[UNLOCKED] Episode 541 - Calling Out "The Compatible Left" (w/ Gabriel Rockhill)

Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have on Bad Faith Podcast for the first time, Professor Gabriel Rockhill. He is the author of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism and has raised this very provocative conversation about whether or not this idea of cultural Marxism that has been the bête noire of conservative movements for the last five, six years should also maybe be criticized by the left. So welcome to Bad Faith Podcast. It's such a pleasure to talk to you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1: I should also mention that you're a professor at Villanova University, and you also run an educational nonprofit called the Critical Theory Workshop. So I'm really happy to have you with us working through some critical theory. Now, Professor Rockhill, you've made some waves by saying things like the CIA ran the largest patronage system in the history of humanity. And I think really provoking lots of us who are very skeptical. And I've done episodes about this in the past, right, about the ways in which the CIA and other sort of deep state institutions have had this influence in our art and our cultural products and a way to influence our broader politics. You've really trained laser focus on the Frankfurt School, which is a source of a body of Marxist knowledge that is often targeted by the right as the problem and the root of all of the leftism in the country. So why is it that we should potentially be as skeptical of the Frankfurt School as, say, Christopher Ruffo?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, the first thing I'd say is that that reference to the Central Intelligence Agency being the largest patron of arts and culture, arguably in the history of humanity, comes from Hugh Wilford, who is one of the leading specialists on the Central Intelligence Agency. And when you try to calculate, because actually the budget is unlimited, according to many internal sources, it really does boggle the imagination, the amount of money and resources that this organization has funneled into arts, culture, intellectual work, and then, of course, into organizing, into unions, into the feminist movement, the Black radical movement, into so many different sources. And we could go down any of those paths that you would like to, but just to stay focused on the first question, I think that you have to understand the current right-wing assault on cultural Marxism in its historical context. And a lot of what my most recent book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, addresses is the overall architecture established in the early Cold War. And what was clear to the US empire at the exit of World War II, if not slightly before that, is that Marxism had an enormous amount of international credibility. I mean, the Soviets had just done the lion's share of defeating fascism, along with the Chinese. And some of the world's most well-known cultural producers were all very clearly self-declared communists. Pablo Picasso, perhaps the most famous artist of the 20th century, was a communist. And Paul Robeson, you know, there are many other examples that one could point to. And so what the United States recognized that it had on its hands was a serious problem. That is that it wanted to wage a war against Marxism, but Marxism had enormous credibility because it was recognized as an anti-fascist force. as well as an anti-colonial force because so many of the Marxist movements were involved in the anti-imperialist struggles that continued through the 50s and 60s. It was the fight against fascism continued in the third world, if you will. And so what the architects of the U.S. national security state decided to do, and this was in fits and starts and trying things out and seeing what worked, et cetera, was to fund and support what they called the compatible left. is critical often of capitalism, even at times of the US and some of its foreign policy. But very importantly, it is much more critical than actually existing socialism. And therefore, it ends up being accommodationist, meaning it will accommodate and accept capitalism, even if it's a bit begrudgingly, as well as imperialism. The decision on the part of these architects was because they realized they couldn't just do a frontal war on Marxism and win. It wasn't in the cards. The left was too strong globally. And so the war on the Marxist intelligentsia and cultural producers was to shore up a compatible left version of Marxism. And just fast-forwarding, because I'm sure you have other questions and comments, a few decades, I think it's clear that this war, this kind of intellectual world war, was largely successful, so much so that the dominant positions within the imperial core tend to be, if they're leftist, they tend to traffic in forms of compatible leftism, meaning accept imperialism and maybe perhaps even capitalism as a better option to socialism. What you currently see with the intensification of fascism in the imperial core and in the United States in particular is the real project behind this. They didn't want to shore up a compatible left. They wanted to destroy the left. And now that they have, to a certain extent, not fully and not entirely, but they've made major advances in redefining the left in the United States as a compatible left. There are many leftists who are pro-imperialists. And they don't even see a contradiction between being self-declared on the left and supporting U.S. military interventions around the world. Now, with the current Trump administration and for a whole series of factors, the rise of the global south, the rise of China, the decline of U.S. empire, there is a turn towards fascism. to intensify the kind of project of accumulation on a global scale, and they want to destroy any left whatsoever. And so now they're going after, and you see this in Project 2025, they spell out very clearly that one of their enemies is this cultural Marxism affiliated with the Frankfurt School and other developments. that many scholars just refer to as western marxism and so we need this historical perspective otherwise we think that the project that i'm engaged in is somehow compatible with what the right is engaged in and instead what i'm trying to demonstrate is that if you begin by shoring up the compatible left then you are on the historical path toward an increasing fascism what we need is a non-compatible left meaning a left that's not compatible with capitalism and imperialism

Speaker 1: This is so rich for me, and I know many folks in the audience are going to feel the same sort of provocation because it feels like what we've been exploring for the last five years on this podcast and what we keep butting up against are folks who seem, even who identify as leftists, we're not talking about liberals or neoliberals or mainstream Democrats, but people who I very much feel or experience as being in my political community. Having a more willingness, shall we say, than those in another part of the left, the part of the left that I see myself as belonging to, to be accommodating. To capitalism, often with a kind of a pragmatic rationalization for why it is that we have to, let's say, vote blue no matter who or why an elected Democrat who identifies as a DSA member or electives should not be as adversarial to the Democratic Party because they're saving their political capital or working toward a long game. So there's a part of me that is. For a lot of reasons, some of personal reasons, really interested in the idea of the compatible left and how that's manifesting today. But I wanted to ask, I wanted to clarify, when you're talking about a compatible left, to what extent are you talking about just the reality of the establishment of a Democratic Party? That is one of two corporate wings that we have in establishment politics today. And how much are you being critical of folks who identify as leftists, who identify even as Marxists or socialists, but have been co-opted wittingly or unwittingly into this sort of compatible left project?

Gabriel Rockhill: I would say that the Democratic Party is actually quite significantly to the right of the form of compatible leftism funded covertly by the CIA, because the form of leftism that they were focused on was a social democratic left in the post-war European context. And many of these were self-declared either Marxists or socialists who thought that we could maintain a kind of softer version of capitalism with a social safety net. And one of the operators involved in these covert ops, Thomas Braden, is on record saying, well, we funded the socialists in Europe because they were the only ones who gave a damn about fighting the communists. Meaning that was the central dividing line, if you will. The communists being those who identified with criticisms often, but at least had some critical support for. socialism as a real world state building project. And so they defend things like Cuba or the Soviet Union or other examples that one could point to. And of course, there's a whole, you know, kind of gradation, if you will, from levels of support and levels of critique. In the case of the Democratic Party of the United States and even just the history of the United States, the social welfare state here is, you know, pales in comparison to what was introduced in Europe. And the Democratic Party is a party of capital. It's a party of imperialism. And the principal difference with the Republican Party is that they have a different strategy for global imperialism. Otherwise, they agree on what most leftists consider to be the fundamentals. And with that said, though, you know, in general terms, absolutely. The Democratic Party in this country is compatible left in the sense that it's compatible with capitalism and imperialism. It's just pretty far to the right, if you will, of the compatible.

Speaker 1: It's compatible because it's the same thing.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, well, that leads to just one other thing that I wanted to highlight, which I think is very important. And that is that in organizing, it is essential to diagnose the precise play of forces in any given conjuncture. The United States arguably has a much more right wing political culture than even the other imperialist countries in Western Europe. And in that particular context, one can distinguish between tactics and strategies, right? The strategy is your overall goal. Like where do you want to head in decades from now? Tactics are the stepping stones that you use to get there. And at times in politics, you have to tactically make allegiances and compromises in order to aim for strategic goals in the long term. And so it really depends on the particular orientations of political figures, movements, parties, et cetera. But for instance, if you rewind back to the first Bernie Sanders campaign and you'd raise the question of whether or not one should support them, this isn't just a moral question. of I'm all in with Bernie or I'm absolutely against him because ultimately he supports imperialism. I think that many people could recognize that, well, Bernie introduced a kind of socialist revitalization, democratic socialist, granted, but within the horizons of the U.S. political culture, which maintains imperialism and has no suggestion that it's going to abolish capitalism. And so you could tactically support the Sanders campaign while recognizing that what you want is to shift the political horizons further to the left, so that you can then create space for an even more trenchant version of kind of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1: It makes absolute sense. I mean, this is, I think, the posture of someone like Shama Sawant, who did support Bernie in 2016 and 2020 and is currently running for Congress right now, who was an elected city councilwoman in Seattle as a socialist, all of these kinds of things. It certainly hasn't abandoned electoralism or the possibility of working within the system of the Democratic Party, even maybe that's not the right running and operating in in American politics where the caucus that she's going to be a part of is the Democratic Party. But the distinction that she makes is that she has an adversarial relationship to it and that her longer-term goals, the strategy, as you put it, has much more left horizons than many other folks in the party cohort. And I do think that part of the challenge, and I wrestle with this myself, is understanding to what extent I'm making progress political considerations versus unnecessary compromises. To what extent I'm having overly limited political expectations or whether or not I'm being a sort of a cuckoo accelerationist, tanky or whatever they call you on the internet if you dream an iota too big, right? And I am curious about, I mean, how do you titrate that? How do you, and maybe this is a good opportunity to get back to the book and understanding what sorts of influence the CIA and the state has had in trying to constrain our horizons, our scope of what we think the strategy should be, as we try to understand how to confront that and design our own expectations as a contemporary political movement.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think that the U.S. state has done just about everything. I mean, we'll see. Actually, I shouldn't say that because in the future they'll probably do more. But they've done a lot to curtail any of the democratic elements that are operative. And if you go back and study the history of the founding of the United States, it wasn't founded as a democracy. It was established as a republic. A republic was the terminology used in the Enlightenment to refer to an oligarchy, the rule of the few. And the struggles to democratize the US state have come from below. They've come from the working class. They've come from the women's liberation movement, the racial liberation movement. These are the things that have expanded some semblance of democracy. But. This has all been in fits and starts, and the U.S. state is very, very powerful and continues to beat back people power in various ways. You're probably familiar with the study done at Princeton a number of years ago that demonstrated that the average U.S. citizen has little to no political power in this country, whereas major corporations and their lobbies exercise an overwhelming amount of influence on politicians.

Speaker 1: That 2014 Princeton study is a major part of my entire personality. I might as well just shove it into my dating profile. It is important to me, yes.

Gabriel Rockhill: These are the basics, right? Yeah, and then we can see whether or not we can advance to the next stage. And that is a fight that's worth fighting. And so just to toggle back to what you were mentioning about the difference between tactical compromises and either being a sellout or abandoning one's principles, this is a delicate process, right? And I think that the best kind of political organizers and intellectuals and journalists on that front always keep squarely in mind the importance of the strategic horizon And they always frame politics in terms of the global struggle of humanity, meaning that you have to look internationally at the historical ways in which the global north has underdeveloped the global south for its own profits and that the struggle is for the liberation of all of humanity, and that the history of that struggle has primarily been the history of the peoples who have been most exploited and most oppressed by that system, the racialized peoples of the global South, rising up and demanding greater democracy, more power, more sovereignty. And so what can we do in this country to facilitate that that rising movement of humanity that has made enormous, enormous gains in spite of, you know, endless setbacks as well. And one of the most important things we can do is support the peace movement, the anti-imperialist movement, say no to war, and support those of our brothers and sisters in, you know, what has historically been referred to as the kind of colonies. in their struggle for liberation, as well as all of the struggles internally within the United States. Now, I know I took your question in a slightly different direction, so feel free to get me back on track if necessary.

Speaker 1: No, no, not at all. This is perfect because my follow-up is then, how does that idea of having an internationalist perspective, which seems so core to a Marxist worldview, get sort of filtered out through the Frankfurt School or whatever this sort of process is of repackaging One of the, I think, easiest ways of understanding the book that I just published is that I apply a Marxist analysis to Marxism.

Gabriel Rockhill: What I mean by that is Marxists always ask the question of ownership and property. Who owns the means of intellectual production, the means of communication that we use? And how does that power exercise influence over the content? At a certain level, it's a very basic question. We've seen this with all the struggle around the ongoing genocide in West Asia and the number of journalists who've been deplatformed, killed outright by the Zionist entity or all of the kind of expunging of videos and other such things. Right. So this should be in the forefront of people's minds if they've been paying attention as of late. If you look at the history of the Marxist intelligentsia, then one thing that becomes clear is that Marxism itself has been affected by the history of imperialism. So just connecting this to what I was just saying, if the history of the world over the last five centuries, in a nutshell, has been the underdevelopment of the South for the overdevelopment of the North, and in particular, the lining of the pockets of the capitalist ruling class, what that means is that in the global North, you have an intelligentsia that has a very privileged social and economic position in relationship to geopolitics and to just the economics of the globe. And that class position has had nefarious impacts on their thinking. one way that you see that very clearly is that with the tradition referred to as western marxism which is the version of marxism that developed in europe the united states going back to the world war one but really developing more intensely in the kind of wake of world war ii is that so many of these figures they were critical of capitalism and in particular of the kind of consumerist experience of you know middle class subjects under capitalism which they were themselves But they often either supported directly imperialism, which Max Horkheimer, he supported the war in Vietnam, which is extraordinary, or the imperialist intervention in 1956 on the part of the British and the French and the Israelis in what's called the Suez Crisis. It was an imperialist intervention, even recognized as such by the UN. So sometimes they just overtly supported militarized imperialist interventions. And other times they just kind of implicitly acknowledged that the system that they profited from, the system that promoted their work as the most important work, was the system that they acquiesced to, if you will, or accommodated. And they rejected those struggles on the part of the peoples of the global south to combat imperialism, like the Vietnamese people in Vietnam is just one example. And so I don't want to get too complex in teasing out the various elements of this, but To bring it all to a point, I would say that left politics in the imperial core in the US and Western Europe has been deeply, deeply affected by the history of imperialism. The fact that we live in countries that have materially benefited from centuries of colonialism, means that a lot of the left has been perverted by that history. I mean, look at U.S. American culture. It's so militarized. It's so racist. It is so in support of all of the imperial interventions and will come up with all of these excuses for it. And all of that is due to this deep history, but it's also driven by economic forces. Right. There are people who, you know, many of them, their livelihoods depend directly on the military industrial complex or they benefit indirectly from what's called the wages of colonialism. And they're just a higher level of developments in the global north. And so a lot of that informs the book because I engage in a kind of political economy of knowledge production. That's also a political economy of left forces that tries to explain why is the left so far right in this country? Well, a lot of it has to do with the history of imperialism.

