"The Global Theory Industry & Left Anti-Communism" - Gabriel Rockhill

Breht: Hi everyone, welcome to the Probably Cancelled podcast. My name is Breht and I'm one of your hosts. Today I'm going to be sharing a presentation from Gabriel Rockhill, who is a philosopher and historical materialist. This presentation is called The Global Theory Industry and Left Anti-Communism, and he gave this presentation at the Critical Theory Workshop's summer program in July of 2021. He's going to be talking about how critical theory is used as a weapon against communism within universities. This is a topic that I keep returning to on the podcast because I really really want to reveal this history of ideological warfare upon the Western left at the behest of the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom. Structuralism and postmodernism have been intentionally weaponized against us, and we see these ideologies really permeating and penetrating every single organization within the West and and trading class analysis for identity politics. And as Marxists, it is really important that we struggle to understand ideologies and how they shape the world and impact class struggle. Unfortunately, these postmodern philosophers are often portrayed as Marxists when they are actively utilized to suppress class consciousness, hence Jordan Peterson's term postmodern neo-Marxists, which at face value would be a hilarious term if it wasn't so true that today as we know it, what parades as Marxism is often really just repackaged liberalism and repackaged postmodernism. So this hidden history is important for all of us to know so that we can learn to recognize it and combat it wherever we can. Gabriel Rockhill is an amazing resource for those attempting to understand the differences between structuralism, postmodernism, and materialism. And I went ahead and included the Q&A section at the end of this presentation because I think these questions and answers can just add more context to this topic. So I really hope you enjoy this presentation. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast to keep updated on new episodes. We also have a Sex Trade Exit fundraiser going on with shirts, bags, and posters for sale. All proceeds go towards raising exit funds so people may get help exiting prostitution. I'll leave that link in the show notes as well. And you can also become a patron on our Patreon if you'd like to support our work. So with all that out of the way, I hope you enjoy this talk by Gabriel Rockhill.

Gabriel Rockhill: For the session today, I proposed the title of The Global Theory Industry and Left Anti-Communism. And the basic goal is to outline for you in a slightly more informal fashion, in the sense that I want to give you the big picture view, and we can mine down into the details if people are interested, regarding research that I've been doing for decades at this point, and give you a little bit of a sense of how I came to this research originally, because in part—

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: I say this in relationship to some of the readings that you did for today's session. I did receive some feedback, particularly on the Foucault article, that interpreted it as a bit of a scorched earth policy that was perhaps being too vicious with Foucault, who made contributions to materialist analysis and other such things. In order to not simply circumvent those concerns, but to take them head on, I'd like to give you a sense of where this research is coming from and why it is that my own personal trajectory has led to a broader analysis of the objective social forces operative behind the global theory industry. So in short, what I propose to outline, and I wanna keep it relatively short, 30 or 40 minutes, is the ways in which my own intellectual itinerary is not necessarily interesting for its own sake, but because it reveals really fundamental things about the objective social forces that have been operative behind both the creation and the maintenance of the limits of the global theory industry. And so my beginning point will simply be— and I take this as a beginning point because I presume that it might overlap with some of your own work and interests, given the age difference between most of us, but then also the kind of the stage at which some of you are at. When I was an undergraduate and a graduate student, I was interested in exploring the most radical and critical theory that was available, that gave us the best tools for analyzing society, but also for transforming society in a more egalitarian fashion. Given the nature of the apparatus of knowledge that I was operating in— and by apparatus of knowledge, I'm kind of drawing on the work of Brecht and others— I mean the entire system of intellectual production circulation, and reception. So all of the material forces operative in producing ideas in the first place, and this isn't only ideas within the academy, it's also ideas within the press, within the culture industries, within the so-called quote-unquote public sphere in general. And that this apparatus of knowledge not only produces knowledge, but then creates very specific channels for certain forms of knowledge circulating and others being excluded from that circulation. And it also predetermines its reception, meaning that if certain ideas are kind of put forth, so to speak, in the public sphere, some of them are picked up upon, written upon, worthy of fame and recognition, and others disappear or ignored or actually have smear campaigns launched against them. And so in that regard, in this apparatus of knowledge into which I came into my own kind of intellectual development, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student in the United States, and I spent about a decade in France, That apparatus was such that it directed me to one particular source, and that is what I would refer to as a generalized critical theory. And that generalized critical theory is a result of a kind of Anglo-Americanization of both French theory, the French theory that is affiliated with the 1960s and 1970s, but I want to return to in a moment, so structuralism and poststructuralism in short, or at least that's how they're called in the Anglophone world, because these terms aren't readily— most of the French intellectual community recognize that poststructuralism is just a further development out of structuralism because so much is shared with the structuralist project. And so French theory functions as one of the principal roots, if you will, to this generalized Anglo-American form of critical theory, but so does Frankfurt School critical theory. Right? And the form of critical theory that was developed in the early 20th century by people like Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others originally in Germany, but then they were exiled to the United States. And so some people distinguish Frankfurt School critical theory as a specific tradition from critical theory in this more generalized tradition. And moreover, both of these, if it be French theory or German-style critical theory, have bled into and really functioned as some of the primary kind of tributaries that have given force to so much of the theoretical development within the larger capitalist apparatus of knowledge production. Decolonial theory would be a great example of this, that of course draws so heavily on, you know, figures like Dussel, who is rooted in Levinas, or postcolonial studies that is mediated by figures like Spivak, who's coming directly out of Derrida. You go on and on with this list. Afro-pessimism, which attempts to make Frantz Fanon into a nonrevolutionary thinker, which is an incredible intellectual task if ever there was one. But there's an entire industry that is doing this at this point in time. Liberal queer theory, which has basically eradicated materialist queer theory under the name of purported liberation, which ends up taking on forms that resemble more petty bourgeois navel-gazing than radical social transformation in the name of the liberation of sexualities and genders, and has actually played a really crucial role in ignoring, downplaying these traditions from a largely anti-Marxist perspective. So, in my own trajectory, I was drawn to this form of generalized critical theory, and I actually wanted to go to the heart of the beast. And so, I taught myself French and went to study in France, because I thought that, well, Derrida is still alive, Lyotard was still alive, Luce Rigauri and all of these other figures. And so, in the mid-to-late '90s, I originally went to France and then stayed there for about 11 years, studied with Derrida, ended up taking classes with Paul Ricoeur, with Julia Kristeva, with the kind of leading luminaries of French theory before a number of them either passed away or stopped writing in various ways or stopped maintaining a more public presence. And during that time, I continued my own investigations into the larger world and my understanding of it, and was confronted with a fundamental paradox that I think might overlap with some of your own experience. And that was that I became extremely well-versed in unbelievably intricate Discursive games that I mastered, and I mastered in the original language, and I was publishing in the original language. And then there were political occurrences. One very big one in my own lifetime was 9/11, 2001, that I had literally no intellectual capacity to understand. I didn't understand global imperialism. I didn't understand the U.S. national security state. I knew nothing about the Afghan trap and the way in which Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen rebels are a CIA product. They were trained and funded by the CIA. I just had no clue regarding very basic facts of the material existence of peoples around the world. And instead, I was oriented towards a so-called deconstruction of Western metaphysics, which takes its parameters of analysis from a pre-established canon of so-called Western thought, with all of the purported great thinkers, many of them, of Of course, also affiliated with fascism in various ways. Martin Heidegger, of course, being the most famous of which, because he was an unrepentant Nazi, never apologized for it, never made a public statement, you know, going back on some of the things that he said in the '30s. In fact, on the contrary, if you know his Introduction to Metaphysics, kind of went in the opposite direction. Paul de Man is a well-known Nazi who ended up reinventing himself and teaching at Yale and inviting Derrida over. And the historical record on Paul de Man, I'd encourage all of you to look into, if you're not familiar with it. It gives great insight into political sensibilities of deconstruction and the ways in which you can be a political liberal or a fascist supporter of either Nazism or various forms of fascism, in the case of de Man and Heidegger. And so, as I was exploring all of this, it made me think, well, wait, there are problems with the limitations to my own intellectual training. And I began to explore more broadly. Going into the historical social sciences, I was drawn to Foucault first and foremost due to the fact that he has a materialist engagement with archives. He's interested in political questions. I was also drawn to the work of the Bourdieusian sociologists and their critiques of idealism as it's operative within philosophic traditions, their critiques of deconstruction and poststructuralism, some of which I think are very important. I was also drawn to the work of Badiou, Žižek, and other figures who were explicit Marxists but also have a very profound metaphysical project that they're involved in, and they attempt to bring together metaphysics and Marxism which, at least from my contemporary perspective, are largely incompatible if you understand by metaphysics the belief in spirit forces and other such things. There are purely materialist metaphysics, so that would be another discussion that I'd be happy to have. But through my engagement with particularly figures like Foucault and Bourdieu and others who are identified as structuralists, whether or not they accept the term themselves— Bourdieu is referred to as a kind of genetic structuralist and embraces the term, at least At least in some of his writings, as well as I should mention Rancière, right? Rancière comes directly out of the Foucauldian heritage and shares so much with Foucault, including his anti-Marxism and anti-communism, but also his dedication to doing forms of transcendental historiography that look at cultural production and attempt to establish the intellectual coordinates that oversee all of that cultural production, right? So it's transcendental in the sense that it's analyzing cultural production, sometimes in great detail, But what it's ultimately interested in are the idealist forms that purportedly govern those particular modalities of cultural production, right? And so this is different than a materialist analysis of the institutions, the economics, the sociopolitical relations, et cetera, that would go into producing these cultural phenomena. And lo and behold, in spite of the fact that I was frustrated by Derrida and the Derridean circles and Levinasian circles that I was in for not providing enough intellectual framing and understanding of what was going on in the world in the wake of 2001, of the September 11th attacks of 2001, as I began to explore more of the work of some of these other figures, I at once found certain resources, but then also extreme limitations, right? In the case of Foucault, you know some of this from the articles that you looked at, he basically ignored the colonial question that was happening right on his doorstep. He was not involved in revolutionary struggles struggles and revolutionary organizing, except for a brief period in the wake of '68, which I interpret— and, in fact, 2 of his major biographers interpret it as being opportunist, right? He recognized that the intelligentsia was going kind of leftist, and he got on board with that project because it elevated his career as a '68 thinker. But then, as of about 1972, he turned his back on that. Racial emancipation movements really weren't on the radar. Feminism he was uninterested in, and even his queer politics were arguably more dedicated to bourgeois respectability than the more militant forms of queer liberation that you find contemporaneously in the work of Daniel Guérin and others, Okwui Enweamke and others within the French intellectual scene. And I was equally then frustrated by Rancière's continuing attacks on Marxism that are not really based in very serious engagement with the history of the Third International, both at the level of political organizing and at the level of just the intellectual writings, right? There's no serious engagement with Lenin, Mao, Che, or any of these other figures. And instead, he relies on strawperson versions of Marxism that could, at the most generous— and this is true of Foucault as well— be described as the Marxism of the Second International, meaning this was a reformist potentially mildly Eurocentric model of Marxism that thought that you could vote the ruling class out of power. And that the entire Third International, beginning with the Soviet Union and Lenin's leadership of the revolution in the Soviet Union, was pitted against Second International Marxism because it recognized that you will only seize— you will only really be able to seize power by a revolutionary self-defense of the social movements, the Marxist social movements themselves. And that requires taking seriously the violent counteroffensive of capitalist countries, 14 of which invaded the Soviet Union in 1918. In that regard, there is not only a lack of historical understanding on the part of the Foucauldian, Rancièrean— I would put Judith Butler and other figures within this lineage— of that history, which they really just don't study. They instead rely on strawperson arguments that are a little bit embarrassing when you compare them to the actual extant record. And there's also then, on the part of those who do defend certain forms of Marxism, such a serious engagement with metaphysics, Platonism in the case of Badiou, and even kind of Christian metaphysics, that is then melded with an attempt to combine Marxism with transcending— trendsetting elements from French theory that often obfuscate the contributions of actual historical materialist analysis, right? So that instead of providing a concrete analysis, you can use a symbolic system such as Lacanian psychoanalysis and project it onto social and cultural occurrences as if this was explaining something rather than simply being rooted in an idealist analogy, right? The idea that how one person thinks could somehow explain how the actual material world operates, right? It is actually the onus of those who do this to explain how those points are connected, rather than simply assume that, well, it's true because Lacan said it was true, based on, you know, whatever anybody could potentially understand in Lacan's writing. The other thing that came to the fore in my own kind of intellectual development is that this tradition of generalized critical theory coming out of French theory, coming out of the Frankfurt School, also cast an unbelievably long shadow over the historical materialist intellectual tradition of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, because for European intellectuals, if we're talking about them at least, you know, in a provisory fashion at this point in time because of their impact on the global theory industry, almost, you know, a large portion of the European intelligentsia was Marxist in the fascist era of the 1930s and in the wake of World War II, because the liberals and the right wing had been discredited for either aiding and abetting the rise of fascism or supporting it directly, right? So it's incredible when you think of Derrida's rehabilitation of Heidegger in the post-war era. And in order to fully understand this, we have to see it as part of what it is, and that is a counteroffensive against the historical materialist intelligentsia of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. So the figures who have been buried include Daniel Guérin, Annie Lacroix-Riz, who we're going to be having in on Monday to discuss her work, I think one of the best French historians, hands down, who's not— you know, is somebody who's not widely translated, not recognized as one of the most important intellectual figures of the— you know, of French theory, of course. Samir Amin. Henri Lefebvre, some people know, but often he's disconnected from his historical materialist roots. Jacques Jorkié. Thomas Sankara. You know, there's so many other figures in the broader the Francophone world that we could introduce to this. Aimé Césaire, of course, who was a historical materialist. And so what I'd like to foreground in this is that my own subjective peregrinations, I don't think are necessarily of great interest in and of themselves, but they do reveal a certain number of things about the objective material relations of knowledge production in the neoliberal era. And increasingly over the last 4 or 5 years, this is what I've become interested in. Meaning that the dominant question for the research project that I'm kind of presenting, but then also want to open up for discussion about, is what were the material forces, the economic forces, the institutional and political forces that supported and promoted this generalized critical theory, right? If it be in the form of French theory, or if it be in the form of German critical theory as the only critical theory that's worthy of serious engagement. And moreover, why is it, you know, that— or what are these material forces? And then why is it that the theory that has been promoted, this generalized critical theory, traffics in purportedly radical discourse but is anchored in extremely conservative worldviews. I just touched on this in Foucault, but we could talk about this in Derrida, in Deleuze, in Luce Irigaray, in Julia Kristeva, many, many other figures. Paul Ricoeur would be a great example. So why is it that this particular discourse that's been promoted traffics in a kind of radical intellectual form of production that's anchored in conservative worldviews and political practices? And what is the substance operative behind the symbols of this radicality? In this regard, the framework of my analysis in the last 5 or 10 years has really shifted. Instead of maintaining the standard idealist and subjectivist framework of analysis that is so widespread in the humanities— and by that I mean that what we're trained to do, or many of us are trained to do, is focus on the individual production of unique singular beings who purportedly thought at a higher level than the rest of humanity or the masses of humanity. And the assumption is that in doing those forms of analysis, we should focus on an internal analysis, meaning what are the ideas and discourses operative within a particular individual production. This is the mirror opposite of the way that I've come to see the world, which is instead from a materialist objective analysis of the apparatus of knowledge production, right? So what I'm interested in is what are the objective forces driving these individual subjective forms of intellectual production? At a certain level, anyone who is or has been a graduate student or gone to art school, I think, could relate to this because you're never— I mean, at least I haven't been in a situation where you are absolutely free and encouraged to do exactly what you want to do. Usually your work is charted in terms of canals that are established of professionalization.

