repression in the Global South, it's also that they brought those targeted forms of repression to the Global North in things like the terrorist bombings in Paris against communist bookstores, as well as Operation Gladio, which we might get into later, which was a series of targeted attacks against the civilian population across Europe that were blamed on communists in order to round them up, throw them in jail, and crack down on socialist organizations.

Jay: Awesome. So I'm going to read a quote here, and you probably will have to help me with some pronunciation because I am not a student of French theory. There's one passage I wanted to read here to give you space to just expand on it, if you'd like, or discuss, you know, these tactics of counterinsurgency. So, quote, according to sociologist Jean-Pierre Garnier, whose analysis aligns with that of, is it Simon Klusgaard and others? Simone?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, Simone Klusgaard and others, yeah. Okay, thank you.

Jay: The petty bourgeois intelligentsia was not interested in overthrowing capitalism, but was instead intent on opening up traditional French society to make more room for professional intellectuals of their ilk. Citing in particular Foucault, Deleuze, and is it Cixous? Cixous. Cixous. insofar as they were some of the government's interlocutors in the post-68 project of creating the experimental University of Vincennes. Garnier claims that Georges Pompidou told him, quote, this is a Garnier quote, all these people, the famous restless ones, if we give them classrooms, if we give them amphitheaters, they will make their revolution in a

Gabriel Rockhill: peace in the street, end quote. That's the end of his quote.

Jay: This is still part of your quote. This, according to Garnier, is precisely what happened. Professors who presented as radical in the wake of 68 were given an academic platform for their innocuous discourses and allowed to advance their intellectual careers at a distance from practical class struggles, end quote. So I just really appreciated this commentary here. A lot of folks that we know that are scholars that are in the academy are have talked about these dynamics going on currently in the post George Floyd moment. And good that they're like, able to see it and acknowledging and kind of struggling thinking about what does this mean. But there's an important thing for us, I think, to talk about, because, as you've already said, kind of this discussion of recuperation and things like that, that certain thinkers and academics are given more space, resources and opportunity in the post George Floyd moment we're in. While other places, of course, so this is kind of another tactic of repression, but anything resembling true examination of U.S. history or U.S. racism or teaching about gender sexuality, things like that is under direct assault by the state and reactionary forces. So I just wanted to give you space here to talk about these phenomenon, either in the context of 68 or as you see in present day.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I think that there's a number of things in your question and comments. that I'd like to touch on. One is that a lot of the petty bourgeois class stratum that we've been talking about engages in and embraces a kind of third way politics, meaning this idea that, well, and this is kind of what you get at best, because some of them are just apologists for capitalism, but at best you get the idea that, well, capitalism is really bad, but the alternative is even worse, which would be socialism. Therefore, there's this new or different idea of how we could do things. And it's usually the thinker in question who then promotes their particular philosophy as this radically new thing or radically new way of thinking about what exists and that we should simply get on board with that project. In that regard, they really... embrace a kind of idealism because the world that we live in is a world in which there's a global conflict between the capitalist world system as it's been developed over the last few centuries and the emergent socialist world that has been developing over the last hundred years or so. with, of course, roots that go back further than that. And so this third way politics is a kind of utopian socialist politics at best, meaning that they would say, well, there's this new magical path that we can get to socialism that isn't the path that human beings have been giving their lives to across planet Earth over the last century. My position is the opposite of that, and that is where we need to begin with materialist history and understand the materialist dynamics of global class struggle and recognize that there is no third way. We're in a system in which there's a struggle between two socioeconomic orders, one that privileges equality and human emancipation, and one that privileges inequality, the destruction of human life, and the destruction of the environment. And what you have to do is choose what side you're on, and then orient yourself accordingly. And that third way politics is an attempt on the part of the petty bourgeois class stratum to tap out from class struggle, to say, no, there's this magical other thing that me and my friends know about, or me and my understanding of a particular concept allow me to engage in that isn't about choosing what side we're on. And so third way politics is usually just a form of capitalist accommodation, meaning that if you don't choose what side you're on, as Walter Rodney often said, we know what side you are, meaning that choice has been made for you because of your clear lack of dedication to developing socialism. The other thing that I would say, though, speaking more specifically to the point that you raised regarding what we were talking about earlier, meaning how certain intellectuals are promoted as radical recuperators, is that you see this very, very clearly in contemporary forms of class struggle. if you can allow me to engage in a description of at least my own organizing experience and what it reveals, I think more generally about some of the objective struggles in the Philadelphia struggle around racist police terror and the attempts to connect racist police terror to the capitalist system that promotes certain forms of policing that targets poor racialized groups. We organize the largest March and the history of Philadelphia, 100,000 people were in the streets. That's an incredible, incredible moment in the history of class struggle within the context of Philadelphia. Eugene Pereira gave an incredible speech that people can watch on YouTube. Was he or were other leaders of the movement invited on CNN or on Fox News? Was there ample coverage that actually allowed the people, meaning ourselves, who organized that particular event, a platform? No. There were a few helicopter shots, a few discussions of this, that, or the other thing, but there was an invisibilization of the grassroots organizing and the leadership that had led that movement and made that a reality. And we see this not only, of course, we see it within the dominant kind of hegemonic means of communication of the capitalist class. And I should note in passing in case people don't know this, that five mega corporations control 90% of what all US Americans see and hear. So that should give us pause to reflect on the nature of control of the psyche within the US context. But it's not only these major corporations, it's also the kind of a rad lib media complex of places like Democracy Now!, who will almost never give a platform to real socialist organizing and revolutionary organizing, but will instead privilege these insurgent moments and give a platform to many of the radical recuperators over and against those who are really embedded in and organically part of the movement itself. So I don't know if there's more that you'd like me to say about this, because we touched on a few other elements, but I'll turn it back over to you.