Speaker 1: So there's a version of this critique of the sort of limits of the academic class that comes from folks like Catherine Liu and Adolph Reed, who talk a lot about the professional managerial class and the fact that they simply don't share the same economic context of the people that they're ostensibly advocating on behalf of as Marxist academics or what have you. makes their focus often disproportionately on elite concerns, things that are not as structurally threatening, let's say. So you get this sort of discourse that maybe birthed the woke era, where the level of discourse was about, you're not allowed to touch my hair, and is tardiness a form of white supremacy? I know what the actual substantive arguments are there, so that's not to say that there's no there there. But you get this superficial discourse where we're all supposed to be very upset that a salesperson didn't try to sell Oprah a $40,000 Birkin bag while ignoring... The substantive problems, economic problems that are experienced by most black Americans outside of a retail context or in a retail context, like not being able to rent an apartment because it has racial discrimination in housing. OK, there's that sort of framing of this. But you are writing about something that's even deeper and more pernicious, not just sort of the natural allegiances that come from sharing a class context. with elites and the wages of sort of academic privilege, even if it doesn't come with this remuneration that, you know, billionaires are not exactly hanging on yachts necessarily. Although for certain Harvard professors hanging out with- No, that's a good point. You know.

Gabriel Rockhill: For MIT.

Speaker 1: That's neither here nor there. For MIT. But you're talking about an active cultivation in some respects of people having certain kinds of ideas and infiltrating- arts, culture, et cetera, in order to prevent more radical forms of art and expression and academic pursuits from being explored.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yes, absolutely. I think that both of those are important factors. So there are social and economic forces that are pushing kind of from the base up, but there are also forces that are part of the overall cultural system within which ideas are produced and circulate. One of the ways in which I theoretically articulate this in the book is in terms of the military industrial academic complex, right? Military, of course, you know, signaling the U.S. state, industrial, the capitalist ruling class, Wall Street, if you will, and then academic, the kind of broader intellectual world. Because if you study it in detail, as I have in this book, you recognize that there is no ivory tower, you know, a place like Harvard, a place like MIT, especially the Ivy League institutions and the University of California networks, all of the elite institutions. institutions of higher education are embedded so deeply in the U.S. power matrix, it boggles the imagination when you start to look into it. What was it? The president of the Rochester Institute of Technology was working directly with the Central Intelligence Agency and coordinating with them for faculty hires. And Herbert Marcuse, who was one of the leading luminaries of the Frankfurt School, was hired at Columbia and at Harvard while he was still a State Department. He was under State Department contract at that point in time, one of the leading intellectual figures who was a specialist in communism. And the two institutes that he was hired at were actually direct U.S. national security state cutouts. What I mean by that is. is that the group of people that he was working with in Washington, D.C., or proximate to D.C., were simply relocated, at times making up 80 or so percent of the teaching faculty at Harvard and at Columbia. And the Russian institutes that were established there and provided the foundational work for U.S. Sovietology were... were themselves set up by the U.S. national security state working directly with the presidents of these universities. Another example would be the Princeton Consultancy Group, where four times a year, academics would meet with the top brass of the Central Intelligence Agency, including people like Alan Dulles, the longest serving head of Central Intelligence, to work on the research necessary for national intelligence estimates. National intelligence estimates are the highest form of intelligence that inform everything that the U.S. intelligence network does. And so once you mine down into this history, one of the things that comes to the fore is that intellectual work is not independent. of power and the forces of imperialism is very deeply entwined with it. And so one of the tasks in this work and work that is comparable to my own is to bring to the fore the kind of power matrix driving ideas so that we no longer assume that, well, ideas just operate in a free marketplace and those that are the most prominent happen to be the ones that most people like. That's not how ideas circulate in a capitalist world. Instead, there is a very controlled market and there are institutional forces that sculpt already the producers of those ideas and then have an inordinate amount of power over what ideas are produced, which ones are circulated, which ones are promoted. And they've set up what Frank Wisner of the CIA referred to as the mighty Wurlitzer. It's a kind of jukebox where from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he could press a button and have any story that he wanted play around the world in all of the press assets of the agency. And that is an incredibly powerful mechanism that is alive and well, and that continues to inform public opinion in various ways. So just bringing that all to a close, I would say that a lot of what my book brings to the fore is the war of ideas and how it actually operates and what we need to understand in order to more effectively intervene in it.

Speaker 1: It's very difficult. I think I heard you say or write somewhere that Ivy League institutions are like the number one recruiting ground and breeding ground for these ideas and recruiting ground for CIA favorable assets. I don't know how you want to frame it. And that seems obviously true. From my experience, it seems obviously true from if you look around and look at the Wikipedia pages and backgrounds and education of the folks who are covering the news and who are the heads of these universities and who are the heads of law firms and who are the heads of Raytheon and who are revolving door, the secretaries of defense and all of these things around and around and around. They're all friends. And yet the public discourse, as promulgated by conservatives, obviously, is that colleges are bastions of liberalism and progressivism. And they have very much been waging a war on colleges, of course, starting decades ago, or maybe not even starting decades ago, but emerging in a real way decades ago with Reagan's attack on any kind of growth of a free public education, higher education system. And sort of manifesting in this very dystopian world we have today where both Democrats and Republicans on the whole were very antagonistic to the idea of any kind of student debt cancellation. Biden offered this $10,000 compromise that he didn't really put his back behind. And now you can get student debt cancellation in America if you join ICE. But otherwise, it's a political idea that is a nonstarter, not to mention the idea of a free public education. So I do wonder what you make of the messaging that says colleges are liberal passions that need to be attacked by the right and the reality that they have, in fact, been the breeding grounds for so much right wing racism. And also it's worth noting it's a way to support and fund conservative efforts as someone who's on the left who doesn't experience any kind of institutional support whatsoever because obviously liberal institutions also are very antagonistic to the left. I think it's worth noting that when Republicans try and fail to, let's say, run for office or a Republican gets canceled, journalists, let's say, a right-leaning journalist gets canceled for a take, they're offered these fellowship positions. They're offered book deals from academic presses. They're offered positions advising at the Cato Institute or what have you. And there is a real effect in their being able to stay in this space and promulgate conservative political goals, you know, work toward conservative political goals in the way that doesn't exist on the left where you're India Walton, you run for mayor, you fail, and you're back to kind of scraping and struggling to survive.

Gabriel Rockhill: Those are such good points. You know, the... CIA actually admitted in 1975 during the church committee hearings that they were working with thousands of academics at hundreds of institutions. So it's just part of the public record that the so-called ivory tower is so closely integrated with the U.S. national security state that it should not be surprising that so many academics advance the agendas of imperialism. And in fact, Daniel Golden has a good book that he wrote in 2017, in which he claims that, this is a direct citation, invited or not, openly or not, U.S. intelligence today touches virtually every facet of academic life. Its influence likely equals or surpasses its previous peak in the 1950s, end quote. So this is part of, there's much more that could be said, of course, but it's part of the reality of the current academy. That being said, the academy is still a site of struggle because in principle, it's an institution that is supposed to foster knowledge. And one of the contradictions under capitalism that you see in a lot of its cultural and educational institutions is that it needs to present itself as being democratic, based on a meritocracy, open to all perspectives. and things like this, while at the same time, it's very tightly controlled from behind the scenes in a very draconian manner. And the space opened by that contradiction between needing to appear democratic and not actually being democratic does give us some leverage. And it's important that the university is a site that says that it's interested in education. And so from a more progressive perspective, you can bring ideas into a university space. One of the reasons that the CIA's central site of recruitment is the university is because they want to get people when they're young, because they realize that they can be influenced, they can be brought in, et cetera. And so it's important as well not to give up on the university as important kind of site of struggle for bringing people in. And this is the one of the reasons that you have the current war on education, that The Trump administration does not want an educated public because an educated public would know things like, I don't know, the elections in Venezuela, according to Jimmy Carter, of all people, are more democratic than elections in the United States. They don't want people to know that according to the largest study ever done by Waitzkin and Sarazoto in 1985, I believe, mid 80s, socialism outperformed capitalism in terms of physical quality of life index meaning that people tend to live longer there's lower infant mortality and people have higher literacy rates in short that it's better for the life of people if young people are going to the university and they're exposed to true ideas, it can and often does have a radicalizing impact. They don't want that. They need to stultify the US population. And so the war on education, the war on journalism is in order to advance a fascist project and to make the US public increasingly ignorant of global politics, of economics, of everything, so that they can then easily accept the false narratives that are put forth to advance their agendas. And what we need to do is develop more progressive forms of political education across the board in order to counter those powerful forces that are posited against us.

Speaker 1: How much have you thought about what that looks like and how to do it? Because I got to tell you, when I say it resonates with my personal experience, I'm thinking of two things. One, I'm thinking about the soft power of a Chipotle burrito. What I mean by that is when I was in law school, you would go to events because there was free food. Everyone had free pizza lunches. Every club, every group would try to entice you with free pizza. But the choice... The choice events that you really wanted to go to is when they had free Chipotle, which was relatively kind of novel at the time, or Qdoba or whatever was on offer back in the early aughts. And the Federalist Society, the conservative recruitment vehicle for Supreme Court justices and ultimately Supreme Court justices, always had the best food. And that was kind of an open joke. It's like, that's how they're going to get us all on the door. Oh, we're just going to go and grab a burrito and leave. And, you know, many people did that. But there's also the chance that you are a less kind of principled and ideologically formed person who goes and sits and stays. And the next thing you know, you're a clerk in for Alito. so i saw how that was playing out and on the other hand i mentioned before we started recording that i had this one marxist professor in law school who was my section leader and my taught me corporate law and also torts who radicalized me through corporate law by opening the class saying you know most corporate law classes start by explaining to you That willingness to pay equals ability to pay. And this is how economics classes get off and going. But I'm going to put to you some examples. Let's say you're dying and you need health care. Certainly your willingness to pay to stay alive is infinite and your ability to pay is not. So let's talk about how the fundamental basis of economics is.

Speaker 3: a lie.

Speaker 1: And he made it clear to us that this was a relatively rare introduction to the topic and went on to debunk a lot of mythologies around cases in the public sphere, like the McDonald's, the case where the woman spilled a cup of coffee on her lap and got third degree burns and the public made a mockery of it. Oh, this woman is trying to fleece McDonald's. She should have just not been so clumsy, but actually explaining the background of the case and how no, McDonald's is saving a penny per cup by superheating their coffee. and you should not be handed coffee under any circumstances that would burn an elderly woman's groin area down to the bone. That is not a temperature that coffee should be. That's not a matter of being responsible or irresponsible. That's a hazard that they're creating to earn a narrow profit. So he introduced us to this world, but we were also very conscious of the fact that this was anomalous and that most people at these so-called liberal institutions are very much being indoctrinated that this is the way the economy works. These are the rules that assume a stapler. People are rational actors, not to mention all of the stuff about communism being bad, socialism being bad, these countries being poor, et cetera, et cetera, that you alluded to earlier. So knowing that that's what we're up against, knowing how the funding structures work that we've alluded to, and knowing how a lot of this got set into place very intentionally. And I keep cutting you off before you have an opportunity to really tell the narrative history of what happened with the Frankfurt School. But I am curious, you know, what kind of thought you've given to getting out of this.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, it's one of the central questions of cultural class struggle. They have all the money. They have all the power. They control all the institutions. What are you going to do about it? And if you look at what humanity has done about it, I think there's a lot to be inspired by. It's a David and Goliath struggle. That's the nature of anti-imperialism. The imperialists always have all of the money and all the power or the overwhelming majority of it on their side. They also have the advanced technology. They have the control of institutions. And those who are opposed to that really have always had to fight like crazy. scrappy little Davids who have to figure it out by any means necessary, working on a shoestring budget, pulling things together, improvising. You have to make up in people power and in community and in camaraderie and in mutual support what you lack in resources. And it's a difficult fight. If it wasn't so difficult, we would have won a long time ago. But it is, I think, one of the most important because if you simply go and have your, you know, Chipotle burrito, and then all of a sudden you're working for the American Enterprise Institute, you know, a few years later, and you can afford a lot better than Chipotle at that point in time, then what you've done is you've taken a human life. You only have one of them on planet Earth, as far as we know. And you've given it to the corporatocracy. You've become a cog in a system. And you can very well dope yourself into thinking that you're doing something else or just use the money and go on skiing trips and go on yachts and whatnot. But at the end of the day, what you're doing with your human life is you're contributing to the literal social murder and ecocide of the planet. And you're doing that directly or indirectly, but you're part of and you're complicit with that. So the other thing that I would say is we do have humanity on our side. Like the people who are struggling as the scrappy underdogs of human history are aimed at alleviating the incredible levels of death and suffering that have structured human history on planet Earth, particularly over the last five centuries, if we're just focused on capitalism. And they're struggling to make a world in which... People can eat and have shelter and running water and electricity. And so if you're going to do one thing with your life instead of screwing everybody else over in order to feel, you know, be able to drink fancy martinis or whatever you happen to be into or or for that matter, get involved in pedophilia rings and the global sex trade and be raping 12 year olds or other things like our capitalist ruling class does and continues to do, along with the political and intellectual elite that's part of that complex. Instead of being on the side of the kind of pedophiles of history and those who are just morally depraved and debaucherous, you could be on the side of humanity and, you know, contribute to a struggle that really matters in any way, shape or form. And also be inspired by those who have fought and won. A lot of people have given their lives to making the world better. And a lot of people have succeeded in making the world better. That's the last thing that I'd say is that we can't be lulled into the defeatist narrative. There have been major changes, even in a country like this. When this country was set up as a republic, you couldn't vote for the president. You couldn't vote for the Senate. You had to pay a poll tax. You had to be a property owner. That has changed. And it's changed because of class struggle from below. It's changed due to massive human sacrifice. And it's much better to be on that side of history because, as Fidel Castro said, history will absolve us because we're on the side of humanity.

