Cover of Gabriel Rockhill’s book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Photo: HistoricalMaterialism.org.
By Arnold August – Jul 24, 2026
A must-read for anyone concerned about international issues
The book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, published by Monthly Review Press, New York, is, in fact, Volume 1 of a trilogy. Volume 2: French Theory Made in the USA. Volume 3: Radical Theory’s Infantile Disorder.
This book review is being published now in July 2026, much later than I had hoped; it was originally planned for February 2026. However, a good wine improves with age. There was an important milestone, and several secondary events that occurred during this more than five-month-long delay from when I first read the book to when I actually wrote this review.
Parenti versus Chomsky
Firstly, the only occurrence in my postponement period that can be truly qualified as a “milestone” is the passing of American Communist icon Michael Parenti in January of this year. Rockhill wrote in his 2025 book quoting Parenti: “Often the term ‘conspiracy’ is applied dismissively when everyone suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interest. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved.” (97) This incalculable loss has stimulated, and continues to leave in its wake, extensive articles, webinars, and celebrations of his passing, highlighting the importance of his work well into my five-month-long delay. This explosion of respect and accompanying analysis of Parenti, by so many, is also a tribute to Rockhill’s 2025 book, to which he himself devoted five pages to Parenti.
Secondly, during the five-month interval, the following event erupted in progressive circles, especially in the United States and Canada: the link between Chomsky and the Epstein file scandal gave further food for thought to Rockhill’s initial passing comments on Chomsky, mentioned as an integral part of his broader distinction between what he calls an “anti-imperialist Marxist tradition” and the compatible left. This icon of the compatible left, Chomsky, supported the Democrats in US presidential elections, lending support to the two-party system in the US, which is the major block to revolutionary theory and action and the basis for US imperialism: War at home and abroad.
“Every accusation is a confession”
Finally, the third event occurred during the interval: Among the dozens of book reviews, the overwhelming vast majority were very positive and balanced; there was only one unfounded “criticism.” The culprit: the American Jacobin (a US-based outlet describing itself as a “leading voice of the American left”). However, its reckless assault on Rockhill and his volume completely backfired, resulting in a plethora of further development and deepening of the points that he courageously raised in his—by then—best-selling volume. It is not necessary to go into details regarding Jacobin; suffice to conclude that, as the saying goes, “every accusation is a confession,” as the title of Jacobin’s hit piece against Rockhill appears to indicate: “No, Western Marxism Wasn’t a CIA Plot.” Typical of the compatible left, for example regarding Cuba, Jacobin allows for a few positive articles to provide cover for its main position characterizing Cuba for not being a socialist democracy, by highlighting the most notorious anti-Cuban “Cuban,” now US-based Samuel Farber, who dutifully asks “…what would it take to turn Cuba into a socialist democracy?”
China
Regarding China, a search of all Jacobin’s articles on China yields, as expected, a mix: on the one hand, articles opposing US pressure on China, for the former, while on the other, many pieces accusing China of having become capitalist. This is yet another confirmation that one of the main features of Western Marxism is to oppose actual existing socialism. This Jacobin position has been fully debunked in Carlos Martinez’s two books: The East is Still Red—Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century and No Great Wall: On The Continuities of the Chinese Revolution.
The heart of the matter is that Rockhill demolishes the very raison d’être of Jacobin and their ilk. On China, Rockhill’s own work along with Jennifer S. Ponce de León also points in that direction, as part of his ongoing defense of actually existing socialism:
The rise of the Global South and a multipolar world order led by China. Building on the theory of class struggle developed by Marx and Engels, Losurdo demonstrated why major class struggles in the age of imperialism take the form of national struggles for emancipation from colonialism, neocolonialism, and fascism. He understood the importance of development and self-defense in processes of socialist construction, as is evidenced in his analyses of China.
This piece was, in fact, an elaboration of the author’s 2025 comment about Mao Zedong, who “adapted this lesson and others to the specificities of underdeveloped agrarian China with its large peasant population.” (338)
Cheng Enfu, one of the most influential Chinese scholars, based in Beijing, is cited as one of the experts who praise this book, because it “tells the ‘truth about ideology’ and ‘Western Marxism.’”
During Rockhill’s fourth visit to China, in a December 2025 interview, he reported: “…The Chinese version of socialism, or socialism with Chinese characteristics, although it cannot simply be replicated in other material circumstances, provides a rich model for learning how to harness capitalist forces for a people-centered economy and a long-term development project.”
Funding and ideas
A word of caution: the main title of Rockhill’s volume Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? may give some the impression that his work is oriented towards “conspiratorial monetary accusations” based on ruling class funding–even if validated by irrefutable facts. However, the subtitle The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry indicates clearly that the author places utmost importance on the content: the war on ideas. In fact, his ability to combine, on the one hand, decades-long archaeological-like excavation research with its more than 400 pages and hundreds of footnotes, and on the other hand, placing ideas at the forefront results in a page-turner whereby funding and ideas converge and intertwine with each other that one does not notice where funding ends, and ideas begin, or vice versa.
Rockwell’s opening salvo on the very first page provides an insight into one of his main themes: the defense of actual existing socialism as the target of “Western Marxism,” or more broadly, social democracy. The example he provides is the Cuban Revolution and its insurgent ideas as part of the cultural superstructure built on the new revolutionary economic system. Rockhill quotes Fidel Castro: “Ideas are not only an instrument to create consciousness so that people fight, but ideas have become the main instrument of struggle; not an inspiration, not a guide, not an orientation, but the main instrument of struggle.” (15)
Furthermore, he then refers to Che Guevara in this way: “They wanted the head of the rebel who had seen through the psychological warfare undertaken by the US Empire in the coup d’état that will serve as one of its models for overthrowing foreign governments around the world,” referring to Guatemala. (15)
It appears that Rockhill specifically provides examples from history by drawing from those experiences that would, rightfully so, attract people from the Imperial core. For example, in addition to Fidel and Che, he brings to life the case of black communist George Jackson, of Black Panther fame, who was assassinated by the United States before his 30th birthday (316), even more appropriate today as we head into Black August.
