The Imperial Theory Industry w/Gabriel Rockhill

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim Salam, hello, peace to you all. Welcome to the Adnan Hussein Show. I'm, of course, Adnan Hussein, a historian of the medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world, and also co-host of Guerrilla History Podcast back here with a really exciting episode and a vital and important conversation. I'm so looking forward to this. I'm delighted to be able to welcome to the show Gabriel Rockhill, who is a professor at Villanova University, is founding director of the Critical Theory Workshop, and is the author or editor of a dozen books, including most recently Requiem pour la French Theory with Aymeric Monville, apparently an English version of that text is coming out soon, and Domenico Lo Cerdo's Western Marxism, which we discussed with my co-host Henry Hakamaki on Guerrilla History. So do go check out that discussion. And that, in some sense, covered a little bit, sort of a prelude to the book that we're going to be discussing today and made us very excited. We've been anticipating this work and the larger project of which it is a part for some time. Gabriel, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on. It's such a pleasure right now.

Gabriel Rockhill: And thanks for having me on.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, I'm really excited again to talk about this book, which is volume one of The Intellectual World War, entitled Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, which is out very recently. And You know, where to start? This is such an important project and I think is going to do so much in a practical way to liberate minds and be an insurgency in the, you know, kind of intellectual world war against imperial knowledge and imperial scholarship and imperial theory. Maybe you can tell us, you know, at the outset, situating a little bit, what is this kind of idea that motivated the book to actually do something like what I believe you called it the last time we spoke with you when you were describing this project to us as a kind of political or maybe geopolitical economy of theory and of intellectual production?

Gabriel Rockhill: know what is the what is the sort of um ground on which this this uh work is really is really founded well thank you for starting with that question because it goes to the kind of methodological heart of the project as a whole i found that in my research the framework of bourgeois culture tends to isolate both the producer of that culture and the products from the overall social relations of production, and it thereby gives us a kind of atomized and individualist account of culture. And this book, as well as the subsequent volumes, is oriented in precisely the inverse manner. If we want to understand culture in the broad sense, and within that intellectual culture and knowledge production, then we need to begin from the point of view of a systemic analysis of the social relations of knowledge production. And if we do that, then we can more easily situate individual producers and their products within the overall system that tends to reproduce very similar subjects and very similar products over time. And in particular, if we do this in a kind of geohistorical manner, so we look at the entire globe and its deep, deep history, then we see that this system of knowledge production is by no means neutral, but is instead inscribed within, at its highest level of concrete abstraction, the principal contradiction that undergirds life on planet Earth under capital, and that is imperialism. Right. So a lot of the focus is on the institutions of imperial knowledge production, but of course, also dissemination and consumption. This vantage point allows us to better grasp something like the theory industry. And one of the arguments in the book that goes along with what I just said is that if we want to study theory, we should not take our marching orders from the bourgeois humanities or the bourgeois social sciences. And I could go into what I think the limitations of them are. But just for the sake of focusing on the positive project, what we need to do is understand that theory itself functions like an industry. Just as we have a movie industry, we have a television industry, we have a music industry, we also have a theory industry. And that theory industry is undergirded by material institutions that are the result of the deep history of imperialism. that have a political orientation and valence that is baked into them. And so a lot of what the book does, I think that actually I should just say one final thing. That is that a lot of people, I think, unfortunately, if they have a facile or superficial engagement with the book, they see CIA, they think about kind of individuals being compromised, they really ignore the systemic nature of this intervention. And what I'm really interested in is the historical effects of imperialism on the type of knowledge that is produced and widely disseminated and how it has become fashioned into a theory industry that is waging a sometimes open, often secret war on the forms of theory that are the most dangerous to empire. and in particular, the tradition of dialectical and historical materialism that has been the principal weapon of class struggle from those who have been the victims of imperialism. So the book is not just a diagnosis of the kind of imperial system of knowledge production and dissemination, but it is also an attempt to bring to the fore the forms of knowledge that have been produced primarily within the global periphery as weapons of struggle against the imperial world system.

Adnan Husain: Okay, yes. Well, so this is a profoundly important project, obviously. You know, when it's placed into that context, some people, you already alluded to some of the work of the book is to examine some of the ways in which certain kinds of producers of knowledge, certain kind of approaches and theories gained approbation and were promoted by, you know, imperial, not both the imperial kind of structures and networks of these institutions of foundations and of institutions like universities and think tanks and, and so on, but that also practically speaking, there were choices made for promoting and patronizing and recruiting by intelligence, so-called intelligence agencies. I think you make a really great point about how the CIA isn't actually an intelligence agency. It is about promoting false knowledge and occluding knowledge and sometimes that's at least as important as what it actually presents and that much of what it presents, as we remember during the Iraq War, the way in which famously the real Vice President Dick Cheney established his own intelligence kind of house, a production house, because he didn't receive enough of what he wanted from the CIA. And so these priorities you know, tend to undermine the actual, you know, nature of like the real information to describe reality, but are to serve imperial interests. That's just a kind of small example of a larger case of this systemically. But as a result of that, that, you know, some people might think that this is reducing complex intellectual and cultural productions to simplistic kind of response to patronage. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about the history that you've uncovered. And I know many other scholars and historians have done relevant work to establish these connections of patronage through the Congress of Cultural Freedom and other institutions and so on that were supported by the CIA. What was the sort of material basis for an effort by the US empire through these institutions and organs? And with what consequences do you think that we could start with those practical kind of connections before we then elucidate how it functioned within the wider system? But let's actually have a sense of how deep did that go? This kind of involvement by what some would call the deep state or the permanent state and these agencies. that reflected US imperial interests.