Tahseen: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Of where the current debate is, of what the dominant journals are publishing. You have to make references to some of the symbolic calves of the academy and render your discourse legitimate according to the protocols of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia in the capitalist apparatus of knowledge production. So this shift from subjective to objective, I think, is quintessentially important, but it's also a shift from idealist modalities of analysis to a materialist framework of analysis. So I'm not just interested in, although I've spent an inordinate number of years studying, the discursive production of individual figures, meaning what their internal system of ideas is, right? And I'd be happy to have conversations about this in the case of the figures that I know best, because I spent so much time studying them. But I actually find that that type of intellectual labor prohibits us and keeps us from consecrating time to or dedicating time to the larger objective analysis. And that is looking at the forces that cultivate particular subjective theoretical practices and are always on the lookout for them, right? An excellent example of this in a slightly different field, but it overlaps so much with what we're talking about, is Silvia Rivera Cisikanki's important critique of decolonial theory that points out that it's all vetted by the powerful institutions and the global norms that decide which discourses are worthy of translation, worthy of discussion, largely because they're disconnected from activist communities on the ground and real material class struggle, and because they participate in the global great game of discursive pyrotechnics, because they engage with the hot commodities, right? They're Deleuzian or Foucauldian or Levinasian or other such things. In this regard, then, and I'm going to give a very quick overview on this, I'd like to give you a bit of insight into where this shift in the framework of analysis has led me into my— in my own account of how we should better understand basically the intellectual history that many of us have been born into. And since this theory industry has been so globalized, you know, people in India and in Australia and in Latin America are also subjected to it. Albeit potentially in slightly different forms. And what I'll present basically over the next 10 or 15 minutes is the core of— oh, I see there's a question in the chat. Is this essential right now? Sorry, I just don't want to— Felipe, was there— if it's a question of clarification or whatnot, please jump in. Could you please send the name of the last author mentioned? Who was the last author mentioned? I'm sorry to bother you. No, it's all good. Do you remember vaguely how it's pronounced?

Megan: Sylvia, maybe?

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, Sylvia Rivera, Critic-Conchita. Yeah. I can share, actually. I'm not sure about the exact spelling of the last name, but if you plug it into a search engine, somebody can correct the spelling. And there's an interview in particular that I'm thinking of with her that is excellent, and I can share a PDF, or you can probably find it online. Aijaz Ahmad's writings on postcolonial studies are another great example of this kind of critical materialist work that I'm also engaging with. So, as I was saying, I'd like to just give you a sense of this book project that I've been working on for 4 or 5 years now called The Intellectual World War, and the focal point for this is on the materialist analysis of the failed attempt to kill the very idea and practice of communism within not only the Western intelligentsia but the broader global intelligentsia that is subjected to the global theory industry. And one of the reasons that this is important is because in some parallel research that I've been doing on the history of the U.S. national security state, and particularly the CIA, but also other agencies, it came to my attention that one of the primary psychological operations of the U.S. national security state has been to kill the communist left and to shore up, promote, and support the non-communist left. This is the vocabulary that they use in their internal documents. They also refer to it as the compatible left, meaning it's compatible with the capitalist interests of the U.S. empire that the CIA is working for. In that regard, one of the most important organizations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that was a front organization for the CIA, was headquartered in Paris and overseen by a CIA agent, Michael Josselyn. Who then used his power and his influence for 17 years, but then they tried to repackage it with other agencies and with other funding. So this project continued after the demise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. They set up an entire network of scholarly journals, a network of translations, of international conferences of the biggest possible sort, in order to promote the non-communist left. There's an excellent book by Frances Donner Saunders called The Cultural Cold War, or Who Paid the Piper was actually the original title. Highly recommend it because it goes into some of this history. Just to give you a sense of it, the Congress for Cultural Freedom organized 37 different international conferences that implicated some 38 institutions, you know, institutions of higher learning. It published a minimum of 170 books, right?

