There is this letter Althusser wrote in 1962, to a woman he was seeing, where he just trashes Lenin.
He is rereading Lenin on philosophy and he is basically going: god, this is weak. Amazing guy when it came to reading an actual situation, reading what was in front of him, but the second he tried to go abstract he became a weak thinker. Then he walks it back a little. Okay, fine, Lenin mattered, he did real work in the fights that counted. But honestly, while he might’ve done good things, today his influence is mostly bad.
Hang onto that, because it is the single most useful thing for understanding the noise around Gabriel Rockhill’s new book.
The book is called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? and the claim sounds insane when you say it out loud: that the whole Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, the names you would put on a tote bag, was basically a manufactured product. Propped up by everyone from wartime intelligence to the CIA to the Ford Foundation. Not because anyone loved the ideas, but because the ideas were useful. A soft, defanged, after-Lenin kind of leftism that would not actually threaten capitalism, built on purpose to drown out the angrier socialism coming out of the USSR and the Third World.
Saying the book divided people does not cover it. Since it came out in December, and even before that, it has been treated as both the second coming of real Marxism and the work of a guy who skimmed the wrong books and lucked into a deal. It even got publicly attacked by one of the most powerful figures in Marxist publishing, who bragged about helping cancel it. Turns out the guy guarding the gates has the morals of a small-time con artist, which, if you know your Brecht, is almost too on the nose.
For the people on Rockhill’s side, that reaction is the whole point. Look how fast they moved to crush him. Does that not prove the thing he is saying about how this world works, how it hunts down and destroys anyone who steps out of line? For the people against him, it is just noise. Whatever he thinks he is doing, the guy is a weak thinker. So he should shut up.
And here is the annoying part: both sides have something.
The detractors are insufferable about it, all that sneering, so it is hard to want to agree with them. But the criticism lands. If Rockhill was ever a sharp thinker, you would not know it from this book. For all the archive-digging, it has got enough holes that people will be cranking out little correction pieces for years, and this is only book one of a planned three. Except there are plenty of weak thinkers out there, including ones the Western Marxism crowd treats like saints, and nobody runs them out of town for it. So that is not really the problem. The problem is he does not want to be a strong one. He has said it himself in his earlier stuff: the idea that a text floats free of where and when it was made is a fairy tale, a trick for cutting art off from the actual world that produced it. There is no pure critique happening above history. There is just history.
Which, fine, is sort of what all Marxism does. It is built to put theory underneath the material stuff, who makes what, who owns what, how it all hangs together. Rockhill is just a really blunt, crude version of that. But the question stays open: how did we get to a point where huge numbers of Marxists, the terminally online ones especially, are falling over themselves for a theorist whose whole move is rejecting theory? A guy who will not even meet theory on its own ground and fight it there?
In the book he basically waves off Fredric Jameson. The problem with Jameson, he says, is that he reads history like one big unified mood sliding from one era to the next, and misses how unevenly things actually develop, that there is no clean snap where suddenly it is the neoliberal age, or the postmodern age, like a switch got flipped.1 As a read on Jameson that is just wrong, because Jameson knows full well that different parts of the system move at different speeds even while the whole thing tracks economic globalization. But I am not bringing it up to dunk. I am bringing it up because Jameson has one idea buried in here that actually helps explain the mess we are in.
The idea is something he called microchronology, tossed off in a 1992 essay.2 The gist: a new group or class, even when it is sitting inside an advanced stage of capitalism, still has to replay the whole past on its way to figuring out its own culture. So you get these side-tracks of cultural history running the old stages again on fast-forward, the way film’s realist phase did the same ideological work for the twentieth-century factory worker that the realist novel had done for the upper class a century before.
You can see the exact same thing in the recent history of the Western left. After the French Revolution fell apart, the early utopian socialists turned inward and built little communes on top of ordinary life, Fourier’s fantasy colonies powered by passionate attraction, Owen trying to kill off unequal exchange without ever actually leaving the market. Now fast-forward: that is the Iraq War years, when a left coming back to life ran from the supposed end of history into anarchist communes, into the Zapatistas, into Chomsky. Then came the party phase. The left figured out that scattered resistance was not enough and threw everything into new movements, France Insoumise, Corbyn, Bernie, basically rerunning the rise of the old German Social Democrats. They talked a big revolutionary game sometimes, but the day-job was obvious: slow the bleeding of the welfare state, save capitalism from itself.
Then 2020 happened and Corbyn and Bernie both went down in flames, and that pretty much killed the whole plan. Teaming up with liberals, people started to realize, was pointless. The actual balance of power did not support real reform anyway. And once there is no reason to court liberals, there is no reason to keep their ideas around either. So: build a vanguard, because in the TikTok era, where everyone is sorted into separate little demographic boxes like never before, vague public goodwill toward socialism as an idea means nothing if all it ever turns into is weak parliamentary maneuvering. Oppose imperialism flat-out, because lining up international allies matters more than keeping the comfortable home-country workers happy. Dig Stalin and Mao back up, because being transgressive is just the baseline of politics now, not the shameful thing you hide. The hardest-line Stalinists today have basically become guys with interesting takes, no more shocking than someone you would catch sipping cognac on Joe Rogan.