Gabriel Rockhill: Let me just begin by highlighting one of the important methodological interventions of the book, and that is pushing back very hard against the idea that as soon as you investigate material reality and the social totality, you're being reductive, right? It's actually the bourgeois humanities that are reductivist because what they do is they isolate individual producers and their products from the social totality. And in that sense, they reduce everything to the product of an individual, which is perfectly in line with liberal ideology writ large. And so in my own research, I've done a lot of scores of Freedom of Information Act requests, consulted a number of different archives, also done a lot of digital archival research to bring to the fore some of the elements of the history of knowledge production that have largely been invisibilized for most likely understandable reasons. I've also drawn, of course, extensively on a very large body of literature that has focused on the history of the national security states of the imperial powers. And the breadth and depth of these operations do truly boggle the imagination. because when I first started doing this work 15 years ago, or maybe even more than that at this point, maybe 20, you know, I came to learn that they were involved in the New York art scene and that they were promoting various artists. And that, in fact, if you look at the board of trustees of the MoMA or major institutions, they're stocked with national security state operatives. And that I found surprising 20 years ago. But now that I'm you know, very, very deep into this research, it has become readily apparent to me that when a historian like you, Wilford, claims that the Central Intelligence Agency in the early Cold War ran what was likely the largest patronage system of arts and culture in the history of humanity, he's likely correct insofar as there's truly just an unlimited budget. And it's also true that Frances Stoner Saunders, whose book, of course, is kind of referenced in the title of my own book, her book was originally titled Who Paid the Piper? And that book looks at the transatlantic relationship between the US national security state and Western intellectuals and writers. And she argues that there's not a single writer, intellectual artist in Western Europe who was not affected in some capacity by these networks. I think both of those statements are borne out within the archival record, and we could get into some of the details and some of the things that I've found out myself in my own archival research. But I would like to connect that then to one kind of larger issue that might allow people to understand the broad scope of the book, because it's not just a story of the CIA funding a few people or a few connections like this or, you know, Theodore Adorno inviting over to his house and corresponding directly with the CIA agent who was the point person for the cultural Cold War in Germany and continued to work for the Congress for Cultural Freedom after it was revealed that it was a CIA front organization. All of this is important, but these are the symptoms of the broader system. And the overall focus is on the symptom. And so there is within the book a kind of theory of the bourgeois state and how it operates, as well as a theory of the bourgeois cultural apparatus. And the bourgeois state actually does, particularly in the age of imperialism, as understood by Lenin. Right. So about from the latter part of the 19th century to the present. is really beholden to a modality of dual governance in which the democratic facade of government the political theater is seconded by what people call the invisible government the deep state the intelligence services etc cia is part of this but there are many other organizations as well And that these are actually the fundamental forces that are governing capitalist society. And what they do is guarantee that capitalism will be maintained and even intensified by any means necessary. And this logic of dual governance is important to see because it undergirds a kind of theory of the superstructure. And that is that the superstructure, particularly under imperialism, relies increasingly on covert operations. In fact, many of the intelligence services that we have in the Western imperial powers They all date from the age of imperialism. And there are very specific reasons for that that actually go into quite a bit in the second volume of the book. But conjoined with that, you have the bourgeois cultural apparatus, which needs to appear as if it's meritocratic and democratic. Anyone who has good ideas or great art or culture or is a writer is free to participate in the marketplace of ideas, or so we are told. While at the same time, just like the political theater of the kind of bourgeois political legal apparatus in the cultural realm, there is a very tight and even totalitarian levels of control exercised from behind the scenes. And so a lot of my research focuses on the darker forces of the bourgeois state and the bourgeois cultural apparatus that create and condition cultural forms that ultimately advance the interests of imperialism, often in complex and sophisticated ways. Last thing that I'll say is one of the things that the CIA did in the early Cold War and continued for quite some time is that they actually funded and supported leftists on the condition that they were anti-communists and they aimed at shoring up and consolidating what they call the compatible left, the respectable left. And this is the form of leftism that as critical as it could be of capitalism, nonetheless ended up accommodating capitalism and even imperialism because they were worse. I'm sorry, they were a better option than actually existing socialism, which they loathed and denigrated to no end. So there's more in your question, but I'll leave it at that. And then we can dig deeper if you like.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, we can certainly and there's so many different directions to go to pursue this is such a rich analysis in this book. It's a very kind of comprehensive project. And, you know, usually if somebody says it's three volumes, you might sort of gasp. But in fact, actually, I think each of these volumes is going to do some very important work in advancing a more comprehensive understanding of this project. kind of intellectual world war. But I did want to kind of maybe pick up a little bit further on this, because one thing that I really appreciated so much about this work was its methodological sophistication. And you drew some great inspiration from a quote I didn't know of Lenin's that was about dialectics being a multifaceted Well, I don't think that's the exact word that he used, but it was... Multi-sided knowledge. Multi-sided knowledge. Yes. And that was a kind of interesting kind of point. And you started by saying that very often in bourgeois humanities, individual texts or individual You know, thinkers or producers are extricated from their social conditions, from their histories, and even in some of the kind of later methods of, say, new historicism and so on. There's something very similar to what you're describing about this kind of compatible left shoring up the compatible left through leftist kinds of intellectual analysis that are avowedly not going to talk about like communism or will be avowedly anti-communist or try and sublimate some aspects of the modes of production as that's too crude a sort of frame in which to pursue. So even if they're doing historicist sort of work, it'll be curtailed in some ways. That was one thing that I really appreciated here was the attempt to look at things in their context and the way in which the specifics fit into a larger systemic framework. So maybe you can elucidate a little bit further how you took to heart this approach to dialectics that Lennon sort of pointed the way, at least as a way of encapsulating, you know, through that quote that you had of his, of a multi-sided form of knowledge and analysis.