I have almost finished Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” (Monthly Review Press, 2025) amidst the uproar among the so-called progressive left academia and publishing. Rockhill has said the quiet truth out loud: the so-called critical theory has in fact nothing to do with Marxism. Its path has been paved by former members of the French communist party turned (post)structuralist and by the phenomenologists of the Frankfurt school, and it has never been a variant of any kind of Marxism. One hardly ever finds any discussion of Marx’s texts in their work. This is certainly true of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and not quite so true about Jacques Derrida and François Laruelle (who is mentioned in the book as one of Rockhill’s teachers but not discussed). One can say the same thing about Adorno and Marcuse and certainly of the anti-Marxists self-labelled as post-Marxists like Alasdair MacIntyre (Nietzsche, Aristotle, all over the place but not a single passage by Marx).
I am not so interested in whether Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno were paid to neutralize Marxism by creating “controlled dissidence” posing as anti-capitalist. What matters is that the postmodern episteme foregrounded the neoliberal “decentralised” and “disembodied” global economy which we stopped calling capitalist and renamed it as “neoliberal.” Rockhill is certainly not interested only in exterior motives but in the quality of the political-economic discourse ensconced in the philosophical discourses he subjects to his critique. I concur with his critique, but I would add a layer to it that Rockhill will probably not agree with. latter term obfuscates the fact that it is quite simply capitalism on planetary scale where private companies transcend national boundaries. The implication seems to be it was a bit better when it was “less or old liberal”, the problem is that it is now “neo-“ (liberal). The prefix means re-invented, renewed, revitalised and it is affixed to the noun “liberalism.” The attacks toward neoliberalism seem to be addressed against both the core term liberal, and the implied “free” market economy, without criticizing the capitalist political-economic system itself. Are we to conclude that we prefer authoritarian, illiberal capitalism (less global, more national)?
Critics of liberalism like Slavoj Žižek have been platformed for two decades by the BBC and CNN to keep repeating they are “Marxist” (jokingly Stalinist) and to tell us that the problem of the neoliberal order lies in the fact that it is liberal. The occasional reference to Marxism is there to remind us of the fact that a bit of “authoritarianism” might be in order or needed, whereas one can find perhaps not more than several passages in the entire work of these authors where they actually discuss Marx. Lacan, Hegel, “Hegel is a materialist, etc., Hegel is more Marxist than Marx so read Hegel not Marx,” has been the mantra of these supposed new Marxists. However, the postmodern dogma of refusing to think in terms of “grand narratives” is embedded in their most supposedly anti-capitalist writings and public statements. Note, they are usually “anti-capitalist” and actually not communist or Marxist, except in the form of an ambiguous jest, a slight provocation, but never serious intellectual engagement. Now, let me remind you of the writings of Pauline Cholchec, Ian Bruff, Igor Shoikhedbrod and, finally, David Harvey who have all explained to us two things: 1) Marx had nothing against liberalism and in fact sought to radicalize its concept, 2) the so called neoliberal globalized capitalism or the late stages of capitalism (Marx, Capital, vol. II and III) can be sustained but through authoritarian rule. So, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler and Alain Badiou have been acting like a “controlled dissidence” just as Marcuse and like it was done in communist Yugoslavia.
And in this sense, the provocation put forward by Rockhill holds water. However, Eastern European communism was far from true to its purported ideals and the Marxist scholarship was very much engaged in thwarting Marx’s original writings to justify the Party policy du jour. I was born and remember Yugoslavia. I wouldn’t know much about USSR.
I was a teenager in the late 80s. My father used to read out loud the op-eds Žižek published in Mladina, we all agreed with him: Serbian nationalism was corrupting the party, the Federation and the entire economic system was facing collapse due to corruption and incompetence. We all looked forward to the dissolution of the Federation without assuming it would result into a decade long war, and we all assumed we would immediately join the European Union because, well, we were European, very much a part of the continent, and not even as East as Romania or Ukraine. We bordered with Austria, Italy, Greece… But they said “no” – we needed to “transition” to “rule of law”; we were confused: we did know very well what rule of law was, just that it was a different law… and the corruption we hated was more moral or matter of principle than outright stealing (like in the U.S political-financial scandals we read about). We were also a region in war, the old institutions were dead, and the new ones had to be built on the rubble of a decades long war. Rule of law?? However, the biggest shock was when they said they wanted us to transition to “free economy” which we also wanted (as in the sense of “open and just,” in the naïve sense) only to learn later on that they meant “capitalist.” I must say that even to my dissident family it sounded like a vulgar, primitive word… becoming increasingly disappointed by the so-called transition (into the EU), my father one day concluded “We were all against Yugoslavia, because we actually believed in the socialist principles, and witnessed their betrayal.”
I would liken Žižek’s opposition to the former Socialist Party of Yugoslavia to what my family experienced in the late 80s and early 90s. He is not part of the “paid opposition,” as Rockhill notes himself. Derrida, Laruelle, Deleuze, Foucault could not remain communists while witnessing its failures and its slow demise. In other words, “Eastern” Marxism was far from perfect, and its dogmatism turned it into tiresome catechesis. It destroyed itself, even in the eyes of its believers. One did not need Marcuse’s committees and boards to bring East European communism to its imploding end.
In conclusion, returning to Rockhill’s main point: critical theory, the poststructuralists, the boomer progressives and their millennial outliers in the form of online “cultural Marxism” have nothing to do with Marx and are in fact anti-Marxist. Marx needs to be rediscovered, reread in his own words, interpreted as any other author without the mediation of any (Marxian) tradition – we need radically new readings placed beyond the poststructuralist paradigm, returning to the original texts and building a Marxism for the 21st century from scratch.