Why has Gabriel Rockhill’s work on Western Marxism, not limited to his recent book but a variety of articles, lectures, and interviews, generated so much discourse?^[1] It is easy to find all of this commotion a bit farcical in the face of a mounting global crisis, nothing more than a bit of gossip about various irrelevant philosophers. This view is understandable, but I think it misses why so much discussion, much of it heated, has been triggered by Rockhill’s intervention. What ultimately is at stake are not really questions about whether Marcuse was a CIA agent or if Foucault was the harbinger of neoliberalism, but rather questions about the type of left we want to build - primarily, the type of intellectual culture it has.

My aim here is not another review of Rockhill’s recent book, but to engage in the broader questions raised by the discourse that his work has generated. At the core of these questions are the challenges faced by Marxist intellectuals, who are presumably dedicated to a project of scientific inquiry while also partisans of a political cause that seeks to address the very class divisions that intellectuals rest upon. What is the role of intellectuals in the communist movement in relation to the tasks of political struggle? How do intellectuals balance a commitment to the integrity of their work with the necessary opportunism of political struggle? Rockhill and those working in his mold offer us an attempt to address these questions and a critique of the sorry state of the current left and its “theory industry”, yet ultimately fall back on past methods that were deleterious to the development of genuine scientific socialism for a solution. Rather than a true renaissance of Marxist theory, what is offered is what I call “heresy hunting” and a pragmatist approach to intellectual work that subsumes its critical capacity to the needs of political maneuvers, hence reproducing the same problems addressed by Marxist intellectuals in the past. It is my hope here to unpack some of these questions, examine how past Marxists have struggled with them, and offer basic principles for developing an intellectual culture for the left that can properly balance scientific rigor, critical acuity, and political engagement.

Emotive Stakes

To begin, we must look at the debate on a basic emotive level. Rockhill and his acolytes take up the mantle of an “anti-imperial Marxism” rooted in “anti-imperialist state building projects that develop socialism in the real world,” counterposed to a “Western Marxism” that has amounted to nothing more than a “compatible left” producing little more than academic seminars at best and engaging in active complicity with imperialism at worst. For the past 50 years, the modern left, especially in the West, has been on the retreat. Yet mountains of leftist theory continue to be produced, and one can only stop and wonder if there is some kind of connection. Rockhill’s disdain for the existing “theory industry” appeals to a sense of disgust at how left theorists have failed for so long, yet have hardly been properly challenged. So what better to throw in their faces than the charge that their whole project rests upon a collective ruling project, a conspiracy, in other words, to defang properly revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and replace it with a phony, fake “Western Leftism”?

In response, we see an appeal to intellectual sophistication, as well as skepticism towards conspiratorial narratives. In our pages of Cosmonaut, Scott Patrick makes the case that what we see in Who Paid the Pipers is the “comfort of conspiracy”, a means of avoiding hard truths about the left’s own failures to avoid necessary self-criticism.^[2] This is fair enough - it’s clear that much of the modern left finds comfort in looking to conspiracies of the ruling class as explanations of their failure rather than actually doing the necessary self-criticism that would overcome its marginality and complacency. Sebastian Budgen of Verso upper management goes a bit further in a now infamous Facebook post, claiming that this is merely the terrain of “chemtrails, 9/11 trutherism, and Covid vaccine panics”, conspiracy ravings fit for “American basement-dwellers and internet revolutionaries” rather than a “cosmopolitan child of Paris”. Budgen even goes as far to brag that he helped halt an earlier attempt at publishing the work, and we even get an accusation that Rockill has “peasant consciousness”, evidenced by his “turn to dwarfish notions of historical causality and shocked, moist-eyed ‘discoveries of loose governmental connections among intellectuals”.^[3] So here we have a work that is not only below any kind of serious engagement, but was worth preventing from being published in the first place.

In more developed critical responses, we see the accusation that Rockhill is merely pushing adherence to a narrow Marxist-Leninist dogma, dismissing the breadth of intellectual work that doesn’t serve this dogma as bourgeois. We see this from boomer New Leftist Russel Jacoby, author of the classic Dialectic of Defeat, who in his Jacobin review seems to have the impression that a dogmatic form of Stalinism is rising against the creative, critical, and anti-authoritarian Marxism his generation championed.^[4] There is a sense that this is all just anti-intellectual at the end of the day, a way for a dogmatic type of Marxist-Leninist to reassert themselves as politically relevant in conditions where their ideology is fading from history. After all, is it not a little ridiculous to blame the failures of the Western Left, to say nothing of the Global Left, on the fact that a few of our beloved left intellectuals were conscripted into the Cultural Cold War? Since when were intellectuals our vanguard? History isn’t supposed to hinge on them, at least not in historical materialism. However, as much as I appreciate their concerns about anti-intellectualism, I find responses like these overly defensive of their own turf, revealing a fear of confronting their own failures. At the end of Jacoby’s review, we are told that “A graying New Left/Western Marxism still holds more promise than Mao or Stalin 2.0,” as if this is any reassurance about the shape of the modern left and the failures of the generations before us. As much as we can point to the obvious shortcomings of 20th-century Official Communism or Maoism, Jacoby’s defense of the Western New Left as inherently superior despite its failure to meaningfully challenge the rule of capital feels like just as much of a dodge as blaming everything on the CIA.

There is also, of course, the fear of social conservatism. There is a common notion that Rockhill’s narratives too closely resemble those of the LaRouche Movement or Michael Lind, who positioned the Frankfurt School at the center of a “cultural marxist” conspiracy to corrupt the values of Western Civilization and lay the groundwork for some kind of totalitarian or oligarchic takeover. If right-wing demagogues place “Cultural Marxism” at the center of a conspiracy that explains their failures in the culture war and the dominance of liberal “political correctness” in mainstream institutions, then the Marxist-Leninists in Rockhill’s camp can be accused of placing “Western Marxism” at the core of a similar conspiracy. In this case, it is not “Western Civilization” being corrupted. Rather, the West itself is the agent of corruption, the corrupted being the great tradition of Marxism-Leninism as upheld in various state-building projects and their ruling ideologies. It doesn’t help that various philosophers attacked under these auspices were known for their more liberated views on sexuality and advocates for social movements of oppressed minorities seen as outside the traditional working class - take Marcuse, for example. The suspicious reader can all too easily see this as a way to regress into a stifling, socially conservative leftism that subsumes all social struggle to the tasks of state-building and the development of the productive forces. It is not long before one begins to think of Stalin’s persecution of homosexuality, or Soviet censorship of jazz and rock music, when one hears the critique of “Western Marxism” from the new crop of MLs.^[5]

The most striking example of this interpretation can be found in a recent article by Patrick Iber in Dissent, which compare’s Rockhill’s book to a recent book by A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, an interesting read about the origins of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory as distinct from Hitler’s ideas of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and how it has managed to shape the contours of our modern culture war. Iber argues that the “right-wing idea-mongers” documented by Wood “have produced a palette-swapped version of this critique”, where Rockhill can only explain the unpopularity of Marxism-Leninism in the Western Left through a state conspiracy, in the same way the Modern Right appeals to a shadowy cabal of “Cultural Marxists” socially engineering social changes brought about by broader social changes.^[6] In Matt McManus’ review for Damage Mag, alongside some compelling evidence that Adorno is severely misquoted and a sound critique of the speculative logic Rockhill engages in, we also get the accusation of “Lyndon LaRouche Redux”. ^[7] One can also find this casting of aspersions in a review by Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss, who end their multi-part polemic with a review of various Red-Brown permutations of Stalin and a claim that socialism-in-one-country has a tendency that leads towards anti-semitism.^[8] All throughout the discourse, one finds the specter of LaRouche; the insinuation here seems to be that Rockhill is flirting with dangerous ideas that can easily lead to some sort of flirtation with far-right politics.