Speaker 1: I agree with you, obviously. But you're still thinking about this. I'm not being a defeatist. No, it's not. Here's what I'm thinking of. The argument about we have one human life on the planet and you don't want to use it working for the American Enterprise Institute resonates with me. But I mean, I've seen how... People also make the case that you have one life on this earth and I don't want to spend it struggling to make ends meet, living in substandard conditions. I watched a TikTok of a young woman earlier today who was talking about how she quit her job over Gaza and how she didn't really expect to not be able to get employed later and that she's really struggling two years later and she's not regretful of the moral consequences assessment that she did at the time. She was also getting sexually harassed at work. It was, it sounds like a really terrible work environment for a lot of reasons, but that she was dealing with the real world consequences of it being a bad job market, of there being so many institutions in her field that are dominated by Zionists that, you know, she's kind of hopped out of the frying pan into the fire.

Speaker 3: I quit my job for Palestine two years ago and I regret it. I feel like it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I feel like I have ruined my life past the point of no return. Like I have been unable to get back on my feet. Every door keeps slamming in my face and it has me questioning every decision I've made in the past two years. I quit because I was working at a small consulting firm and After October 2023, I found out that they were Zionists, major Zionists. I mean, the company was only like 20 something people and it was filled with Zionists who were harassing me, who were sending emails to the entire company. in support of Israel. And there were a lot of things that started to add up that made me realize that I had actually been being discriminated against by the leadership for years. And the straw that broke the camel's back was that after I made a complaint to HR about an email that was sent out to the company about the mental health of Israelis, a leader in the company went out of their way to pursue a client who had a program that supported Israelis with their mental health. And that just felt like the biggest slap in the face. I felt so unsafe at that company for other reasons as well, because I was being smectually harassed by the CEO as well, who had been inappropriate on countless occasions, all of which was reported to HR before I left, by the way. And despite all of that, that still felt like a better option than the position I'm in right now. And I don't say this to like discourage people from doing things in acts of protest, but this is the reality of living in America and living under the shackles of capitalism. You have to fall in line with the system if you want to survive, otherwise you're screwed. I am just in like the lowest point of my life. And I honestly don't know how I'm gonna get out of it because I never expected that this would go on for two years, especially someone like me. Like I don't mean to brag, but I am a high achiever. Like anyone who has known me my entire life, I've always been in the top 1% of my classes. I was fucking valedictorian. I studied neuroscience. I am one of the best employees at every company that I've worked at. And I know that, I know my value. But you can't prove that to companies, especially in an incredibly competitive job market. I just don't fucking know what to do anymore.

Speaker 1: And I've seen particularly among black peers who feel like I'm the first of my generation, first to my family to access these opportunities and this elite higher education. to earn more money than anybody's ever earned before? And don't I have an obligation to go and work at McKinsey or what have you? And how are you going to tell me that the bladder has to be pulled up the second that I got here? And I'm very cognizant of how the argument to do the right thing is even harder to make or is maybe even resisted more fulsomely from people who are from historically marginalized groups. And I have some interpersonal experiences Sympathy for that position at the same time that it is obvious that our collective fate depends on some substantial chunk of us making the choice to make a personal sacrifice so that we're all not building drones that are ultimately going to come back on us in the imperial boomerang of it all.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, you have to see yourself as part of something larger than yourself. And there is a rank individualism baked into U.S. culture where you're taught that what matters is you as an individual and your career or your ability to get a job or whatever. what you can consume and other such things. And of course, particularly when you're dealing with communities that have been subjected to extreme forms of immiseration, everybody has to survive and find ways of surviving. And at times you have to make tactical sacrifices. It's not like there's a clean job market out there where you can work for the perfect entity that's going to, you know, actually be perfectly in line with your political and economic ideals. But you can, I think, deal with the complexities of that fact while also if we want to get out of the world that we're in, if you're in a family, you're close with friends and you want your people to have a better life. then you have to think of yourself as part of something much larger than just your individual trajectory. And that is a kind of gestalt shift. It's from individual opportunism to recognition that you're part of something larger than yourself.

Speaker 1: Professor Rocco, even the word opportunism, like I want to be so clear that I'm with you. But I feel also that I'm in a privileged position, for instance, where I can get fired from my corporate newscasting job and I can still support myself with this podcast because I happen to be, quote unquote, famous enough that I can get a certain number of subscribers and still be able to pay my rent and my own health insurance. But that's a very privileged position that I have because I was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders and that I was chosen for that largely because of the pedigree that I have, not because of my political experience per se, and that those are like stacked privileges that other people don't have. And what am I supposed to do? Tell some person who's working at Starbucks because it is a tough job market that they shouldn't work at Starbucks because Starbucks is an evil institution and I'm boycotting Starbucks? Is it enough that they're unionizing their Starbucks? Am I supposed to tell some Amazon delivery worker that they're evil because they're working for Bezos when I'm not the one that has to do it?

Gabriel Rockhill: I'm with you on all of that. I also, I'm a university professor, I'm tenured, you know, I have a certain small platform, so I am definitely among the privileged. There's no doubt about that. And I'm not advocating for harassing Amazon workers or anything like that. I'm for harassing Jeff Bezos and the ownership class and figuring out how, you know, you don't choose the circumstances of your exploitation, right? Those are imposed upon you.

Speaker 1: What do you say to the people who went to law school and are working at some firm and the firm bent the knee to Trump? What do you say to the person who is, let's say they're a doctor and they feel the downward pressure to spend limited time with patients and not order that x-ray because the health insurance company told them not to? I mean, there's a big gap between the delivery worker and Jeff Bezos, obviously. But now we're in this like weird PMZ zone, which coming back to the book does seem to be the zone where people have a significant amount of power and influence like these Marxist scholars and professors and are getting a lot from the system. Yeah. And yet aren't they aren't literally the titans of industry. They're not the Rockefellers who are funding their work.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. I mean, I would say that the kind of broad working class, the Amazon workers, the Uber drivers and things like this, it is in many ways easier to radicalize them or get them involved in politics because they have the lived experience of exploitation. They're the ones who are delivering packages in the rain. They're the ones who can't afford health care. They're the ones who are sleeping in their cars. They're the ones who should clearly know we need system change because it's not working. But to get to system change, you can't do that on your own. And you just quitting your job isn't going to get us anywhere. What you have to do is work together in an organized form to change the system. And you need the political education to know how people have fought and won in the past so that you can reinvent those tools in the future. The middle layer or the middle class is a very different animal because you have a class that benefits from the crumbs that fall from the table of the ruling class. And that has been put in a situation in which many of them aspire to a bourgeois lifestyle. They might not have yachts, but they love to go on them and maybe get a yacht if they could just, you know, get certain performance in their in their job or whatnot. And those who are on the left end of that spectrum. Some of them will identify very clearly, and both Marx, Lenin, Engels said this very clearly. They said that for a true transformation of society, you actually do need members of this middle layer and members of the intelligentsia who align themselves on the broad working class for a system change. because they're the ones who have the leisure and time and material resources necessary to do a systemic analysis of society and develop things like a sophisticated economic analysis of contemporary capitalism, for instance. Whereas somebody delivering Amazon packages might be able to educate themselves on the weekends, but they're beaten down so much by the system that they don't have as much time and resources. But many in the middle layer who are on the left, and this brings us back to some of your references, like to the work of Adolph Reed Jr., who I think is an incredible and important figure, is that some of that middle layer will pose as leftist while actually just wanting to maintain their status as superior to the broader working class. And that's the segment of the middle class that is open to and has been to at least some extent bought off by the capitalist ruling class. And what they want to do is appear as leftists without actually being dedicated to a serious system change. You know, there are these compatible leftists who want the symbolic credibility of appearing on the left while materially and economically they want to still be above the working class. They're actually fearful of being driven down into the working class. And so that middle layer is historically it's very unstable. Right. It can be perfectly aligned on the ruling class and work for the American Enterprise Institute or other such organizations. It can also pose as leftist without actually wanting a system change because it might mean a change in their the quality of their own life. And what I advocate for is that that middle layer, and there's great examples of this, the Cuban Revolution, which is obviously in the news with the war on the Caribbean, many of the leaders of that revolution were from the middle layer. They were lawyers, they were doctors, they were trained, they were educated students. That's where some of the leaders of that movement came out of. And they decided that the most important thing was the liberation of Cuba from imperialism, more so than their law career or their doctor's career. And they also recognized you need lawyers and you need doctors under socialism. It's just that you need the lawyer of the people. You need the doctor of the people. You need people who actually care for other people, not just being a kind of cog in the insurance system and making money for themselves.

Speaker 1: How conscious do you think the choice to, for lack of a better word, sell out is? I've heard you talk about figures like Salvoi Žižák, for instance, who has arguably been positioned as a representative of Marxist thought While talking about Marxism only in kind of an abstract, what do you call it, utopian Marxism, as opposed to supporting real life versions of Marxist governments in the world, whether it's Cuba or Venezuela or whatever example you would point to. How would you call out someone like Zizak versus other sorts of actors who, I mean, I deal with this every day, right? Like I don't necessarily want to be walking around thinking, oh, that person's an op, right? I think it gets really like paranoid and destructive. It could just be a person who disagrees with me on strategy, okay? But sometimes I have to admit, I see who's invited first. on MSNBC and who's blacklisted. I see the ways of talking about social democracy that seem sanctioned and the red lines that seem to be thrown up in other instances. And I do wonder about the soft versus hard influences that folks are under and how you've, for example, come to a decision about what you think is motivating someone like Zizek.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think that if you approach this issue from an analysis of the system and you situate subjects within the system, we all know, given your own experience within the legal world and your education, that the system... has rewards and punishments linked to it that anyone who wants to succeed in that system knows. And you internalize it. It's like knowing how to get a good grade in a class. You're like, okay, the professor wants me to act like this, talk like this. I've got to tick these boxes and then I'll get a good grade. The system operates in much the same way. And To survive within that system or to advance, you have to, to some degree, give it what it wants. And that could be a negotiation process too, where you give it a bit, but at the same time, you hold back on other things. You know, there's an extensive gray zone. if you will, between somebody who's just completely selling themselves out to the system and somebody who's not. Henry S. Kissinger, as he was referred to by his fellow students at Harvard, is a good example. That guy was sucking up left, right, and center. He was just an absolute bourgeois pig who wanted to ingratiate himself to the system and do anything for the system. But of course, there are other people who are a little bit more liminal or will push back in certain minor ways. And so in doing an analysis, you have to really look at, well, here's what the system wants. And here are how different subjects are situated in relationship to it. Some of them giving a lot more, some of them resisting in various ways, but all of them subjected to its pressures, right? There's no subject who gets to live their life outside of any social and economic system. We all have to deal with it. And so then the question becomes how and to what extent do you push back against the imperatives of the system? And in the case of someone like Zizek or other intellectuals of his ilk, the system of intellectual production in the West does have an entire market niche that is leftist intellectual production. But the red line is whether or not you produce work that seriously investigates and potentially even supports socialism in real world forms. And if you start to do that, then the system is going to push you out and it's going to try to de-platform you, label you in various ways. That's how that system operates. In Zizek's case, he was, you know, he's a self-described liberal. He was the founder of the Liberal Party that was involved in dismantling socialism in Yugoslavia. And so a lot of his claims to be a Marxist or a great communist or all of these things, this is just waving a red flag as a propaganda campaign to appear lefty because it's trendy in certain market niches or niches. But he's not someone who has a historical record of doing that at all. On the contrary, he's someone who supported the kind of general totalitarian discourse. And he oversaw, I mean, he supported... the capitalist measures being introduced in the former Yugoslavia. So the guy's on paper as being a pro-capitalist anti-communist and his own self-presentation is little more than leftist posing. It's commie cosplay, if you will. And there's a lot of that, unfortunately, on the left. And it confuses people, particularly young people who don't have either historical perspective or the kind of breadth of view to be able to distinguish someone like Zizek from someone like George Jackson, for instance, who was a major intellectual and political figure in the United States, was assassinated in prison, but also put forth writings that are of a very, very different tenor than what you find in Zizek and are much more more worth reading than Zizek.

Speaker 1: All the good ones die in prison or killed somewhere or die poor, Kwame Torey style. I mean, honestly, it has gotten to the point where I borderline am not that interested in you if you're doing too well for yourself. I wish I could remember exactly what it was we were debating when he was last on the show, Zizek was last on the show. But I have had the experience of finding myself banging my head against a wall in conversations with some of these folks who I sort of had the expectation of having more radical politics. Noam Chomsky, I got to say, is another one of these. And I wonder what your take is on him, not just in the context of the Epstein reporting, but generally speaking as a public left intellectual. Our butting of heads happened when he came on the show in I think our 10th episode. And it was right before the 2020 election. And you know, I was confronting this question of vote blue no matter who. And I even conceded, let's say that Trump is a unique existential threat and that we're going to project forward into what the left should do for 2024 and not 2020. What is your thinking about how to get out of this lesser of two evil cycle, which basically guarantees we're going to get pairs of increasingly evil people to the end of all time because of the ratchet effect?

