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Follow The Money: A Critical Review of Rockhill's Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

George Paterson on 18 May 2026 - Blog exclusive

Review of Rockhill, G. (2025) Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?: The Intellectual World War. Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry Volume I. New York: Monthly Review Press.

In the first of a three-volume effort2, Gabriel Rockhill seeks to unmask the failures of Western Marxism. Its failure in short is its “imperial ignorance”3 and its inability to support actual revolutionary change. Western Marxism for Rockhill is an ideology that is compatible with the interests of the ruling class and is promoted, funded, and – in part – steered4 by state actors aligned with the American Empire.

An Outline of the Book

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? is broken up into two main parts. The opening salvo and introduction outlines Rockhill’s reasoning for producing the book. Rockhill wrote the book because he sees the main trends of academic Marxism as part of the intellectual battle within the ongoing class war. The author is also critical of his own work5 and clearly feels the need to redeem himself for having been, in his view, miseducated by his apprenticeship in French Critical Theory and the other trends within Western Marxism. What Rockhill advances in response to this is a “counter-history of contemporary thought”, which departs from the standard histories of Western Marxism and The Frankfurt School, by highlighting the failures of the Critical Theorists to support revolutionary movements6 both domestically and internationally, and also their failure to properly address the state infiltration of the intellectual Left7.

Part I continues on the themes of some of Rockhill’s earlier talks and articles, which outline his Marxist critique of Western Marxism. Building on declassified and FOIAed documents, as well as works like Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War8 and Tim Muller’s Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg9 Rockhill provides a “political economy of knowledge” to unearth the economic base behind Western Marxism10.

Part II focuses on the life and work of the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and then Herbert Marcuse who is treated separately. Rockhill attacks Adorno and Horkheimer for eschewing political action and documents their links with CIA operatives. Herbert Marcuse, the godfather of the New Left, is attacked for his misleading comments about the nature of his work with the imperialist American state, as well as his lack of support for actually existing post-revolutionary states like Maoist China. Marcuse’s portrait is a bit more complicated than Adorno and Horkheimer’s, because, as is already well known, Marcuse was spied on by state actors in both the USSR and the USA, and he did at least write positively about the prospects for revolutionary change11 - despite dismissing many of the anticolonial struggles and attempts to create socialism in the Twentieth Century.

The appendix then shares photocopies of some of the declassified documents and photographs that have informed Rockhill’s study.

Comments on the Book

Rockhill is at pains to argue that he isn’t assuming guilt by association and emphasises the scholarly, rather than conspiratorial and speculative, nature of his claims, the book cites reems of evidence outlining the role of state actors in the lives on the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School. There are repeated mentions of CIA operatives and CIA funding which almost force upon the reader the impression that Adorno’s intention was to promote aims aligned with the CIA. Moreover, Rockhill’s more important criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer’s political position, namely that they both were not politically (in any meaningful way) Marxist is correct. Adorno, throughout his works dismisses political action. Throughout the articles published in The Culture Industry for example, Adorno claims that the masses are “powerless” 12 and that “only thinking [can] offer an escape” using the metaphor of somebody stuck in a barricaded building13, and his letters and books dismiss both Stalinism and the New Left14. However, discussing this isn’t breaking any new ground. In addition to the information contained in the aforementioned works by Saunders and Müller, it is already well known that dissident leftist journals like Encounter were funded by the CIA15. Adorno’s attacks on the New Left and that the Frankfurt School’s working relationship with the OSS too is well known, and as the author points out, not hidden from the author’s publications. As well as Adorno’s own students, who protested his lectures, even intellectuals who are typically associated with an avoidance of overt revolutionary politics, like Jean Francois Lyotard, attacked Adorno for his “shamefaced nihilism” and his lack of any “affirmative politics”16. So why all of this needs restating in detail isn’t clear. It certainly raises ethical questions about the relationship between academic publishing and intellectual freedom but few activists would be delusional enough to assume that reading the Adorno and Horkheimer’s state-sanctioned work provides a recipe for revolution.

Furthermore, there is a lot of argument by citation, which is strange considering the number of dubious references made in the book. For example, Rockhill cites Mark Lane’s Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK and William F. Pepper’s The Plot to Kill King, two books both published by SkyHorse Publishing – an outfit that has been criticised for publishing dubious conspiracy theories17. Whilst it would be fallacious to dismiss the claims in these books outright based on the publisher, these controversial works cited are not ideal sources of information for an otherwise serious work of scholarship. Relatedly, Rockhill uses the problematic phrase “cultural Marxism”18 to describe Western Marxism, which has in recent years been used to describe the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Frankfurt School theorists sought to undermine Western Civilisation through a mixture of political correctness and other subversive methods19. Whilst Rockhill presumably doesn’t believe that the Frankfurt School are involved in a grand conspiracy to undermine Western Civilisation20, it is advisable that he refrains from using this phrase or at least clarifies his use of the term.

