Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and ideology. Author Gabriel Rockhill demonstrates the explanatory and transformative superiority of a dialectical and historical materialist approach, while elucidating how the world of ideas is a crucial site of class struggle. He then engages in a meticulous counter-history of the Frankfurt School—which made a foundational contribution to Western Marxism—by situating it within the global relations of class struggle and the imperialist war on actually existing socialism. With the explicit and direct backing of powerful elements in the capitalist ruling class and the world’s leading imperialist state, the Frankfurt School developed a widely promoted form of compatible critical theory as an ersatz for dialectical and historical materialism. The volume concludes by bringing to the fore the positive project that serves as the guiding methodological framework for the work as a whole: a thoroughly anticolonial and anti-imperialist Marxism dedicated to building socialism in the real world. Drawing on extensive archival research to pull back the curtain on ruling class machinations, Rockhill’s book elucidates how the intellectual world war on the socialist alternative has sought to shore up and promote a “compatible left” intelligentsia while misrepresenting, maligning, and trying to destroy the revolutionary left.

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