Speaker 3: For sure. And kind of along the lines of counterinsurgency, the uprisings of 68 were met with counterinsurgency efforts on both an intellectual and cultural and brutal state repressive fronts. And you write that, I'm quoting here, both ideological and repressive state apparatuses were mobilized in this project. While French theory was being culturally promoted, draconian forms of state and peristate repression were unleashed on anti-capitalist left, including the intelligentsia, The state brutally targeted journalists, publishers, artists, etc. And all this is happening while the fashionable French theorist Critical of 68 rode the ascended wave of discursive radicality and profited handsomely from a market niche that was being globalized by the Anglo-American Academy, the radical intellectuals involved. in 68 face both cultured emotion and direct repression, end quote. So yeah, you discuss how Raymond Marcelin, I think that's how you pronounce it, a French politician, announced that protests were forbidden during the campaign for the upcoming elections. And he invoked an anti-fascist law from 1936 to ban 11 leftist organizations involved in 68 while allowing the extreme right, including violent movements like Occident, to act with impunity. So if you can, discuss some other means by which the state enacted violence, terror, and repression against participants of the uprisings and how it empowered vigilante fascist right to join in on the terror.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, this is a very I'm glad that you highlighted this point, because I think it's central for understanding my argument around 68 is that in the wake of 68, you see the bifurcation between those intellectuals who are giving to the hegemonic system what it wants, on the one hand, which are the French theorists who rode the radical wave in the wake of 68. the kind of wave that was trying to recuperate 68 for its symbolic value and its marketable value because it was cool to be a 68er in the wake of 68 just as it was cool to be supportive of occupy in the wake of occupy for cool to be in support of george floyd protests in their wake right without much conversation usually in these instances about whether or not people were organically involved in them when they were happening And then the opposite side of that is the repressive side. So at the same time that the French theorists were being promoted in France and globally, most importantly, as these radical thinkers, you had professors in France who were losing their jobs. You had journalists who were losing their jobs, bookstores and publishers that were being shut down and unbelievably draconian, fascist oriented laws that were being signed by the French government. In that regard, you see both elements operative in the wake and those who then simply embrace the idea that French theory is radical theory and don't recognize it as a hegemonic product of post-68 failure, ultimately in the sense that the movement failed to topple the government, although there were successes, as I mentioned earlier, particularly for the working class and for minimum wage workers. That moment meant that there was a symbolic elevation of the French theorists, while at the same time, there was this enormous amount of repression that was unleashed against the working class and against leftists. It basically became illegal in post-68 France to be distributing leftist tracts and leftist publications. You couldn't show film footage publicly on 68 without getting the authorization of the government. I mean, this was basically France going in a much more totalitarian direction than prior to 68. And all of that repression needs to be understood within the context of the promotion of the French theorists, because it was the communist intellectuals and the socialist intellectuals who were being repressed while the rad lib anti-communist intellectuals were being globally promoted. The other thing that I'd say in this regard is that I spell out some of the details in the piece that we're discussing regarding what happened in France, but we also have to see this as a phenomenon that structured a lot of the class struggle in Europe in the wake of 68. One of the extraordinary things that happened in that time period of the late 60s, early 1970s, is that the capitalist ruling class and the people who work for them saw very clearly that there was a much more insurgent form of organizing that was widespread, much of which was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. But of course, there were different elements within these movements. and that one of the responses to the insurgent 60s was the development of Operation Gladio, which demonstrates how this operated at a European level. Operation Gladio was a project overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency working with MI6, the CIA's equivalent in Great Britain, that worked with the intelligence services of all of the Western European countries, all of the NATO countries, including four neutral countries, in order to set up, as they'd already done in the immediate wake of World War II, secret stay-behind armies, that were not in the control of democratically elected governments, even if these are all pseudo-democracies, but instead in the control of the intelligence services and ultimately overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6. These secret stay-behind armies were originally set up with the idea that if the Soviets moved west because they liberated Eastern Europe