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I really appreciate that question because it brings to the fore really the first half of the book, which I'm a bit not necessarily concerned, but I want to make sure that people read that part of the book because the reason this became a trilogy is just because I had too much information. So I had a draft of the book that was well over 500 pages and in discussions with Monthly Review Press, we decided that there were three natural parts, so why don't we break it into three parts? But the first half of this book, that is a kind of methodological crash course in, in my opinion, how best to draw on the dialectical and historical materialist tradition and advance it in the direction of developing additional ways to best analyze culture. And a lot of this is a direct response, if you will, to what's referred to as cultural Marxism, which has some minor strengths, but I think is ultimately held back by its limitations because there's not a serious political economy of culture. There is a reification of individuals and their products like you just mentioned. They don't center the principle contradiction of imperialism and so forth. And part of the methodological sophistication or intervention is in the first part of the book is based on my own trajectory, because I have training in bourgeois philosophy and humanities on the one hand, but then I also have training in the bourgeois social sciences and in particular, the historical social sciences. And the reason I pursued this dual training is because I wasn't satisfied with either of them. And I was looking for the necessary tools to understand them. And in very simplistic sense, you could say that, well, the bourgeois humanities focus on the isolated product of cultural production. They focus on the text. Whereas a lot of bourgeois social science focuses on the context. And what this does is it creates a kind of fragmentary knowledge in which then even within the social sciences, you have particular domains that are broken off from one another. So it's economics or it's politics or it's sociology, and they're all splintered. Opposed to all of that, what I try to do in the first half of this book is to draw on because, of course, you know, we are all collective beings who are learning from the traditions that we're working within. So to draw on the rich tradition of dialectical and historical materialism in order to further develop its account of culture. And a big part of that is recognizing that culture is not produced by isolated individuals as they intuit magical forms or in conversation with other theorists in the kind of transhistorical ether of ideas or culture. Culture is produced out of material situations and concrete social relations of production, and there is a political economy that drives it. Therefore, what we need to do is have an analysis of the socioeconomic objective forces operative within bourgeois culture knowledge there included therein. But we also need an account of subjective agency and how it operates within that objective force field, if you will. So in doing so, it's not about you know, abandoning human freedom and making it reductivist and just focusing on determination is really mapping out the complexities of how individual subjects situated within an overall objective material world make choices And then there are reactions to those choices on the part of the more objective structures such that, for instance, they're rewarded for the work that they do and they receive uplift within the imperial superstructure, or they don't do the work that is demanded of them. They're sidelined, you know, invisibilized. In certain instances, they're eliminated, they're killed. And so that's part of the logic that goes into studying the cultural forms that I'm studying in the book. But then there's also an attempt to further develop a dialectical account of hermeneutics. that isn't just the relationship between individual subjects and an objective world, but that situates that within time. And this is drawing very strongly on a lot of Lukács' excellent work, Lenin's great work, Ilyenkov, the best dialectical historical materialist accounts of dialectics. And within those accounts and trying to further develop them in particular ways, one of the things that's recognized is you never have a reified and isolated relationship between a stable subject and a stable objective system within which they're situated. This is always changing over time. And so when Lenin describes dialectics as many-sided knowledge, what he's doing is he's identifying the fact that we're subjects situated in an objective world. And then if we want to have the best possible understanding of the objective world, we have to look at every single facet of it. We have to analyze it as if it's a prism and we have to explore not just the economics, not just the politics, not just the culture, every aspect of it, not just the objective forms, but also the subjective agency that's operative within a particular situation. So that's the kind of phenomenon of many-sided knowledge. But Lenin, just like Lukács, then also adds to that since time is a factor in absolutely everything and is essential to a dialectical understanding of reality, there's no stable objective world or subjective pole, but these are changing over time. And the objective world is changing as subjective agents are trying to change it or contributing to its perpetuation in various ways. So this many sided knowledge actually has to be tracked in a temporal dimension. And the goal, Lukacs is fantastic on this. is that our subjective knowledge comes not to carve nature at its joints, predict the future in this kind of positivistic and reductivist, objectivist sense, but instead that we as subjects can develop a better apprehension of the multifaceted nature of the objective world over time so that we can intervene much more forcefully and more successfully in it and have our agency maximized. How do you maximize agency? It's not by a blind belief in the individual freedom of subjects isolated from a situation. It is by having the best changing multifaceted knowledge of the objective world, intervening in that objective world with that knowledge, and then changing and adapting that knowledge over time so it is better and better adapted to the situation. Because ultimately, dialectics is founded on a primacy of practice. And it needs to be a materialist dialectics. And this is maybe the last thing that I'll say is that a lot of the dialectics that you get in Western Marxism, it's actually one of the reasons that very early on I was turned off to dialectics, is a subjectivist idealist dialectics that is disconnected from material reality. So we're all hopefully familiar with the way that dialectics comes to function freeform, independently of any materialist analysis. And it basically amounts to a series of rhetorical gestures, gotcha moments of overturnings, of contradictions, and it just becomes an idealist formal apparatus, if you will, not a materialist way of analyzing and improving our apprehension of the world. because I'm increasingly convinced that the dialectical materialist understanding of the world, while situating subjects within the objective world, absolutely needs to be grounded in a primacy of objectivity, in the sense that the objective world was there before any of us, and will be there after any of us, and subjects themselves are part of this larger objective world, hence the necessity of the dialectics of nature and of a broader analysis of the materialist world within which human beings are only nodal points. We're only part of the broader natural world, but we can reach our full potential if we engage in all this many-sided knowledge in order to become real practical actors in that world and harness the powers of that world to direct it ideally in a more egalitarian and ecologically sustainable direction.