A theme that runs throughout the book is that the intellectuals who did support the USSR, China, revolutionary anticolonialism, etc have been met with a form of career glass ceiling which prevented them from being carefully ensconced in the imperial academy. There is of course some truth to this, and there are countless examples of professors and government bureaucrats being hounded out of their jobs because of their political views21. For instance, Rockhill points to Michael Parenti’s inability to secure a tenured academic job despite his impressive bibliography22. But Rockhill misses some important counterexamples, which wouldn’t fit his view that it was merely pro-Soviet or vocally anticolonial intellectuals that are – or were – solely the victims of such purges or career ceilings. To name just those published by the Monthly Review, Ronald Meek and Paul Baran23 all held tenured (or at the least relatively secure) positions within the imperial academy – despite being politically active Marxists who openly praised Stalin and later Mao. Similarly, Albert Szymanski, who is praised by Rockhill24, wrote defensive books and articles about the USSR, and held a prestigious position at Rutgers all whilst playing an important role in the American Sociological Association. Why doesn’t Rockhill’s materialist analysis extend to them? I say this not to dismiss the obvious and well documented evidence that the CIA and the educational establishment have tried to suppress radical thought, but rather to point out the limits of Rockhill’s ‘follow the money’ analysis. In contrast, Marcuse faced much more overt opposition than Szymanski for instance when the then-governor of California Ronald Reagan tried to oust Marcuse from his teaching position at UC San Diego25. If “the empire does not promote work that is of a real threat to its existence”26 as Rockhill claims, how and why did so many Stalinist and anticolonial radicals slip through the net and become eminent in their field? Rockhill does note that the CIA is not all powerful and regularly fails to achieve its goals, but when there are notable examples that run counter to Rockhill’s narrative, it is worth commenting on. It seems prima facie more plausible that the imperial academy acts as a velvet prison where academics are rewarded for publishing in niche journals and students use their education to further their career ambition, rather than the ruling class simply shutting out uncompromised pro-Soviet radicals. This is of course in sharp contrast to the experience that Cominterned intellectuals faced in Soviet Russia, many of which perished or were imprisoned.

Moreover, Rockhill seems to ignore the fact that the crises within Marxist philosophy led to founding of what we call “Western Marxism”. Rockhill’s ‘follow the money’ analysis seems to ignore the actual intellectual lineage of Western Marxism. As György Lukács explains in Record of a Life:

“in the twenties, [Karl] Korsch, [Antonio] Gramsci and I tried in our different ways to come to grips with the problem of social necessity and the mechanistic interpretation of it [Marxism]…”27

It is this mechanistic interpretation that led intellectuals like Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch and later Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer to develop a more philosophically enriched form of Marxism – against the unsophisticated Marxism of post-revolutionary Russia28. There is also an important aspect of how Hegel29, psychoanalysis, and other modes of thought were generally embraced by Western Marxism. If the Russian, Hungarian, and German revolutions had been successful and had led to a world communism then the work of the aforementioned intellectuals associated with Western Marxism would be superfluous. Western Marxism arose largely as a critique of the mechanistic Soviet and proto-Soviet Marxism as well as a response to the failures of revolution in the early Twentieth Century. This important aspect of Western Marxism is largely ignored in the book because of Rockhill’s singleminded focus on state infiltration and funding. Politics often makes for strange bedfellows, and the imperial academy is certainly not immune to this. The CIA and OSS were playing politics by supporting the dissident left and the right, because the Frankfurt School and the imperial state shared an opposition Soviet Communism. The Frankfurt School theorists were simply caught up in this logic, and it is uncontroversial to say that they benefited from this arrangement. But emphasising this, without explaining the intellectual lineage of Western Marxism only tells part of the story.

Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkehimer may well have been funded and promoted by the imperial state, as were many dissidents, anti-Soviet Marxists, and left wing intellectuals. But the question remains, so what? The unwritten conclusion that the reader takes away is that we should not therefore trust these perfidious Critical Theorists who distract the Left with their theoretical blind alleys and avoidance of political radicalism. Rockhill says that the Left should use its intellectual resources to invest in a truly radical theory that can liberate the proletariat from capitalism30. But why then should the Left engage with thinkers that Rockhill lauds like Michael Parenti, Domenico Losurdo, and Al Szymanski31 who praised the Soviet system – a system which no longer exists and ended in failure? Surely, a sober dialectical analysis of our current period, rather than an analysis that relies on work that praises non-existent or authoritarian states, is a better first step for analysing the prospects for real change in this century.