Speaker 3: And

Speaker 1: Even worse than us just disagreeing, I was frustrated by the rigidity with which he pushed back, basically unwilling to engage the question substantively and just repeating that you just got to vote every four years.

Speaker 3: You got to stand in the light of the vote. You just got to stand in the light of it.

Speaker 1: Now, as I said in a recent episode, I chose to attribute some of that rigidity to his age, and I didn't want to be too hard on him because of what he means to so many people on the left. And, you know, who am I to say that I know better than Noam Chomsky? But over the years, I have been emboldened, and I'm curious to put to you, where do you put him in all of this in terms of someone who is obviously – very professionally successful and has done a lot to define what it means to be a socialist publicly in America.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think that in approaching Chomsky or other figures like this, you need to do it dialectically and excuse the slightly academic language or Marxist language. What I mean by that is something very simple. You have to look at it from all sides. And in particular, you have to assess both the kind of positives and the negatives. Chomsky obviously was a very smart person who has good research skills and has published a number of books, particularly on U.S. foreign policy, in which he was able to capture essential elements of U.S. foreign policy. And he has made contributions at that level. At the same time, he is an intellectual, had an incredible, incredible platform. like no other leftist intellectual in the history of contemporary United States. And there are very clear reasons for that. One is that, and he says this in an introduction to a book by Daniel Guerin called Anarchism, he traces his intellectual roots back to liberalism. And there's a very strong liberal thread throughout his work. He self-describes as an anarcho-syndicalist. But that orientation also made him one of the most outspoken anti-communists. And if you read anything that he has to say about actually existing socialism, you'll see that his research skills ended with the diagnosis of U.S.-American foreign policy. Because what he says about actually existing socialism is, I mean, honestly, it's an embarrassment because it – demonstrates no knowledge whatsoever of these histories. He refers to Lenin as being a counter-revolutionary who was just interested in a power grab. You know, the guy who dedicated his life to the revolution got shot and died young because of it was just power hungry. Like that sounds a lot more like a capitalist than someone like Lenin. And he also cast a long shadow over some of the most nefarious elements in the U.S. national security state. He was an outspoken proponent of rejecting any serious investigation into state assassinations like that of John F. Kennedy or others.

Speaker 1: Why? What does that even look like? Why raise your hand and be like, no one should investigate that actually?

Gabriel Rockhill: I think because if you investigate it, then you'll begin to see things that are highly problematic, like the fact that Frank Morrow, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency, published a book called First Hand Knowledge, in which he described his involvement in the great event, meaning his involvement in the assassination of the president. And there is a very large body of literature. I don't have enough of it. You know, we don't have enough time to sum all of it up right now. But rest assured, if you look into it very, very seriously and read the best sources on it, you are going to find out that the Central Intelligence Agency has played, to some extent, a role within the overall operation. And that reveals a dimension of the U.S. state that most people are very uncomfortable with.

Speaker 1: But that Noam Chomsky is uncomfortable with? Why is Noam Chomsky uncomfortable with it?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, another aspect of his work that's really important is that he was primarily interested in a negative critique of the US empire and the overall intellectual framework that he used is, well, this is what the US state says it is. This is what it actually does. It's hypocritical. It says it's democratic, but it's not promoting democracy in the third world. And he just constantly points out this hypocrisy and this contradiction. When it comes to real world solutions, and this comes back to the frustrations that you had with him, He is not an open supporter of, you know, he changed a little bit on certain questions, particularly regarding Cuba. He was a very, very open critic of various other forms of actually existing socialism. And he wasn't one who was invested in building people power in the United States for some type of alternative project. And so you'd go through the cycles and he'd come back to saying, as you mentioned a moment ago, that it's the kind of lesser of two evils argument. And I do think there are two things to highlight in that regard. One is that if you're serious about changing the political spectrum in the United States, you can't just do it around election time. They control the electoral mechanism, the electoral college. Everything is so fundamentally anti-democratic. What you need is to develop real people's power in organized institutional form. so that when you come to an election, you actually have the power necessary to fight and win. Right now, we're not there. I would like to be there. A lot of people would like to be there, and there are various endeavors to get there. If you look at the positions that he's taken, and it depends because each election, also, there were kind of different stakes, and I would strongly encourage people to compare his positions to that of Michael Parenti over the years. Michael Parenti said back in the 80s that a vote for Reagan was a vote for fascism. And he supported the people on, it was Mondale who was running, as far as I know, yeah, it was Mondale who was running on the Democratic ticket. And that's an interesting position because what you get with Reagan is the death squads in Central America, an intensification of the anti-communist war globally. You do get what many would recognize as a form of, call it what you will, proto-fascism, fascism, fascistic, but in any case, something that has a family resemblance. to what we have under the Trump administration. I'm of the position, and we might disagree on this to some extent, and that could be good for your listeners and viewers or good just for our conversation. I am of the position that given the current state of U.S. American politics, Genocide was never on the ballot. It's never been on the ballot. Genocide is a constant under US imperialism. The Democrats do it, the Republicans do it. What you see different under the current administration is an increasing turn towards fascism that is at certain levels more intense than what you saw under Biden and then the Harris campaign. Right now, would I prefer Harris to be in office as opposed to Trump? Would I think that that would be incrementally, incrementally better Yes. Do I think it would get us further to abolishing imperialism? No. Further to abolishing capitalism? No. Further to dismantling the structures that maintain that two-party system? No. But in order to do that, you need strategic thinking and you need strategic political action. Right. There's who else could we have voted for in this particular situation that would have gotten us further? Because in the case of voting, this is the last thing that I'll say, is that there's often an assumption that voting is about one's moral relationship to a candidate. And so you collapse the political field into a moral and consumerist relationship. Like I as an individual, who could I morally vote for? As if voting for someone was a symbol of who you are as a person. That's not what voting is. Voting is a tactical political decision that takes about five seconds and relates to what the overall field of forces is and where you want to go strategically in the future. And in the United States today, going in the fascist direction is not going to allow us to develop more power. political power on the left, going in a direction that maintains U.S. imperial fascism and also certain forms of capitalistic fascism, but is not as intent on rolling back democratic norms and attacking the university, attacking the journalistic core involved in all the extrajudicial killings in the war on the Caribbean. I mean, As far as I'm concerned, incremental differences matter in politics, but they have nothing to do with my strategic horizons of struggle, which are ultimately in the long term. But we might disagree on that. And this is fine.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So it triggered me a little bit with the takes five seconds to vote because that's what Chomsky kept saying, saying to me, which is ironic because it was also during COVID times and it was voting was certainly not a sure thing and people's ability to do it and Democratic Party's efforts to discourage people in some places from voting and shutting down a primary early to screw Bernie. But that's neither here nor there. So when I was talking to Chomsky, as I mentioned, I conceded. I conceded because Trump, I understood psychologically, loomed very large in the public imagination. More so now because he's doing the things that he promised to do. But back then there was the sense of he was already president. The first term wasn't the escalation that we're living in now. But despite all of that, I said, OK, let's presume that Trump does represent a unique threat and that four years from now we're going to have more of a Romney type figure. What do you want to do then? What is the plan between? And more importantly, what is the plan between now and then? It's more likely to put us in a position where we're not being beaten over the head with, well, you just got to vote for Buttigieg over Romney because Romney is the worst thing that's ever happened. And then four years from then being told you got to vote for Gavin Newsom over Mark Rubio because Mark Rubio is the worst thing that ever happened. The next time we got to vote for Amy Klobuchar over whatever this endless hellscape is. But in fact, it's going to be people who are... increasingly worse because when the Democrat is in office, they increase funding to ICE. They win by saying that the police are good, actually, and we should fund them harder. They try to pass a border bill as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did that doubled ICE funding. They continue to destabilize Libya and do the same wars, but nobody really protests because it's Obama. It's somebody who listens to Kendrick Lamar and who seems very charming and loves his wife and children doing it. And so in some ways they get away with more literal murder. So my question is, it wasn't a performative commitment to not voting for the liberal candidate. It was a genuine open-ended question at a time in my life where, frankly, I was much less rigid in my own politics to having some analysis of how to stop lesser to evil voting. What's the plan? I also would throw in there that there are these historical, and I don't mean to make absurd comparisons, but there are these historical moments where the gap between what the major political parties have on offer and what is the overwhelming preference of the people do yield these breaks where you get third parties emerging, like the Republican Party of Lincoln, because there was no voice for any kind of abolitionist movement in the two major parties at the time. And especially in the context of Gaza, I do think it's an interesting question of what would have happened if we had had a candidate, a vaguely, let's say a Ro Khanna style candidate, who is at least willing to run in a primary saying, hey, I'm a normal Democrat, but at least I don't want to do a genocide. And what does that do to the country? public consciousness? What does that do with our willingness to commit to Democrats no matter what? What would happen if someone like Bernie Sanders said, I'm going to break away and have a third party run because the moral question, the political question is so significant at this time? And I do think that if no one else is talking about that, this section of the left should be, and Noam Chomsky, should be entertaining these kinds of ideas and not be the folks on MSNBC screaming that we need to vote blue no matter who. That's just not our space. Does that sound...

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I mean, I think there's some agreement between us insofar as the lesser of two evils logic and the history of the control of the entire party apparatus by the capitalist ruling class has made it such that over time, if you look from the 50s to the present, the whole political spectrum has just been shifting to the right. And so a 1930s Democrat is nothing like a Democrat 100 years later. And that is the process that we have to see because the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, they're just outgrowths of the capitalist ruling class and they represent different segments of that ruling class. So they're always going to be pro-imperialist, they're always going to be pro-capitalist, and they're always going to be anti-communist. That's the bread and butter of those two parties. The real question is, like, neither of them are going to lead us to where we need to go, and neither of them are going to stop genocide, social murder, or any of these other things. And of course, there are many clear instances where, you know, Obama was arguably worse on immigration than some of his Republican predecessors, or he was one of the people who really oversaw a lot of the drone targeted assassination programs and was really good at killing, as he said himself. And so we shouldn't be confused about any of this. It's all a matter of how this duopoly relates to the space of broader politics in the US in order to move things further to the left. And if there are candidates who are making an open war on any form of leftism, including science, and just being able to speak rationally about what exists or what doesn't exist in the world, who's an open white supremacist, who wants to make America great again by returning to its colonial fascistic roots, who is openly waging a war on the Americas and has just kidnapped a foreign democratically elected president, there's a clear uptick in the fascistic turn of US empire. And I think in comparison to that, just to come back to what we're saying a moment ago, Harris would have continued with many of these operations. I don't think that it would have been because what the capitalist ruling class has demonstrated. decided, particularly those who control the digital world, is that they want to move in a more fascistic direction. They want less democracy. They want less health care. They want less social safety nets, et cetera. But what we really need has nothing to do with those two parties, right? Those two parties are part of the problem, not part of the solution. What we really need is a people's movement that has organizational structure that can move the political culture and ultimately, hopefully, the political elite as well further to the left. And so when I talk about wanting now in this moment, I think that a Harris in office would be absolutely horrible. I'd be critical of just about everything that she was doing. I do think that there is a difference between that and the open fascism that you have in the Trump administration.

Speaker 1: Well, certainly there's a difference. But that's not really, certainly there's a difference, but that's not really the argument, right? Let me put it this way. We started talking about how the compatible left had to be an invention of the deep state corporate elites, whatever, because communism was just so damn popular. It was the communists who had just defeated the Nazis. It was the communists that were liberating concentration camps. Paul Robeson's a communist. Pablo Picasso's a populist. Neruda, all of the cool kids in the art scene were communists. And you couldn't just come out and say, we're just completely anti all of that. So you would invent an accommodationist version of like this kind of soft, squishy socialism, fine. And we're allowed to do socialism, we're allowed to do Marxism, but not socialism as it actually exists in the world. Okay. The fact that they're even forced into that compromise position is because there's some people somewhere willing to be loud and communist and having done so successfully. And then the argument is that in the context of the United States in the 30s and 40s, when you have these New Deal-grade society gains, it's precisely because there is a communist party, big and loud and aggressive, agitating for workers' rights and presenting a threat to establishment politics. If I'm in practical real world terms, not performative voting, but in practical real world terms, wanting the Democratic Party, understanding that we're going to be in a world where these are the two major parties for the foreseeable future, to move to the left as opposed to keep ratcheting to the right, I believe that we have to dangle the carrot of my vote is gettable over here, but only if you move in my direction. And I think that loudly proclaiming and not just not voting, but voting for a party to the left of the Democratic Party, whether it's the Greens or the PSL or any new thing that anybody wants to come up with, but something clear so that the non-votes can't be laundered into this narrative of, oh, these people are disaffected and these people don't care and these people don't care about their rights and they want Trump to win and they're secret right-wingers and all of that. But that, to me, seems to be the only way in the short term to get any kind of correction to the rightward ratchet effect. And committing your vote before the fact to voting for the lesser of two evils guarantees that the Democratic Party will never win. move to the left to get votes. And that people who are loud and strong about creating Palestine as a real line is why you have folks like, I don't know if you saw this clip that just came out of the election in Nancy Pelosi's district with Shrikant Chakrabarty and some others. They just had some kind of town hall or debate or candidate debate where they asked them, would you characterize what's going on in Gaza as a genocide? And Shroikha and another leftist candidate raises their paddle and the centrist candidate doesn't. And this becomes a deal breaker now in many races because people stood their ground. What happens if Kamala wins and a bunch of other candidates around the country, Andrew Cuomo, manage to win their races despite being genocidal maniacs? Well, I don't know that you have any kind of shift to the left.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, I think I agree with most of what you just said in the sense that when I say we need people's power and organizational force on the strong left, that's exactly what I mean. But we have to be very strategic in this, right? It's extremely difficult to get on the ballot. Most of the parties that you just mentioned weren't even on all of the ballots in all of the states. Yes, because the Democratic Party works tooth and nail to get them off. Exactly, because the entire system is rigged against them. And so what we're put in a situation of, at least in recent elections, is a situation where there are candidates to the left of the Democratic Party who couldn't possibly win the national election. That's the situation that they've put us in. Now, what we need to do is develop enough power to you know and this could operate at different levels change the laws get rid of the electoral college change the preliminary the um primaries system like there's a lot of both legal and political class struggle that can and needs to be done in order to build that power all that i'm talking about is when you're in a moment and that power play has been played out and you know well this is the extant play of forces And it's not possible to elect certain candidates in certain situations. I actually would not at all be in favor and was not in favor of saying all in for Kamala. This is the person we have to vote for anything like that. I'm instead I was focused very specifically on I think it's only swing states that actually make any difference in this country. So in all other states, you have to be full on even in your actual voting situation. Supporting candidates and parties that are not the Democratic Party swing states raises an issue. And there's only what really what five of them or so that actually matter. And in those states, when you look now where we are back at the election and you see everything that Trump has done and everything he plans to do. I think that if you fast forward 10 years in history and look back at this moment, I think you'd be very hard pressed to say that, well, Kamala would have been better or something like that. And I'm talking about incrementally better, not, you know. Of course she would have been better.