Tahseen: These—

Marwa: this—

Gabriel Rockhill: and remember, all of this This is being done with direct financial contributions by the CIA and by the American corporatocracy, particularly the Ford Foundation, was very involved in these projects and works hand in glove with the CIA. They also established a press service called Forum Service, which is like AP, and it was just pushing out articles basically tailored for the press by the CIA. Was offering free of charge everywhere in the world reports and analyses in 12 different languages that would appear in some 600 newspapers and reach 5 million readers, right? This network included some of the premier journals that were being published not only in English, like Encounter, Partisan Review, and others, but also in German, Der Monat, where Adorno published. Also, they had 2 journals they were running in Latin America, one in India, and elsewhere So it's a very important operation that itself is only part of a larger propaganda mechanism that Frank Wisner, one of the architects of the U.S. national security state and a very important CIA officer, referred to as the Mighty Wurlitzer. He wanted to have— I think I've mentioned this in passing before— a centralized control of the apparatus of knowledge production, circulation, and dissemination. And reception, so that sitting in the headquarters in CIA in Langley, Virginia, he could press a button and have the same story play everywhere in so many different languages and with so many different faces appearing in different press outlets, quote unquote liberal and conservative, in many different languages, so that they could control the narrative. This included an incredible involvement in the history of the bourgeois press and running an inordinate number of journalists as undercover agents. The CIA itself has admitted to, you know, as many journalists as 400— or actually, no, the original admission was 50 journalists who were employed directly by the CIA. But over time and through the course of various investigations in the 1960s, it came out that there were at least 400 American journalists. And then in an important exposé by Carl Bernstein, he concluded that there were, um, some 800 organizations and individuals involved in the global press that had direct ties to the CIA, right? So this was a global propaganda campaign to smear the anti-capitalist left intelligentsia, and in particular the communists and socialists. Enemy number one, arguably within at least the intelligentsia, was Jean-Paul Sartre because of his Marxism, and Simone de Beauvoir for her communism, right? But there were others— Frantz Fanon, Césaire, and others, right? So it's a major, major operation. And when we situate the emergent forms of generalized critical theory coming out of the French and German variants in relationship to this, we see that there were also elements of this operation that were funding and supporting the promotion of anti-Marxist theory under the guise of being the most radical discourse being produced around the globe. A great example of this, I think I touched on this briefly before as well, is the Ford Foundation include— really promoted the arrival of French theory in the United States in 1966 by a major conference that they ran at Johns Hopkins. They invited the structuralists, but all of the Marxist structuralists, with the partial exception of Lucien Goldman, were not invited. And so it was a clear arrival of structuralism within the United States as being an anti-Marxist or non-Marxist structuralism. This continued, of course, with the work of that was going on in Yale Literary Studies. The Yale English Department, and in my own research, I found out at one point in time, almost the entire faculty, or at least a large majority of the faculty in the English Department at Yale was CIA, meaning that they had direct ties, either working as contractors or as full-time officers or as recruiters, right? So we also, in this research that I've been doing, It behooves us to pull the scales from our eyes and recognize that the university is not an autonomous ivory tower. It is part of a military-industrial-academic complex that is policing the ideas that are deemed legitimate for public use. So the French theory aspect of that is really important because of the promotion of figures like Derrida as opposed to Daniel Guérin or Henri Lefebvre or some of the others that I've mentioned, right? It's also important because one of the ways that French theory was integrated into the larger Anglo-American world was as a political project, because it was affiliated directly with what's called '68 thought. And there's the assumption that even if there wasn't a direct connection, somehow this radical thinking being done by Foucault, Kristeva, and others had some type of tie to May '68. May '68, which is not just May, it's May, June, it's the entire year. And in fact, it goes back to at least '66. It's a global uprising against the capitalist world system that had significant developments in France, the largest strike in the history, I believe, of Europe, but definitely France at that point in time. But also there were major movements, of course, in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. So it's a global uprising against capitalism. And a lot of it was driven in France, or began at least, or I should say that's one of the important seeds, because there were others like the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. But one of the important seeds was the student movement that was critical of the Gaullist regime for their pro-capitalist reforms that they'd been shoving down the throats of the university. Michel Foucault was involved in writing those reforms, did not speak out against them, did not question them in any rigorous or serious fashion, and had a reputation as being a Gaullist technocrat who operated in these elite circles of power. So Foucault is a very good example of someone who is not only not a '68er, he was on the opposite side of the barricades in '68. Since then, I've mined down into this and looked at all of the other figures, and I've written a very long and detailed article that'll be coming out next year called Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback that looks at '68 and its relationship to French theory. For the purposes of this conversation, I'd just like to highlight that the affiliation between '68 and French theory is based on an idealist analogy. What I mean by that is that there's the assumption that some discursive radicality, meaning a discursive system such as deconstruction or other such discourses like Foucauldian archaeology or genealogy or other such things, that these discourses have been put in an analogy with May '68, but there's no materialist basis for that analogy, meaning there's the assumption that there are new ways of speaking and new ways of thinking that emerged in French theory that are somehow connected to what was going on in '68. Now, surely, since they emerged in the time period of '68, there's probably some connection between them. But the connection between them is not idealist analogy. The connection between them is materialist. And what has become increasingly clear to me in this research is that the '68 thinkers that were promoted in the wake of '68 were largely those who were opposed to Marxist and anti-capitalist modes of organizing that had their careers accelerated due to that, and that were promoted as radical precisely because they were not only largely not involved in these movements, but were not supportive of the global anti-capitalist movements more generally. I could say a lot more about this, but in the interest of time, I think I'll just go on. And if you want any of the details about what Lacan was doing in May, or Derrida, or other such people, I'd be happy to share it. I juxtaposed that to the actual thinkers and actors of May '68, who were first and foremost the working class and all of the working-class intellectuals who are involved, but also included so many of the intellectuals that people who are subjected to the global theory industry don't know and haven't been translated. Uh, Jorké is one of the people I mentioned before, but there are so many others, and I can provide names if people are interested. Now, the other point of connection that I wanted to make is to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory as one of the primary sources for this generalized global critical theory that has developed in its wake or in conjunction with it to a certain extent. And one of the things that's very unique about Frankfurt School critical theory is that it emerged largely as a response to the failure of the German Revolution in the West. So if you're unfamiliar with this history, in a nutshell, 1917 overthrew a czarist feudal regime in Russia, established the first workers' republic, and it was hoped, presumed by some, that that revolution would spread to the West, and Germany became one of the global sites of class struggle. And so the German communists Rosa Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and others were involved in, in these movements and were in direct conversation with Lenin and the leaders of the Russian Revolution. And there was not only the possibility, but the very real material occurrence of an uprising that began to take over part of Germany and look like it could topple the government. What happened, though, is that the Social Democrats, who were reformist Marxists who believed in using the ballot box as the really primary mechanism for social transformation turned on the revolutionary Third International Marxists and put them to death. This is an incredible moment in the history of communist organizing and so important for understanding what happened in its wake. And the Frankfurt School critical theory project was set up in part to understand the the failure of the German Revolution, as well as the rise of fascism in the wake of, you know, in the interwar periods, basically. What happened, though, is that although the very basis for German Frankfurt School critical theory was, in fact, one of the original titles for the institute was the Institut für Marxismus, so it was going to be a Marxism institute. They went against this and instead changed the name to the Institute for Social Research, as I'm sure a lot of you know. And when Max Horkheimer took over the directorship of the Institute in the late 1920s, there was a very decisive shift away from labor politics and internationalist organizing in the direction of speculative reflections and academic research that were very distant from historical materialism and labor politics more generally. Gillian Rose has written very poignantly on this, referring to what happened with Horkheimer's arrival as the academization of politics, not the politicization of academics. One very, you know, there's a number of very, very telling signs of this. I'll just highlight one or two of them to give you a sense of this, because what I'm ultimately interested in this project is not simply subjective ad hominem critiques saying, oh, you know, Foucault was on the wrong side of history and so or Horkheimer made us drift in the direction of speculative philosophy instead of actually doing historical materialist analyses that could have been helpful. What I'm ultimately interested in are the objective social forces that are conditioning these forms of individual intellectual production and also promoting them as the best possible accounts of You know, quote unquote reality, right? And in the case of Horkheimer and Adorno, they situated themselves politically to the right of the Social Democrats, right? So the revolutionary socialism is often identified with the Third International. Social democracy in the wake of 1917 came to be identified with reformist forms of Marxism or progressive liberalism. Liberalism, right? You have Yankee versions in the United States, like the Sanders campaign is often identified as kind of vaguely social democratic in various ways. So we could come back to that if you like. But Adorno and Horkheimer were to the right of that and were actually critical of the Social Democrats. And Horkheimer is on record speaking out at the Amerika Häuser, which were cultural institutes that were set up in Germany in the postwar era to promote American culture and American views. They're just part of the larger cultural war of ideas, as defending the war in Vietnam, saying that it was in the interests of, you know, saying 2 things. One is that it was when the U.S. goes to war, it does it to defend the rights of, quote unquote, man or the rights of humanity and defend constitutions. And also that both Adorno and Horkheimer suffered from this very racist description and anti-communist description of the Chinese and of the communist Vietnamese who were fighting off both French and American imperialists, right? They also supported, Adorno and Horkheimer, the intervention on the part of the French, British, and Israelis into the Suez Canal. So they're defenders of imperialism. Meanwhile, not talking out in support of so many of the important anti-colonial movements that were going on at the time. And they put forth what many people will now identify as a form of Western or cultural Marxism. That form presupposes that real materialist class struggle is either too complicated or too risky because it could run into forms of totalitarianism, so-called. And therefore, our focal point should be on culture and cultural production, forms of representation, and other such things. And we can, and in certain cases should do this, unmoored from direct political struggles. So if you look at the history of socialist and communist intellectuals going back to like Lukács, Gramsci, Lenin, and others, they were all directly involved in political organizing in various ways to differing levels of capacity and whatnot. But the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory has severed those ties in the name of cultural modes of analysis embedded within more speculative forms of philosophy that focus on cultural representations and the norms of Western bourgeois democracies. And therefore contribute to a kind of liberal political project, liberal in the sense of believing in the electoral mechanisms, and for the most part, and at best what you get is a kind of social democratic quote unquote left wing of Frankfurt School critical theory in the work of Nancy Fraser, for instance. But you do not get any of the like historical materialist and revolutionary socialist that is far to the left of that particular orientation. So all of that then leads to my conclusion. And so gather your thoughts and comments, and we'll look for raised hands in one second. And that is that my primary concern, I think, in this research is the extent to which left anti-communism— and by that I mean a position in which it's assumed that the left is not communist and that being on the left means being opposed to actually existing socialism and embracing ideological concepts like totalitarianism that try to merge communism and fascism, which is a historical, uh, conundrum. You know, it's not been done successfully yet because they're materially, uh, opposed at such profound levels. And that, that left anti-communism I'm interested in because it has in many ways become the lingua franca of generalized critical theory, meaning that so many self-proclaimed critical theorists can not only make statements about actually existing socialism or the history of historical materialism that are patently false and that have been disproven by not just me as an individual, but by a collective sense of researchers who have explored these topics, but that that lingua franca, this kind of standard common sense within the academy, continues to function as a bulwark against these more left-wing orientations, right? So the other thing that I'm interested in is how there are material forces that police the left border of critique and that communicate to people, particularly young people, that if you want to be you know, a socialist, or if you want to be anti-capitalist, there are ways of doing that. And the ways of doing that are within the compatible left. But the non-compatible left is beyond the pale and largely not only unpalatable, but has been structurally expunged in various ways from the academy. A lot more that could be said, but in the interest of time, I want to stop there so that we can have ample time for discussion, debate, questions, and comments. So who would like to start us out? And the field is open because I completely understand that people might be writing a dissertation within a Foucauldian framework, right? And so some of the things that I'm saying might strike you as either incendiary or problematic, and I'd rather have us have A conversation where people can put all their cards on the table and work through things, rather than assume that we just have to, you know, begin from a site of agreement, if you will. Nico, yeah.