This allusion to the far-right Cultural Marxism narratives misplaces where Rockhill’s critique, and those sympathetic to him, are coming from. I don’t think that Rockhill is motivated by some “red-brown” culture war agenda seeking to drive us back to the days of Maxim Gorky’s policies on homosexuality. Rockhill, and I think it is fair to say most of those who take up his arguments, are driven by a genuine frustration with the state of the current “Theory industry”, as Rockhill calls the world of humanities academia: its overrepresentation in the left, its failure to produce intellectuals and theoretical works that are of much use for any kind of serious revolutionary project, and the fact that much of the theoretical works that are produced and promoted by the left are useless or obfuscatory. Rockhill, himself a former student of Derrida and then Alain Badiou, describes his moment of realization upon being asked to give a talk at a conference on the events of September 11th:

To say I was ill-equipped would be generous. What did I really have to say about what had just happened? Given my training, perhaps I could frame the events, which I scarcely understood at the time, in terms of an irreconcilable differend between phrase regimens, or a confrontation with the big Other? Maybe the planet was being deterritorialized under our feet, or we had just entered the desert of the Lacanian Real? If all else failed, I could fall back on references to the ever-nebulous différance as the condition of possibility—and impossibility—of all thought and discourse, thereby making some ponderously abstract metaphysical claims that could not possibly be beholden to reality.^[9]

It is, of course, easy to immediately mock this as philistine anti-intellectualism; surely, after all, a scholar of Derrida, who engaged with issues of state sovereignty and political ethics in works like The Politics of Friendship, to give an example, should have something interesting to say about 9/11 in the context of his existing philosophical education. But at the end of the day, Rockhill was not wrong to feel this way. Sure, a knowledge of Derrida can give one the intellectual wits to have an insightful and literate take on a current event. But it doesn’t give you the type of knowledge to actually understand the world. You have to know about the history, about the political economy of imperialism, of energy, the nuances of the politics of Islamic armed groups, and the actual processes at play in world history that govern us all. You need the science of historical materialism, which is not a philosophy but a theory, one that can only be developed through practicing it. At the time of September 11th, 2001, not many were seriously practicing this science and developing it, and the situation today is only slightly better.

This desire to know about the real world and take up a philosophy that actually matters to existing political forces globally gives Marxism-Leninism an appeal to those who have had these frustrations. It is easy just to dismiss these concerns, to say at the end of the day that workers decide to revolt, not intellectuals, and that it matters very little what intellectuals think. To this, I would say that a left that is organized around false ideas will not succeed, no matter how vigorously workers may revolt. “Idealism” is not simply the notion that ideas matter, and there is nothing wrong with taking the production and circulation of ideas and how the state interacts with these processes seriously. The jump to “red-brown” aspersions risks essentially labeling any kind of inquiry into the Cultural Cold War’s impact on the left as a taboo topic.

The intentions of Rockhill and company seem to be genuine. They desire to build a real Marxist intellectual culture that is rooted in historical materialism, class struggle, and partisan anti-imperialism. All of Rockhill’s critics are quick to point out that his project is tied to a defense of Actually Existing Socialism, past and present, yet for those attracted to his project this gives it a prestige - the defense of modern China marks one as serious and hardheaded, willing to look past imperialist propaganda and appreciate the PRC’s pragmatic approach to national developmentalism in a world divided by imperialism. For those in the modern left frustrated by a lack of commitment to serious anti-imperialism and support for national liberation, this project carries an obvious appeal. Leftist academics, on the other hand, defensive of their work in a precarious situation of right-wing assaults on the university, are of course wary of being under attack. Rockhill is not wrong that the legacy of “Western Marxism”^[10] and the “theory industry” does merit some self-criticism from its practitioners - the problem comes when we look at the kind of intellectual culture Rockhill seeks to build.

The Anti-Bureaucrat Scenario

While Rockhill is sensitive to such accusations, it is clear to me that the intellectual culture he seeks to build is Stalinist, but in a very specific sense. This is not a problem simply because it is Stalinist, and I do not seek to trace out a variant of the typical Trotskyist narrative that has already been done to death, but it is nonetheless a problem. Nor is my aim to impugn Rockhill with the crimes of Stalin or claim he is the founder of some “Neo-Stalinist” tendency, nor do I claim the same kind of political stakes are remotely at play. My aim is merely to point to a logic deployed in the politics of Stalin that comes out in Rockhill’s book and thus in the broader culture of modern Marxism-Leninism with its “heresy hunting”.

Understanding the logic being deployed by Rockhill will require a detour in an exercise in Stalinology, in this case, an examination of how Stalin related to the intelligentsia, both bourgeois and Red. In his essay “Stalin at Work: Introduction to Stalin’s Letters to Molotov”, Lih gives us a summary of how Stalin understood his day-to-day work based on his personal letters to Molotov from the tumultuous period of 1925-1936:

There is no objective obstacle to the successful construction of socialism in Russia. The soviet system of government, the state control of the commanding heights of the economy, and the natural resources of Russia itself – all of these provide the potential for successfully completing the revolution. Correct leadership thus becomes the crucial factor. The first task of leadership is to define the correct line. The core leadership of the party – its ‘leading nucleus’ – must accurately size up the situation and deduce the necessary tasks facing the party at any one time. The main threat to defining the correct line comes from wavering on the part of leaders who in their hearts lack faith in the revolution.