Notes

  1. In text citations are from Rockhill’s book unless stated otherwise.🡅

  2. The first instalment Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? picks up and develops a lot of what Frances Stonor Saunders explored in her book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War – which this title clearly references and cites. Future instalments will address French Theory and contemporary anti-imperialism.🡅

  3. Pp. 49🡅

  4. I should emphasise that Rockhill isn’t saying that the Frankfurt School were directly told what to say or write by the OSS, CIA, and Rockefeller Foundation, but rather that the work of figures like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse supported aims and goals in line with initiatives like Philip Mosely’s Marxism-Leninism Project which sought to fund alternatives to Soviet-aligned philosophy that still had a Marxist bent to them (281). 🡅

  5. I assume he is referring in particular to his own teaching and his earlier work published such as his translations of Jacques Ranciere and Emmanuel Levinas.🡅

  6. Rockhill doesn’t fully explain this very much, but from the little he does discuss, we can assume he means supporting Maoist China, the USSR, and its satellite states. 🡅

  7. Pp. 45🡅

  8. F.S. Saunders, Who paid the piper?: CIA and the cultural cold war (London: Granta, 1999).🡅

  9. T.B. Müller, Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010).🡅

  10. Pp. 86🡅

  11. For example, in An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse argues in favour of revolution, but he does so in ways that depart from classical Marxism by in large part questioning the revolutionary potential of the working class. See H. Marcuse. An essay on liberation. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) pp.54-60 and L. Kołakowski Main currents of Marxism (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005) pp.1119-1123.🡅

  12. T. Adorno The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture (London: Routledge, 2001) pp.92🡅

  13. Ibid, pp. 200🡅

  14. Ibid, pp. 223🡅

  15. This was known back in the 1970s. For example Robin Blackburn attacked Alasdair MacIntyre for working with Encounter on account of its CIA funding see E. Perreau-Saussine. Alasdair MacIntyre: An intellectual biography. Translated by N.J. Pinkoski. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), pp.11.🡅

  16. J.F. Lyotard, J. ‘Adorno as the devil’. Telos (1974) pp. 132-133.🡅

  17. Skyhorse has published many unserious and conspiratorial books like Plandemic by Mikki Willis for example. 🡅

  18. Pp. 182; pp.336.🡅

  19. R. Busbridge, R., Moffitt, B., & Thorburn, J. ‘Cultural Marxism: Far-right conspiracy theory in Australia’s culture wars’, Social Identities, 26:6 (2020), pp. 722–738. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822.🡅

  20. Rockhill’s book in fact argues the opposite – that the Frankfurt School are involved in supporting the aims of U.S. Empire to advance anticommunist ends. 🡅

  21. H. Bruce Franklin and Angela Davis for example struggled with gaining secure academic employment in the 1960s and 1970s due to their radical views. 🡅

  22. Pp. 157🡅

  23. Paul Baran did face “quasi-official harassments” over his political views, but this was comparable to how Marcuse was treated. See R Jacoby The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp.176-179. Also, Baran like Paul Sweezy, worked for the OSS, like members of the Frankfurt School. 🡅

  24. Pp. 174🡅

  25. For an account of this see B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse: Art of Liberation (London: Verso, 1982), pp.174-175.🡅

  26. Pp. 64🡅

  27. G. Lukács. Record of a life: An autobiographical sketch. (London: Verso, 1983), pp.173🡅

  28. Western Marxism was a movement against what Russell Jacoby calls “automatic Marxism” – namely the assumptions held in the Russian Orthodoxy over Marxist philosophy. See R. Jacoby, ‘Towards a Critique of Automatic Marxism: The Politics of Philosophy from Lukács to the Frankfurt School’, Telos, 10 (1971), pp. 119-146. https://doi.org/10.3817/1271010119.🡅

  29. Particularly the importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology to Western Marxism. Whereas, within Russian Marxism, Hegel’s Science of Logic took precedence over the Phenomenology in the Soviet understanding of Marxism see R. Jacoby. Dialectic of defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.37-41.🡅

  30. This is the thrust of the conclusion pp.331-342. 🡅

  31. This is not to say to dismiss the work of Losurdo, Szymanski, Parenti, or the other authors mentioned on pp.174. My point is that focusing on their analyses of Soviet Russia, Maoist China, or Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam won’t provide fruitful answers to contemporary issues. 🡅

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