from authoritarianism and fascist occupation, then these capitalist stay-behind armies would be there in order to run sabotage missions against the Soviets. And they were stocked with fascists and Nazis. In that regard, this continued, and this has to do with, I know that we're talking about slightly different issues in French theory right now, but one of the other book projects that I've been working on for the last few years is on fascism, and in particular, the role of the U.S. national security state in developing an international network of fascists in order to impose capitalism by any means necessary, which is, of course, linked to what we're talking about, because a lot of the work that I'm doing in this book on French theory is about the hegemonic struggle, but I'm also very interested in the repressive front of global class struggle. And so in that research, I've developed an account of the ways in which Operation Gladio then staffed so many of these secret stay behind armies with fascists and Nazis. And it did then mobilize these armies in the wake of 68. And very specifically, in fact, there's an excellent documentary film that I recommend that all people watch all three parts of by Alan Frankovich. I think the single most important documentary filmmaker in the Anglophone world. of the 20th century. It's available on YouTube if you look for it, called Gladio by Alan Frankovich. And you have the direct first person testimony on the part of many of the intelligence agents who are involved, many of the terrorists who are involved. And so it's basically irrefutable unless you're going to take the position that these people were lying and that they were all lying in this very synchronized fashion about what they were doing. And one of the things that's pointed out is that the secret stay behind armies were activated in the wake of 68 because 68 was seen as a threat because there was this massive leftist insurgency and the capitalist class didn't know where things were headed. Was the Communist Party of France going to take over the French government? That seemed like it might have been a possibility at some level. And it was activated in order to undertake terrorist attacks against the civilian population across Europe, including the most heinous terrorist attacks in the history of Europe, like the one that killed 80 people in the Bologna train station in Italy. These terrorist attacks were then blamed on socialists and communists who were rounded up and thrown in jail. The organizations, including Bader Meinhof in Germany, and the Red Brigades in Italy, according to first-person testimony, once again, were infiltrated, including the leadership of these organizations by elements of the intelligence services who had connections to Gladio. And so some of the activities that these organizations were doing, particularly the more terrorist activities, that resemble right wing terrorism in general are actually not the result of socialist and communist organizing, even if it's of a kind of ultra leftist sort, but instead actually directly linked to the intelligence services. What this means is that the repressive mechanism was so developed at this point in time that it was orchestrating a pan-European set of terrorist attacks against the civilian population in order to try to terrify the general population into supporting law and order governments and green light crackdowns on socialist organizing in order to keep Western Europe within the pro-capitalist fold by any means necessary. And so that level of repressive violence really needs to be understood because the capitalist ruling class and the agencies and organizations that work for them, the political elite, the intelligence services, et cetera, never simply allow the political theater of bourgeois democracies to play out, they always have and always orchestrate a plan B, C, and D. And that is that if there's the risk of communists or socialists coming to power within bourgeois democracy, they have plans. And these plans have been revealed for orchestrated coup d'etat and repressive mechanisms against the left. Anyway, I've kind of gone off immediate script here, but hopefully that will just flesh out a little bit more how the mighty Wurlitzer that we've been talking about, this kind of propaganda complex that promotes the compatible law, needs to be understood in terms of a social totality in which there's a bloody Wurlitzer and the repressive mechanisms that are constantly used in order to try to destroy the socialist left. And I should add, and this will be my final comment, ultimately unsuccessful. With some successes in certain instances on the part of the capitalist ruling class, but one of the things that's extraordinary about the global socialist movement is it's a many-headed hydra. The more you cut off the heads, the more working class people figure out that there are people and there is a science of human liberation, not science in some rigorous, really mechanical sense of the term, but a way of understanding what's going on in the world and a way of understanding how people have struggled and won their liberation and continue that struggle. And so it's also really important to highlight the fact that that hegemonic and repressive struggle on the part of the capitalist ruling class is ongoing precisely because the fight back is so powerful and because they have not succeeded in quelling the quest of humanity for a more egalitarian, social and economic and ecologically sustainable system, and that is socialism.