Defining the correct line is only the first step. Next it must be spelled out so that all other party members understand both the overall picture and their own role in it. This requires clarity in presentation and a careful selection of slogans and directives. But it would be criminal laxness to believe that the party line will be carried out automatically. Proper leadership requires unremitting attention to ‘selection of officials’ and ‘checking up on fulfilment’. The main threat here is Russia’s low level of culture, which forces the worker-peasant state to rely on many ‘class-alien elements’ in its government bureaucracy. As a result, ‘vigilance’ is one of the basic duties of each party member.^[11]

In classic Lih fashion, this summary is then recast as a sort of heroic narrative, a “dramatic antibureaucrat scenario that portrays well-intentioned Communists doing battle with sophisticated bureaucrats who try to fool and corrupt them."^[12] Stalin believes that the master of the state is he who masters the state apparatus. Hence, it is necessary to find officials who will not simply follow directives from the top but follow them with conviction. Furthermore, an enemy within still exists, despite the change in the class character of the governmental institutions and the expropriation of the enemy classes. “Former people”, saboteurs drawn from these class enemies who mask themselves, fill the enterprises and bureaucracy of the Soviet system. Even more dangerous are those who underestimate this threat due to their own self-assured comfort with the accomplishments of the existing system. They, too, must be purged.

This fear of saboteurs meant Stalin was particularly fixated on “checking up on fulfillment”, a basic task of any leader, but given a special dimension by the “anti-bureaucrat” scenario - after all, failures of fulfillment can be taken as evidence of class hostility. This meant taking not only competence into account but also the issue of whether an official would be able to unquestioningly follow party directives and not fall prey to the lures of “bourgeois specialists”. In a political economy where the party-state's authority is invested in all spheres of economic policy in a program of state-led industrialization, technical tasks now become imbued with the drama of class struggle. The existence of bourgeois sabotage and conspiracy, something that had a basis in reality but was inflated beyond proportion, could explain problems with the performance of the emerging Soviet system in class terms and even serve to mobilize the masses in anti-bureaucratic purges.

Take, for example, the purges against specialists in the 1930s, where the hammer came down on any of the technical intelligentsia who expressed concerns about industrialization and collectivization. Forty-eight specialists in the meat industry were executed after a secret trial, public trials of engineers supposedly aiming to form an illegal party, and even a trial against remnant Mensheviks, all of which sought to put fear into the hearts of the technical intelligentsia prone to class sabotage. The mass difficulties of industrialization could find a scapegoat in these class strata, and Lih gives the reader reason to believe that Stalin was not entirely cynical in his employment of this scenario.

The anti-bureaucrat scenario would go beyond attacks on the technical intelligentsia and those bureaucrats who were of unreliable class origins, however. As mentioned, the anti-bureaucrat scenario sees the “naive communist” as much, if not more of a danger, than the “wily specialist”.^[13] Lih describes an epidemiological element to the anti-bureaucrat scenario, where ‘petty-bourgeois’ dilettantism moves up the chain of bureaucracy to where it can come into contact and “infect” Communist administrators and then the leaders of the CPSU itself. Hence the existence of the “right opposition”, which in Stalin’s specific variant of the scenario is not defined by any real specific beliefs but as the manifestation of this “infection”.

This, of course, raises the problem of how any communist is to work among the specialists without themselves becoming infected. It also raises the obvious question of how to determine if one’s political objections are a result of “infection” or simply a rational disagreement with policy informed by knowledge obtained from a specialist. Take, for example, Stalin’s paranoia regarding Groman, a former Menshevik and prominent economic planner in the 1920s, whose talent as a political economist cannot be doubted. Stalin complains about his influence in 1925, calls for his department’s influence to be smashed in 1929, and in 1930 wants him shot, as it seems like every Communist who works with him becomes “infected”.^[14] The idea that Groman could have given advice to communists that could have been judged on its own scientific merits, despite his background, doesn’t seem to register in the anti-bureaucrat scenario. To the extent that Groman’s are necessary, it is to fulfil the orders of the party until they are replaced by loyal Communists in the future.

The logic of the antibureaucrat scenario carries an almost messianic revolutionary zeal, as well as a populist side, reflective of what David Priestland has called a ‘revivalist’ tendency in Bolshevik political thought and practice.^[15] Its number one ideological enemy is doubt - doubt that victory will follow, that socialism can be built, that it has been built, or that one's cause is morally righteous. Lih quotes Molotov on the necessity of faith:

Faith in victory, assurance about one’s own forces, a genuine conviction about the correctness of one’s line and unwavering decisiveness in struggle that flows from it - this is what will decide the outcome [of our struggle]...In this period of undoubtedly tense and long drawn out struggle, it is necessary that our hands not shake, that our will not waver, that our thinking not be paralyzed.^[16]

Hence, the best way to identify those “infected” under the anti-bureaucratic scenario is to find those who lack faith, who carry doubt. Criticism expressed too sharply can be seen as doubt, as vacillation in one's historical task, and then as sabotage. It is easy to see how the capacity for genuine critical and scientific discussion, when put under such pressures, becomes muted, if not impossible. What does one expect when the political whims of the party-state can run roughshod over the protestations of actual experienced technical bureaucrats for fear of being tried as saboteurs? Despite the accomplishments of Soviet sciences in many other fields during this era, this political logic was able to wreak havoc on the fields of agronomy and biology in what is known as the Lysenko affair.^[17] Prominent Bolshevik historians like M.N. Pokrovsky were accused of “wrecking in the field”.^[18] In many fields, scientific and cultural, this logic led to pointless censorship, holding back the massive talent held by the rising Soviet state. An honest appraisal of the USSR, regardless of one's political sympathies, requires dealing with these realities.

I contend that Rockhill and his followers, despite whatever protestations they make, do not really want to deal with these realities, because they are themselves trying to perform an anti-bureaucrat scenario in the field of philosophy (and the broader humanities), unmasking the sources of “infection”. In this case, we have the fledgling corpus of global Marxism-Leninism, what Rockhill sees as a genuine “Anti-Imperial Marxism” that has been rooted in a real, successful resistance to capitalism and imperialism. Genuine proletarian theoretical production can happen in academia, as Rockhill assures us, but there must be dedicated followers of Marxism-Leninism to carry it out. However, this means coming into contact with the “intellectual labor aristocracy” of the university, the equivalent of the “wiley specialist” who is susceptible to serving imperialist and bourgeois class interests, in this case through the networks of foundations and intelligence agencies. Hence, there must be an “unmasking” of the vectors of “infection”, those intellectuals whose works serve to cast doubt and shake the faith of the Marxist-Leninist intellectual. While in Stalin’s classic anti-bureaucrat scenario, the “right opposition” was the ideological watchword of those in our camp infected by the class enemy, for Rockhill, it is “Western Marxism” that infects the would-be leftist intelligentsia with doubt and vacillation. As a result, “Western Marxism” becomes defined less and less as a coherent body of thought and more as simply any work that spreads potential doubt and vacillation, particularly in socialist state-building projects.