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, that's such a hopeful vision for what genuine dialectical analysis could help us achieve, because one thing that I've always noticed or felt a little bit about the Western Marxist framework is that, you know, with a pseudo materialism, it kind of argues for you know, a kind of inevitability of the contradiction, you know, and of course, it's pulling from Marx the idea that, you know, at some point, capitalism, you know, has to fail. And of course, what we're seeing is that, you know, these ideological mechanisms in the superstructure are very useful in occluding that on a broad level of consciousness. But there has been this kind of sense of, oh, the inevitability of capitalism's collapse, almost as if history, as if they forgot the other dictum of Marx, you know, which is that history is what we make. We don't make the conditions of our history, but we make our history. And so the point, of course, is to be able to understand objective reality so that we can actually intervene in it and make change, right? And that seems to be a part of this that tends to be underemphasized, it seems, in Western Marxism, where there was much less of an optimism about actually making change or making a difference, which is perhaps why it focuses so much on those theological questions of ideological purity and so forth, rather than the praxis of how you might actually intervene in one's historical moment. But it also seems like this analysis that you have helps resolve some of those classic problems of base and superstructure. It puts it in a much more complex and dialectical way. I think that point you made about time It's so crucial as a historian. I'm very sensitive to that, that very often we reify. And when we're doing the kind of necessary structural analysis, it has to be accompanied with the sense that this is unfolding in time. You know, it's not like these are structures that just exist in an abstract space. So that's all been so, so helpful. And I really encourage readers to take a look at that first part. But one thing you said earlier that I want to like now turn to is about, you know, imperialism being a primary, perhaps the primary, you know, contradiction. And this seems to be partly because a lot of Western Marxism might. characterize what it's doing as a critique of capitalism, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they understand it in its historical unfolding globally through colonialism and subsequently imperialism. What do you think is so important for the intellectual world war about, you know, the need to really apprehend and understand and critique and confront imperialism as a primary contradiction, which is something you don't find so much in Western Marxism. It reminds me a little bit of the importance of a contribution, even if he's not so much a materialist scholar, but somebody like Edward Said, who kind of foregrounded the problem of colonial knowledge, but then, of course, didn't put it in the same kind of materialist context. framework of analysis that one might want for a full and thorough understanding of the operation of colonial knowledge. But it seems that it is absolutely crucial to capitalism, this creation of imperial knowledge. Perhaps you could talk a little bit more about what you do to unpack that.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. The first thing that I would say is just concerning the methodological points and what you highlighted, it's absolutely true that the orientation of the book is such that the goal is to really maximize the agency that people have in order to engage in praxis in the contemporary world. and that there is also a kind of dialectical analysis of the base and superstructure that I don't need to go into. But I do think that this terminology, understood metaphorically, is extremely useful for understanding how what some people will simply refer to simplistically as ideology operates. There's a material reality and institutional instantiation, if you will, of ideology that the book attempts to tease out. Regarding imperialism, though, if you want to understand human life on planet Earth, then you need to situate it within the historical underdevelopment of the tricontinent, the global south, the third world, call it what you will, in order to favor the hyperdevelopment of the global north, and in particular, the line in the pockets of the capitalist ruling class. That is the fundamental force that has structured human life and extra human life, meaning the entire ecosphere on planet Earth. If you ignore that, then you're really ignoring the material baseline for how to understand anything else on planet Earth. And the reason that so much Western Marxism has done that is precisely because they were the victims knowingly or not, or, you know, to varying degrees, let us say, of the ideological effects of the imperial superstructure. What I mean by that is that a lot of the intellectual work that is done in the Global North, when it is analyzed from the vantage point of the social relations of production, needs to be situated within what I call in the book the intellectual labor aristocracy, meaning that the leading figures of the theory industry today are at the absolute summit of global pyramids of intellectual labor, in which they're given incredible economic and symbolic perks for doing the type of work that is rewarded by the Imperial Academy. And arguably the single most important thing that these intellectuals can do if they're on the right, left, center, or they imagine that they're not beholden to these categories, the single most important thing that they can do is to invisibilize, obfuscate, naturalize imperialism while at the same time denigrating or misrepresenting the most important and most successful forms of struggle against imperialism, which historically have been forms of actually existing socialist state building. In that regard, one of the things that I've found in my research, and I didn't go into this with a chip on my shoulder or dedicated to just being critical of a bunch of people, I went into it actually with quite a different vantage point, and that is that I assumed, because there are earlier iterations of this project, that certain of the more radical intellectuals, including within the imperial core, would nonetheless live up to their reputation as being radicals. And what I found is that really the principle dividing line is between those who center the principle contradiction of imperialism and support the real world struggle against it, and those who do not. And what is pretty incredible, and I'll spell out in the rest of the trilogy, is that you would be very hard pressed to find a prominent left intellectual who has a platform akin to the platform that one would have either on the right or in the center or just a liberal, who maintains a resolutely anti-imperialist position and even more radically is supportive of socialism in the real world in some capacity. So this book focuses partially on Western Marxism in a Frankfurt School, but the second volume looks at French theory and the third volume engages in contemporary radical theory. And there's an incredible level of ideological consistency. The reason for that is that all of these are subjects who have agency and are acting and making decisions within an imperial superstructure that is rewarding them and encouraging them to rise to the top if they give to it what it wants. And what it wants is a left discourse that's compatible with imperialism. And that's what it has gotten because it's paid for it.