Faced with this online-bred new Leninism, the respectable left mostly went into crackdown mode. People in the more radical DSA groups got pushed out of their local chapters. Academics tagged as part of this current, potentially up to and including every Chinese Marxist, which is a weird mirror of the whole economic decoupling from China logic (LOL), got quietly banned from the prestige venues. And Jacobin, the magazine Bhaskar Sunkara spun up into a whole media franchise has, despite the left flank of the DSA urging it to dump Israel, slid further and further into being the Democrats’ in-house apology machine. The same guy who built an empire on selling socialism as a lifestyle brand now mostly sells you on staying loyal to the people arming the bombing.
Which tells you how much the ceiling has dropped. A couple years back Sunkara’s whole pitch was that this stuff scales, that you franchise the magazine, franchise the merch, franchise the optimism, and a mass socialist movement falls out the other end. What it actually shrank down to is cheering on a guy winning a mayor’s race. Mamdani is fine, except his annoying liberal Shia Islamism. But if the grand strategy of the post-2008 left has come down to managing one city while its flagship outlet runs cover for the DEMS, you are allowed to ask what the franchise was ever really building toward.
Part of this is just prestige/class panic. The insurgents threaten the cultural respectability the establishment left spent the years after 2008 carefully building. But it has also got a geography to it. When Jagger sang in ’68 about there being no place for a street fighting man in sleepy London town, he meant that England, next to France and America, was a sedate little bubble, untouched by Algeria or Vietnam, its left soft and stuck in its own head. That divide held up. Rockhill’s book came out through Monthly Review in New York, who have stuck to an anti-imperialist line forever; most of the pushback against it comes out of the Marxist publishing scene in London, the Verso world, which started backing away from that line in the mid-seventies. One British writer back in 1980 even had the nerve to argue, against literally everything Lenin taught, that imperialism was actually good for the developing world, a stimulus. Jameson once said you have to back social democracy precisely because watching it fail is the basic lesson, the real education, of any serious left.3 But in sleepy London town there is still no place for the street fighting man, or for real education.
You could obviously argue none of this leads anywhere, that the whole split just weakens the left and scatters it at the worst possible moment. Maybe that already happened. A couple years back the dream was taking the whole United States; now it is holding onto whatever Mamdani can win as mayor. Or, if you want a different version, it is France Insoumise pulling the biggest bloc of seats in the election and then just getting locked out of power anyway. But I am not here to rule on who is right. I am here to show the situation Rockhill is wading into.
Which is where Althusser comes back. Yeah, he called Lenin a weak thinker first. But five years later he flipped. Before that, he had been trying to keep theory safely walled off from practice, philosophy as this referee floating above the field, sorting real science from ideology. Rereading Lenin made him see that the aloof referee pose is itself the mistake. Philosophy is not standing outside the fight. It is in the fight, swinging. And what is it swinging for? It is making arguments where there is nothing underneath to prove. Nobody can actually prove the world is fundamentally material rather than ideal. Left alone, philosophy drifts toward idealism almost by default, see Husserl starting out hunting for the things themselves and ending up basically back at Kant. So the job of a materialist philosophy is to defend what science has actually achieved. That is what Lenin was doing, using philosophy as a weapon. Not just against idealists like Bogdanov, but for the science of history, for historical materialism.
That is exactly why, as Althusser put it, Lenin is unbearable to academic philosophy, maybe to philosophers full stop. He was born too early for philosophy; his whole job was to cut it down to size, to reduce it to what it actually does inside the class struggle. And that is also why Rockhill makes the room gasp. His question is dead simple: if Western Marxism failed, first as tragedy in the New Left years, then as farce more recently, what was it ever good for? Or flip it: who was it actually working for? For asking that, every guardian of academic good manners came down on him. But he knows one thing they do not. They think they are living after philosophy, like they have outgrown Marx and his clunky economic determinism and class reductionism. He knows he comes before it, that step one is just clearing out the people who, in the name of rigor, are relativizing Marxism straight out of existence. Lil Wayne actually put it best: if we are too simple for you, then you do not get the basics.4
None of which means Rockhill is the last word here. He is probably not even the first. What he has actually done is something else: he held philosophy to the standard of historical materialism, and by doing that, cleared the ground for a version that might someday live up to the spirit of the thing. And that will not be easy. Because, as Althusser pointed out, there has never actually been a Marxist philosophy that pulled off both halves at once: hard materialism and real coherence. Partly that is just the lag between Marx discovering historical materialism and anyone working out its philosophy. Partly it is specific wrong turns Althusser was happy to name: voluntarism, humanism, dogmatism. We could name our own today: denying imperialism, identitarianism, liberal mix-and-match. And only once that is sorted, he said, will justice finally land for the people who had to live caught between political urgency and philosophical lag.
But it is too early for justice. So Rockhill goes picking through old military surplus and comes back with a rerun of Lenin. If that makes him look like a LARPer, micro-sect, dog-eared copy of Dialectical and Historical Materialism and all, then fine, let him LARP. There is no shame in it. Marx himself said revolutionaries at the start always nervously summon the ghosts of the past, borrowing their names and their slogans and their costumes to stage the new thing in old, familiar dress.5 But you have to remember the next line. The beginner only really gets the new language, only moves in it freely, once he stops translating back, once he forgets his mother tongue entirely.
Notes
- Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025), 57–58. ↩
- Fredric Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1992), 156. ↩
- Fredric Jameson, “Lenin as Political Thinker,” in Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009), 299. ↩
- From the 2006 song “Shooter,” with Robin Thicke, on the album Tha Carter II. ↩
- Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 11 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2010 [1852]), 104. ↩