It cannot be doubted that the CIA sought to create a compatible left, that it recruited from those among the Marxist Left who were disillusioned by the practical results of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is reasonable to presume that the post-war Frankfurt School was deemed to be not particularly dangerous to the ruling class and therefore “safe” to receive funding from official sources due to its acquiescence to censorship and increasingly conservative direction under Horkheimer. It was also true that genuine conspiracies existed in the besieged Soviet state, with sabotage from class enemies being a foundation theme from the early days of the regime. Yet the existence of sabotage and conspiracies from the enemy needs careful detective work, not arbitrary purges of the intelligentsia. Neither do we need the equivalent in intellectual work: some kind of grand heresy hunt.

Heresy Hunting

Perhaps Rockhill will protest that he seeks a heresy hunt, but it’s hard to see this type of thinking at play. Take for example Rockhill’s recommendation of “rigorous, historical materialist analysis of the USSR” as counterposed to Marcuse’s book (itself flawed like most Frankfurt School work on the USSR, but there is nary a serious critique of its contents despite the surface level usual claims of “utopian”, “non-dialectical”, ect.): Annie Lacroix-Riz, Domenico Losurdo, Ludo Martens, and Michael Parenti.^[19] Of the latter three of these authors, the ones I am familiar with, I can confidently say were not chosen because of their insightful knowledge of the workings of the Soviet system or because they produced work that shed light on its tendencies and contradictions as a social formation. They were chosen because the work they have done is politically useful to the Marxist-Leninist political agenda and is essentially apologetic. This is not to discount the works of these authors; Losurdo, especially, has produced much of worth. But to claim that one can find in their works the kind of serious critical examination of the legacy of Actually Existing Socialism that is necessary today is absurd. Such a work would require engaging with intellectuals who are not Communists, who work in bourgeois academia, who might even have suspect political agendas; even, god forbid, “Trotskyites”.^[20] Take the example of Rudolf Bahro, who Rockhill turns to in order to condemn Marcuse through a logic of “infection”.

Because Bahro was an East German dissident and convicted for betrayal of state secrets in 1978, only to be granted amnesty to the West, one can only imagine that he is to be viewed with extreme distrust by Rockhill and those who follow his analysis. Yet one finds in his book The Alternative in Eastern Europe a rather mature analysis of the challenges faced in Eastern European socialist countries, dealing with issues such as the inheritance of pre-capitalist class civilization and the continuation of its legacies, how to pursue the overcoming of the mental and manual division labor, and in general the question of how to further the project of communism as classless horizon in societies where socialism “actually exists”. Rockhill doesn’t seem interested in what this forbidden book has to say at all - merely that Marcuse’s support for it, and for the intelligence-backed campaign in support of its author, are evidence that he was still on State Department Payroll. The fact that Marcuse finds the book so important and similar to his own ideas is further marshaled as evidence against him.^[21] This anti-intellectual approach seems incapable of judging arguments on their own merits, a notion Rockhill rejects as “intellectual commodity fetishism”. At the end of the day, this is really just a rejection of the notion that ideas can have truth beyond the conditions of their genesis, which ultimately entails a rejection of science itself.^[22] Today, with the Eastern Bloc long gone, it is possible for us to look at a work like Bahro’s a bit more objectively and not feel like we have to take sides in a Cold War drama. We can look at states like the DDR and how intellectuals diagnosed their problems without worrying about feeding into a CIA intelligence campaign, and instead seriously think these problems through.

If Bahro did indeed collaborate with Western intelligence, this is, of course, something to be condemned. Yet this case touches on a broader issue, which is how intellectuals developed legitimate grievances with the Soviet system and with the Official Communist movement more broadly. The great French Marxist “Orientalist” (and former Communist Party member) Maxime Rodinson, in the foreword to his 1966 Islam and Capitalism, spoke of how a “set of taboos stands in the way of a free approach to the great (and sometimes even small) problems on which the only answer permitted is that which is laid down in dogma.”^[23] For Rodinson, those comrades in the Communist Party, while deserving of respect, were subject to certain fetters they could only escape through “doublethink”. On a personal level, he could not justify this sacrifice. This is not to say the world of “Official Communism” and “Eastern Marxism” was an intellectual wasteland. Many brilliant philosophers came out of this tradition, and have been unfairly underrecognized by the world of Western leftist academia.^[24] Yet it would be hard to deny they faced an intellectual environment that was often stifling, and pointlessly so. While we can blame intellectuals for taking up the cause of Western imperialism and for real collaboration, can we really blame them for having criticisms of the Soviet Union and Actually Existing Socialism? Were there really no legitimate grievances to be had?

The reality is that the arbitrary heavy-handedness of the Soviet system impacted the personal lives of Communist intellectuals globally in ways that went beyond censorship and intellectual constriction. Intellectuals who were sympathetic to Communism and the Soviet Union faced its oppressive elements head-on in rather tragic ways. How does one balance personal tragedy at the hands of the system one is dedicated to, with their political commitments to the defense of this very system? Writing to Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman in 1950, Paul Baran spoke of utter desperation when faced with his father stranded in Moscow by his mother's death, incapable of getting from the Soviet government permission to leave and reunite with his son:

It is frightfully difficult to control oneself, not to join the “baiters” and call those butchers the names that they deserve…this brutality is not a means to an end. It is a means without any conceivable purpose - sheer contempt for human existence, sheer soullessness of power-drunk soldatesca [bands of soldiers], sheer weight of a heavy seargent’s boot. How should one think straight on days like these, how does one not lose one’s equilibrium, one’s ability to see forests, when one is hit over the head with a tree? It takes all that one has not to become desperate…

Sweezy responds arguing there is a sound logic behind the Iron Curtain and its policies, but concedes that the Soviets have little actual reason to hold him in this specific and that the Soviets “don’t consider the problem from the point of view of simple human relations” are acting callous - albeit, a callousness that has kept them in power, despite being “bound to extend far beyond the strict limits of necessity.” In response to Baran’s sacrilegious confession to wanting to “join the baiters” (with the Cold War now in full swing, nonetheless), Sweezy fails to give a moralistic scolding about lack of faith and doubt, but instead tells Baran

I know what you mean…the reasons are not only in the Soviet Union either. Communists everywhere are very difficult to take: fanatics always are, I suppose. But one is always successfully - and in my case easily - restrained by one look at the baiters. The only real alternative course seems to me to withdraw completely into as private a life as possible. That seems to suit some people, but I’m afraid it never would me. The real index of the world crisis is the way it reaches deeply into the personal life of almost everyone.^[25]

One should, of course, grant Baran and Sweezy, in particular Baran, the moral courage they deserve for not only refusing to join the chorus of Cold War “baiters” like Sidney Hook, Max Schactman, Jay Lovestone or James Burnham (among others), but upholding the progressive accomplishments of a very fraught and compromised social formation in the face of mass social conformism, and in the case of Baran, intense personal tragedy. Of course, using a truly Stalinist approach, one could point to the fact that Baran at this point was working at Stanford, a major research institute integrated into the rising military-industrial complex that had just employed him earlier in its burgeoning era during WWII and its immediate aftermath. From here, one could insinuate that this class background was expressing itself in a petit-bourgeois sentimentality over his incapacity to see the minor importance of his family tragedies relative to the grand historical scheme of global class struggle. But this would be nothing more than an insinuation, taking a vocabulary of class analysis that is meant to be scientific and stretching it into a means of casting vague aspersions for vulgar political ends.