Speaker 3: Thank you so much. So I had a couple questions just about sort of looking for your response on— I think there's an interesting sort poststructural or postcolonial threat that sort of does the opposite, or attempts to do the opposite work of what you're thinking through. And like Homi Bhabha, for instance, accuses Marxism of being tied to and sort of being an extension of liberalism and sort of being impotent in that sense. And I just wanted to hear like your materialist response to that, or what you would think of that. And then also, this might be like a long topic or for another day, but just curious as like the role of the Situationists, um, in May '68 and how they served as, um, maybe sort of like a hinge into sort of anti-communists after what you, um, perceive the historiography of that to be. So yeah, thank you so much.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, great, great questions. Homi Bhabha is not the person that I would go to for rigorous analyses of actually existing Marxism, on the contrary. And I do think it's important— one of the things that that I really embrace within Marxist traditions is clarity of writing is linked to clarity of conceptuality and the desire to connect with the masses of humanity in a broader collective project of pedagogy. And so the ratio of obscurantism that is almost systematically introduced into discourses in order to ratchet up one's symbolic capital is more rooted in the petty bourgeois opportunism than in a collective project that includes other researchers and is part of a broader scientific project and social scientific project of analysis. The idea that Marxism is tied to liberalism, then, just to take this head on, is a misunderstanding of the entire material history of both of these traditions. I I think I recommended before Domenico Losurdo's book on liberalism, A Counterhistory. It's probably the single best book on the topic. I'd also recommend, but not as strongly, my 3rd chapter in Counterhistory of the Present that looks at the category of democracy and the material history of democracy in the case of the United States. And there's lots of other really good work, because liberalism emerged as a political project as both the ideological and institutionally material support for global capitalism. And it accompanied all of the projects of global capitalism: mass genocide, enslavement, not only the oppression but the super-exploitation of women as domestic slaves, the racialization of global populations, go on down the list, right? And political liberalism, both as a philosophy and as a set of material institutions is not in contradiction with these projects, but is part and parcel of these projects and always has been. Whereas Marxism is a historical materialist tradition that emerged out of the direct critique of bourgeois social science and bourgeois institutions, particularly liberalism, right? There's a lot more that could be said about that. The situationists are are often identified as one of the important seeds in the struggle for anti-capitalist organizing within the Francophone, or within the French world more specifically. Clearly, they were important intellectual references in the lead-up to '68, and they were directly involved in some of the occupations, particularly the occupation of the Odéon Theatre in central Paris and one of the other occupations. I'm drawing a blank on which one right now. So they, I think, are important touchstones in that regard. You know, their own engagement with historical materialism is rather complex, and we'd have to take some time to unpack it. There's also a little bit of opacity in their discourse and their cultural production. But they're one of the traditions that's not as foregrounded as some of the others, right? Many people feel a requirement to read Foucault and Derrida, but not a requirement to read Debord, or at least he'd be like a second or third-tier author in that regard. Nico, and I would say this for anybody else who asks a question, if you want to follow up, just jump right back in and unmute yourself. But if we're good to go on, then maybe Megan is next.

Speaker 3: Hi.

Megan: Yeah, I just wanted to say thank you again. It's a super enriching talk and articles as well. And I guess just like on the topic of like the limitations of working within the academy, both from like a material perspective of having to work for tenure or jumping from adjunct positions, kind of being processed through a meat grinder as like a grad student laborer, but then also like the ideological confines of working like within like the global theory industry. I guess I'm just wondering like what like practical alternatives like you see or would suggest? Like, obviously this like critical theory workshop is like one example of something, of like an alternative like academic or theoretical project where people can actually engage with like these radical, with radical thought. But I guess I'm just wondering, like, especially as a lot of people here are like grad students or students in general, like how to kind of engage But a level of praxis that does, I guess, engage with these theories in a meaningful and practical way as well, within or outside of the academy. Sorry if that's a confusing question.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, not at all. It's, I imagine, because it's so existential, a very live and important question that I completely identify with, because it's been one of my frustrations and one of the in charting the strange trajectory that I'm on. I couldn't agree more. I would give a shout-out to— if Emiliano allows me to award Churchill, because he has done some important work, although he has done some things that Emiliano and others are critical of, and I think justifiably so— he refers to a PhD as the terminal degree, because you will only arrive at it after literally decades of education, and anything critical that you put into your dissertation has to be vetted by those who are overseeing it. And it's terminal not only in the sense of, you know, you arrive at an end, but it's largely the end of one's autonomous critical thought, because it has to make it through the gauntlet, I think, as you put it. And that is a very complicated and difficult situation that I think needs to be identified as such. And people should have conversations about tactics and strategies and order to deal with that, so that you can carve out as much autonomy as you potentially can. It is also true that 70% of academic jobs in the United States are adjunct, right? So there is a very direct material assault on the conditions of possibility of doing intellectual work that wouldn't be simply in line with the ideological common sense, as Gramsci would put it, or the dominant ideology. In that regard, you know, as far as identifying tactics for, you know, mitigating that or struggling against it, of course, one of the things— and thank you for pointing that out— that we've been trying to do with the Critical Theory Workshop is to carve out some space where people can get some of the credentials from the institutionalized world, profit from its connections, potentially its financial resources and other such things, but cultivate a community that allows us to have different types of engagement discourses, modes of analysis, and potentially be in a community where all of a sudden the lingua franca is maybe different than the lingua franca that one would otherwise be engaging with. But of course, we're not the only ones trying to do this. There are a number of other important projects. And so the support for contributions to— and I mean that not only like financially or as a student, but potentially doing your own things or with your own initiatives to alternative institutions or counter-institutions, as Eduardo Galeano would call them, of knowledge production are unbelievably important. And, you know, there's the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, there's a lot of other examples that I'm sure people are aware of, and please don't hesitate to share them in the general email or in the chat or other such things. But I also think it's important for one's own intellectual development to recognize how some of the material conditions for doing certain types of work that are not available within the academy might and sometimes are available in other worlds, in particular cultural worlds and activist worlds. Some of the most important intellectual work, I would argue, of the contemporary era that's been done just even within the US framework has come from intellectuals who are embedded within communities of activists, communities of cultural producers, and sometimes both at the same time, right? So the article that I just shared with you that I just wrote on fascism was for Liberation School, which is also a platform for collective education that is resourced from activist communities, some of which might have a foot in the academy, might have a foot in the cultural world. But what we really need to do is work together in order to increase objective power, rather than simply focus on our own subjective power and our own individual itineraries, right? If we all leave the critical theory workshop and then pursue our own careerist lines, then I would take it that the project hasn't fully succeeded, because the goal is, you know, we have power by working together and by finding solutions that might not be the solutions that the extant establishment necessarily wants, right? And so collectively, I think we could do a lot more than we could, of course, just individually. And again, Megan, if you want to come back at me, then by all means do, or add a follow-up. Great question, though, or comment.

Caitlin: Caitlin? First of all, my service is a little funny. So if I go out, just give me a hand signal and I'll put my question in the chat. Yeah, thank you so much for that talk and for your answer to Megan. And everyone, that was— it's just been really illuminating. I guess my question is the extent to which— I don't want to defend anyone against these really, you know, brilliant and valid critiques that you've just leveled, but the extent to which these thinkers could be or are potentially still useful. Like, I think of Foucault being so present in the work of Edward Said and his development of, you know, his theory of Orientalism. Like, I don't think he could have written that book if it weren't For, you know, his use, the way that he uses Foucault's analysis of power and knowledge. And then I work on— I'm working on Adorno right now, so I'm thinking of the extent to which his material analysis, you know, of, you know, idealist, uh, you know, subject-object relations is useful. You know, the way that he turns that around is really useful for an ecological analysis. So yeah, I'm just wondering, I'm sure you've heard this criticism from so many people.

Breht: Yeah.

Caitlin: before, but what you think about the extent to which they can be used for any kind of radical analysis, or if they can, or if we should just throw everyone out the window, so to speak.