Adnan Husain: Hence the title. Yes. I mean, that's what's been funded. It was really astonishing to learn the extent. You said at the outset that, you know, in terms of cultural patronage, it was, you know... the kinds of investment that was made in cultural production, art, intellectual work is historically unmatched really by any other era. That obviously, when we think of the cultural monuments of ancient histories and societies and the exploitation that was required, you know, in order to build these wonders of the world and so forth, we're seeing something that is at a level, you know, you know, even greater than that, that has, of course, built this architecture of universities and foundations sponsoring just hundreds and thousands of works. So this is really a major, major cultural formation. I was fascinated also by all this work that you've done looking at these CIA papers and so forth, and you quoted from one of them, the kind of five aims of the psychological warfare campaign in the chapter entitled Imperial Intellectual Apparatus. And, you know, here it's put in its most kind of policy style language. With these five points, eliminate communist influence, reduce neutralist sentiments. Interesting. Transmute nationalism. I found this one fascinating. Transmute nationalism from a single country basis to identification with membership of the large European community. Four, unite Western Europe with the Atlantic world. And five, this one was hilarious as well, demonstrate to non-Europeans that the Atlantic community is not a white man's club, but rather... the democratic bastion of the free world. I mean, this is indeed a tall order. When you put the propositions out there in this way, it seems like, wow, that is a really difficult task. How are you going to convince people of these things in this sort of direct way? But that with the kind of investment, the material, you know, kind of investment that went into it translates into a very subtle and complex and sophisticated and variegated sort of what I found so important is that you pointed out here that the best tactic was not just confrontation with, you know, by promoting anti-communism. But, you know, creating these alternatives that were anti-communist in their way, while selling an idea that the American kind of way was a superior one, like it was important, it was absolutely necessary to assert you know, that the United States was promoting democracy and freedom and, you know, that this was, you know, a positive alternative to communism. And in order to do that, it also had to it had to recruit, you know, these kind of compatible left sorts of theories that were anti-communist. And so that's What's so fascinating is that they invested in a lot of things that on the cruder side of anti-communist rhetoric would have been seen as totally useless. And in fact, cultural Marxism, this is what's so amazing about it, is that what's condemned by the contemporary right about the depredations of so-called cultural Marxism, destroying the fabric of Western civilization and all of that, is in fact the tool by which it most effectively promoted and sapped, promoted a vision of alternative that sapped actual socialist organizing and support for really existing socialism. I'm wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about how you get from you know, these kind of 1952 very direct propositions as goals to sponsoring such a variegated and sophisticated set of forms of cultural and intellectual production.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think it's important to remember that when the U.S. inherited the helm of global imperialism at the close of World War Two, they actually inherited it on its heels. Right. In the sense that it was the communists who had just defeated fascism. Communism had a level of global credibility that arguably has never been seen before or since. They liberated the concentration camps. They really routed not only fascism, but prior forms of authoritarianism from Eastern Europe. And they gave 35 million lives in the Soviet Union doing this. And there were many major cultural figures. Pablo Picasso, the most famous artist in the West, was an outspoken communist, self-declared. Jean-Paul Sartre and Beauvoir in France were fellow travelers of the Communist Party or became fellow travelers of the Communist Party. Pablo Neruda, you know, as many, many, Paul Robeson. Communism was culturally identified not only with the anti-fascist fight, but also with the anti-colonial struggle, which was the continuing anti-fascist fight after World War II. And so what the US had to do was it was faced with kind of an impossible situation. They needed to brand themselves as anti-fascist. They needed to brand themselves even as anti-colonial. While, of course, the reason for that was that they were seeking to recapture the colonial possessions of the former imperialist powers and use them for their own ends. And they wanted to find a way of using a soft sell approach to get the Marxist intelligentsia as well as socialists on board with their project. The reason they did this is because they had no choice. they could not defeat marxism openly they simply couldn't and so what they ended up settling on in the early cold war and it's quite brilliant when you think of it and it is important to recognize that the intelligence services in the united states really come out of the military-industrial-academic complex. So you have the government, you have Wall Street, and then you have the academy. And the principal site of recruitment for the CIA was and is the university. And the intellectuals that they tend to recruit are from the most prestigious universities, so the Ivy Leagues in particular. So we're not dealing with people who, for the most part, are intellectually inept. We're dealing with quite a savvy and well-trained crowd. And these groups of people decided that the soft sell, even at certain points in the Cold War, going behind the back of the US Congress to fund socialists in Europe because they were the only ones, in the words of Thomas Braden, who oversaw some of these operations, who gave a damn about fighting communism. And so the goal was to split the left between the respectable and the not, you know, the disrespectful left and to shore up socialism as a weapon of war against communism. Socialism understood, of course, as social democratic and therefore a form of socialism that could or often did easily acquiesce with the interests of capitalism and even imperialism. And it's that orientation that is so key. And so the Psychological Strategy Board was established in 1951 to oversee and coordinate the psychological warfare operations of the entire intelligence apparatus. So what you have in this trove of documents that's available at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, is amazing insight into the fundamental architecture of what I call in the book the intellectual world war. And one of the focal points I actually included this document in the short appendix that's at the end of the book that they did is they decided that they needed attacks against communism that were formulated in Marxist terms. And they also wanted defenses of the West formulated in Marxist terms. They wanted to create the. ability on the part of people in the west to remain self-described marxists while being able to be anti-communists and it's this version of anti-communist marxism that of course became predominant and it's what we call western marxism And so there's not a one to one correlation. And if people are approaching the book with the kind of liberal ideology of conspiracy theory, like there'd be three guys in a dark room with a few briefcases and they pay Adorno or Horkheimer, this is all just a laughable Hollywood driven image of how these operations actually work. And in fact, many of these images themselves are a consequence of CIA operations or State Department operations because they've been involved in all of the films about the CIA and have a very strong role in the cultural apparatus. What we have to understand is that there's not a mechanical relationship, not a one-to-one relationship, but there's more of a kind of systemic and organic nature that of the imperial superstructure that makes it such that what these intelligence services did is they kind of guided the nature of intellectual production in a particular direction, but with the ultimate goal that these systems would just function on their own. And so if you can prime the pump and get the system functioning in that way for the first generation, then the second and third generation of intellectuals will be hired by these people, beholden to them for their jobs, beholden to them for letters of recommendation and everything else. And you can do it in a more kind of hands off manner. The last thing that I would say is that there has been some confusion, unfortunately, after the publication of Lasorda's Western Marxism concerning the critique of Western Marxism and cultural Marxism. Some people even assuming that somehow this aligns us who are doing this on the Trump agenda or something like that. What you have to see is the historical evolution. The war on cultural Marxism is a recent war that is the result of the fact that the operations that I analyze in the book, unfortunately, have been largely successful in shoring up a faux left within the imperial core, a left that is pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist. In doing that, now they have set the stage for the further war that they want to wage, and that is a war on any left whatsoever. So the term cultural Marxism is just a stand-in for woke politics, identity thinking, anything that's kind of lefty. And so for all we know, maybe Obama or Biden or these people are cultural Marxists, according to the way in which they characterize them. But the goal is ultimately to move things further and further to the right. Right. And so our critique of cultural Marxism or Western Marxism isn't, you know, pulling out from underneath us the last bulwark against a Trump-style fascist agenda. On the contrary, it's pointing out why and how we got here and the fact that if we want to wage a real war against increasing fascist encroachment, then we need to do that with the tools and the strategies that are precisely the ones that have had a war waged against them by the compatible left versions of Marxism that have become predominant under the name of Western Marxism.