His first volume of the trilogy was written before the perilous new context that the Trump offensive in the hemisphere initiated with the surprise January 3, 2026, military attack in Venezuela, resulting in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Deputy Celia Flores. Since then, one result has been a major ongoing international debate on the Bolivarian Revolution’s version of actually existing socialism, as manifested in the pages of Orinoco Tribune. This US military incursion into Caracas was followed by the international, extraterritorial genocidal oil blockade against Cuba, tightening the screws even further after the island lost its main fuel supplier, which was Venezuela. Readers are therefore now drawn into the current situation whereby Cuba is fighting for its precarious socialist life against the US.
Paris 1968 vs actual existing socialism
As one of the many who directly went through the 1968 period in Montreal and elsewhere, I had been waiting for decades for a full analysis of 1968. Rockhill carried this out because he did so from within. He decided, during a tormented period of his life, to go to Université de Paris 8 (formerly Université de Paris) and obtained his doctorate there, among other studies, on the thinkers who dominated 1968, the French School, such as its New Left proponents, especially Herbert Marcuse, and its “Western Marxism.” Its essence was opposition, first, to actual existing socialism and, second, hand in glove, co-optation of student youth away from those examples and into the “third road” of social democracy, as opposed to anti-capitalism at home, and communism abroad. Rockhill’s unprecedented, detailed account inspired me to reflect further on my own 1960s experience, which confirmed every point the author wrote; thus, it persuaded me to write this review from this angle.
Even though I was born and raised in an English-speaking atmosphere in Montreal, because of culture, family, and politics, I became a Francophile. In 1966, after graduating as a Poli Sci major, with a student visa in hand, I traveled to Paris with the goal of enrolling at the Université de Paris in Sci Pol, where I was accepted. However, I met a large group of backpackers on Île de la Cité who told their stories of hitchhiking and working at odd jobs across North Africa, the Middle East, and India, at a time when this was economically feasible. This encounter proved to be a fork in the road of my life. I abandoned Université de Paris and instead hit the road. I lugged with me some books, among others Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism. I became connected to this actual existing socialism all my life, even though I was the victim of ultra-leftism for a short period of time. Nevertheless, Île de la Cité in Paris proved to be a fork in the road of my life. This was the case so that even when back at the University in Montreal in 1967-68 I read Marcuse’s 1964 New Left bible One Dimensional Man, this did not shake my conviction in favor of communism thanks to Snow’s book and subsequent reading of Marx and Lenin. This reading was buttressed by concrete action such as the autumn 1968 McGill University Political Science Department strike, which I led in the wake of May 1968 Paris and then the 1968 Columbia University protest and occupation. This action at McGill is famously known from the Canadian National Film Board documentary Occupation. It confronted me and others involved against actual existing capitalism and the futility of the third way.
Marcuse, the new left and co-optation
Rockhill drills us on Marcuse as one of the Western Marxists “who took up the torch of the anti-communist Marxism” that was promoted by government agencies. (44) At the core: “anticommunism… remains largely hegemonic, even among those who are self-declared Marxists or even communists. (54) “They also generally reject Communist parties and anti-imperialist state building projects, some of them even rebuff parties and disciplined political organization in general, as well as any focus on state power.” (64)
Rockhill continues:
On the other hand, the New Left had some radical aspirations that were seen as a threat, particularly when it sought to call into question imperialism, the reign of capital, and the dominant socio-economic order. It therefore needed to be contained and controlled, and ideally it would be eliminated along with the communist left. The US national security state thereby often took a two-pronged approach, using what it could of the New Left as a weapon of war against the purported Old Left, while seeking overall to beat back any form of left politics. (310)
Agencies like the CIA saw Marcuse as a useful enemy. “Although he did continue to support Angela Davis after she joined the Communist Party USA, he remained an anti-communist radical.” (311) “This helps to explain why the bourgeois press widely promoted him as the spokesperson of the New Left.” Rockhill, as he does throughout his book, provides all the details to prove this.
“Most important,” Rockhill goes on to write, “Marcuse’s status as the godfather of the New Left cannot be separated from the media and cultural apparatus that bequeathed this status on him. The imperial superstructure, of which these apparatuses form an integral part, provided uplift and public visibility to Marcuse because he was a non-threatening anti-communist radical rather than a revolutionary communist.” (315)
Rockhill continues:
Overall, Marcuse advocates for actually non-existing socialism, which is a form of socialism that coheres in the mind of intellectuals as a utopian order distinct from the material existence of socialism… Marcuse’s particular variant is an excellent example of what some Marxists referred to as magical third-way politics, which invents the stairway to socialist heaven—in the minds of the beholder—the material reality of class struggle between two rival socio-comic orders (capitalism and actually existing socialism)… (328)
Marcuse’s embrace of public populism and rebellionism, as radical as they might seem within a certain framework, went hand in hand with his persistent anti-communism. His tendency to fetishize revolt, and more specifically the freedom of subjectively acting out against systems of power, applied as much to anticommunist counterrevolutionaries as to rebels in the West. (330)
All of my experience since 1968 to date serves to verify every one of the theses presented by Rockhill. It is essential reading, more than ever today, as actual existing socialism is even more in the crosshairs of the Empire, while an explosion of third-way politics in the US itself raises its ugly head to coopt and steer people away from the main target. I am looking forward to reading the second and third volumes in the groundbreaking trilogy.
AA/OT
