Book: Who Paid the Pipers or Western Marxism
Author: Gabriel Rockhill
Publisher: Monthly Review Papers, New York, 2025
The fall of the first socialist state in 1991 was a shock to genuine communists as well as to formalistic communism, and at the same time a victory for Western Marxism. It made the first group weep, terrified the second, and invigorated the third, leading to a massive abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. It was indeed a difficult moment, to the extent that only a few remained steadfast in the ideological fortress. Naturally, we called them “pockets of resistance,” a military term referring to the guerrilla groups left behind by a defeated army to hinder the enemy’s advance until the army regains its strength and reorganizes for a counterattack. This is what comrade Ahmad Hussein expressed with painful eloquence:
“But alas, how few knights remained on the field of commitment.”
I was among those who criticized the Soviet system in its post-Stalin decades, and the lesson learned was that the greatest losers were the peripheral countries, especially the Arab nation, since the Soviets had long acted as a force restraining the imperialist beast. More importantly, this collapse was, in historical-materialist terms, a setback—an exception—because history fundamentally advances upward. Though our wounds were deep, the class enemy emerged victorious but also wounded, most notably by becoming the sole superpower, exposing its flaws and unleashing its brutality.
In this brief context, I attempt to summarize Gabriel Rockhill’s book—a painstaking and rigorously documented scholarly work. Yet its timing is no less important than the work itself, for it constitutes a bold revolutionary confrontation that demonstrates the author’s profound communist commitment in an era when loyalty to communism has become rare and the fungi of internalized defeat have spread everywhere, filling the burrows with fleeing rats. This book is not a cry of lamentation but a scientific and class-based challenge directed at the deserters, exposing both right-wing thinkers and the “left of the right.”
Many parties changed their names from “Communist” or “Marxist-Leninist” to others: Democratic, People’s Party, Progressive, Left-Nationalist, etc. In truth, these people did not change their theoretical background because they were never truly communists to begin with. Thus, changing the name merely aligned form with substance. Ridiculously, some self-proclaimed communists once behaved as though they were a “red aristocracy,” refusing to recognize anyone’s communism unless it passed through their ideological purgatory. It later became clear that their communism was merely formal, not substantive: party membership cards replaced deep class consciousness. Therefore, once Boris Yeltsin announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these people scattered in terror and opportunism across most parts of the globe.
Rockhill’s book is difficult to summarize or discuss briefly, let alone review in a few pages. The only practical and just approach is to read it in full, however much time that requires. It is one of the rare works distinguished by intellectual rigor and serves as the opening salvo in a cultural and ideological war—a communist offensive that has become necessary:
- Because counterrevolution can only be confronted by force and by the dialectical interaction between two class weapons: armed struggle and ideological-cultural warfare.
- Because monopoly capitalism is in crisis, requiring us to move onto the offensive.
Vladimir Lenin wrote about the revolutionary intellectual, and Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of the “organic intellectual.” But Rockhill’s work confirms what I have added: the “engaged intellectual”—the thinker who is deeply committed theoretically and actively involved in class struggle and confrontation, even if alone for a moment that may last a lifetime. Life itself is but a moment, though it never exhausts the range of consciousness.
Thus, the author scientifically and meticulously critiques the Frankfurt School, subjecting it to a coherent critical bombardment because it functioned as capitalism’s cultural ammunition against communism. He documents how intellectuals associated with this school were funded by the Central Intelligence Agency through various overt and covert means. Major American universities themselves were funded by the capitalist class, enabling coordination between university administrations and intelligence operatives embedded within academia.
The events following October 7 attacks and the retaliatory genocidal war against Gaza strengthened Rockhill’s analyses and documentation. Students from elite American capitalist families at universities such as Harvard University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, and Stanford University rose up against administrations funded by their own class background, protesting universities that serve capital and reproduce intellectuals loyal to capitalist hegemony. This culminated in the support by Jürgen Habermas—the last major figure of the Frankfurt School—for the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Rockhill also exposes the nakedness of French culturalism, especially figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek, whose work, he argues, contributed to uprooting communism. He likewise scrutinizes figures such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Delving deeply into the labyrinths of culture, Rockhill reveals forms of funding, containment, and influence surrounding names many would not expect, including Arnold J. Toynbee, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ernesto Laclau. He also discusses feminist figures such as Judith Butler, Gloria Steinem, the latter openly expressing satisfaction with anti-communism, and Hannah Arendt the most aggressive against communism, she might influenced by Mikhail Agirovsky, a Jewish Soviet dissident and Trotsky supporter, who fled to the Zionist Entity 1975 described the Soviets as National Bolsheviks in his book *The Ideology of National Bolshevism*, placing them, especially Stalin, on par with National Socialism, i.e., Nazism.
The US Information Research Department also purchased works by writers, translated and distributed them globally to ensure their fame. Besides George Orwell, authors included Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Czesław Miłosz, Victor Kravchenko, and hundreds of others.
The significance of Rockhill’s demolition of these intellectual icons may matter more for revolutionaries in the periphery—especially in the Arab Homeland —than for those in the imperial center. These thinkers have long occupied central positions in Arab university curricula, particularly in Palestinian universities under occupation.
Liberal academics in Arab universities introduced these distorted leftist currents while boasting that they were providing students with revolutionary thought. Instead, students graduated having lost access to communist theory and having their simple anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class instincts erased.
Thus, the book is a moment of exposure, revealing the falsity of Western Marxist thinkers as one of the bourgeoisie’s most insidious tools for infiltrating communism from within—a cultural Trojan horse. Humanity has witnessed in the beginning of this century moments that exposed the fraudulence of bourgeois Western culture, morality, propaganda, and media, leaving Western Marxism naked and unable to defend either the bourgeois state or the capitalist class riding upon it.