Gabriel Rockhill: Great question, and thank you for being so straightforward about it, because it is a live question. And I get it that people— we actually have to take seriously the objective forces that are having an impact on all of our subjective intellectual production, right? And so if we don't recognize the general kind of lingua franca of the academy, then we're, you know, eliminating a very essential part of the analysis. So I guess I would say 2 things. One is that given the breadth and depth of the work of some of these figures, there are I think, elements that can be found within them that could potentially contribute to various projects. Adorno's writings on music technology in the early 20th century, when it's actually a materialist analysis, I find quite compelling and quite interesting. When you compare that to some of his aesthetic theory, his account of autonomy, which is largely idealist, I think it comes to be quite problematic. Or you look at some of his political positions, right, not only calling the cops, but he was generally opposed to the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist organizing that was going on, not only at his doorstep, but in his classroom. So I think that as analysts, we should always be using what I would refer to as a kind of variegated or compositional hermeneutics, right, where it's not just a moral judgment where everything this person said is bad, wrong, but there can be elements that we could find that would be useful or productive in various ways. While at the same time, I think it's very important to recognize what the limitations, or some of the limitations, are. For instance, if Edward Said had been more deeply versed in the historical materialist traditions, and in particular historical materialist critiques of imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere, I think it would have improved the book. And the Foucauldian detour into a discursive modality of analysis arguably is an impediment to a deeper level of analysis. And then maybe the final thing that I would say, and this might be a little bit more provocative, is that I've sometimes asked myself, and I have students who will ask me this question, they're looking for like what value could be found in these things, you know, basically the generalized critical theory of the global industry that I've been referencing. And one question I always ask myself is, well, why look there? If you're interested in, like in my own research, I wanna understand fascism. Should I read Adorno and Foucault on fascism? Well, why would I look there in the first place? And one of the reasons is the objective coordinates of the apparatus of knowledge that I mentioned before. And so that apparatus is making decisions And it's not necessarily directing me to Michael Parenti's book Blackshirts and Reds, which is probably one of the very best books written on the history of fascism. Instead, it's directing me to Adorno and Horkheimer. And so I think if we want to cultivate our autonomous and self-reflective intellectual practices, we should always ask these questions. It will also make for more interesting intellectual work because we'll find resources that are not simply the resources that everybody else is talking about anyway. And the final thing is that if you are really looking for gems, you know, of intellectual content that are going to help advance you and those with whom you interact theoretically and hopefully practically, why would you look in a desert instead of in a mine? Or another way of putting that is, right, if you're looking for diamonds, don't look in Foucauldian and Adornian There might be one there, maybe 2 or 3 hidden somewhere, but there's literally millions in other mines that have been excluded in the name of this desert. And in that regard, I think it's really important to plug into some of these traditions of global historical materialist analysis that really gives us resources for understanding the world. Maybe a final thing. Sorry, but Caitlin, it's such a good question, is that your generation has been under the jackboot of capitalist social relations arguably more than any other generation, right? The global pandemic in capitalist worlds has been decimating people's livelihoods, their lives, just killing people. And the ecological crisis means that there might not be a biosphere left, right? So the stakes of class struggle for your generation are potentially higher than for any other generation before because of the contradiction not just between capital capital and labor, but because it's a contradiction between capital and nature, right? If we don't solve this problem, then capitalism is not only capable, but is already destroying the conditions of possibility of not only life, but more specifically human life, right? So in that regard, let's go hunting for gems, because time is short and these are actually urgent questions.

Caitlin: That was amazing. Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Um, Josué?

Josué: Yeah, thank you so much, uh, for all of your comments. They've been really stimulating. In general, I do find very convincing your focus on sort of like the material practices of like academic, like, industry in order to kind of like contextualize this series and makes— and makes them like sensible, right? And I'm wondering maybe, uh, I'm also at a more like subtle level, like how, how successful is the project of generalized critical theory? How successful is it in kind of like cutting ties completely from like the socialist Marxism? And like, or like the— and not because I'm particularly interested in defending them, or like kind of like, like I do recognize that their, their widespreadness like forces us to kind of like have to be able to be versatile in them and move back in between them. But for example, I'm thinking of someone like Kevin Floyd who writes about Foucault and Marx, right, and how Foucault's idea of biopower, you could read it as Foucault taking Marx's general law of accumulation and kind of getting rid of the main ideas of class struggle and like, and like that, and again, like depoliticizing it and like kind of like ontologizing it. So, so I guess like, like, it seems to me that like Marxism is always the place where more generalized critical theory comes for its own innovation or for its own kind of like paradigms of critique. And so in that extent, I wonder whether that could be used in our advantage to kind of like repoliticize them or like move back between them or change the framework of them just in order to connect with the audiences in which are already versed in those disciplines, in those like frameworks. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I was just curious what you thought about that because it did— it does strike me very much that you are very focused on the prac— on the material practices around it, and I'm just curious whether they can also be a blend at looking at the internal systems themselves and their own contradictions. But yeah, thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: That's a really great question and series of comments. A few things really quickly. One is that the generalized critical theory of this global industry has, for the most part, constructed a strawperson version of Marxism and historical materialism that we should all be aware of, right? We hear regularly that Marxism is about white male workers. It's Eurocentric. It's teleological, it's determinist, it's reductivist, it doesn't take into account gender, doesn't take into account class or colonialism. This is a very classic case, and I want to write a short piece on this, of liberal projection. I'm sure if you're familiar with psychoanalysis, you're familiar with projection, in which the key components of your reality are projected onto your enemy. And if you look at the material history of bourgeois democracies under capitalism and compare them to the material history of actually existing socialism, one thing is readily apparent. There was one part of the world that was at the cutting edge of anti-colonial, anti-racist, also gender-liberatory movements. I mean, the Russian Revolution was the most emancipatory revolution for women before or since, according to Valentin Mogadon. Who is a relatively kind of progressive, but not necessarily a Marxist thinker. And so it's very important for us to see through those straw person arguments and tap into the ways in which, if you look at the work of Alexandra Kollontai or Claudia Jones or so many other people and movements that I could recommend, Marxism is the vanguard of social transformation for gender, racial, colonial, and capitalist relations. Sexuality— read Engels on the Family, right? There's some problems in the book, but he's interested in the family as a product of historical social relations, and he recognizes that it's modifiable and can be changed and should be changed, right? Because bourgeois social relations are about property, a man owning a woman. Engels himself said that the touchstone for the analysis of any society should be the level of female or women emancipation. That's how we should judge societies. That is straight from the horse's mouth, right? Lenin said as much. Lenin on the Women's Question, Clara Zetkin. Again, there's an enormous body of literature. So this isn't me saying it. It's this entire tradition that has been excluded from the academy that's saying it. And so if Marxism is engaged with, it's often engaged with in terms of this straw person representation And it's often made into a discourse among other discourses, right? As if the point was to interpret the world, not to understand it profoundly in order to transform it. And so there are many rad lib kind of intellectuals who will either say they're Marxist or you know teach Marxism and engage with Marxism and cite Marx and all of this. But there's a big difference between an idealist reduction of Marxism to a discourse or to a straw person versus a materialist understanding of the ways in which Marxism is a science of society that is evolving and changing and constantly leading learning from feedback loops from practical reality, right? There's not a determined framework. There's an ongoing body of science that is constantly changing, right? And that is formed not by Marx the man, not by Lenin, not by any individual. It's formed by a collectivity of human beings struggling to emancipate themselves from one of the most exploitative and oppressive systems known in the history of the planet. Right? So that's just a quick proviso. To actually get to your question, I do think that you're absolutely right that the symbolism of critique is unbelievably important in the academic and the art world, right? People generally, even reactionaries, want to present themselves as critical, right? And there's so many good examples of that. And so one of the forms of symbolic, symbolic capital in the academy is, is radicality, right? But the whole point is usually symbol, not substance. But, and this is what I really like about Josué's suggestion, we can use that as a bracing point to our advantage. Meaning, if everybody wants to be really radical, let's be really fucking radical, right? Like, if you want to bring the heat and do an analysis that is actually doing some of the things that these people say they're doing, meaning question the extant systems, bring to the fore actual class struggle in which something is at stake more than discourse, more than language, because it's human lives and human emancipation, and more generally just life, the emancipation of life in general, then let's do it. And in that regard, there is, I think, a way of You know, there's a certain way in which history is on our side, because, as Michael Parenti would always say, society and the world that we're living in is radical. Like, people are unemployed. They don't have access to healthcare. Their lives are being shattered in so many different ways. They're being super exploited to the age of like 30 or 40 to make it through, or 50 to make it through the academic system. Academic system, right? All of these mean that the system is in profound crisis. And so if we can link that symbology of critique to substantial critiques, then I think that we do have a bracing point to gain real leverage within the kind of larger intelligentsia. And I think it's a real— I don't know if, Josué, if you want to follow up with additional precise tactics and strategies in that regard, but I think it's a really important way of suggesting that we not only are on the defensive, but we go on the offensive as well, right? All good? Thank you.

Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Tahseen, I think you were next. And Ahsan, I think you had your hand up. I didn't want to jump over you if you wanted to jump in. But Tahseen, maybe first, and then Ahsan? Oh, unmute yourself.

Tahseen: Thank you, Gabriel. And in fact, when I raised my hand for questioning, at the time I thought of asking you something, but then I was so engrossed in your answer that I just have to reframe the thing which I wanted to ask. Actually, yes, what I wanted to ask rather is something related to the understanding of the this Marxist understanding of things, is it not that in, in, in, in the explanation of general critical theory, what we are actually doing is somehow missing the account of those from, for example, my part of the world? For example, in, in, in, in all the, the, the theoreticians and other scholars you quoted, Gabriel. It was so nice that you quoted a plethora of them from different— you accounted for almost most of them who have actually done tremendous work on issues like this. But I think scholars like— there is one practitioner-scholar by the name Iman Raw from India, Iman Raw. And he fundamentally differed in the meeting with Lenin, and then he came back to India, and he actually came with a critique of that Marxist interpretation as done by those who were actually putting it to practice. So is it not that somehow in the theorization of— or for example, the scholars from the later scholars from Russia after, for example, what I can— scholars from during those time when during the time of the Cold War, when generally they were actually coming out with their understanding of things in a particular manner. But after the end of the Cold War, a plethora of scholars came out from Russia writing in Russian. Not generally in English or French that way, or for example, Indian scholars. So is it not that somehow in terms of our understanding of things, as you also said, that we are locating scholars in desert when actually we need to go in for a mine, at a place where there is a mine, mine of scholarship. So is it not that somehow we are we are missing the interpretation of things from scholars from this side of the world on issues, on important issues of Marxism, important critical issues of Marxism. So how far do you think is it there, or I'm just overemphasizing this, or how— what do you think properly incorporating the views of scholars from this part of the world will help us in better accounting for things. I'm not very clear in my question, I think. I hope— but what I want to convey, I hope it's clear to you, Gabriel.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I get your question. Let me take a shot at it, and then come back at me if I haven't responded, you know, appropriately. Appropriately or at the level that you were expecting. Because one of the things I think is really important within the historical materialist tradition, particularly of the Third International, is that it's always been internationalist. So the idea that Marxism would be a European product is a misunderstanding of the historical materialist tradition that's international through and through. I mean, Marx himself taught himself Russian and was corresponding with the Russians in the lead-up actually to what would later become the Russian Revolution. And so within that tradition, you have people from the Soviet Union, from the Middle East, from India, obviously, from China, from Indonesia, largest communist party outside of China, right, at one point in time prior to the massive genocide. The Latin American historical materialist tradition is unbelievably important, Mariátegui and Galeano and so many others, Che and Fidel, etc. And so this is a tradition that is international through and through. And I think that that is a different approach than the ways in which the global theory industry tries to construct a relationship between what's called the Global North and the Global South, in which there's a liberal logic of inclusivity, right? The presumption being that what we should do is be more inclusive. So let's bring in Spivak, or let's bring in Chatterjee, or let's bring in these figures from the so-called Global North— Global South. But when they do that, that's actually mediated by a class and colonial project. I'd point you to Anya Loomba's work. Jennifer, I know, who's on the call, would have a lot to say about this because she's collaborating with Anya on some of these questions. Some of postcolonial studies that has been canonized within the U.S. academy, these are Brahmins who have a discursive relationship to the Marxist tradition, And anytime that you valorize someone in that regard, you're also casting a long shadow over all of the other intellectual production, right? The other thing that I would say is that the historical materialist tradition is not only internationalist, it's a tradition that's founded on self-critique. And there's this very unfortunate form of liberal projection that consists in assuming that as soon as someone would defend historical materialism, or actually existing socialism, this means that they defend 100% of everything that has ever occurred anywhere in the world under that name. That's not the case, right? Class struggle continues within the socialist camp, and it's important to identify strengths and weaknesses of various projects, right? That's how these projects have grown and evolved over time. The Cuban Revolution, when it first occurred appeared to many in the global communist movement as adventurous and ultra-leftist. When it succeeded and then established power and shored up its relationship to the Soviet Union to defend itself against U.S. imperialism, it was then later kind of incorporated within the Marxist-Leninist camp, so to speak. But that was because the instigators of that revolution were also parting ways with tenets, right? And so experimentation, self-critique, and the dynamism of ongoing collective traditions are really essential to the— it's the lifeblood, if you will, of the historical materialist tradition. I don't know if, Tasneem, if that answers, or if Jennifer, if you want to weigh in on any of your own research on postcolonial studies more specifically.

