this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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What is at Stake in the "Western Marxism" Debate? (cosmonautmag.com)
submitted 5 days ago by RedWizard@hexbear.net to c/marxism@hexbear.net
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58586

Reviewing the fallout over Gabriel Rockhill's critiques of Western Marxism, Donald Parkinson argues the controversy is ultimately a battle over what kind of intellectual culture the left needs.

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[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

of course cia/ngos will find intellectuals that are compatible or obfuscatory, that's their job as arm of capitalism.

I haven't read Rockhill's book yet, but I've watched several of his interviews discussing the book. I think that's basically the point he's making. The focus is not so much on individuals but on the roles that they assume, roles that exist independently of them — a familiar concept to Marxists. Of course, the degree of individual culpability varies with the individual... some people were/are unashamed bastards (see Žižek) and some were more well-meaning but misguided.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 8 points 5 days ago (2 children)

but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn't make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless. plus, maybe i've gotten the wrong impression, but i think he treats their disciples as guilty by association. marcuse and his ilk are shit marxists not because he sometime was oss-funded, he was oss funded cause he is a shit marxist (well not oss in his case, his work was later anyway) if that makes sense. zizek is a cultural influencer and thus not a marxist is very simple, zizek is funded by 50 ngos with some shaddy ties and thus not a marxist is very unclear lense. some marxists could receive funding incidentally (especially in academia, good luck avoiding rockafeller/ford/soros foundations somewhere)

trusting in cia funding as an indicator of shittiness rather than using your own eyes and mind is not a good recipe for rescuing marxism from sociology.

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

but the fact they are finding and funding them doesn't make the theory wrong in itself, just more likely to be useless.

This is precisely what Rockhill says in the video I posted yesterday: https://hexbear.net/post/8857126. His elevator pitch starts at 7:07.

My approach is always to situate the production of ideas within production more generally, and that implies at least two fundamental principles.

One is that intellectual production is never done in isolation. It is done in a material system of production. Therefore, if we want to understand the intellectual production of any individual (Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, etc.) it is imperative on us to situate that individual production within the overall system that produced both the thinker in question and the work that they produced.

Second is that any intellectual production is the result of a theoretical practice, and we need to analyze that theoretical practice, see how it operates and what it is its fundamental goals are. In the case of French theory, what you have, if we look at it from a larger historical perspective, is that these thinkers became prominent within the imperial core because it was largely driven by the theory industry that developed within the United States in the wake of World War II.

So the fact that people today read Lacan, you know, people like Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. isn’t because these people are, organically, on their own, individually finding these authors and becoming bewildered at how brilliant they are. It’s because there is an entire system of intellectual production, distribution, and consumption, that has promoted these thinkers as the most important in the world. Given that this system of intellectual production itself is situated within the larger social relations of production, it is necessary, then, to recognize that this is part of an outgrowth of the broader capitalist system.

Rockhill makes a careful and dialectical analysis. It’s kind of like saying pop music is not inherently bad, but it’s not as good as its popularity implies either. You have to account for the record labels, advertising, celebrity cliques, etc.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Theres an annoying tendency in leftist circles to instead of reading a book and examining it themselves while being aware of the biases the author may has had, to instead go use whatever a google search has turned up as an excuse not to read. Investigation seems often limited to finding reasons not to investigate further