Speaker 1: But I really bristle. I mean, that is a very common framing. Right. Because it's an easy argument to win. Of course, the whole point of lesser of two evils is that the Democrat is better. No one disputes that. The logic of the Democrat being incrementally better, it's the question of what that ultimately leads down the road. And there needs to be something that breaks the Democratic Party's belief that it can survive while being incrementally better, right? So you're not really arguing with me, right? I'm a Green Party voter in Washington, D.C., And certainly, while I would like to have the reach to credibly be responsible for the outcome of a general election, and as much as people on the Internet pretend that Nina Turner and Susan Sarandon and I single-handedly yielded Trump, it's not the case. But despite my lack of influence, it remains the case that Kamala lost. Right. Kamala lost. And it's not because of anything that I said on this podcast. And in fact, postmortems that the Democratic Party doesn't want to talk about. Famously, recently, the DNC decided not to release its autopsy report on 2024. But other autopsy reports, including by the IMEU, have made it very clear that in those swing states that you mentioned, the top issue for voters who voted for Biden in 2020 but declined to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 was Gaza. So it seems to me that when I say or when Uncommitted says, hey, Gaza is a red line, if anything, we're trying to help you out, bro. We're trying to help the Democratic Party out. That's not how I would frame it for myself. But constructively, we're sending up a red flag saying, it's not about how I personally am going to vote, but I'm telling you, people aren't going to vote for you, regardless of how horrible Trump is and how very real the threat is. People aren't going to vote for you unless you move on this critical issue to the left. And I have a tweet from like, I don't know, probably 2017 or something. I think it's 2017. So it's after the election. But I was arguing with someone and they were like, don't people understand how important the Supreme Court is and these Green Party voters and da da da da. And I said to them, people love to screen grab this tweet as though One, I had a platform in 2017 and not like 500 followers. And two, that I was saying something I wasn't saying. But what I was arguing was not that the Supreme Court doesn't matter, but these arguments about the existential nature of the threat of Trump or any other Republican simply aren't persuasive. And the reason is other things are going on in people's lives. You can say that that's right or wrong and their decision-making is wrong and they're stupid and they need to care about Citizens United and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what is obviously objectively true from watching what is happening with the electorate is that they are hearing the warnings about 2025 and saying, I don't care. You have to move on this, that, or the other for me to vote for you. And so when I'm saying this to Chomsky, when I'm saying this to anybody else, what I'm saying, like, it's not just my narcissistic project as like an online leftist that I want to win or as a Bernie Brewer or whatever, that you need to move to the left. Your fate, if you care so much about all of this stuff, if you care about the existential threat of Trump, you should be moving to the left. And the fact that the Democratic Party knew that, they saw the polling, they knew what it was going to take for Kamala to win. They heard the protests about Palestine. And they did it before. And they still chose to lose?

Gabriel Rockhill: Of course.

Speaker 1: That's not on me.

Gabriel Rockhill: They're working for the same masters, right? These are two parties.

Speaker 1: Right, and that's the Democratic Party. So if that's true, if everything they're saying is true, they're the same. I mean, they're different. Okay, Kamala's better. But they're equally committed to genocide and they're equally committed to all of these things.

Gabriel Rockhill: No, 100%.

Speaker 1: Like, what are we doing?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, electoral politics in this country are captured and controlled by the capitalist ruling class. And that spectrum does not allow for a popular left position. And it has been foreclosed. So what we need to do is the difficult task of building real organized power on the serious left. You indexed a moment ago, right, the Communist Party in the 1930s was a serious power. And they were also at the forefront, the very vanguard of racial class struggle. They were for the liberation of black people long before the kind of 1960s version of the what's referred to as the civil rights movement. And so there are precedents. There have been strong socialists who have even run for president in this country. And the position that we're in is that we've really suffered from the amount of just corporate control of this duopoly. And to break out of that, we need organized politics. And so it's not so much about the moment of the election or individual choices. It's much more about the collective struggle to build Party structures, movements, associations, organizations that can actually shift the political spectrum. And that's the long-term struggle of politics. A lot of people love to focus on elections because then it's just a matter of, well, you choose and that's it. But what's actually important in politics is the long-term process of building alternative power. That's what we need. And that's what a lot of people are doing. I mean, the Green Party's moved to the left over the last few years, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1: God bless the Green Party. I got a Jill Stein sign irritating all my neighbors in the corner there. But like that's not – it's not that I think I'm going to snap my fingers and magic is going to happen. But I also am wary, coming back to our earlier conversation about how much of this is reformism intended to knock us off of our mark, is – Inuring people to the status quo and de-radicalizing them and de-motivating them to act versus just saying, hunker down, it might not manifest for 10 or 20 years, blah, blah, blah. Here's my issue with so many folks who I obviously like and respect and had on the show who have sort of taken the, oh, we just have to build an organized approach. What it feels like to me so often is that we are being organized back into the burning house. When I say I want Bernie to be willing to break away and run as a third party candidate or to invest in third parties now that he's at the end of his career and no longer running for president. It's because I see all the people who are rightly frustrated with the lack of health care, with the rising premiums, with the war in Gaza, with the fact that an American woman was assassinated yesterday with three bullets to her head by an ICE agent, blocks from her house and blocks from where George Floyd was killed.

Speaker 3: That there are people angry and I'm probably about to go out to a

Speaker 1: protest if we don't go too long after this. And people are rightly angry. But what is everybody going to say? What is Tim Walz already saying? What is Bernie going to say? What are they all going to say? They're going to say the way to fix this is to vote ourselves out in the next election. This is why you got to vote for Democrats. They're going to say don't do anything violent. And by violent, they mean destruction of property damage, not interpersonal harm. It's not really coming to that. And they are going to figure out ways to mollify the crowds just like they did in 2020. And the very people who are well positioned to make this unrest into something are gonna do the exact opposite. They're not just gonna be quiet, they're gonna be counter-revolutionary.

Gabriel Rockhill: Meaning that they're going to try to siphon off that energy and drive it into the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1: They are going to fortify, yes, the Democratic Party out of this. All of them. And so at a certain point, it's like, I cannot be a part of that project. And I don't always know where I'm going necessarily. But I have the instinct to say that feels aggressively counter-revolutionary. The Voplo, no matter who, the Bernie stuff. I'm hopeful about Zoran, but I am worried about certain choices that have been made. Because it feels like we're not going to get the 1930s. There's no one willing to be a communist. There's barely anybody willing to be a socialist. The word socialist has been neutered down to meaning basically, I like health care, please. Let's be Canada.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. No, I think that what you need is the strategic thinking that recognizes that we do need political organizations that are outside of the duopoly, that are strong and powerful, and they are building slowly but surely. And And we also need to recognize that you can make tactical compromises along the way, not because you say, oh, well, we'll get there when we get there and, you know, just sit back and be chill. But because you always have to do a concrete analysis of any concrete situation. Right now in the United States, there's a great distinction that Gramsci makes between a war of position when you can actually move forces in and you can win versus a war of maneuver. I'm sorry. No, a war of maneuver is when you move forces in, of course. And then a war of position is when you're actually digging the trenches and doing the hard work of building power. I think that we're in a war of position in the United States. We need to build left power, left political education, left party structures, a left culture, because it's been decimated. for decades and decades. And we have to know full well, as a lot of people do on the left, that the Democratic Party is going to try to hijack, siphon, control. I don't know why this video keeps cutting out, but sorry. And we have to insulate ourselves against that because they have a long history of doing precisely that. They want to take something that's leftist and make it compatible leftist. And maybe just to tie this back to the earlier point of the conversation, my argument is not Hey, let's give up on leftism and just kind of line up and vote for genociders because there's no other thing on the ballot and we'll do the lesser of two evils or anything like that. My argument is that there's a deep history of moving the left towards the right. And then if you think strategically about this, what we need to do is shift that back. And the more quickly, the better. But you can't just jump from one situation to the next. We're not going to jump from Trump to some type of like socialist revolutionary in the United States. It's not in the cards right now. We have to build the power necessary to get there. And that the further that we can push candidates to the left, if they be Democratic Party candidates, Green Party candidates. psl communist party workers world name who you will on that spectrum we need all of that to shift to the left and that is that's the difficult thing about organizing it is going to take time but it doesn't mean that we can't be fired up about it driven to make that change happen sooner rather than later and insulate ourselves against those forms of recuperation we need to use the compatible left elements that are there in order to forge a real left. That's the basic argument that I'm making. And you have to think strategically about it.

Speaker 1: That is such an interesting, an interesting gamble. I'm curious about this, Professor. I'm hearing you. When I hear the death of corruption and co-opting that has happened in the compatible left, The idea that it could be a tool for the real left as opposed to like a vortex that's sucking all of our energy away and distracting us, which is what it was designed to do, I do find myself skeptical. When I read you, when I listen to you, my instinct is to say, let's root them out and make it clear to people that they're being mismanaged, that they're being integrated into a burning house.

Gabriel Rockhill: Absolutely. But I have a dialectical analysis. So again, you have to see it, the many-sided nature of reality. On the one hand, my political positions are clear. I am for a version of leftism that is not compatible with imperialism and capitalism. That is, I think, necessary for the survival of humanity and the planet at this point. I think it's actually just a basic principle. like necessary assumption. Otherwise, we're all dead and most of the planet. In order to get there, though, and this is the flip side of that analysis, you do have to recognize that we are in the most reactionary political culture, arguably in the history of humanity, or at least it's definitely ranks very high. A history of indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, militarism, social murder, on and on and on. Within that context, if people who had a non-compatible left position were the majority, there wouldn't be an issue. But we're not. We're the minority. And so what I'm interested in is the primacy of practice.

Speaker 1: That's arguable, too. I think there's a world. I mean, depending on how you're defining it. No, I don't think if I walk out into the street, I'm going to find a bunch of people identifying as Marxist. But if I go out into the street, coming back to that Princeton study that's in my dating profile and ask people, do they want health care to tax the rich minimum wage? You know, let's say social democracy. A hundred percent. Everyone is with me. And then if I ask them, well, why do you think it is that we're all in agreement on this on like 70 to 80 percent basis on all these policies? But we don't get it. And it isn't a corruption. They're all in agreement. Democrats could win every election from now until the cows come home if they actually ran on this stuff, because there's massive public agreement. There's an open lane, which is why I'm so frustrated with the birdies and the others in the world that don't want to occupy it and wouldn't occupy in the last election cycle when it was obvious that Biden wasn't fit to run or lead. But I am frustrated by the presumption that I, to be a good, reasonable, pragmatic leftist, am supposed to say, I don't think we can have socialist nirvana tomorrow. But we're supposed to believe that we go from Barack Obama to the most radical right wing fascist regime. moment in contemporary American history with the flip of a light switch. And that the culture that we live in today that only started getting foment, I mean, backlash to Obama, whatever you want to call it. OK, we're about to have some kind of backlash to Donald Trump in the Gestapo. So why is it that we seem to be even framing these things as the so-called radical left in such a limited ways? Why am I going to tell my audience? given the existential threat of climate that you just alluded to, where we literally don't have the time to make the changes, and we all understand, citing Kate Aronoff and all these others, that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with what needs to be done on the climate front. We're starting a brand new war for oil in Venezuela that's only going to exacerbate these problems, that we're like, we've got a 20-year horizon of organizing. Even rhetorically, that could be perceived as de-radicalizing. And I might not know the answer of how to get the thing to happen faster, but I sure as hell, I think, can honestly say, oh, it's got to happen a lot faster than that, or we're all doomed. I mean, that's true, just as a diagnostic principle.