Jay: Appreciate all that. So definitely reading this piece, you did want to demonstrate a lot of things that we've laid out in terms of, you know, kind of how French theory gets promoted to the level that it does, you know, situating it within different counterinsurgency efforts going on at the time. But also, you know, illustrating that a lot of these folks referred to as the 68 thinkers are closer, at least to being anti 68 thinkers. that means that there's a group of folks that we haven't talked about a whole lot in this. You've alluded to them, but these are the folks that, you know, we're really the real thinkers of 68. And so I'm just curious, like give you some space to talk about those folks. If there are any, you know, My sense from your piece is that there's not a lot of material out there about these folks or by these folks. But I'm interested if there is some of kind of talking about that and, you know, who you think are among those folks that should be thought about as more closely tied to what was going on in 68.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you for highlighting that because it's really important, as I mentioned, kind of at the outset that my project is not just a critical project. It is rooted in a positive project of developing socialism and developing the intellectual tools of analysis for a revolutionary transformation of society. And therefore, the critique of French theory isn't just a kind of attempt to cast shade on a particular intellectual tradition. It's precisely to point out that French theory has unfortunately helped invisibilize the forms of French theory that are actually invested in revolutionary social, political, and economic transformation. And so there's a long list of authors that people find in my piece, because I know that orally it might be hard to understand exactly how some of these names are spelled. But people like Michel Simon, or Simon is what his last name looks like, provided one of the most astute analyses of 68. Michel Kouska, who we were talking about earlier, also, I think, is an excellent analyst of 68, both of whom identified with the workers' movement, supported the workers' movement, and pointed out the limited tactics of the student movement and the kind of gauchisme that we were talking about earlier, the ultra-leftism. Lucien Sèvres is another very important French intellectual, has a great critique of structuralism. In general, I would recommend that people look at the French publishing house that sounds like in English, DELGA, D-E-L-G-A. And the majority of the authors that they published are authors who work in a tradition of supporting the struggle for socialism. And so these have been the intellectuals who've largely been invisibilized by French theory. And if you operate in French theoretical circles within an Anglophone context, as I at least did prior to being kind of deplatformed within those circles, then you can ask any of the specialists of Derrida or Deleuze anything about any of these figures, and they'll be I assure you, completely ignorant and probably not even know the names of some of the individuals that I just mentioned. And so it just hammers home the point of how much they've been invisibilized. It is true that there's a dearth of work available in English due to the fact that the publishing houses that have promoted French theory have promoted anti-communist French theory. So you're not going to find published by, you know, Verso has done a few good books, but they've also done a lot of bad work, in my opinion, and also occupy a position that squeezes out other voices in very important ways. There is a book by Emeric Monville, who's a contemporary French intellectual who's working in this tradition. That is a book on Michel Puscard, who's the intellectual I just mentioned, that's coming out this month, I hope, with Iskra Editions. I helped work on that project and I wrote a long introduction to it where I talk about Monville's work and Puskar's work. So if people are looking for a kind of English primer on work from France that is more in line with this, then I would highly recommend that book by Iskra. There's also, hopefully, there will be forthcoming translations, or at least I'm trying to get some more of this work published. I would recommend the work of Annie La Croix-Risse in particular, Georges Gaston, Bruno Guigui. Again, these names can be found in the article that I published. There's also the work of Ludo Martens that I very strongly recommend, who's a Belgian analyst and political organizer, M-A-R-T-E-N-S. Some of his work is available in English. I would recommend reading anything you can get your hands on. He wrote a lot in French and he also wrote in Flemish. I'm also trying to get more of his work available. If there's any publishers out there or translators out there, hit me up. I really want to make more of this work more widely available. Maybe one of the last people that I'll mention is someone who is radicalized by 68 and whose work is widely available in English, and that is Thomas Sankara. The great revolutionary from Burkina Faso, who was radicalized in Marxist reading groups in the wake of 68, he wasn't in France at that point in time, wasn't involved in those struggles. But in reading Marxism and particularly Leninism in the wake of 68, that led him on the path that would eventually lead him to be the most important leader of the socialist revolution in Burkina Faso. And so I'd also encourage people to plug into the work of Sankara. In fact, I've been involved in a Sankara translation project on the platform Liberation School. And we've published, I think, about five or six translations at this point in time of previously untranslated Sankara work. So there's not only what work was already available by Sankara, but more work that is forthcoming.

