Leo Schwarz, The Left Chapter.
Gabriel Rockhill’s book on the emergence of the “compatible” intellectual left in Western countries.
Book Review: Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025.
Shortly before his death, Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay on Rudolf Bahro’s book The Alternative in Eastern Europe. In the essay, Marcuse hailed Bahro’s “critique of actually existing socialism” as “the most important contribution to Marxist theory and practice in decades.” This statement was part of a coordinated campaign for the book and for Bahro that swept through the major media outlets of the Western world between 1977 and 1979–80. As we now know (or can know), a striking number of the key figures in this campaign maintained connections in the postwar decades to the Central Intelligence Agency or to various institutions and organizations that were either controlled, funded, or considered “friendly” by the CIA or the U.S. State Department. In the first volume of his three-volume reconstruction of the “intellectual world war” against actually existing socialism, Gabriel Rockhill examines the history and specific function of these networks of the “imperial theory industry” that emerged after 1945, with his interest focused primarily on the Frankfurt School and the academic “Marxisms” of the Western world, which are usually categorized as “Western Marxism.”
Rockhill has embedded this investigation in an elaborate “materialist contextualization” of the relevant theoretical literature. The most contentious aspect of this undertaking, as evidenced by some enraged reactions to the book, is the detailed account of how “Western Marxism” and its protagonists were incorporated into the strategy and practice of the intellectual struggle against socialism developed in Washington. Rockhill supports his finding — that “Western Marxists” have been “supported and strengthened by the imperial superstructure, both by the bourgeois state, for which many of them worked for years, and by the bourgeois cultural apparatus” — with a wealth of empirical material. He aims to show why this theoretical output was of interest to these apparatuses and to what extent, for example, the intellectual influence of the Frankfurt School has anything to do with this “invisible” support. “Like a shadow,” he observes, “collaboration with powerful state agencies” accompanied “intellectual fame in the capitalist world.”
Anti-Communist “Marxism”
Rockhill does not claim, as he was immediately accused of doing, that “Western Marxism” was an “invention” of the CIA. But he reconstructs how the integration of this theoretical output into the “intellectual world war” against socialism was organized and conceptually thought through. He shows how far this integration went in specific cases and why it was logically consistent in terms of content. It was precisely because the “Western Marxists” tended “to support imperialism, or at least to make it acceptable.” It is to Rockhill’s credit that, drawing on the framework of a Marxist history of ideas, a discipline that has largely died out in the German-speaking world, he undertook the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of this “world war.”
The discussion of Marcuse’s essay on Bahro forms the substantive conclusion of the book. “Western Marxism,” as Rockhill attempts to demonstrate here and in many other places, was an anti-communist (or “imperial”) pseudo-Marxism intended for a “compatible left” in the capitalist metropolises. The core of this approach was a deliberate opposition to what Rockhill calls “anti-imperialist” or “universal” Marxism. For Rockhill, the characteristics of “imperial Marxism” are: the rejection of the Marxist-Leninist model of revolution as well as the concept of class struggle and, in the case of Marcuse, for example, their replacement with a vague sympathy for “rebellions”; a shift away from materialist categories toward an emphasis on subjectivity and consciousness (and, in terms of one’s own actions, away from practice toward theory); the reversal of the relationship between the socioeconomic base and the superstructure, whereby a leading role is attributed to intellectuals or culture; and, finally, the struggle against the notion that a socialist transformation is necessarily linked to a (temporary) centralization of state power or a dictatorship.
“Western Marxism,” Rockhill writes, has never been interested in changing the world, but at most in interpreting it, with a tendency to focus solely on texts or cultural products “so as not to have to deal with the real world.” This disposition also gives rise to its characteristic preference for intellectual “brand management”: idiosyncratic vocabulary, “theoretical obscurantism,” and “extensive bourgeois-cultural references.”
Socialism, for example, is understood by Marcuse as a (council-)democratic superstructural phenomenon, but not as a conflict-ridden reconfiguration of the socioeconomic base. Using the Bahro essay as an example, Rockhill writes: “The idea that such countries should immediately decentralize and abolish their own state and democratically empower the entire population while under attack by imperialism amounts to insisting that, in order to be considered truly socialist, they must create the objective conditions for their own defeat.” Such an argument, Rockhill argues, is worthy of a “U.S. State Department intellectual,” as he calls Marcuse.
Ideological Warfare
This is not a baseless accusation. In the German debate on postwar history, there is still little recognition of the scale, both conceptual and material, that the struggle “for hearts and minds,” launched by the United States after 1945, took on. Under the specific conditions of its confrontation with the USSR, the new leading power of imperialism developed a new type of propaganda. According to Rockhill, this imperialism, “under the banner of democracy, freedom, and human rights,” established the “unique tradition” of “denying its own existence” (“empire denial”). It presented itself on a global scale as a liberator and relied primarily on indirect forms of influence and domination. However, this was not possible without a minimum degree of control over the “overall ideological worldview”—that is, without the creation of “the most powerful, far-reaching, and centralized cultural apparatus in human history.” This apparatus for “ideological warfare” also targeted “the world of the professional intelligentsia.”
The idea emerged early on—specifically, for example, in the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which reported to the National Security Council—that the fight against the world communist movement and the Soviet Union should no longer be waged solely through “hard” anti-communist propaganda, but, as a 1953 PSB paper states, also through “long-term intellectual movements, which will appeal to intellectuals, including scholars and opinion-forming groups.” A 1952 PSB paper, which Rockhill documents in full in the appendix to his book, explicitly recommends “attacks on communist ideology using Marxist terminology” as well as the “defense of Western society using Marxist terminology.” This document explicitly states that such literature already exists and that “we” must first ensure that this literature is “reviewed, popularized, and widely disseminated.” The next goal, it says, must be to expand this body of literature: “We have the necessary means to encourage the production of such books by competent foreign authors.”
Rockhill calls this concept a “soft-sell campaign against communism.” Marcuse is of particular interest to Rockhill because he did not simply fall in line with this campaign like other “Western Marxists” and benefit from the associated “uplift,” but was actively involved in its development. As head of the “Committee on World Communism” at the U.S. State Department, he worked directly for the PSB.
However, Rockhill’s book is not primarily concerned with proving personal involvement (despite intensive apologetic attempts at obfuscation, many facts have long been known), especially since he repeatedly emphasizes that Marcuse, in particular, stood to the left of other “Western Marxists” on many issues. Rather, using the example of “Western Marxism,” Rockhill meticulously demonstrates a “state-financial-intellectual nexus”: the influence of “various governmental forces and ultimately the capitalist ruling class” on the production of theory, which did not consist solely of the fact that the return of the Institute for Social Research to Germany was subsidized by the U.S. with the then-considerable sum of 440,300 Deutschmarks. All in all, he succeeds in presenting a compelling critical panorama of postwar intellectual life. A German translation of this book would be most welcome.
Translated by Helmut-Harry Loewen.
photo: Herbert Marcuse during an appearance in Frankfurt am Main, June 6, 1972.
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