Adnan Husain: Absolutely. I think that's really helpful in clarifying. You know, I don't want to keep you too long. You've already been generous with your time, but this book has so much to discuss. There was a couple of other areas that I wanted to ask you a little bit about. One thing is that You know, Edward Bernays features, interestingly, in that kind of complex and matrix of sort of, you know, weaponizing theory, you know, as part of the propaganda, psychological war, disinformation, information war that is also crucial to capitalist commodity, you know, marketing in consumer society. And that was an interesting, you know, sort of area to think about a little bit more, particularly since I only recently learned that he was, I guess, Freud's nephew or something like this. And you mentioned it also in the book and that he may have really consciously been developing psychoanalytic insights from Freud's work for this kind of imperial form of knowledge on a mass scale rather than, you know, for this kind of therapeutic sort of application, but to this broader approach. And that's something I wanted to ask a little bit about, because the place of psychoanalysis also in the story is a little bit less prominent, say, than, you know, kind of critical theory. And I'm sure, you know, it's integrated, of course, at various points into, you know, the Frankfurt School and so forth. But as a discourse that also comes from the late 19th and early 20th century, I just was interested, that's an imperial era, colonial era discourse. How you think about that? Is it really a separate story? How would you see that, and particularly via somebody like Edward Bernays, it playing a major role, you could say, in imperial forms of knowledge?

Gabriel Rockhill: It's a fascinating question because Freud himself, of course, was very deeply inscribed within bourgeois culture and was a kind of liberal ideologue, if you will. And there are excellent critiques of Freud for his dependence on a kind of naturalization of colonialism, the naturalization of patriarchy, and there are excellent kind of both feminist critiques, anti-colonial critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as anti-capitalist critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis. And Bernays own history is quite fascinating because he was the double nephew actually of Freud. So two family lineages basically. And he quite consciously was drawing on psychoanalysis and using it as a form of mass mind manipulation. And it's what he then offered the capitalist ruling class and the major corporations that he was working with, like United Fruit, in overseeing their operations for the CIA orchestrated coup d'etat in Guatemala in 1954. But he also, and I found this out through digging through archives, corresponded with Allen Dulles, who is the longest serving head of the Central Intelligence Agency and himself a master in psychological warfare. And you can't really understand, I don't think, the 20th century or imperialism without understanding the role of the public relations services, propaganda, psychological warfare in being essential components for how it is that the capitalist ruling class does the impossible. I mean, they have redistributed wealth upward in a way that means that the overwhelming majority of the planet, increasingly so over time, is strangled by the search for super profits on the part of a tiny, tiny minority of the population. This contradiction is unmaintainable unless you are able to capture hearts and minds and direct them in particular ways. And this is one of the reasons that a lot of the psychological and propagandistic work that was being done by Bernays and Ivy Lee is one of the other major figures, of course, in the history of the US propaganda apparatus. All of this needs to be understood as part of the kind of broader imperial superstructure and the war on the mind of the working masses. In fact, the Psychological Strategy Board which has an important title that we should recognize. The focus was on psychological warfare. Many of the documents point out very explicitly that the pen is mightier than the sword, that intellectual war is more important than military war, because the war for hearts and minds is the overall global war within which individual military skirmishes take place. Therefore, the psychological warriors like Bernays, Ivy Lee and others are absolutely essential to everything that they do. The last thing that I would say, and this is taking the question in a very different direction, is that Freudian psychoanalysis and later a major influence by Lacan became integral to a lot of Western Marxism. And so one of the narratives that you get about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is, of course, one of the focal points for the second half of the book, is that they recognized that classical or orthodox Marxism had a major limitation because they only focused on objective structures and they didn't have an adequate account of subjectivity. Therefore, Marxism had to be supplemented by psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis allowed us to peer into the subjective psyche. and thereby fully develop a kind of broader critical account of consumer society. I think that this is a very, very misguided approach. First of all, it ignores the very deep and important work done across across the Marxist tradition on questions of subjectivity, subject formation, ideology, etc. It has to basically invisibilize Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all of their accounts of ideology in order to come up with this idea that somehow Marxists weren't dialectical. They were just focusing on reducing everything to class forces or economics. And it also then, unfortunately, takes Freudian psychoanalysis without subjecting it to a materialist critique. And they don't engage seriously with the critiques that were operative at the time by the likes of people like Vygotsky and Vygotsky School in the Soviet Union and many other psychoanalytically trained individuals who recognized the extreme limitations, subjectivist and idealist limitations of psychoanalysis and thereby sought to situate psychoanalysis within the social totality of global class struggle and thereby draw on, obviously, you know, there are contributions by psychoanalysis, but draw on it and further elucidate it by situating within the broader objective world. So one of my other critiques of Western Marxism is precisely that it doesn't do that. And so if we want to draw on insights from psychoanalysis, we have to do it in this more robust manner by drawing on some of these other traditions that have been critical of the subjectivism of psychoanalysis.