Caitlin: No?

Tahseen: No, thank you. Actually, I was In terms of incorporating the theorization by scholars who have actually— from not actually bracketing them in different knots or divides sort of a thing. For example, Spivak or others, they are sitting there in the Western universities and then getting themselves— they were canonized that way. What I was actually curious to understand is the theorization by scholars, for example, those in India or Russia writing in Indian languages and Russian languages, not those who have actually gone into— so, and they will be incorporated in terms of inclusivity of the Western liberal project. But those, for example, I took the name of M.N. Roy, For example, so and others similar. So the writing of those, for example, those those because Marxism that way has actually for a period of time has went very much into the into the very very very blood of the Indians because as even these days when we go to the to the to the villages in India even now so those people there. Older people, and they had got there. We can't even imagine that they would have gone to Russia and then have met with people there and then have come back by— even they went to Cuba and came back because they're living in the smaller villages of Bihar and West Bengal. So what I wanted actually to understand is, is it not that these— the theorization which is which is done by, if I may use this word, this indigenous— I mean, I mean to say, in that sense, indigenous scholar. So that is not being accounted, and that actually is one of the ways that the appropriation of Marxism gets done in a particular way. Yeah, that is what I actually Yeah, no, I think I see why is it so easy for the Western liberal to get things projected regarding Marxism or other things, and that projection gets easily accepted. Though there is this mechanism of this bourgeois industry and bourgeois university industry, knowledge production and all these things. But part of the reason that the Marxists fail in this is that there is a need for a proper accounting of things at the level of those people who are espousing and trying to understand things in the local languages, in the local setting, in the local milieu.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that you're absolutely right that historical materialists always take seriously their embeddedness within specific conjunctures, specific times and places, and that one thing that is unbelievably important if one wants to seriously engage with the tradition of historical materialism is engaging with those theorists around the world. So what I would recommend— and Tasneem, it seems like you know some of the important figures in this regard. Please share them with everyone. My knowledge of India is minor, I'm sure very minor compared to your own. I make a concerted effort, though, to try to discover what the traditions and groups are that I should be plugged into as much as possible. But it's difficult, as well, because so much of that is mediated by material social forces, right? So what arrives on my desktop from India— fortunately, I have some very close Indian friends and intellectuals who can help me make sense of that. I don't read Russian or the various Indian languages that are spoken and written in India. And so that's also a limitation. That's one of the reasons that a lot of this has to be collective, right? Because the limitations of our own linguistic and cultural background is such that we have to be able to connect to people who are more embedded within these indigenous struggles around the world. So I think it's a really, really important point. As'lan, did you want to weigh in?

Ahsan: I apologize. I'm probably going to sound a bit muddled, because everyone has asked such excellent questions. I've been listening along. of expanded on one level. So—

Caitlin: No worries.

Ahsan: Megan brings up a good point. You know, as someone that's gone to grad school, over time, I increasingly feel like, you know, there's a kind of like moment of being awry where you feel kind of like an intellectual ronin of sorts when you're in this field of things going through grad school in the burning building, hopefully it works out on some level. But, you know, there's an increasing realization that You know, universities are slowly turning back to ways that they always used to be. They used to be institutions that represent the status quo. Radical critical thought isn't necessarily going to be a bastion of places like that. And so I appreciate things like the Critical Working Theory Workshop that, you know, as a certain like radical '60s moment comes to a close where universities had spaces for that type of stuff, do you see institutions or, like, activities such as this maybe being generative towards forming its own kind of scholarship beyond the university, or people working together as time goes on in the coming decades, as things get more and more severe? Because, like, I've been thinking about that, because I'm wrapping up my thesis. And, you know, I come from a working-class Kashmiri family that, like, moved to Canada. And then, you know, I ended up in university. And then I did my fieldwork in Dubai. And a certain level that I do use Foucault, I do use, you know, Marx, and I do use many theorizations. I also pit them with the current style in Middle East studies that has been leaning towards anthropology, that kind of is dealing with its colonial hangover of not giving any kind of political or judgment-based observation about— and this is a generalization, of course it's more complicated than that. But like when I go to Dubai and I meet people from you know many walks of life, like people that have illegally entered into Dubai with like a Tanzanian passport from Yemen, which is a war zone, and trying to like delicately write scholarship that on some level is trying to you know push the needle towards a particular left or Marxist bent, but also being understanding that the the act of theorization is so engendered. With this kind of like hegemonizing, totalizing force of flattening the ideas of things. I guess, you know, that's the muddled part where I don't think I'm clear, but what I'm more or less asking is like, do you have some advice on an approach for, I guess, a more ethically and I guess more nuanced notion of writing scholarship that might help or advise? Because like the larger project that I'm working on is like how neoliberalism goes local in a place like Dubai, per se. And the idea is that, you know, the theorizations make sense on the broad spectrum of things, like you have Adem Haniyeh and other Marxists that will theorize the Middle East in very broad perspectives, but then it's always— I'm always taken aback with the actual ethnographic exercise, just meeting and talking and discussing, you know, large economic formations in the area.

Gabriel Rockhill: And then I wonder Really great series of questions and comments. Some elements of a response, as you'd say in French. Regarding the pointed question of writing scholarship, I do think that there's so many forces that contribute to an intellectual Taylorism within the larger global theory industry.

Carlos: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: And I think that one of the things that's really What we're supposed to do is train ourselves as micro-experts in a tiny territory that maybe our thesis director advises that we explore. And that prevents us from asking larger questions or even exercising our own intellectual autonomy. So part of at least my recommendation from, you know, my viewpoint, because I'm still growing and evolving as an intellectual at such a quick pace that sometimes it makes me anxious, But, and so I think just in the sense that I think that we should all be like vitally engaged in asking ourselves these questions all the time, and pushing back against that intellectual Taylorism means, okay, maybe you do have to give the system a little bit of what it wants. If you're writing a dissertation on Joyce or on Dubai or other such things that are more focused, I think it's essential to always ask yourself not only the question but to explore the larger materialist framework of the context that you're exploring. Because one of the most powerful things about materialism is the process of concrete abstraction, where you can move from a particular element— it can be a work of art, it could be a political occurrence, economic crisis— and you can scale out from it so that it's not just about the details of what you're investigating, but it gives you an apprehension that would be equivalent to when you look on a map, you pinch out so you can see the big picture. And if you can't see the big picture and how all of this is nested together, then you're losing sight of the social totality. So in short, I would encourage people, even if you do specialized work, take the time to situate it within the social totality, which is an internationalist perspective on the particular time period or set of struggles that you're focusing on. The other thing that I guess you began by touching on is tactics for navigating. And I'd be happy to talk with anyone personally about this. I got my job because I'm a specialist in French theory, because I did, you know, I did my master's with Derrida, my PhD with Badiou, I worked closely with Balibar and Montcier. And those are figures who, as I pointed out, of course, create— carry a certain amount of symbolic capital. In the academy, I didn't get my academic position because of an outspoken historical materialism or dedication to the Third International, right? So I'm not naive enough to think, you know, or to think that the system functions differently than this. And so I think that at a tactical and existential level, it's important to identify and map out, here's how the system works, here's the work I want to do and the communities I want to be part of, And how can I solve this problem of finding a way for me to the utmost extent possible to do what I want to do in this particular intellectual community while gaining the resources necessary to do that, if it be in the academy, the cultural world, or other worlds, journalistic world, etc.? And that is— I'm always reminded of Jean-Luc Godard's statements on how he'd make his films, because there was always so much pressure to change his films in various ways. And he would, in certain cases— I'm thinking of the 1963 film Contempt— and he changed it based on what the producers made him do. But after the fact, he said, you know, the creative process of making a film, which could be compared to making a dissertation or writing a book or organizing a protest, is one that is always mobilizing creativity to solve real-world problems. And so part of our intellectual energy should be focusing on the as real-world problems. How are you, as people, going to, if you haven't yet, find the material conditions necessary for your own intellectual, practical growth, development, etc.? And that should also be something, as a follow-up, that we should help one another with, right? We should be allies, because so much of the Taylorism that goes into intellectual production is also pitting us against one another as competitors. Right, as opposed to having us recognize, no, we're in this struggle together and we have to try to build power together. There's a lot more in what you said, Hasan. I don't know if you want to follow up or we should go on just in the interest of time to others.

Ahsan: I'd let other people— so we can keep talking about some of the themes I've brought up in other conversations. Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, thank you. Misha, I think you're next.