At the end of the day, the kind of heresy hunting that Rockhill and much of the modern Marxist-Leninist community perform is self-defeating because it undermines the possibility of forming a genuinely critical community of intellectuals that is willing to look at our past squarely in the face. After all, the founders of Monthly Review themselves, some of the most important purveyors of anti-imperialist and socialist scholarship in times of Cold War conformity, expressed the “doubt” that Molotov saw as the ultimate vector of “infection” among cadres. Could any approach do more to marginalize genuine scientific Marxism in an age where the Soviet project lies in ruins and socialism struggles to articulate a model of development that meaningfully breaks with capitalism while remaining relevant to mass politics? The intellectual culture of the Stalinist “anti-bureaucrat scenario”, or the heresy hunt, should ultimately be rejected.

Marxism and the Intelligentsia

While the kind of intellectual culture that Rockhill (and much of modern Marxism-Leninism) offers is quite dire, moving forward to developing an alternative should not start from scratch. Hence, it is worth engaging with two theorists who did engage with the question of Marxism, intellectuals, and their relation to political practice - Karl Kautsky and Louis Althusser. If in the work of Kautsky we see the basic themes and problematics that are later explored in Stalin’s “anti-bureaucrat scenario”, in Althusser we see a Marxist philosophy coping with intellectual life in a party that exists in the aftermath of Stalin’s purges and their lingering impact. If Kautsky’s primary concern is the assimilation of intellectuals into the party, Althusser is dealing with how an intellectual assimilated into a party deals with the tension between political pragmatism and intellectual integrity.

Karl Kautsky wrote on the antagonism between intellectuals and workers in a 1903 Die Neue Zieit column, noting that while the intellectual did not “stand in any economic antagonism to the proletariat…his status of life and his conditions of labour are not proletarian, and this gives rise to a certain antagonism in sentiments and ideas” (it is worth noting that Kautsky is not framing intellectuals as a separate class with opposed interests, but as strata whose forms of work create certain conflicts that are theoretically resolvable). Proletarians are nothing as isolated individuals - they must unite as a collective in order to achieve any progress as a class. The intellectual, on the other hand, fights “not by means of power, but by argument” - capable of advancing their position in society through their talents, knowledge, and ability - and hence “seeks the freest play for these”. This is the classic desire for intellectual autonomy, which Kautsky essentially argues is rooted in the very nature of their labor being based on the production of knowledge and symbols. These conditions make the intellectual less amenable to the subordination to the whole that collective action necessitates, seeing “the need of discipline only for the masses, not for the select few. And naturally he counts himself among the latter.”^[26] One can see the themes of Stalin’s anti-bureaucrat scenario prefigured here: a basic thread of skepticism if not hostility towards intellectuals and a concern with how to assimilate them either into a party or workers’ state where their autonomy is more or less seen as a threat.

It should be noted that Kautsky’s concerns about intellectuals were not a hostility to free thought and expression as such, but rather a matter of practical political concern. In Volume II of his 1902 book Social Revolution, concerned with tasks of constructing the future socialist society once the proletariat has taken power, Kautsky portrays a broad explosion of scientific and cultural development. Important is his call for freedom from censorship that serves to “compel the intellectual workers to direct their views according to those of the governing classes and will not permit them to investigate freely and independently,” making it clear that “the intellectual workers will have every reason to breathe freer when the proletarian regime sweeps away the direct and indirect dominion of the class of capitalists and land owners.” Regarding the production of “social necessities of intellectual production”, we are told that the central government will “not be the only leading and means granting organ, but there will also be municipalities”. Furthermore, Kautsky describes a flourishing of free unions which “will serve art and science and the public life and advance production in these spheres in the most diverse ways, or undertake them directly” - a phenomenon he sees growing with the decrease in labor hours as more can take part in the fruits of cultural and intellectual life. While it is clear that modern productive industry must be placed under a rational and orderly plan, Kautsky argues that in intellectual and cultural life “a central direction of production is not only unnecessary, but absolutely foolish.” The espoused formula is surprising from a man who helped kick the Anarchists out of the Second International: “Communism in material production, anarchism in the intellectual.”^[27] Yet in the reality of daily party organizing, Kautsky was clear that this ideal did not hold - the anarchistic tendencies of intellectuals came with a lack of discipline, a tendency that should be “understood, but not condoned, in a party organised for the class struggle.”^[28] One is reminded of Zinoviev’s exhortation in response to Karl Korsch and Gyorgy Lukacs that “‘If we get more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost.”^[29]

Kautsky’s ideals of how intellectual life should be handled under socialism, in my view, are certainly more enlightened than Stalin’s, but Kautsky never had to put his ideas to the test in the actual field of revolutionary state building. The autonomy of intellectuals that causes so much of the individual and anarchy in the party that distresses Kautsky does not cease to pose political challenges once the capitalist class is defeated, as exemplified by the Soviet experience. Stalin’s long-term solution was ultimately to train a new intelligentsia during one of the greatest periods of upward mobility in history.^[30] Yet as Boris Kagarlitsky points out, Stalin never ceased his distrust of this strata, as the nature of intellectual labor itself requires a level of autonomy.^[31] This was recognized in practice by earlier Bolshevik policies, yet the underlying anxieties that would guide the logic of Stalin’s solution remained. Even in the 1950s, when the Soviet intelligentsia had largely been replaced by cadres trained by the party-state, we see the Doctors' Plot and other purges aimed at the intelligentsia.

The truth of the matter is that the autonomy required by intellectual work, in specific philosophical work, is in inherent tension with the need for an intellectual to be a mere soldier of the cause in a political party. This is not reducible to the tensions between workers and intelligentsia rooted in a more ancient mental/manual division of labor, pointed out by Kautsky, but to the very nature of politics and intellectual labor as fields of operation. The daily Sturm und Drang of mass politics is an activity that is subject to the daily moods of the masses and the inevitable opportunism that comes from operating in the confines of bourgeois society, as if one’s party is steadfast in its oppositional principles. The need to merge with the labor movement, whose concerns are typically sectoral economic struggles, the concerns of appealing to changing daily moods of the masses, and the need for alliances and compromise, all create a field where the practical needs of reproducing institutions are supreme. In political concerns, it is simply not always the search for truth that is paramount. This is an uncomfortable reality, as Marxists inherently see their intellectual work as politically partisan, yet are also committed to a notion of truth.