Adnan Husain: Oh, that's so helpful and really well observed. And it's a great segue into the last sort of question or topic that I wanted to ask you about, which is, of course, really your critique of critical theory, of your analysis of what it's actually doing and performing, including not only the main figures of Adorno, Horkheimer, etc. But also, you do spend quite a lot of time talking about Marcuse and his rather unique place. And maybe he's a bit of a different case since he comes out of that, but maybe ends up in a different sort of location, but how would you, you know, what should readers take away from your analysis apart from the way in which they tried to resolve the question of subjective agency and so on by importing psychoanalysis without an appropriate critical and materialist locating of it and critiquing of it? What other kinds of projects, you know, were being performed by what we might think of as the Frankfurt School or, you know, critical theory?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. I look at the Frankfurt School because of the foundational role that it played in Western Marxism. And methodologically, I highlight this in the early part of the book. I engage in a kind of constellational approach. And what I mean by that is that you can't map everything out in great detail. Otherwise, you know, you would have books that would be hundreds of thousands of pages long. And so I chose Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse as important nodal points in a constellation. If you understand what they were up to and some of the other figures they were working with, then that allows us to engage in micro analyses of the specifics of each of these figures, while the kind of analysis that situates them within the objective social totality allows us to use those specific analyses to shed light on the broader tendencies of both the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism. And what you see in the case of the Frankfurt School is not a Marxist think tank that was centering the principal contradiction and arguing for you know, forms of socialism that would liberate us from them that are actually real forms of socialism, not utopian new ideas of socialism that are subjectivist and imaginary. What the Frankfurt School actually is, is a group of intellectuals who made their careers by cozying up to the capitalist ruling class and their foundation managers, as well as working directly with the U.S. national security state, depending on how you count the numbers, at least seven of them worked for a combined total of over 50 years for the U.S. national security state, so much so that I refer to them during their U.S. American exile as the Washington School instead of the Frankfurt School. Entrance into the academy was largely due to the springboard of the US National Security State and all of the academics and movers and shakers that they met during that time. Prior to World War II, when they were exiled in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, they were publishing in German. They were largely disconnected from the Anglosphere. They were pretty unknown. And then when you look at the postwar period, you have Frankfurt School scholars at the most prestigious universities across the United States, from Stanford to Harvard to Columbia to the New School and on and on. And they worked with a public relations campaign to I'm sorry, a public relations firm to promote their work within the Anglosphere. And they were funded in particular by the Rockefeller Foundation, who obviously appreciated the work that they were doing because they funded them not only in the United States with individual and then also collective grants, but then they funded their return to occupied West Germany in the wake of World War II. And then some of the figures who are working within the U.S. national security state and for many propaganda agencies within the U.S. national security state, like Voice of America, the Office of War Information, other agencies that I highlight in the book, they continued those ties after they moved into the university. Right. So Marcuse was arguably the leading State Department specialist on communism. And when he began working at Columbia and Harvard, he was still a State Department operative. He was still on contract with the State Department. And in fact, this should not be surprising because the people he was relocated with were the other national security state operatives who were specializing in Sovietology, who were relocated because both of the institutions that he worked at at the beginning of his academic career were U.S. national security state cutouts. that were doing the same work they were doing in Washington, except they were doing it under academic cover at Columbia and Harvard, as I spell out in some detail in the book. Now, all of this needs to be situated within the dialectical methodology that we talked about a moment ago. Individuals aren't reified, fixed, like butterflies with a pin in their back on a board, they are changing individuals and they have their own trajectories. Horkheimer went full on reactionary, supported the war in Vietnam, et cetera. Adorno arguably followed more or less the same path with some exceptions. Marcuse has his own trajectory. He was radicalized. Clearly by the student movement, the anti-imperialist movement, he ended up coming out in support of the feminist movement, the ecological movement, the racial liberation movement. He was a kind of what he referred to as a kind of movement of the minorities he supported. And he got on board with a particular version of new left Marxism. At the same time, and I'd encourage people to read through the details of this, he occupied a position that ended up maintaining the anti-communism that was foundational to all of the work that he did with the U.S. national security state. Every major book that he published outside of collections of interviews or lectures or things like that were vetted by former or current members of the US National Security State. So he continued to work closely with the colleagues that he had forged. And the idea that he was just doing anti-fascist work within the OSS is a real misrepresentation of what was going on. Because he continued to work in the State Department, he knew that Nazis were coming in through Operation Paperclip that brought 1,600 Nazis to the United States and other operations that were bringing tens of thousands of Nazis and fascists to the United States and elsewhere, if not hundreds of thousands, because the full calculations aren't readily available. And he then... had a trajectory where the critiques of fascism were always combined with a critique of the principle way in which you fight against fascism, which you eliminate the seedbed of fascism, which is the capitalist system. So I raised the larger question of, well, can you really be anti-fascist if you're resolutely anti-communist? And the last thing that I'd say, and I, again, just invite people to look at the sections in the book on this, is that The Frankfurt School is often depicted as being at the forefront of the anti-fascist struggle for the work in the OSS, but then also because of all of the research on the authoritarian personality, they're held as a kind of reference point for the leftist critique of fascism. One thing that I discovered in a lot of my research is how closely they worked with fascists. including in the post-war era when they were relocated on partially Rockefeller's dime to West Germany, they worked with a whole series of former fascists who were members of the Nazi party. They were not light, you know, accommodators. They were full-blown Nazis, including people they integrated directly into leadership positions of the Institute for Social Research. Von Friedenberg is an individual I point out explicitly because he spent more time as a Nazi than as a former Nazi before he was integrated into the Frankfurt School. And then he became one of the leaders of their work on social scientific research and became the longest serving director of the Institute for Social Research. So the idea that the Frankfurt School was this you know, hotbed of Marxist scholarship that was resolutely anti-fascist and really motivated to change the world in meaningful ways is a complete misrepresentation of this history. What we have is compatible left Marxian, anti-communist, version of intellectual work that segues extremely well with the interests of the leading imperial forces. And this is the reason that they saw them as allies. They weren't idiots. They understood that the work that they were doing was precisely the type of work that they wanted to promote.