Speaker 3: Yes, thank you. Uh, that actually leads in nicely to my question. Uh, I was wondering how we understand our own positions as academics in relation to this global theory industry, as you've identified it, uh, particularly, uh, within this critical workshop on critical theory. And, uh, yeah, I wonder how we might understand some of the materialist underpinnings that allow it to take place in light of the critique that you have developed in the context of poststructuralism and other aspects of this global theory industry?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I mean, the materialist underpinnings for the Critical Theory Workshop were originally funding that I received from Villanova University to start a summer program. But over the years, unfortunately, that was eliminated. And so now we are largely dependent on program fees for supporting the work that we do and the various people who are involved. And behind the scenes, one of the things that we— I would say there are at least 2 fundamental principles that guide the decisions that we make. One is that it's important, even if it's as you know has certain limitations, that people be paid for their labor—not paid an enormous amount. Unfortunately, it's sometimes almost just symbolic compared to what you know certain faculty members who are getting paid half a million dollars a year are getting paid for their you know their hourly rate. But that is really important to us, and the other is. Finding ways of generating revenue streams that allow us to maintain the most internationalist and— how to put it— class-intelligent group of participants. So we always want people who are able to contribute nothing or next to nothing, not because it helps us solve the budgetary problem, but because the educational endeavor that we're invested in is trying to create an intellectual world in which class or position within the global economy, if one is from an under— quote unquote, underdeveloped or structurally underdeveloped country, that one would of necessity be excluded. And so one of the ways that we've tried to do that in— and this is an ongoing project, so if people have ideas or contributions— we've not been able to obtain grants, unfortunately. But I also know how the grant system works. And so I think there are pretty clear reasons for that. The— if people have a foot in an institution, then we try to get them to leverage their institutional funds for support for the workshop. Whereas if they're paying out of pocket, we try to work with them to find solutions that would make it such that they can attend the workshop. Those are some of And Misha, I don't know if this is exactly what you're thinking of. I interpret materialist as like, well, let's go to the political economy of how we make this thing work. It also means that there is a large portion of labor that's not really covered. And honestly, a lot of that labor probably ends up falling on me and one or two other people who are involved in the workshop. And it's because it's a passion to try to develop an institution that functions in a way that's different than the other extant institutions. And so we don't have— the spigots aren't open with the cash flow. There's larger things though, because this would lead to a larger question, but I hear in Misha's question as well, there are really important things about the history of the formation of the professional managerial class and its relationship to class stratification more generally. So I grew up on a farm, worked in construction. I come from a strange hybrid background because my father ended up also teaching at the university. So he was working construction and teaching at the university at the same time. So I don't know exactly how you'd materially describe my class background, but I knew a lot more about farm work and construction than about intellectual labor until at least the age of 18 or 20. And so I bring that as well, and that sensibility to the workshop and also to my engagements with the professional managerial class, which I think is best described as a class that plays a very unique function because it mediates between the capitalist ruling class and the masses of humanity. And one of the roles that that class has played— I'm thinking of journalists, intellectuals, cultural producers, etc., in the professional managerial class— is to solve an impossible contradiction. They want to make the world appear as if the one— the world constructed by the capitalist ruling class is actually in the best interest, to a certain extent, of the masses of humanity. And they also wanna make it appear like they as intellectuals are on the side of the people. And this says a lot to what José highlighted about the importance of radical symbology within the academy. And that function means that they're often working at counter purposes, right? And I think that a class analysis of that is really important important for us to both understand the kind of extant world of the intelligentsia, but then also how we situate ourselves and relate to it in various ways. Misha, I don't know if you want to come back at me or follow up on that, or we should move on to tomorrow. Unmute.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually have to get going to another workshop, but thank you. And yeah. I'll let you move on.

Gabriel Rockhill: Okay, sounds good. Well, we'll turn the floor over to Marwa, and this will likely be our last question, unless somebody— if somebody wants to jump in, they can. But otherwise, Marwa.

Marwa: Yeah, thank you for that. But my question is essentially how to navigate and recoup racial and gendered struggle from bourgeois liberal identity politics that is currently divorced from material change, because this liberal identity politics that seems to have been encouraged by French theorists like Foucault and Derrida, and that applauds localized struggles instead of bigger material changes, and that has had so much success and actually masks racial and gendered material inequalities through things like token diversity hires and ideology of multiculturalism that is used in capitalist commercials. And then, meanwhile, there's Black people still being shot on the streets. And I guess this is a praxis question, just because this ideology seems to have been so successful in halting radical change for minorities. So, yeah, I guess it's kind of a praxis question, but—

Caitlin: Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's really important to identify the historical center of gravity of the project of identity politics as being one of the dominant ideologies of neoliberal capitalism. It's the kind of ideology for the liberal left and the progressive intelligentsia. And you do have the white power movement, which is also an identity politics. Yeah. Politics movement that is part of the right-wing conservative and reactionary forms. And so both of them share this particular orientation, which largely is rooted in essentializing and reification of socially and historically constructed identities, right? So there's no real analysis of how these identities were forged over time and why they were forged, what particular ends they served. And that's part of the struggle Right, is the struggle to fully elucidate the racial categories that are now dominant within the U.S. or also in other countries, of course, or the dominant gender and sexual categories and practices. And so there's an enormous body of literature that I'd encourage all of us to tap into. The Field sisters' work on racecraft is excellent on the history of racism in the United States. Adolf Reed Jr.'s work, you know, there's so much work that I'd be happy to share bibliographies. Biographies if people are interested. But regarding more specifically the kind of practical orientation, the— one of the interesting things about identity politics is that it does identify a series of social problems that are rooted in real-life issues. Women continue to be oppressed. There continues to be a wage gap. There continues to be racism, you know, institutional and otherwise. And so, at some level, it's an ideology that touches on the real, right? There are facts that are poached. But what happens are those facts are framed within an ideological gestalt that distorts them. So, we don't understand where those facts came from in the first place. And we also don't understand how to actually struggle against them. And so, part of the area or territory that is opened up by some forms of identity politics is taking seriously these facts of racial and gender oppression and super-exploitation and whatnot. And then the more practical orientation that you're kind of asking about, I think, consists in identifying very clearly the difference between symbolic and representative false solutions to real problems. Substantive, transformative solutions to those problems, right? So if this— the solution of identity politics is mediated by all of these different tactics— tokenism, the word that somebody broke some glass ceiling, the call for greater diversity in fighter pilots who are dropping bombs around the world, or the ways in which the diversity industry also funnels itself into, as Jennifer pointed out, having spokespeople, so that you have professional intellectuals who, with a straight face, will say the Black community thinks this, the LGBTQ community thinks this. And you have to ask yourself, who appointed you as our spokesperson, right? And so there's lots of different tactics that are used, and you see it within the mass media, within the political establishment, and kind of in the more general cultural world, right? The diversity industries, not only in in the academy. It's a generalized ideological form of neoliberal capitalism. To marshal power against that, then, if we take these facts and we frame them within an ideological gestalt that explains both how they were actually produced in the first place, why they were produced, and secondly, how to actually address these problems head-on by material social transformation, Then I think that will give us the tools necessary, at least at an intellectual level, right? At the level of actual practical struggle, this requires direct activism, involvement in various organizations, and other such things. But at least it will give us the coordinates for what a radical transformation would actually look at. And actually, coming back to some of the things that I was saying earlier, that's one of the reasons that exploring actually existing socialism is so important. There's a great documentary film you can watch called I think it's Mujeres in la Revolución. Which is Women in the Revolution. It's about women's involvement in the Cuban Revolution. And it's a fascinating insight into the issues of women and racialized women in Cuba prior to and after the— and during, then, the Cuban Revolution. And what we have on full display is a response to gender oppression and exploitation, as well as racialized capitalist. That is the mirror opposite of the symbology that you get in the Biden administration or the diversity industry, because it's about actually changing the material relations by allowing women access to reliable healthcare, jobs that are equal. And the stats in Cuba are incredible. I don't have them in the forefront of my mind, but when you look at the labor force of professionalized women in Cuba, it's very clear that And it's leagues, you know, far beyond what's going on in the United States. And so we can also learn from those examples and then be able to point to them and say, if we don't simply want one woman to become a new member of the corporatocracy or the political elite or the professional managerial class, but our politics is invested in the liberation of the masses of women, then we can't embrace symbology. We can't embrace tokenism. We can't embrace these faux narratives about equality.

Ahsan: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Glass ceilings, what we have to do is develop a politics that is materially grounded in the liberation of the masses of women and look at all of the examples where that has successfully occurred. I don't know, Marwa, if again, if you want to follow up or if there are any final— I know we've surpassed a little bit our time, but if there are final questions, comments, or concerns, then by all means.

Carlos: May I ask a final question?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, for sure.

Carlos: Thank you, Professor. So this question is more, I think, narrow. It's just that when reading your articles, one of the things that I found very interesting, the articles on Foucault, was the question of how to understand the inscription of individual agency on this sort of wider projects or bigger structures. The sort of thing that came to my mind was this interview of Noam Chomsky with a BBC journalist discussing his book book, Manufacturing Consent, when they discussed self-censorship. And then this journalist dismisses that notion, saying like, oh, but I'm not self-censored. You know, my ideas, I really believe in them. They're not like imposed on me by the editor or the owner of the BBC. But then Chomsky says, well, yes, precisely because you have those ideas is that you have that position. Otherwise, you wouldn't have it. So that's the sort of thing that came to my mind, because reading your articles, I begin to— Yeah. I begin to realize that the production of ideas has to be linked with the circulation of ideas, these other forces like, I don't know, governments, editors, publishers, that are— they have invisible worlds, but they really play an important role in getting these ideas wider public. And that's why, I guess, some of the other ideas we don't see or we don't have as much exposure to. So my question is really, how do we understand the I mean, since coming back to Foucault, you mentioned that he wasn't a hired gun for the CIA, but nonetheless he participated in a way in this project of obscuring the more Marxist communist left. So my question is really, do we have a framework or, I don't know, or theories or set of authors that we can rely on to really understand these individual agencies inscribing this wider Great, great question.

