Worthy article to post, and useful for its contextualization of the discourse around Rockhill’s recent book.

I disagree with the main points, which I summarize like this:

• theoretical plurality is good
• pragmatism should not overshadow theoretical development, nor should the former be used as a cudgel against the latter
• Rockhill’s argument is reminiscent of “Stalinist” “heresy hunting” used to purge political adversaries, which has weakened socialism
• we all should self-crit, we’re all trying here, the solution isn’t to attack others

I want to be fair to the author, Donald Parkinson. On the one hand, I don’t know much about him. On the other hand, his view feels like a slightly refined, but still recycled, version of old Trotskyist complaints about Stalin and the alleged repression of intellectuals. I think my vibes are pretty close because as far as I can find out, Parkinson is a “neo-Kautskyian” ex-Trotskyist. That’s not to dismiss the article out-of-hand, but it does give me some basis for understanding his angle. My view is much more aligned with Rockhill.

In my view, Parkinson does not succeed in answering his own question, “What is at stake in the Western Marxism Debate?”. His answer is that we might slip into old “bureaucratic paranoia” alleged of the Soviet Union, thus falling into the same trap of the last century.

Instead of attempting to reframe Rockhill’s project, Parkinson should start from Rockhill’s own description of his project, “anti-imperial Marxism.” That is, in my opinion, the correct framing for 21st century socialism. But Parkinson, working from what I guess is a “post-Trotskyist” point of view, and unsure of how else to interpret Rockhill’s point of view, immediately retreats into the safety of more litigation of the Stalin era:

“Understanding the logic being deployed by Rockhill will require a detour in an exercise in Stalinology.”

Sorry, why is that required to understand the state of socialism in 2026, a year witnessing the continued ascent of the Global South and a PRC that has successfully spurned US imperialism? This reads to me like someone who has little to add, not someone introducing “theoretical pluralism.”

If you venture outside the confines of Trotskyist litigation of Stalin, it is plain to see that there has always been a tension of “theoretical pluralism” within anti-capitalist theory and organizations. This was the case during Marx’s time; even earlier still, going back to the earliest utopian socialism and anarchism arising in western Europe. The Communist Manifesto was itself, according to Engels, a triumph of unification of a variety of socialist tendencies present in the 1840s:

Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’ s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation.

It seems that we are faced not with a problem of “Stalinist” intellectual repression. Instead, the problem of today is whether we forget about the incredible achievements of Marx and Lenin who managed to identify the correct path for socialism amidst a sea of contradictory ideas emanating from the diverse class origins of those ideas. Not only did Marx unify the socialists under the banner of the Manifesto, but he wrote thousands of pages of critique (and polemic) against other socialists — not only against capitalism! Marx, himself a bourgeois class traitor, was interested in extracting the useful insights from bourgeois theory, and appropriating it for the purpose of the working class.

Lenin dedicated the first chapter of What Is To Be Done?, in fact the opening paragraph, under the heading: “Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’”. Already in 1901, when the radical social democrats (out of which the Bolsheviks would later form) were a minority and not-at-all possessing the power to enforce theoretical purity, Lenin encountered charges from certain camps of an intolerance and unfreedom of speech. I won’t repeat the arguments here because Lenin expressed it perfectly. But is it not obvious that this same situation continues today, in this article? Here we see the same charges of intolerance and unfreedom of speech, this time leveraged against Rockhill’s contribution that can help us identify latent imperial ideology within our own theory.

Rockhill is correct: the question for socialism today is whether you allow imperial-chauvinist thought to infect your theory, or do you adapt your socialist theory to the conditions of 21st century socialism, which has a distinctly anti-imperial character.