Speaker 3: Absolutely. I guess you kind of like alluded to this a little bit already, but in closing, is there anything else you would like to add or promote? Anything else you're working on and or that people should be looking out for?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I'm going to Emerick Monville, who I just mentioned, wrote this book on Kluska, and he and I are going to be doing a session with Midwestern Marx later this month on French theory and 68. So it'll overlap a bit with what we talked about, but we're going to open it up more broadly. And Emerick Monville is also the director of Édition Delga, this publishing house that I just mentioned that does excellent work. And so I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to discuss more broadly some of the more revolutionary elements in French theory. You can check out the Critical Theory Workshop's website, criticaltheoryworkshop.com, for information about that event. It's an educational nonprofit that I run with some other people invested in Marxist political education. We do a summer program as well, and there's still the opportunity if people are interested in applying for the online version of the program, they'd be more than welcome to do so. Again, you can find information about that on the Critical Theory Workshop's webpage. Other than that, I mentioned my book at the beginning. I hope to be able to finish it by the end of this year and that it'll be out in 2024 with Monthly Review Press. It's entitled The Intellectual World War, Marxism versus the Global Theory Industry. That's all that comes to mind as far as the work that I'm currently involved with myself. But of course, there's lots of excellent work out there. And hopefully all of your audience is eagerly pursuing that work and not being vacuumed up by the ideologues of the global theory industry.

Jay: Well, Gabriel, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been great to talk with you, for you to share your work and your analysis of these important concerns. And yeah, just appreciate it. It's been great to be in conversation.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, thank you so much for having me on. Keep up the great work. I think it's really important and it's a way of leveraging power for us within the struggle for developing socialism. And so this type of work is extremely important and I think reaches a very significant audience. And I know that I've already seen with my interactions with students and with young people in particular, there is a lot of interest in different modes of analysis that don't traffic in the kind of boomer ideology that I was subjected to, which is anything that smells of socialism and communism is bad. So keep up the excellent work and thank you for having me.

Jay: I appreciate that.

Speaker 4: Thank you. So, Thank you. So, Bye.