Adnan Husain: Gabriel, I really want to thank you so much for laying all of this out, for writing this really important book. I think the whole three volumes are going to be really sensational, and I'm hoping that we'll get a chance to talk with you further, both about things that you've covered here, but also as volumes come out. But I just wanted to end with one final point of praise for the final conclusion actually had, I thought, a very interesting and important discussion about strategy versus tactics. That I actually had a conversation like this with somebody before reading this about, you know, the problem with us on the left is that we don't have enough of a sense of strategy and strategic goals such that you know when you can adjust and change tactics. And it's only if you have that kind of sense of the overall strategy that comes from this multi-sided form of knowledge and dialectical analysis that you can actually make wise decisions and choices that might look to others as abandoning a particular orientation, et cetera, but are in fact actually the tactics that you need in order to achieve the strategic objectives and the goals. That was a really helpful kind of final conclusion, which promises more as we go through unpacking the imperial knowledge, debunking it, and trying to resuscitate genuine dialectical historical materialist analysis. And so I really want to thank you for not only a really informative and analytically interesting and methodologically significant work, but also for giving us more hope, I think, and useful sources and resources in which to sustain that, that there is a chance in some ways to do some real thinking, even in the imperial core. And so I want to thank you so much for coming and talking with me and for the work that you're doing.

Gabriel Rockhill: well thank you adnan and thank you for all the great work that you're doing and it would be a pleasure to continue these uh conversations uh as additional work comes out or as you know when whenever we have the the opportunity i'll close also by saying that i wanted to conclude the book as well as I open it on a more positive note, not because of some psychological need for optimism in spite of all odds, but because I think that any true dialectical critique can only be grounded in a positive project, because the reason for criticism isn't just to debunk certain claims. It's because you have the clarity of vision of a positive project, and that is the need to develop real forms of egalitarian politics and ecologically sustainable social formations before it's too late for humanity and the planet. And that form of strategic thinking is really the highest form of socialist consciousness. And it's what we see in the work of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Lukacs and so many other figures within this tradition is they operated a very very high level. It's what, if we could invoke a non-Marxist thinker, someone like Hegel referred to as thinking in world historical terms, not to overdramatize things or things like that, but really to be able to see the fundamental forces driving life on planet Earth and identify bracing points by which we can gain leverage over them. And also, as you said, very importantly, strategic thinking does require identifying when it's necessary to engage in moments of retreat, backtracking, changing of tactics. You have to be supple. You have to be able to give up on your ideal forms of knowledge and always source your knowledge from the practical reality that you're trying to transform. This is, I think, precisely what we need to do. And maybe it's a great point to conclude. It's the last thing that I'll say on this is that so much of the Western Marxist tradition is praised for being innovative and creative and coming up with new thought forms and not being held back by these orthodox classical Marxist, etc. This is really a profound misrepresentation because the most creative, innovative, high-level thinking that you see is the thinking on the part of the people who are literally charting uncharted territory for humanity, not just theoretically, not just by reading history, understanding it, and having the strategic vision of how you build socialism in an imperialist world, but also by practically doing it. and solving all of the complex problems that have had to be solved, or at least advancing toward a solution, because full solutions are not always possible. Sometimes you have to work through contradictions, and that takes time, and it's a process. And so we have a lot to learn from this rich, deep tradition of anti imperialist Marxism, which at the end of the day is just Marxism, right? It's what we should know and recognize as real Marxism, not the imperial product that has been shoved down people's throats as a weapon of class warfare against the forms of dialectical and historical materialism that actually contribute. to human liberation and the salvation of the planet.

Adnan Husain: Speaking of learning, I think it would be great if listeners heard about the Critical Theory Workshop summer programs where maybe they can engage in some of this collectively training, how to do exactly what you're talking about. Where can people find out more information? When do these typically happen? What information can you give listeners who might be interested?

Gabriel Rockhill: Thank you for mentioning that Adnan, because I think both of us, well, I know that both of us have an intellectual practice that isn't limited to our individual production. And this is because we recognize that the collective struggle and institution building is essential to moving things in the direction that we need to move them. So the Critical Theory Workshop is an educational nonprofit, and we run a summer school that's hybrid. People can find information on the Critical Theory Workshop's web page. And it's also a portal to a number of other collective projects that I'd love for people to know about in general. These are book series, the journal The World Marxist Review, Spine, which is an association. Anyway, if people go to criticaltheoryworkshop.org, they'll find all of that information. And I'd encourage them. to support the work that you're doing with the various collective projects and get collectively plugged in to the larger struggle if it be through direct political organizing through political education or other means we need to work collectively nobody's going to do this individually and we need the systems and structures by which we can do that

Adnan Husain: Absolutely. And so take it from Gabriel. You know, you can there's a lot of good things to support both for your individual learning, but also projects that will put you in networks with larger collectivities of people collaborating together. That's the way we need to do it. And in the meantime, also check out and get this book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Part one of the intellectual world war. Until next time, comrades, peace with justice and solidarity. to you all.