Cultural war may well be the foundation for military war. Culture is enduring; it lives long and provides the terrain upon which class struggle unfolds. Its war is broader than armed conflict and quietly prepares the ground for it.
These words cannot encompass all that Rockhill offers; they are merely scattered flashes from a much larger work.
One of imperialism’s most insidious methods, as Rockhill demonstrates, is funding researchers to write within specific ideological frameworks serving capital, then publishing and promoting their work as though it were independent scholarship, thereby granting it great credibility.
He also notes the importance of publishing institutions. Even significant books cannot circulate widely unless backed by powerful and recognized publishers.
When I completed my master’s thesis in Britain in 1985, The Political Economy of the West Bank: From Peripheralization to Development, I submitted it to Zed Books for publication. They replied that it could indeed become a book—if I agreed to alter Chapter Five. Instead of arguing that Palestinian workers from the West Bank and Gaza occupied the bottom of the class hierarchy inside the Zionist economy, concentrated in black labor and subjected to discriminatory wages and rights, they wanted the chapter reframed around the idea that Arab and Jewish workers were engaged in a unified class struggle together. I refused, because that was not reality. It would have destroyed the foundation of the thesis and transformed me, as an author, into a class and national traitor.
When I first read Doctor Zhivago as a teenager, I was struck by the author’s literary skill in portraying suffering while simultaneously delivering seductive bourgeois deception. Later I began asking: who financed the translation, printing, and dissemination of such books throughout the Arab Homeland in the 1950s? The same applied to existentialist works flooding Arab markets—Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Colin Wilson—while communist literature remained absent. It later became clear that this cultural campaign coincided with the era of Arab nationalist anti-imperialist mobilization.
Rockhill’s book can also illuminate, though indirectly, the so-called Syrian “revolution” carried out by political-Islamist armed groups—what might be called “terrorist Orientalism.” Numerous statements supporting these forces included names associated with the left who had been mobilized by Trotskyist networks, among them Norman Finkelstein, Tariq Ali, Fredric Jameson, Fawwaz Traboulsi, David McNally, Asef Bayat, Hamid Dabashi, Ilan Pappé, Talal Asad, and Vijay Prashad.
The Syrian regime was not a democratic paradise, but its opponent was local terrorism directed by imperialist-Zionist-Gulf-Turkish power. Once the Syrian state collapsed, sectarian massacres followed, more Syrian territory was ceded to Turkey and the Zionist Entity, and Syria became a platform for aggression against Iran.
Through intelligence agencies, media, and capital, the West built a cultural NATO aimed at erasing the Soviet Union’s sacrifices in defeating Nazism. Rockhill demonstrates that during imperial, not World War II, American imperialism hoped for a Soviet defeat so it could ally with Nazism. Once Nazism was defeated instead, the United States compensated by recruiting Nazi military officers, scientists, and intellectuals into its own institutions while simultaneously preaching anti-Nazism. One clear example was the rehabilitation of Martin Heidegger.
Imperialism, through cultural warfare and recruited intellectual battalions, undermined political culture in countries far from the Soviet Union—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, and others—before penetrating Eastern Europe itself, contributing to the destruction of the Soviet Union. The Soviets confronted imperialism with their own resources, while imperialism drew not only on its own wealth but also on centuries of plunder from the periphery as Anwar Abdulmalek calls that plunder “The Historical Surplus Value”.
If Rockwell’s work severs ties with centrist culture situated between communism and market ideology, it parallels Samir Amin’s theory of “delinking” the periphery economically, politically, culturally, and socially from the logic of capital.
Rockhill’s exposure of CIA infiltration into American universities also invites reflection on Gulf-state funding of Arab culture, creating a condition of coexistence between Arab political forces and the intelligence services of dependent regimes. The role played by Azmi Bishara through Qatari funding exemplifies, in the author’s view, this corruption of Arab culture.
Perhaps the most important conclusion from Rockwell’s work is the necessity of the party—often clandestine rather than public—and the need to invent new methods of class-rooted organization. The so-called Arab Spring confirmed this necessity, ending instead in a long autumn characterized by:
- The eruption of latent counterrevolutionary forces from within Arab social formations.
- The disorientation of the masses in the absence of revolutionary leadership.
This reveals the inability of Arab liberation forces to grasp historical moments and lead popular classes, because party leaderships often trailed behind the masses, abandoned revolutionary democracy, suppressed criticism and self-criticism, and demonized engaged intellectuals, pushing them toward isolated work outside party structures.
Although The Communist Manifesto preceded Das Kapital chronologically, Rockhill’s book can be seen as a kind of “Capital of Culture,” from which a new communist cultural manifesto for the twenty-first century ought to be derived.
Finally, one must apologize to Rockhill as we continue to witness Arab academics insisting that the Frankfurt School was Marxist and that Habermas—despite supporting Israel’s right to genocide the Palestinian people in Gaza—somehow remains a progressive thinker.
This demands two observations:
First: These academics are an example of the professors about whom Marx wrote: “…therefore, political economy was not a product of our land, but came to us ready-made from England and France as an imported commodity. Our professors remained students. And there is something better than this” (See: Capital, Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Muhammad Itani, Dar Al-Maaref Publications, 1950, p. 13).
Second, this intellectual dependency underscores the urgent necessity of translating Rockhill’s book. But who will undertake the translation!
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The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Kana’an’s Editorial Board.