For this reason, intellectuals do have a reason beyond narrow-minded sectoralism to resist the subsumption of their labor to the immediate practicalities of politics. This was a tension that one finds throughout the work of Louis Althusser, whose position as a Marxist-Leninist intellectual in an “Official” Communist Party made it all the more pronounced.

In his work Reading Capital, an anti-pragmatist epistemology of “theoretical practice” is developed with the notion that science holds its own protocols of verification and knowledge production internal to its field of study:

To speak of the criterion of practice where theory is concerned and every other practice as well, then receives in full sense for: for theoretical practice is indeed its own criterion, and contains in itself definite protocols with which to validate the quality of its produce i.e. the criteria of the scientificity of the products of scientific practice.^[32]

In this schema, a science does not need validation from a practice external to its own theoretical practice; the example of a mathematician not waiting for a theorem to be practically used by a physicist is given. Althusser then applies this logic to Historical Materialism, arguing against any notion of this theory being subsumed to a project of being verified by political practice in history before its truth can be maintained: “It has been possible to apply Marx’s theory with success because it is true; it is not true because it has been applied with success”.^[33] Here we see tension between the truth of science and success in politics addressed, with Althusser covertly polemicizing in favor of a sort of “intellectual autonomy”. This must also be understood in the context of his polemics with humanism, best represented by the future Roger Garaudy, which he saw as a right-opportunist trend that watered down Marxism so as to more easily form alliances with the Catholic Church and social democrats. For Althusser, humanism was the conformist ideology of a right-deviationist trend overtaking the Communist Movement, dangerous because it diverted a genuine critique of past inadequate forms of Marxism from developing a genuine philosophy of scientific socialism.^[34] “Theoretical practice” can then be seen alongside the critique of humanism as part of an attempt by Althusser, however flawed it may have been, to carve out a space for scientific inquiry in the party in the face of a stifling political culture.

In this period of Althusser’s thought, Dialectical Materialism sits alongside Historical Materialism as examples of scientific disciplines that Marx has developed. Historical Materialism holds as its object the “modes of production, their constitution and their transformation” while Dialectical Materialism as a scientific theory holds as its object the “history of the production of knowledges - or yet again, the historical differences between ideology and science”.^[35] Dialectical Materialism emerges as a “theory of all theories”, standing above various other scientific theories and demarcating between their ideological elements and scientific elements, also containing its own norms of scientificity internal to its field of practice like any other theory. By creating a scientific theory of history, Marx also necessarily gives birth to what Althusser, in this period, sees as a truly scientific philosophy that can truly free itself from ideological mystifications.

There is a problem, however. Althusser finds himself “hard pressed” to cite any examples of great discoveries of notable caliber in Marxism since the days of Lenin. The problem is a “politics of the ‘cult’”, which for its credit has been uncompromising in the development of socialism, but had the effect that it “effectively ignored all the indispensable conditions for theoretical reflection and research and, with the suspicion it cast on any theoretical novelty, dealt a very serious blow in practice to the freedom of scientific research and to all discovery.”^[36] Again, we see the tension between the need for theory to serve political agendas and the need for theory to have enough independence from politics to carry out its task of developing scientific truth. This is the meaning of Althusser’s early revolts against pragmatism and empiricism, the source of what he will later call his “theoreticism”. The problem for Marxism is not a separation of theory from practice in this case, but its subsumption to practice, theory turned merely into a means for political ends without any capacity for truth judgments independent from its political utility for the party.

This, of course, raises a question - what exactly is the relationship of the Marxist intellectual to politics, to the class struggle? Are they just scientists floating above it all, providing objective truth according to the internal norms of their theoretical practice, which is then provided to the political militant as they find useful? Whatever happened to the “unity of theory and practice” or “praxis”? Are we supposed to end up like the latter-day Frankfurt School, so derided by Rockhill for their separation from political struggle? While a subsumption of theory to politics can lead to its degeneration, its separation is also a danger. This implication was not lost on PCF General Secretary Waldeck Rochet, who complained of Althusser’s “omission” of the “union of theory and practice” in 1966, the party Central Committee then having surrealist poet Louis Aragon direct its proclamation of the humanist line as party orthodoxy.^[37] Althusser would then engage in self-criticism on some fronts while refusing to concede on the question of humanism. Yet this self-criticism is not a complete surrender to the pragmatism and empiricism either, and is performed more through a reassessment of his categories and how they are utilized.

First in his essay “Lenin and Philosophy” we find a break from the earlier position developed in Reading Capital regarding the status of philosophy, with an assertion of a “distinction between philosophy and the sciences, between philosophical categories and scientific concepts”.^[38] While philosophy is assured to be distinct from the sciences, a special link is of course still present, in particular with materialist philosophy; as mentioned by Engels the form of materialist philosophy changes with scientific discoveries, and as mentioned by Lenin a “spontaneous” form of materialism dominates within the natural sciences.^[39] Philosophy, rather than a “science of all science,” instead either intervenes in the sciences to guard them from idealist philosophy or to exploit it. This struggle between idealism and materialism is understood as a broader class struggle, where philosophy is now a partisan force, or as put in his reply to John Lewis, “Philosophy is politics in the field of theory.”^[40]

It is in his later self-criticism that Althusser most fully breaks from his earlier conception through breaking with his earlier notion of philosophy, directly calling his “thesis of philosophy as ‘theory of theoretical practice’...the highest point in the development of this theoreticist tendency”.^[41] It is this theoreticist tendency that Althusser blames for an overreliance on structuralist terminology and what he sees as an unfair focus from his critics on his affiliation with this strain of thought. Yet he also defends his “bending of the stick”, to use a Leninist metaphor. While moving to a position of philosophy as “in the last instance class struggle in theory,”^[42] he still does not take such a position regarding theory itself. Theory is still understood as a process of developing scientific truth that is not subject to verification from practices outside the realm of its specific objects’ theoretical practice. Philosophy for Althusser, unlike the sciences, has no object, or even history, but instead intervenes in the sciences. He now attempts to use a distinction between philosophy and theory to essentially solve a contradiction between two paradoxical needs:

Opposition to all forms of pragmatism, to justify the thesis of the relative autonomy of theory and thus the right of Marxist theory not to be treated as a slave to tactical political decisions, but to be allowed to develop, in alliance with political and other practices, without betraying its own needs. But the same time this thesis had another effect, in opposition to the idealism of pure theory, of stamping theory with the materialism of practice.^[43]

Did Althusser ultimately solve this problematic that seems to occupy much of his work through this distinction between philosophy and theory? He certainly came closer than the typical meandering Gramscian idealism about “unity of the militants and intellectuals” or appeals to a “philosophy of praxis” that merely handwaves the problem away rather than unpacking it. What he is encountering is the balancing act the Marxist intellectual must walk between partisanship and science, an act that is not solved simply through appeals to the “primacy of practice”. For this begs the question - what type of practice?

