I’m not sure what I think about this but just throwing it out there.
Who ever this person is needs to get their head out of their ass. Western Marxism did not produce an academically honest critique of the Soviet Union, it served to sell lies to Soviet leaders about how much better and more free their populations would be under democratic socialism, which never came to fruition.
Whatever problems exist within Rockhill’s analysis, the fact that there has been no actual widespread public Western leftist re-examining of the Marxist-Leninist approach, in light of the opening of the Soviet Archives which put to bed the most absurd of Soviet stereotypes, is a damning nail in the coffin of most of these so called ‘honest intellectuals’.
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There have been a significant amount of informal work done. But western academia has relegated actual materialist analysis to the engineers, financiers, and supply chain managers, with the human affects relegated to non-profit work.
However, because of that, there is data out there to analyze.
Tbh, there’s been a massive re-examination of the USSR since the archives opened in the 80s and 90s. This re-examination has been based on the archival evidence and materialist analysis, and can be seen in works like The Great Urals, Affirmative Action Empire, Arctic Mirrors, On Stalin’s Team, etc. This work has not been carried out by Marxists and is often not read by leftists however
Why? For the first, because in general the more marxist you are the less likely you are to 1) decide to go into academia, 2) be accepted into academia, 3) be funded. The people who do this (useful) archival work on events that happened decades to a century ago are going to self select for people more interested in interpreting the world than changing it.
For the second, because 1) the more effective as an org a leftist group is, the less time.they will spend studying hundreds of pages of academic writings, and 2) many marxists either do not know such works exist, or discard them out of hand for not being written by leftists
All this is unfortunate, bc without such detailed examinations of the USSR, China, etc (warts and all) we cannot hope to do better in the future
The critique of some of the factual assertions made in the book seem pretty strong, but the dismissive rhetoric in the review makes me think that it may not be a particularly good-faith assessment of the book.
I took a look around the internet, found a more positive review of it https://mltoday.com/book-review-who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism/
And another similarly critical one https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22624_who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism-by-gabriel-rockhill-reviewed-by-richard-gilman-opalsky/
I agree. For another very positive take: RevLeftRadio had Rockhill on for an interview about the book.
I like the Marx and Philosophy one so far, though it’s not written very efficiently and seems to misdate the Mao quote ('53 or '56?). It seems like Rockhill is engaged in the very question-begging about AES that many on this site do, so it makes sense why people like his work so much.
I wish the author didn’t do the idealist framing about “Marx’s dream” and some of the “no u” of their criticism of the AES dogma is too precious to read well, but the overall points are otherwise correct.
Can I ask what you mean by question-begging in this context? I get it abstractly as a form of sophistry but I have a hard time noticing it in action due to my fundamental gullibility lol
No problem, the author basically also mentions it in other words. Question-begging is a method of argument where you take the point that you are trying to “prove” and just accepting it as a premise instead of actually proving it (which can be done covertly or blatantly). As the author points out, even if they extend it more broadly than I would, a lot of “AES” discourse starts from the standpoint of basically assuming that a given party is trying in good faith and with solid competence to implement socialist policies, when usually it is the point of contention from the anti-revisionist crowd and others that they are not, so the question of what is and isn’t socialism (and especially Marxism) becomes not a question that we can answer by assessing methodology and the like, but just a collection of inherited rulings. It can be given a further appearance of argument by throwing up some superfluous justifications (e.g. pointing to the difficulties faced by the party), but fundamentally it is hostile to the idea of having any sort of meaningful falsification criteria (e.g. it gives us little idea or a completely fanciful idea of how a non-socialist state would respond differently).
Obviously, there are many “AES” defenders on this instance and elsewhere who engage in much better faith than that and do try to assess methodology, etc., I’m just saying this is a thing some people do and you’ll see it pretty often.
This article is full of the very thing the author accuses Rockhill of doing…
How many revolutions have come out of the Frankfurt School and French Theory? Adorno was even paid by the CIA.
Later he claims that Habermas “had himself been a member of the Hitler Youth and studied for four years under the ‘Nazi philosopher’ (his description of Heidegger).”
Gee, I wonder why he’d “claim” that.
https://xcancel.com/J_Habermas/status/62408076568965121?lang=en
This is a peak Habermas tweet
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This is frustrating because the whole point of demcent is you publically support the party line. Wanna argue about it do it behind closed doors.
I really recommend this interview with the author. Rockhill is very dialectical and factual in his analysis.