Gabriel Rockhill: I do think that the analysis, a dialectical analysis of the social totality, allows us to identify the objective forces that are operative in a particular conjuncture, a particular space-time, and link those to the behavior of subjective agents, right? So we do have agencies, you know, And I put that in the plural on purpose because there are also conflicting agencies within us, right? You might have the career-minded person on one shoulder and the, like, political revolutionary on the other, or other versions of that, right? And that an analysis of the social totality, particularly regarding the global theory industry, clues us into, or I would hope, one of the most important factors for me, and that is that Part of the way this system works is that it's not the case that the objective world of social forces like the capitalist corporatocracy is just operating with a series of marionette strings, and they attach them to, I don't know, Foucault or Joe Biden for that matter, or anybody else, and they're just moving them and they move move in accordance. This idea, in fact, is one that's been widespread within the intelligentsia to confuse us about the dialectic of objective and subjective. Instead, one of the things that is essential to intellectual production in the contemporary world within at least this industry is that the CIA and the corporatocracy haven't just set up a bunch of marionettes They pay for the construction of marionette theaters, and the marionettes come of their own free will, which hooks up with the point that you raised from Chomsky, which I think is an important point. That is, there's a phenomenon of what's called uplift. If you've ever been in an elevator shaft that's open and there's air that's coming through it that is blowing up, you put a piece of paper out and gravity is not going to take it down. The uplift is going to take it up. What subjects are often subjected to, in both senses of the word subjected, within an objective force field of relations, is uplift. We all understand that if we want to get a good grade on a particular paper or get a job or do certain things, we have often an innate understanding— innate in the sense of, you know, it's become second nature, not that it was born there. of uplift and what we need to do in order to play a particular game or succeed in a particular way. And so the journalist that you're referring to is the journalist who's going to get hired for that job because it's a journalist who doesn't see his or her own self-censorship. Just as intellectuals who would be hired for the academy and believe that it is a free realm of ideas in which it's the meritocracy and whatnot are usually going to be the people who would be promoted quite seamlessly into the professional managerial class. And so attention to that uplift, I think, is important for identifying how the system works as a dialectic between objective and subjective social forces. And there's also, just to kind of plug this into very specific instances, there's ways that we can see this very, very clearly, or I would hope that most people could see it. Some of the most well-paid and promoted intellectuals. Look at Francis Fukuyama. I mean, the guy worked for the RAND Corporation, which is a CIA cutout. Or Hannah Arendt, whose research was funded and supported by the Foreign Office in Great Britain, and whose books were also translated by— or there were at least connections to money through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. She participated in their conferences. Horkheimer did. You know, you go through the list of people like this. In my own case, There, an article that I wrote called The CIA Reads French Theory was rejected by The New York Times. Why did I send it to The Times? Because I published things there before. Did I expect it was going to be published? Absolutely not. Uplift doesn't work that way, right? And so also identifying those material constraints will hopefully allow us to see where there are sites where we might be able to intervene, whereas there are others that are just blocked. Carlos, does that speak to your Absolutely.

Carlos: Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Great. Well, I think we're pretty much— unless there's an urgent— we've engaged quite a bit with some of the existential questions, which I really appreciate because they're really vital questions and they're ongoing questions too, for me, right? Because the relationship to institutions, this idea of a long trajectory through an institution, how one relates to larger intellectual worlds, Is, is an ongoing question, right? So I imagine that none of you assume that you'll just get to a point where it'll all be resolved. These are ongoing struggles. But maybe the last thing that I would say, and I imagine I speak for Jennifer here as well, is that we'd be more than happy if people want to reach out with particular concerns or issues that they're having. Again, we should have an economy of solidarity and mutual support rather than individualism and careerism that pits us against one another.

Caitlin: Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: one another, because that will play into the hands of the people who've created a system where so few people actually have the material conditions necessary to do rigorous intellectual work. Jennifer, I see your mic's off. Did you want to echo anything? I just wanted to make sure you saw the questions that were in the chat. Oh, no. I did not, but I'm also vigilant about the time. Were there one or two of them, Jen, that you thought that I should definitely— Well, there is— I just saw— Tyler, Karna, Shenry, and Julia, I think, all had questions.

Marwa: I didn't know if you wanted to—

Gabriel Rockhill: like, there was this question about the analytic critique of certain continental theorists and how you would differentiate your historical materialist critique from that of the kind of right-wing critique coming from out of analytical philosophy.

Caitlin: A question about the history—

Gabriel Rockhill: I could run through. I don't want to abuse people's time. Or patience. I could run through them in 5 or 10 minutes if people want. If people are either exhausted with Zoom or have other things to do, then I understand if you need to exit the call. So Tyler did— yeah, Tyler raised the question about the analytic departments that dominate the US and position themselves as more scientifically grounded. Part of the research that I've done does look at the history of analytic philosophy as to a certain extent, the philosophy of empire, meaning the philosophy that has been largely promoted by the United States. And it's an international colonial project in the sense that it's taken over a lot of philosophy departments, at least in the world that I know, in Europe. But I also see signs of it in other parts of the world. And part of that is because there was a targeting of communist intellectuals within the United States. Many of them were fired from their jobs, of course, through the Red Purges going back to the interwar period, but then also in the wake of World War II. And analytic philosophy, at least in certain forms, was promoted as a kind of bourgeois technoscientific approach that purported to ground philosophy in a purely rational modality of analysis and went ahead in doing that project. Of course, now I'm summing up part of analytic philosophy. For any specialist, we could talk about the details. There might be minor exceptions, like there's analytic Marxism and other such things. But the big picture is that historical and social analysis are bracketed in the name of shoring up logical reasoning as the be-all end-all and the main framework for an approach to, um, to the world. So it occludes so much of what comes from the historical materials tradition and those modes of analysis. Of course, there's a lot more that could be said about this. Karna says, does or must the incompatible left completely reject the Foucauldian notion of historical a priori? I ask because my line of thought is close to what you have described as a generalized critical theory. So, you know, Foucault developed this idea of a historical a priori, particularly within The Order of Things in the '60s, And The Order of Things is a profoundly anti-Marxist book. It's, you know, in and of itself, but it tries to bleed Marxism into bourgeois political economy, which is basically mixing apples and oranges. It's like fascism and communism. They just don't— they are not structurally compatible. And so I think that the argument is flawed through and through. And that in the wake of that, as I pointed out in the article, of course, Foucault came out with all of these anti-Marxist statements, basically saying that Marxism is dead in the century when it only began to take on a practical life beginning in 1917. And so I think it would really depend, Karna, on how exactly you define what a historical a priori is. In Foucault's case, there's the construction of a kind of transcendental plane of history, which is the coordinates of any particular episteme or discursive configuration. And it's presumed that those coordinates, at least within one episteme or one kind of epochal block, will remain unchanged until there's some type of rupture that he has a lot of difficulty explaining that will introduce a new set of coordinates. That is largely based on a kind of idealist approach to history that presumes that there are actually these transcendental coordinates, like something above material history that would oversee all of the occurrences of material Right? So instead of a bottom-up analysis, it's the projection of a kind of top-down framework, which you find in Rancière's work on aesthetics as well. He basically incorporates, with slight changes, the same Foucauldian methodology. So I would see that as kind of a difficult project. But again, it would depend on how you define historical priority, if it's in a strict Foucauldian sense or maybe a slightly different sense. And then I think this is the final— oh wait, there's 2 more, so I'm going to speed up. Thank you. I won't talk too fast, I promise. I wonder, how does one reasonably combine biopolitics with Marxist theory, especially in post-indecolonial contexts? They seem to especially work well when it comes to the analysis of the making of human capital that is outstanding with neoliberalism. So of course, going into biopolitics would take some time. The basic idea that there is a governance of the masses of humanity that focuses on birth rates and demographics and death rates and things like this. Now, that's an important understanding of the emergence of centralized liberal states under capitalism in Europe at one point in time. I do think that there are very coherent descriptions of those processes that don't drift away into the more— both idealist elements that you find in Foucault, as well as certain apologies for forms of neoliberalism. Again, I know and recognize that this would open up a big can of worms and debate around neoliberalism, as there is one in the Foucauldian scholarship. The— and then the ways in which biopolitics has been picked up by people like Membe and others also continues to divorce these biopolitical questions from global class struggle. You know, there might be certain signs of that that you could unearth a little bit in Membe. Membe also suffers from a misreading of Foucault in that famous essay on necropolitics, which isn't very helpful because it reveals The lack of materialist rigor in engaging even with the text of Foucault. But again, this would lead us a little bit far afield, so let's move on to the final question. Sorry, I'm racing here, but just trying to respect time. What strategies of turning attention to the Marxist intellectuals you've mentioned can be considered for a post-Soviet country which got on the track of pro-capitalism and is, after the collapse of the USSR, actually totally prejudiced towards left discourse, excluding it academically and marginalizing it culturally? Great question, because particularly in the former Soviet bloc, we've seen so many countries that were opened up to capitalist pillage, theft, and the general degradation of human existence. And I think that we need both a materialist analysis of those consequences. I would suggest Michael Parenti's work on that front. Particularly a YouTube lecture on Reflections on the Collapse of Communism, I think it is, or on the collapse of the Soviet Union, where he points out the fact that actually existing socialism was beneficial to the masses of humanity, meaning the masses who had access to free and/or affordable healthcare, housing, education, and I'm sure other things that I'm saying that are escaping me right now, I'm forgetting about right now. So in that context, I take it that it's probably that much more difficult because a lot of the intellectuals who I've met who are academics in those contexts have profited handsomely from the global uplift of the theory industry, meaning they tend to be the intellectuals who engage with the dominant discourse of the so-called West. And then they police those borders, right, where we can no longer talk talk about things that are beyond the pale, but instead we should do, you know, Derridean, Foucauldian modes of analysis would be kind of at best, if they're not further to the right of that. So I don't know the specific context well enough to recommend very precise tactics and strategies, but I do think that the dual project of a materialist analysis of the violence introduced by the dismantling of the Soviet regime combined with an analysis of how so much of global intellectual production is a result of uplift by the powerful institutions, most of which are situated in the Global North, that encourages certain types of work, right? If you're in, you know, lots of different countries, Romania, Hungary, but also India or Japan or China, for that matter, one of the ways of developing a very lucrative academic career is to get plugged into the global theory industry. And so, pointing that out and analyzing it, while also then plugging into these more revolutionary traditions, I think, can be at least part of a tactic for struggling against it.

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