My point is not that Althusser got everything right or solved this problem, but rather that his work shows a real attempt to grapple with these questions by acknowledging the distinct roles of philosophical, scientific, and political practice, and the tensions and interconnections among them. It is probably the most explicit theorization in the body of Marxist thought of the tension between practical politics and intellectual labor, a tension one finds expressed mostly violently in the Stalin era but also expressed in infant form during the Revolutionary Social-Democracy era, as we saw in Kautsky's writings. Being a Marxist intellectual is not so simple as rejecting the quietist path of the Frankfurt School or being a soldier for the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party to ensure that one’s intellectual work serves the work of the class struggle. Marxism must be committed above all else to scientific socialism, for a struggle for truth, even when it is politically inconvenient.

Conclusion

In the US, where I reside, socialism as a movement is primarily a movement of white-collar workers. Often, they align with various “progressive” sections of the ruling class in hopes of passing reforms so as to social engineer a more just and equitable society, often with genuine support from the unskilled masses of waged and unemployed proletarians. For those more farsighted, the hope is that down the road, this activity will serve to recompose a working-class subjectivity that can fight for genuine socialism. Socialism primarily takes a moralistic tone; its programs are not based on any digestion and integration of a genuine scientific analysis of our social formation and the realities of class struggle, but the spontaneous demands of the day, without a serious assimilation of them into a Marxist framework. What theory one agrees with is often predetermined by the political conclusions one is reaching for - good theory is what makes the militant “feel good” about their existing practice.

Faced with this situation, Rockhill and co. seek to build a genuinely Marxist-Leninist intellectual culture that can guide the socialist movement towards a genuinely revolutionary politics. On the failure of the modern left to rise to the level of scientific socialism, there is agreement, and there is no doubt that so much leftist theory has in fact been contradictory to such a project, mocking any such attempt as “positivism” or “scientism”. Yet we cannot fall for a strain of Marxism-Leninism that collapses the relative autonomy of theory into pure pragmatism around defending various state-building projects. Politically, the defense of such state-building projects can be necessary - there are good reasons to see developments in the People’s Republic of China as socially progressive, primarily in their development of the productive forces, and worthy of critical support. Yet should theory submit itself to such a project so as to refine the basics of historical materialism in a way that allows us to better defend the project of the PRC? Are theories of the PRC to be judged not on their scientific rigor in understanding the objective mechanisms that govern the social formation in China, but in how they best allow us to rally around their government? Based on reading Rockhill’s work, I am not confident that his approach to Marxist theory, or as he calls it, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” is really up to the task.

We see in the white-collar reformist left and the new Marxist-Leninists who seek to challenge them a mirror image of each other. The former merely seek the theory that justifies whatever activism is provided by the path of least resistance in a two-party system, while the party heresy hunts in order to protect its dogmatic faith in the continuity of its historical tradition. Theory becomes a moralistic badge to wear, or a stick to beat those who express “doubt”, those vectors of “infection”, not a genuine scientific project. Take the two most prominent Marxist-Leninist organizations in the US, FRSO and PSL. FRSO has produced no noteworthy theory at all, only catechisms about the “science of Marxism-Leninism”, and while PSL has shown itself capable of attracting some intellectual talent, they have also revealed themselves prone to the same old heresy hunting.^[44]

A solution to this problem will ultimately have to be found in organization, perhaps ironically, in practice. The tensions between intellectuals and proletarians are rooted in the division of labor at the end of the day, and until we live under communism and abolish this division, it cannot be solved in pure thought. Yet it is clear that Comintern-derived models of party building that rely on “theoretical centralism”, where unity is built around theory (usually a specific theorist heading a sect) rather than political program, must be rejected. Both Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyists have inherited an organizational legacy from the Third International, which conceived itself as a world army for revolution, where national sections only held power to the extent it was delegated by the ‘general staff’ of the world revolution in the Executive Committee of the Communist International. The militarized party of Civil War-era Bolshevism became universalized as a model for organization for an era when world revolution seemed imminent, and then crystallized over time into the norms of the Communist Movement. Furthermore, the Comintern was formed through an imposed split with the labor movement on the basis of a mechanically applied ‘21 Conditions’, from the beginning taking up the false idea that purifying splits with reformists will organically attract the working masses to the party. These particular circumstances gave rise to what Fernando Claudin has called ‘monolithicity’, a mythological kind of party unity that is upheld through administrative fiat, striving not merely for majority rule but complete uniformity; a logic that “tended to establish the idea that the principal virtue of a revolutionary, called upon to change the world, and allegedly upholding the most advanced of social ideologies, was not to think.”^[45]

Rather than theoretical centralism and its associated monolithicism, there must be theoretical pluralism in the party, regardless of how much any notion of pluralism makes hardheaded Leninists recoil at the sight of any potential nod to liberalism. Yet it was exactly a kind of theoretical pluralism that Karl Marx declared to be necessary for working out a common theoretical platform:

Since the various sections of working men in the same country, and the working classes in different countries, are placed under different circumstances and have attained to different degrees of development, it seems almost necessary that the theoretical notions, which reflect the real movement, should also diverge. The community of action, however, called into life by the International Working Men’s Association, the exchange of ideas facilitated by the public organs of the different national sections, and the direct debates at the General Congresses, are sure by and by to engender a common theoretical programme. Consequently, it belongs not to the functions of the General Council to subject the programme of the Alliance to a critical examination. We have not to inquire whether, yes or no, it be a true scientific expression of the working-class movement. All we have to ask is whether its general tendency does not run against the general tendency of the International Working Men’s Association, viz. the complete emancipation of the working class.^[46]

Does theoretical pluralism mean “anything goes”? Is this not the intellectual “anarchism” that Kautsky feared so much in party life? Let us not forget that Kautsky also saw as his ideal for the future society “communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual”. Perhaps as a transitional phase, rather than anarchism in intellectual life, we can have democratic-republicanism: not freedom from interference, but freedom from arbitrary domination. The Marxist intellectual should not be free to join with the CIA, to join with the bourgeoisie, and do propaganda for the class enemy, to become a useful idiot. Yet they should be free to pursue their work regardless of whether the party at any given moment finds it convenient for its tactical maneuvers. There shall be duties, but there shall also be rights, and the right to disagree and to question must be protected. The alternative is to risk the errors of ‘monolithicism’, to make any real debate impossible, potentially reproducing a membership that only knows Marxism as a rote catechism handed down to rationalize the latest dictates of the Central Committee.

To be a Marxist intellectual today, above all else, requires genuine self-criticism and honesty, a commitment to the truth. There can be no prettifying of the past, nor of the present, but only a realistic account of the circumstances facing us, their origins, and the potential pathways beyond them. The road to communism, the tortuous path of the class struggle, will require unveiling many hard truths. These will be hard truths not only about ourselves and our own history, but also about our own class enemies and how we have understood them. This kind of honest self-criticism is really what is needed from all sides of these debates over “Western Marxism”. If this entails finding out that the CIA funded many of our beloved intellectuals, then so be it. But if it also reveals the cost that counterproductive bureaucratic paranoia has exacted on communist intellectual life, then we must have the courage to tell the truth as well.