Gabriel Rockhill: No, 100%. And I don't disagree at all that we need radical solutions because the world is in a worse state than it ever has been. The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it ever has been. It's code red for humanity, according to the UN, and food chains could collapse and we'd all be eliminated. So the urgency of global class struggle is at fever pitch. So I agree 100% with your fervor, the need for change, and this needs to be a systemic change. There's no opposition whatsoever. On the contrary, I might even want to light a few more fires to make sure that we all know how important this is. The point, though, is the primacy of practice. It's one thing for an individual like you or an individual like me to want these things. If you're going to be serious about getting them, you need to analyze the actual play of forces in the US empire now and figure out how you're going to get there. And if it's a matter of getting 15 people together to storm the White House, the fascists can do that now quite successfully. And they did. But the socialists can't do that now. They would have just been killed. And not even just put in prison and then, you know, let out in the case of the people who stormed the White House. And so in that particular situation, what you have to do is figure out how to practically and concretely build power. Because the people, if you study the history of class struggle, I'm interested in fighting and winning. I'm not interested in fighting and losing, but having the glory of being the most fearless. you know, outspoken firebrand on the barricades. I want to fight and I want to win. You look at the history of who has fought and won and the people who are very good at fighting and winning are strategic thinkers. Lenin said this repeatedly. He said, the most important thing about a strategic political analyst is knowing when to retreat. Knowing when to compromise. It's not because you're giving up on the struggle. It's because you're smarter than your adversaries. And you know that now you have to maybe take one step back to take a leap forward. You have to make certain compromises so that over time you can build the type of power that you need to do. All of the greatest strategic thinkers that I've studied, Ho Chi Minh is a great example of it. I mean, Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese defeated the U.S. Imperial Army. And how did they do that? By running out and saying, screw you, we're just going to run right into the tanks and into the... No, they built power. They tunneled underground. It took, what, 30 years for them to do this. And so we have to be steeled in the struggle and have the strategic vision to build the power necessary to fight and win. Otherwise, we're just going to have the glory of being the firebrands who end up wanting change so much, but not having the practical means to get it.

Speaker 1: There's some irony. And I'm not expecting you to have the strategic blueprint for the left's defeat of fascism. But I feel like I have endless conversations on here about how we need to organize that are sort of put forward in a way that feels like it cuts off any conversation about... what that looks like. So for example, I say we're in a shock doctrine-y moment where a brutal execution is being reacted to outside of the bots on Twitter with horror by people across the ideological spectrum in America. A mother was shot on camera in cold blood for the crime of at worst being confused about the directions she was given by an ICE officer as she tried to drive to pick up her kid, it seems, from school, blocks from her house. And I say, well, it seems obvious to me that this is an opportunity to use your kind of trench warfare analogy to dig in. to say Republicans have exposed who they are. J.D. Vance is getting out way over his skis and making claims about how this woman is a direct domestic terrorist, et cetera. And here's an opportunity for the left, liberals, whomever wants to take a bite, to say we are the party, we are the community, we are the organization against shooting moms in the head. And we are going to disband ICE. Vote for us. We need to disband ICE. We need to prioritize public safety. We want to actually respect your constitutional right to be in your home and not have the police knock down your door. And as a commentator, I'm articulating frustration that The Democratic Party certainly does not seem so far to be willing to take that line. They're saying we've got to retrain ICE. They're probably going to give more money. If 2020 is any indication, they're going to say we need to give more money to ICE so that they're trained better and have more cameras on their vests or something. And it feels like an acknowledgment of what we're up against and that there is an opportunity to do something more in this moment and to exploit the current moment. is at times characterized as a naivete about what has to be done in the longer term. And a way that feels, again, sort of counter-revolutionary. And I'm sorry if I'm sort of just being triggered because I've had versions of this conversation before and I'm not really responding to what you're saying. Feel free to tell me, like, no, that's not what I'm saying to you at all. I heard you say this recently in a podcast, a sort of a revolutionary optimism that the point of this research and this book is to set people up for more success down the line, not to be demotivating.

Gabriel Rockhill: Absolutely. No, and I am an optimist, not in the sense that I just want to believe that things are going to get better, but because I've studied history and I've recognized humanity's ability to develop the tools necessary to fight and win. Because to be a good organizer, you have to know how this history has played out. So for instance, in relationship to the most recent assassination, with the anti-racist police terror protests of 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, you did have an enormous moment that was mobilized around that. And that did, it brought a lot of people into the streets. It motivated people in a way that was very important. And it also then built some people's power. Here, I'm just going to change this. Well, at the same time, in doing that, yeah, the end result from that was also then that there was increased funding to police and there hasn't been a change that was substantive or systematic. And so the real question- Right. And so what you need is not just to, I couldn't agree more that you have to take advantage of each situation and mobilize around it. Well, at the same time, you have to mobilize in such a way that's effective. And if we just repeat what was done in 2020, given the results from 2020, we're not going to get where we need to get. So agreed.

Speaker 1: So what do you do? What is your assessment of what went wrong in 2020? What would you like to see happen differently this time?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, in 2020, there was a lot of public mobilization, but there wasn't enough of the organized power that could shift away from the Democratic Party hegemony that we're talking about. And what the compatible left kind of Democratic Party elements do is they recuperate that energy and they try to put it into something else. There was the whole scandal, for instance, around Black Lives Matter, the amount of money embezzled by the foundation and other such things, right? And this is just continuing a long-standing history of this. Part of the reason that that happens is because we don't have enough of an organized left and a broad leftist culture that can exercise the level of power necessary. So the left in this country, if you look at the mainstream media left, the mainstream political left, they have power and can exercise it, but they are beholden to the capitalist ruling class. The people that need to develop more power are the organizations, the media platforms, the educational platforms that are further to the left. And if they have that power, then they can exercise a lot more influence over kind of the mainstream status. But right now they don't have as much power as as they need. And so I think that. Assuming that there'd be hundreds of thousands of people in the street in reaction to the most recent assassination, and this would have a direct impact on what the Trump administration is going to do, I think is not a good assumption. Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't nonetheless mobilize in the street because you don't just mobilize for the purpose of changing political decisions. You also do it for a lot of other reasons, demonstrating people power, bringing people into the struggle, just showing that there's pushback and that people don't agree. Even if they can't fight and win, they want to show their opposition. Right. And so I think a big part of the problem in this country is that we don't have enough of the organized leftist culture. Like just as an example of this, because it sounds abstract is so I lived in France for a long time and I've done a lot of organizing in France as well. And in France, you actually do have it's a capitalist country. It's an imperialist country. But you actually have a much deeper, stronger and more developed leftist culture there. so that you have organizations, strong unions, that take positions that are further to the left than in the United States. They're not great. They could be better. But nonetheless— They per quoi?

Speaker 1: Why is it that way?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, it's that way because there has been a history of vibrant class struggle from below that has fought in such a way that it's able to win. And so you have presidential candidates who are interviewed on TV that are self-declared Marxists. You have positions that are far to the left of what you have in the United States. And so what I'm referring to is pipe dream or a utopian aspiration. It is that if you look at countries like this or look at Latin America and certain countries in Latin America where you have a very strong, highly represented left politically, in the media, in the educational sphere, that makes an enormous difference for the very nature of different struggles and how they play out. And if we can develop that more, then we're going to have more power. But to do that, we need to bring more people in. No? No.

Speaker 1: This is great. This is great. Okay. Well, until they bring more people in, because I really, I think a lot of this stuff, we already have majorities and it's not about like, quote unquote, raising awareness. And I think that can be a little bit of a trap. Not everything, but a lot of stuff. But I'm like, so with you. So now here's my question. When we're talking about the culture that exists in France that doesn't exist here and what happened in 2020 and the lack of organizations that are independent of the Democratic Party, to me, that's a lot of ways of saying the Democratic Party co-opted and suppressed The energy around the George Floyd moment and we're able to swoop it back in to the 2020 elections. Very explicitly, the argument was made that these protests hurt Biden and that if you don't want Donald Trump to win, you got to settle down, kids, and not just vote for Biden, who you might not be super excited about, but vote for Biden as he argued we should fund the cops more that just killed George Floyd. And everybody got in line.

Gabriel Rockhill: And was involved in setting up the prison industrial complex. And, you know, there's so much more that we could add, of course.

Speaker 1: 100%. Okay. I completely think that's what happened. So when I see that, I say, okay. the compatible left in the form of the Democratic Party. I know you're saying that they don't really count because they're just the right, but whatever. They are enemy numero uno. And moreover, there's a bunch of people on the left left who have spent the last five years coming on this gosh darn podcast and trying to argue with me about the merits of the defund movement. Ostensible leftists are wasting their time coming on this gosh darn leftist podcast trying to fight with me about defund. And this is people who are more establishment like Ben Jealous, but also someone like Matt Stoller, who's, you know, very left on anti-monopoly stuff, but who doesn't necessarily identify as like a leftist. I don't know exactly how to identify. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's, you know, but very left on some stuff. And even people like, this came up in a recent episode with Ross Barkin, who worked for Zoram Omdani for many years as a lefty reporter for New York Mag. People I like. This is not meant to be a dig, but repeatedly over the course of the years, I found myself fighting with leftists. who are seeming willing participants in all of this. And this is why the vote blue no matter who stuff irritates me, because it's half the left, more than half of the left, that is very much doing shaming and blaming around voting for Kamala Harris, even in the midst of a genocide. Mehdi Hassan, Who is so good on talking about Gaza and who is Muslim and who has skin in the game and who I believe genuinely cares about Palestinians will still tell you you're SOB if you didn't vote for Kamala Harris and didn't use this platform for one second to say, well, maybe Kamala Harris should be the one that moves to meet the voters. I don't understand how we're ever going to have an organization when even the left quote unquote organizations, the media institutions, even the independent media institutions are largely. putting out a narrative that ultimately shores up the primacy and the power of the Democratic Party. Very hostile to left organizing outside of the Democratic Party. They hate the Green Party. They hate BSL. You bring up Jill Stein around these people and they act like you just framed a picture of Hitler and threw it on your wall. I am not exaggerating. And that's most of the left, the quote unquote organized left, since it exists. And so to me, it's not just the left is insufficiently organized. That's not really it. It's that what you've been talking about, what you wrote about in this book, what it feels like to me, my experience of it, and it's emotional and I haven't done the research that you've done, obviously, but my experience of living in this world is that everyone is captured, wittingly or unwittingly, knowingly, unknowingly. And that there is such a small universe of people who are independent enough or financially comfortable enough to be independent, like myself, and who have enough privilege in their background to be willing to hang out a shingle and take a risk. But everyone else has got bills to pay and wants to keep going on MSNBC or wants to have an opportunity to interview Zoran Mamdani or AOC or whomever. And it's not that we've got to organize. It's that it's like, frankly, I have some skepticism of our ability to organize with the limited resources we have because this class of PMC middle managers in left media and left organizing spaces are all too willing to preserve their status and the potential of having some incremental change to organize in the way that the communists were organized to actually get something done back in the day.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, I would say that our fundamental enemy isn't the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I would say it's the capitalist ruling class that funds and supports both of them, because all they're doing is they're the middle managers who are the members of the political elite who are proposing strategies for the financial ruling class for how to advance their interests. And the Democrats have one strategy, which is fighting Russia and China at the same time. And the Republicans have generally focused on primarily fighting China, although they've admitted now with the recent well, a series of recent developments that it's pretty clear they can't win that war in the short term. And so they're going to wage war on the Americas in order to get all the natural resources and try to develop the productive forces to the point of being able to then wage that war. And so what we ultimately need in the United States is to defeat the capitalist ruling class and their party apparatchiks, their machinery, if you will. And to do that, though, that does beg the question of, well, how do you do that? And you need to look at history for how that has been done successfully. And right now, we're in a situation where socialist revolutionary projects have, for the most part, only been successful within the Global South, except for in the case of Eastern Europe, which was liberated from fascism and authoritarianism by the Red Army. And there might be a few other exceptions that one could point to, but we have no example of a socialist revolution in the imperial core. So the questions that we're raising, because it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, what you would advocate for is something like a socialist revolutionary transformation. Is that where we're headed?

Speaker 1: I don't know. What does that look like?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, that looks like health care for everyone, accessible education, housing. Oh, sure.

Speaker 1: I thought you were talking like methodologically, like where are you going to go next? shoot up a castle or whatever. But yes, those are the goals for sure.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. A sustainable life world in which the value produced by workers comes back to them in the form of healthcare, education, housing, and all of that infrastructure, sustainable environment, cultural development and things like that. Well, then the question is, well, how do you get there in a country like the United States? And that is a question of strategic political organizing that I don't think that we have. Like, I think that we have the masses on our side if we're thinking in terms of do you want affordable health care? Do you want education, et cetera? I think I agree. Most people, if they're in fact, there's been sociological studies that have been done where they give people a test and they say, do you want all these things? And at the end of the test, they say, oh, well, it sounds like you want socialism. No. no, no, no, not socialism. It's like, well, that's what socialism gives. So why wouldn't you just embrace it? So we have a big ideological war so that people recognize that, well, socialism isn't something that kills hundreds of millions of people. Socialism is what provides for children and gives healthcare and housing and is anti-racist and supports women and anti-colonial and all of that. And so we've got to win that ideological war. And that's a big part of the work that I'm invested in. And when I say bring people in, it's also that we need organizational form. We can't just have masses in the streets. We've seen this again and again in our own generation. Masses in the street don't necessarily, they can be good for certain things, but they don't necessarily lead to wins. You need an organizational form that has power. And the main form that that's taken historically has been the party form. or unions for different types of struggles. And right now, as far as parties to the left of the Democratic Party, as we both know, there are some good parties doing good work, but they're also very small compared to the Democratic or Republican parties, even though they're not really parties, right? They're just ways of funneling votes in. And the legal system is set up to disenfranchise them. So we have to shift that situation. How do we shift it? That's a long and difficult struggle. I wish that we could, and I hope that we will, figure out how to do that within a year. I would need to know a precedent for where that's happened before, because I wouldn't be optimistic about being able to do it in the short term. But we could do it in two to three years. We could do it. And it all depends on people, right? At the end of the day, we're the people who make history. And the speed of that history is going to depend on us.

Speaker 1: So Professor Rockhill, if we agree on a lot of these big ticket items, there is unanimity. We're in agreement. But that for some reason, people aren't willing, ready to make demands that accord with what the Democratic majorities want. My answer, those two realities have led me to the conclusion that the job is to heighten the contradictions. For some reason, the masses of people who agree with us that we should all have health care, et cetera, to me, the propaganda machine is tricking them all into believing that the other party's the reason why, basically, the long and short of it. And the reason that I'm focused in on the Democrats is because the Republican Party doesn't even pretend to want these things. And a lot of Republican voters have been convinced that they don't deserve these things. But that the Democratic base, at the very least, purports to want these things. And they have an elaborate scheme of excuses involving filibusters and parliamentarians and not having majorities in this house, the other, and not actually codifying anything into law so they can dangle abortion or what have you over our heads, health care premiums every two to four years. So there's some emergency that they can use to get us to fall in line even after we're very frustrated that they haven't actually delivered on what they said that they cared about. And that my job and the reason why I focus on the Democrats so much is to make it clear that this is the system as it's meant to work. And when I see a moment like this, the reason I'm like so frustrated that no one's willing to break from the Democrats, criticize the Democrats, funnel this energy anywhere else. And the reason I'm so hellbent on not affirming the Democratic Party in any way, shape or form, including in an electoral moment is is because unless the public realizes that the Democratic Party is the one with the knife at their throat, the one that put the funding in the pocket of that ICE agent who killed that woman, that they are going to be convinced, just like they were in 2020, that they are somehow doing a mitzvah by going, lining up, and voting for the guy that was the problem in the first place. And that the only way to break free of that is to get people to have a level of consciousness to connect the fact that they don't have anything in the world to that 2014 Princeton study and realizing that they have to hold the party hostage. They have to be willing to take their ball and go home. They have to be willing to funnel their votes, their energy, their organizational energy, whatever it is, into something other than the Democratic Party. And so the one thing that I know to be true is that I want that energy to go anywhere, I mean, obviously not to the right either, but anywhere but either of the two right parties. I need the energy to be moving to the left. And I can't be a party to that party. and all the people in these left spaces who I think are a party to that. But that is why I'm so compelled by this book because I gotta say, maybe it's unwitting. I'm not saying people are like getting checks under the table But it seems obvious that the incentive structure, I feel the downward pressure of the incentive structure to say what needs to be said so my classmates like Abby Phillips can get these jobs. Do you know what I mean? Like, I see the road not taken. And I see the people who are much more precarious than I am in this left space. I don't even really judge them for it half the time. But I'm sure as hell not going to affirm it. Do you know what I mean?

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, a lot of what this book is about is the shoring up of the compatible left as a weapon of war against the real left. And what we need is a real left. But we also have to recognize that we live in the real world, not the world that we would just choose. And so if you're driving people away from the Democratic and Republican Party, which I fully and absolutely support, then you need also an alternative. You say, don't do this, do this. If you simply say, don't do this, then we leave people. Yeah. And so am I, because I think that is the fight that is necessary is to build that left power that we also need culturally. Right. We need educators. We need journalists. We need people who are actually developing a culture of the left. And that opens the spectrum of both analysis and for practical organizing possibilities. And if we're going to get anywhere, then we have to break with that compatible left stranglehold.

Speaker 1: So we've got to oust them. We've got to name names. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely.

Gabriel Rockhill: Absolutely. And we have to identify the... power structure for what it is, because it's much more nefarious. I mean, we've just been talking most recently about the Democratic Party. But in one of my other books, I go into the history of the black liberation struggle and the Ford Foundation and the U.S. national security state. They were interested in funding elements of the black liberation struggle that even for today's standards would be considered quite radical, some self-declared socialist. And but they were the controlled opposition. They were the controlled opposition to the revolutionary movements of the time. And so this has a very deep and dark history. The cooptation of leftist and radical movements for compatible left orientation is is it's a very, very dark history. I'll just put it. I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I don't dabble in this because, again, I don't want to be accused of ad homineming and I can just argue with people on the merits of their arguments. But a lot of people say, for example, Jeffrey Katzenberg's, however many millions, $20 million donation to TYT affected their coverage. TYT being the biggest, most far-reaching left media outlet that there is. What am I supposed to do with that?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, it's very clear.

Speaker 1: Am I supposed to think you're just competing for views with Cenk Uygur?

Gabriel Rockhill: If you follow the money, then you learn a lot about how culture is structured. And the ruling class invests in culture, in journalism and education very directly to get a return on their investment. So it's not surprising at all. I mean, all of the media that we have in this country, what is it? Ninety five percent of what all U.S. Americans see and hear is owned by five corporations, maybe six. I'd have to check most recently. So literally you have boardrooms of five corporations deciding what everybody more or less sees and hears. That's an awesome degree of power. We need to develop counterpower. But to do that is it is quite difficult, you know, because you're not given nobody's rolling out the red carpet or inviting you on a yacht or giving you a studio or anything like that. And that fight, though, is one that will bear fruit, I think, over time, because, you know, we've been talking about this and framing it in a particular direction. But there is a really important element, I think, to insist on, and that is as we see the U.S. empire declining. contradictions within the empire are sharpening and people are faced with the sheer brutality of capitalist social relations increasingly. And that's going to radicalize people. The great Michael Parenti always said that, well, one of the problems for the ruling class is that reality is radical. Reality is radicalizing people. And those people are people who are looking for resources. They want knowledge. They want to understand how to build power and fight and win. And so I think that in many ways, in spite of all the negatives of the kind of turn to fascism on the part or increasing, I should say, turn to fascism on the part of the imperial ruling class, there are some positives. And that is that I think that there are an increasing number of people who are opening up the spectrum of analysis and saying, well, this compatible left isn't working out so well. What about that non-compatible left? Why were they slandering it all the time? Why were they saying that they just kill people and they're horrible? Like, didn't they provide housing and literacy and do all these other things? And that is what we need.

Speaker 1: That's what's so scary because I think you said earlier that there was this need for it to look like a meritocracy in the academic space. The world needed to look like it was fair for people to buy in. I read that and I thought to myself, okay, so then what do you make of this hard pivot that the right is doing? where they're like, no, it's white guys now. We're doing white guys now. The whole kerfuffle over the Indian H-1B visa, all East Asian as well, H-1B visa recipients. And Vivek Ramaswamy is like, I thought we were doing meritocracy. Let the best man win. And they're like, no, we meant that when it was white people winning. But under no other circumstances. Yeah.

Gabriel Rockhill: This is one of the reasons that I think that the Trump administration is incrementally worse, is that you have a model of liberal imperialism that has dominated the U.S. in fits and starts since the Second World War. And the Trump administration, there are precedences under Bush and Reagan and other examples one could point to. They are now pulling that back and saying, fuck democracy. Like, we're doing targeted assassinations. This isn't a meritocracy. It's white people first. We're going to make America great again. And what we mean by that is we're going to make it white and we are going to wage a war on immigrants that is brutal and a spectacle of, you know, destroying people's lives. And we're going to do it in a way that communicates to the world that we are willing to go to any lengths necessary to maintain our imperial grip and our stranglehold on planet Earth.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and it feels like... in-game stuff. Because I think you're right that if you want it to be sustainable, you got to Rockefeller's got to build some libraries. You got to throw some coins to the masses. You got to make it seem like a meritocracy. You got to give people their iPhones and their ice cream cone in the refrigerator. You know, you got to make people's lives OK.

Gabriel Rockhill: But they're not doing that.

Speaker 1: You know, the pressure of the Soviet Union being anti-racist and you got to give us the civil rights movement as a consequence. The posture that we seem to be in right now, the openness of what's going on, the way that J.D. Vance just hopped on the mic and said, we are all looking at the same video, but I'm going to lie and say this woman ran this guy over with a car. And Donald Trump says he's injured and was in the hospital, but he's OK. When we all saw the man walk away... Like that 1984 level of there are no consequences to me lying in the most flagrant way says to me that there is no intention to have any longevity in the system, that they all understand that this is the last round of play.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think that to understand the current state of U.S. American politics, you have to situate it within the geopolitical field. And what you see since at least the financial crisis of kind of 2007, 2008 is a partial decline in U.S. imperial power combined with the rise of the global south and in particular the rise of China with all of its international development projects. And what you have in the battle between the Democratic and Republican Party is ultimately two different strategies for managing empire, because the most important thing that both of these parties do is manage empire, because that's where the real revenue comes from. It's from squeezing the global south, getting their natural resources, getting their cheap labor. and then offloading commodities as well, as well as a whole series of other mechanisms of what's called unequal exchange. And the problem that the U.S. empire is facing is that now there is a very serious possibility that what Domenico de Sordo referred to as the Colombian era, the last five centuries by which the imperial core dominates the global south, might be coming to a close. Because with the rise of China, you don't just have a state, you have a civilizational state. It's four times the population of the United States. It is enormous geographically. And it is a powerhouse that is breaking records left, right and center on scientifically, technologically, environmentally, with the alleviation of 850 million people from extreme poverty never before done in human history. And the U.S. now has to deal with that fact. The Democrats had their own imperial strategy. They weren't able to win the proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia. They got bogged down in the genocide because it did. They kind of, when you look at it from their perspective, which isn't ours, they were in a pinch. They needed to increase imperialism while the people didn't want genocide. And they're caught in the middle. So what do you do? You pretend it's not a genocide. You slander people from calling it a genocide. You try to hide reality, basically. And they didn't succeed in doing that. That's good that they didn't succeed in doing that. And now we're in a situation where with the Trump administration and across a lot of the capitalist core, you have rising fascism, because if you can't. maintain imperialism with the kind of velvet gloves of liberalism where you say, well, we've got democracy and we're going to give a tiny social safety net and all of this. What do you do? You take off the gloves and you pursue a more fascistic mode of governance. And so the shift to the Trump administration is very much a reaction to global politics and the rise of China in the There's a kind of endgame element here because capitalists think in terms of short-term gains. They don't have strategic thinking. So if you really want to defeat China, then you need to continue developing science and technology. You don't start defunding science. It's just stupid from an imperialist perspective. You don't wage a war on universities and chase away the kind of brain drain from the global south that you've been profiting very handsomely from for years. So there's a very, very short term thinking in this regard. And a lot of it's transactional and just trying to make a buck quickly and redeploy as quickly as possible. And so I also think that the right does not have a strategy to actually get U.S. imperialism where it needs to go if necessary. anything is helping advance its decline in various ways, which is not to make an accelerationist argument or anything like that. I don't think if it's the Democrats or the Republicans that they're going to be able to revive the forms of imperialism that they had under neoliberalism, unless there's some type of, you know, major event that changes this. I think you're going to continue to see the rise in Global South and you're going to see a U.S. imperialism that's in decline, but that is much more violent and much more anti-democratic and much more forthright in claiming that now we will maintain our hegemony by any means necessary. So I see dark clouds gathering and continuing to gather over the U.S. empire.

Speaker 1: I take your point about the short term nature of like short term structure of capitalism, but almost darker in my mind is that there is a sort of a longer term plan. I'm not saying it's a civilizational length of plan, but at least for the next 40 to 50 80 years that some of these billionaires seem to think they're going to be alive, that they have a plan for the managed decline of US empire and that they're basically looting the store. They're not thinking about their long-term lease. They're looting the store because they know it's over. And that they're building their bunkers in New Zealand and Hawaii and they are doing open white supremacy and talking about how they're going to upload everybody's head to the cloud and they're going to do AI. And they're culturally priming us for some sort of – where they're not even going to pretend that the role of the state has anything to do with supporting the welfare of any kind of generalized public, that we are all just have to commit to the idea that they are our authoritarian leaders who are in that position because of the merit of their individual genius as evidenced by how many billions of dollars they've managed to exploit, extract. They're behaving in a way that suggests they know they can't be stopped. I'm not saying they can't be stopped, but they are behaving in a way that suggests the game was already won.

Gabriel Rockhill: That the game was already won by others.

Speaker 1: By them. By the Trump and the Vance and the Teals and all of them. They are acting like, even in the context of some of this Epstein stuff, and Larry Summers getting to continue to sashay around Harvard's campus until like a week ago, they all are behaving as though they're untouchable, which suggests to me that they know some stuff about how untouchable they really are.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, they can break the law and get away with it. I mean, the legal system here is it's two tiered at a minimum between the ruling class and the rest of us. And so they are quite literally above the law in many cases. And I think that there's a way that some of the ruling class does already recognize. And They have kind of at least implicitly admitted that the war directly against China can't be won. I mean, they run all the war games against it with the Pentagon. It always comes back that they don't win. And so they're in a situation now where they've openly decided to fold back on regional dominance and they're going to try to make the Americas subservient. and potentially colonize Greenland and use that as a wedge in the war ultimately against China. And a lot of how that plays out, I think, could potentially force further the types of stronger leftist movements that we've been talking about, because at the end of the day, if there is an increasing war on working people and there's not access to really just basics of, you know, health care, we have skyrocketing health care costs. We have skyrocketing education costs. We have difficulty of finding gainful employment that's not precarious. And all of these other issues is going to move people to, I think, more radical solutions. And that can potentially.

Speaker 1: How radical are we going to get? Because there's some stuff that I can't say on the Internet.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, yeah, I know.

Speaker 1: I'm not saying anybody's. I'm not saying anything. I'm not saying anything at all. But there's some stuff that I can't say on the Internet. And when I look at the history of how things have changed. Let me quote somebody else. Was it, is it a Kwame Ture quote that's like, there's this idea that we're going to protest and if people are beat up with the protesters, then we'll get public sympathy and people will move in your direction. But it doesn't, you know, if there's no, if the public doesn't have, see your humanity, then it doesn't work. I'm butchering that.