1. Gabriel Rockhill, "The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism," The Philosophical Salon, June 27, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/, Gabriel Rockhill, "The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback," Monthly Review 75, no. 2 (June 2023), https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-myth-of-1968-thought-and-the-french-intelligentsia-historical-commodity-fetishism-and-ideological-rollback/, Critical Theory Workshop, "Gabriel Rockhill, 'Western Marxism'," YouTube video, 2:15:40, streamed September 8, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1mlpJoIZ4., "Western Marxism w/ Gabriel Rockhill," Guerrilla History, podcast, November 1, 2024, https://sites.libsyn.com/307478/western-marxism-w-gabriel-rockhill, The Red Nation, "Western Marxism Is Not Anti-Colonial W/ Gabriel Rockhill," YouTube video, 1:08:24, May 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciINv0GlDkU, Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry, vol. 1 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025),

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2. Scott Patrick, "The Comfort of Conspiracy: A Review of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?" Cosmonaut, April 14, 2026, https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/04/the-comfort-of-conspiracy-a-review-of-who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism/

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3. The Facebook post can be found here: https://x.com/GabrielRockhill/status/2005093043012337674/photo/1, Budgen’s defense of his post can be found here: https://sebastianbudgen.substack.com/p/on-the-sweetness-of-stalinbro-tears

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4. Russell Jacoby, “No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot,” Jacobin, April 18, 2026, https://jacobin.com/2026/04/review-rockhill-western-marxism-cold-war.

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5. This is to say nothing of those like the followers of the American Communist Party, who do openly advocate for a Marxist-Leninist cultural conservatism. That said, to my knowledge they do not have friendly relations with Rockhill and many of their prominent members like Haz Al-Din and Carlos Garrido are critical of his work.

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6. Patrick Iber, “Which Way, Western Marxism?” review of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? by Gabriel Rockhill, and The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy by A.J.A. Woods, Dissent Magazine, Summer 2026, https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-frankfurt-school/.

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7. McManus, Matt. 2026. “Western Marxism Through the Looking Glass.” Damage Magazine, April 8, 2026. https://www.damagemag.com/p/western-marxism-through-the-looking.

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8. Doug Greene and Harrison Fluss, “Theory Betrayed: An Essay on Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Part Four),” Historical Materialism, 2026, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/theory-betrayed-an-essay-on-gabriel-rockhills-who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism-part-four/.

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9. Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry, vol. 1, 48.

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10. I would however be remiss to not mention the excellent contributions to the discourse that cast doubt on the very dichotomy between “Western Marxism” and ‘Eastern Marxism”, for example: After History, "De-Stalinizing Stalin: Losurdo, Rockhill, and Soviet History," The Stalin Era (Substack), May 9, 2026, https://thestalinera.substack.com/p/de-stalinizing-stalin, Rob Ashlar, "Against 'Western Marxism' and For Gaza," For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN (Substack), July 8, 2025, https://robashlar.substack.com/p/against-western-marxism, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, "The Inner Western Marxism of Soviet Philosophy," e-flux Notes, June 4, 2026, https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783503/the-inner-western-marxism-of-soviet-philosophy.

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11. Lars T. Lih, "Stalin at Work: Introduction to Stalin's Letters to Molotov," in What Was Bolshevism? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 349.

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12. Lih, “Stalin at Work,” 350. He also notes that if he were to write the original essay today, he would have talked about Stalin’s “hostility to the deep state”.

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13. Ibid., 384.

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14. Ibid., 387.

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15. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

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16. Lih, “Stalin at Work”, 388.

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17. See Flores, Renato. 2021. "Making Sense of the Lysenko Affair." Cosmonaut, September 24, 2021. https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/lysenko-affair/ and "Revisiting the Lysenko Affair." Cosmopod. Podcast audio, December 5, 2020. https://cosmonautmag.com/2020/12/revisiting-the-lysenko-affair-2/was for an introduction to the Lysnko Affair and further sources.

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18. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Verso, 1988), 102.

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19. Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, 299-300.

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20. For example, the work of Hillel Ticktin and Donald Filtzer, among the most empirically rigorous and critical material available on this topic.

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21. Ibid., 323-324.

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22. It does not escape me that this notion of “intellectual commodity fetishism” is essentially an attempt to turn the “Genetic fallacy” into a concept that carries that weight of high Marxian theory. In reality, its subjectivism is completely destructive to scientific discourse if taken seriously.

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23. Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), xiii.

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24. It was primarily the non-Marxist scholar Loren Graham who brought serious scholarly attention to the work of Soviet philosophers of science.

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25. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964, ed. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 60-61. This passage was brought to my attention by Tim Barker.

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26. Karl Kautsky, “The Intellectuals and the Workers,” trans. from Die Neue Zeit (1903), Fourth International (April 1946), Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol1/no1/kautsky.html.

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27. Karl Kautsky, “The Social Revolution: Volume II: On the Day after the Social Revolution (Part 2),” in The Social Revolution, trans. A.M. Simons (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1902), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-2.htm#s8.

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28. Karl Kautsky, "The 'Intellectuals' and Party Principles," Socialist Standard, November 1912, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1912/xx/intell.htm.

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29. Cyril Smith, "Defence of History and Class Consciousness," review of A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, by Georg Lukács, Revolutionary History 8, no. 1 (2000), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol8/no1/smith.html.

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30. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) for an excellent study on this.

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31. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, 95.

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32. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016), 61.

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33. Ibid.

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34. Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, “Underground Currents: Louis Althusser’s ‘On Marxist Thought,’” Viewpoint Magazine, September 12, 2012, https://viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/underground-currents-louis-althussers-on-marxist-thought/.

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35. Louis Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 8.

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36. Althusser, “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation”, 21.

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37. Haider and Mohandesi, “Underground Currents.”

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38. Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 189.

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39. Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy”. 190-191.

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40. Louis Althusser, "Reply to John Lewis," in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: Verso, 2011), 68.

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41. Louis Althusser, "Elements of Self-Criticism," in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: Verso, 2011), 124.

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42. Louis Althusser, “Elements of Self-Criticism,” 143.

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43. Louis Althusser, "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy," in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: Verso, 2011), 169.

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44. Read Walter Smolarek’s resignation letter for a perfect case study of the failures of modern sectarian Leninism, where items of concern for leadership are members reading Jacobin and attending Jane McLevey organizing classes: https://libcom.org/article/walter-smolarek-resignation-letter

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45. Fernando Claudín, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 121-122.

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46. Quoted in Claudin, The Communist Movement, 119.

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