Speaker 4: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none. Has none. Dr. King and his associates got together and said, this is inhuman. We will boycott your bus system. Now understand what a boycott is. A boycott is a passive act. It is the most passive political act that anyone can commit. A boycott. Because what the boycott was doing was simply saying, we will not ride your buses. No sort of antagonism. He was not even verbally violent. He was peaceful. Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption.

Speaker 1: But you know, like, society has to have a conscience for civil disobedience to work.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah. Well, I think what we need when I say radical is that we need a socialist horizon to our struggles and a strong socialist horizon. There are certain versions of social democracy that are prevalent in the West. You see it in Mamdani. You saw it. their political platforms are definitely more to the left than the mainstream Democratic Party. But when it comes to U.S. imperialism, they just line up more or less systematically and they have more or less the same kind of even rhetoric that they use. And what we need is a socialist horizon that is unabashed and that is straightforward and that a lot of people embrace. I mean, there are studies that demonstrate that some 70 percent of young people identify as socialist. And these are different versions of socialism, but the...

Speaker 1: They're going to get Zorand.

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, the generation that I grew up in was so subjected to this kind of, you know, Cold War anti-communist stuff that they can't even conceive of anything like socialism. What we need is for people to recognize that, OK, there are different versions of socialism. And one version of socialism is a kind of socialism that works very well for... for the privileged working few in the imperial core that continue to wage war on peoples of the rest of the world. That's not real socialism. That is imperialist version and an imperialist compatible left version of socialism. What we need is a version of socialism that supports the free determination, self-determination of all peoples of this world. And that version of socialism has been successful in developing projects that do provide healthcare, education, housing, and just development for that matter. And I think increasingly, I mean, when you look at the young people's perspectives on China, it's quite interesting. Like 10 years ago, a lot of people were just like, oh, it's authoritarian, it's a hellscape, et cetera, et cetera. Then you see, you know, oh, Well, I don't know. They're not killing people in the sea. They're not engaged in extrajudicial killings. They're not running a genocide like the U.S. is in West Asia. They're also off the charts when it comes to the introduction of environmental civilization, renewable energy. They believe in science. They have electric vehicles. There's like so many things that... If people have criticisms or they raise questions, great, you know, think critically about it, raise questions. But you have to see that the model that it represents is very different than the U.S. and the imperial core. And we need to open people's minds up outside of that kind of anti-communist Cold War mindset.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw people saying in China, you can stand in front of a tank and not get killed. In America, you can't make a three point turn in your own neighborhood.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah, that goes to the heart of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: OK, well, look, I'm going to let you go because I've had you here for two and a half hours.

Gabriel Rockhill: I think I triggered you with the conversation around the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and I apologize to the audience because there's a lot that we should have gotten into. The way I just keep saying Frankfurt School and then like going on a frolicking detour away from my actual question about the Frankfurt School, that's on me. But I do recommend that people read the book and listen to your other interviews where you've stay closer to the source material. And I'd love for you to come back, especially after I haven't had a hard copy yet, but after I have a chance to do a close read with a hard copy, I will be much more prepared to stay rooted to the source material. But I will say this in conclusion, after the tough day that was yesterday with the ice killing, I am thinking about all this stuff with the end game and how it's how visceral everything's feeling these days, I prepared myself a steak and a baked potato with some caramelized onions and half an avocado. And I enjoyed this extremely decadent, high-fat meal, thinking about how this world where I get to sit here with my heated apartment eating a piece of cow that emitted many greenhouse gases and was an environmental nightmare are quickly coming to a close. And then I better enjoy every taste of the luxuries that I get to enjoy the imperial core and its last days because life is about to be very different going forward. It feels like very soon in a way that in some ways it should be. But I wish we were moving toward giving up those things because it was improving the lives of the global South and not because it was improving the lives of Elon Musk, but that's neither here nor there. That is to say, I am not at the most optimistic mood, but I do get clarity from, interesting to me that you don't agree with me on this, given that this is like what I get from your book. I had this experience with Osita Nuevo recently where I read his book and I was like, oh, this book is all about how the Democrats are terrible and they're the enemy. And he was like, no, it's about how we need to preserve liberal ideals. And I was like, oh, well, everything I'm arguing is from your book, Osita. And also, I don't want to simplify this. I don't want to put words in Osita's mouth. Go read his book. Go listen to the episode, people. You know what I'm trying to say. But there were these values and like You know, I think a lot of people, I think McManus was on the show recently. A lot of people on the left make this argument about how the right purports to care about some of these like founding fathery federalist paper, liberal ideals, enlightenment ideals, and that we should exploit that to get them on our side as Donald Trump and them completely abandon all of their alleged commitments to liberalism, free speech, anti-imperialism, the things that they pretended to be. And my takeaway from the current moment is actually it was all a farce. I think it was useful to reach out to certain members of the public who I think are sincerely committed to that stuff, but only if you were going to convert them into a party project that was genuinely committed to them, but not the Democratic Party, which is also going to betray those ideals. And that ultimately we shouldn't try to frame our moral goals in terms of what like Thomas Paine cared about or whatever. I don't know. But that we should just say good things are good because we have a humanistic orientation and we value human life and prosperity and stop trying to... Anyway, that is a version of the argument that has been had. How much are we going to try to exploit people's commitment to structures of the past to get them on board with our project. And to your point about how exigent everything's feeling and how late stage capitalism at all is and how people are suffering more and more, I just don't think it's necessary. I think we can just say it's bad to shoot people in the street. at a traffic stop and that it's good for people to have health care. And we're living in the richest country in the history of the world. And it's absurd that we don't have it. The harder part is that even on the left, and I brought this up in the last episode, when you start to talk about us having a quote unquote lower standard of living, like having to give stuff up in order to have equality around the world and to not continue to exploit the global south, You see how the right melts down if you talk about eating less red meat and the left will melt down if you talk about open borders or open up the question of what an ethical immigration system looks like. I'm with you on that. There's a lot more persuasion and like, you know, cultural evolution that needs to happen on those fronts. I'm with you there. Not on healthcare. I think we got the team assembled on healthcare, but what the future looks like and that it's going to look different than it does now. And in some ways you're not going to have as much materially, but there's other benefits like, not dying from preventable illness because you can't afford a bill. I think that's the work. That's the work that still needs to be done.

Gabriel Rockhill: Sorry. No, there's a number of things that you touched on. I would say that in bringing together some of the different threads of our conversation that a lot of my own work is dedicated to diagnosing the history of why the left has lost its teeth. And what we need is a left that has some real bite to it because it is advancing an agenda that argues for a revolutionary change to the socioeconomic system that drives All of the things that we've been talking about, lack of access to health care, lack of access to housing, education, getting shot in the street, the racial dynamics that are bound up with dynamics of super exploitation, immigrant labor pools, like all of this is bound up in a particular socioeconomic system that privileges profit over people. And when you have a capitalist left, then you have a left that says that, well, we should have a system founded on profit. And that is not a left. The left project needs to be and has historically been anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. I think the part of the point where there were frictions in the positions that we're taking is it seems like we agree on that. But then the question is, well, how do you get there? And my approach to how you get there is, well, you look at history and you study how people have done it, not because you're going to cut and paste, but because you want to understand the practical exigencies that inform a struggle that is going to win. and or at least be victorious in general and so for me i think that we need a very clear and strong left position articulated in the media in education in political spaces in organizing in the kind of broader social world and that we need to articulate how people's grievances that are very very justified can be solved not by putting America first or doubling down on whiteness or doing the things that the fascists propose, because the fascists are proposing solutions to real social problems. They're just false solutions to those problems, and usually solutions for only a segment of the population, a privileged segment of the population. We have to say, yes, these are the problems, And guess what? These are the solutions because they've been tested and they've proven to work. And therefore, what we need to do is figure out the mechanisms by which we can develop power in that direction. We need a real socialist left in this country. and we can have debates about exactly how we get there but at least if we have that horizon for our struggles then and here i think we clearly agree then we won't be hoodwinked by the compatible fake left that is trying to browbeat us into being complicit and accommodationist with capitalist imperialism and then ultimately what it's trying to do is get us to fight against ourselves It's trying to get us to say no to racism, no to misogyny, no to all of these social ills, but to practically do things that don't go to the root causes of these social ills. So we need to not only diagnose the problem, we also have to propose a very clear solution to the problem. And a lot of the Western left, including some of the Western Marxist left and the Frankfurt School, might as well say the words that we get that terminology, has not embraced a real diagnosis of the solution to the problems with capitalism. A lot of people know about the problems. The solutions have a socialist form, and that's the direction that we need to go in.

Speaker 1: Well, it's very funny that you end on the term fake left because that is what the aforementioned Cenk Uygur once called me. Oh, called you? It was the subject. Oh, yes, I am the fake left. And then we ended up having a constructive debate about it, I think. But the irony to me is that you get called the fake left if you don't subscribe to lesser to evilism and supporting the Democratic Party. And the self-defined real left is the one that always seems to find its way back to establishment politics again and again, whatever you want to take from that. Just one last very quick thing before we go. It doesn't feel to me like you have a particular desire to kind of name names call out or like oust i mean we talked about jack a little bit obviously we talked about chomsky a little bit but it does my instinct is to say well tell me who you think tell me who you think is the problem and let's let's at least clue people into the fact that they are being hoodwinked by these names and part of the left's effort should be following the money and doing more reporting on who's been captured and why does matt taibbi sound so different these days you know But it doesn't seem to be a particular preoccupation of yours. What do you think we should do about the reality of all of the co-opting that's been going on?

Gabriel Rockhill: Well, in many ways, what I propose is a systemic analysis with a recognition that the subjects operating within that system are symptoms of the overall system. And so I do name names and I will name some more in a moment, but it's more important to understand the system because it will continue to produce subjects. There are journalists who haven't yet been born who are going to be co-opted by the system. And once you recognize those structures, then you can see all the different ways in which people operate within them. In my own case, this book is the first. is based on 10 years of archival research. And so it became too long. And so I divided into three parts. And the second part is on postmodernism, French theory, and it'll be out next year. And then the third part is on contemporary radical theory. A lot of the theory that's promoted as being kind of cutting edge today, if it be Zizek or Judith Butler or other figures like this. And so I do name names very explicitly because one of the things that's remarkable is that the intellectuals with major platforms in the imperial core have many, many disagreements, but they tend to agree on the essentials. And that is that they are anti-communist when it comes to practice, and they tend to be capitalist and imperialist accommodationists. And that's a remarkable fact. And it's not just a result of individual decisions. It's the system has promoted the types of intellectuals that do not propose real solutions to the problems that we've been discussing. And it does that because it wants to keep people within the fold. I've focused on what I call the intellectual world war and the intelligentsia. So mainly intellectuals in the sense of like professors and some journalists and things like this. But they're doing the exact same thing in many other fields. And they do it precisely because they have the money and the resources to fund and support a fake left as a weapon of war against the real left. And that dividing line is really, really important. The more kind of tactical elements that I was highlighting saying that, yeah, I think that probably a Democratic administration right now would be better if you look at it retrospectively in relationship to the Trump administration is not greenlighting that kind of fake left or saying, yeah, let's embrace the compatible left. It's the recognition that if we want a real left and right now the left is dominated by a fake left, then we have to be serious about the practical struggle to build that left power and recognize that the play of forces is such that the media, the educational system, the political elite, Hollywood, it's all dominated by, if they're on the left, they're fake left. So what do you do in that situation? I think you have to do two things at once. And I'll close with this. You radically criticize that fake left and you outline not just a critique, but a positive project of saying this is what a socialist horizon looks like. And this is how it's done. And this is what we need to do. While at the same time, at a practical level, you say, well, there are elements of this fake left that we might be able to recuperate. Just as they've recuperated people for their cause, we might be able to bring them in because they'll be hanging out, voting for Bernie or supporting other people like that and then realizing it didn't get us anywhere. We've got to bring those people in. We've got to make them part of our cause. And we also have to recognize that there are some people who are within that larger compatible left who are there for very different reasons. They might actually think that what they're contributing to is, you know, a kind of project that is going to improve over time. And they don't see the kind of broader horizons of imperialism. They don't see the complicity with the U.S. war machine. And so we have to be able to leverage those elements in our direction so that we can build a real left. and recuperate that fake left that has been brought in by capitalist forces and more right-wing forces. And that's not because I want to work with the compatible left. I would rather have a world where all of our debates are about the real left because there's plenty of debates. There's lots to figure out. It's very complicated. I don't want to waste my time. But given the nature of the world, that is the predominant left. So how can we transform it in a way that serves the cause of developing a real systemically oriented revolutionary left?

Speaker 1: Well, Professor Rockhill, I appreciate the Hollywood aside because you have provided justification for me doing multiple episodes critiquing one battle after another. Oh, yeah. That was Praxis, actually, guys. Gotta root out the fake left in Hollywood. Thank you so much for being extremely generous with your time here today. Tell the people really quickly before you go where they can find your book or follow you online anywhere else.

Gabriel Rockhill: The book was published by Monthly Review Press. It can be found on their website. I started a sub stack recently and am using it as a platform for interviews, publications and other things. And the critical theory workshop dot org is a portal to a lot of the collective educational political projects, publication projects that I'm involved in.

Speaker 1: Terrific. Thank you again for being so generous with your time. Thanks to all of you who are listening and supporting the Real Laugh Project. That is tenuous and increasingly precarious as every day passes. So thanks for your support as always. Take care of yourselves and remember to keep the faith.

Speaker 5: And this emptiness fills my heart