Another critique of Rockhill, https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/04/the-comfort-of-conspiracy-a-review-of-who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism/ .
"...This review, however, argues for an inversion of Rockhill's causation: class position creates ideological orientation, and the imperial superstructure recognizes and amplifies tendencies that serve its interests. CIA operations are effects of class dynamics, not their cause. Understanding this distinction matters for revolutionary strategy. If we misidentify the cause of past failures, we will misidentify the cure, wasting limited resources on the wrong battles while the actual obstacles to revolution remain unaddressed. By treating CIA operations as the primary cause of Western Marxism's theoretical weaknesses—instead of as amplification of tendencies rooted in class position—this approach offers contemporary communists a seductive but politically damaging explanation for organizational failure. It allows us to externalize responsibility for our weakness onto past institutional manipulation, deflecting attention from the material obstacles and strategic questions that serious communist organizing in the imperial core must address. If the left's failures stem primarily from CIA sabotage and not from our own inadequacies—our inability to build organizations workers want to join, our mechanical application of models developed for different conditions, our sectarian fragmentation—then no fundamental self-critique is necessary. The problem becomes one of exposure (revealing the sinister enemy's machinations), rather than learning hard lessons concerning organizational reconstruction and strategic development. The conspiracy-focused framework emerging in works like Rockhill's (and shared, with different emphases, by Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn) reflects a broader methodological error: the substitution of empiricist documentation for a truly dialectical analysis. These authors treat historical outcomes as determined by institutional forces rather than as products of class struggle in which revolutionary agency remains possible. If we misdiagnose the sources of past defeats, we will replicate rather than overcome them...." Daniel Tutt @TuttReal Rockhill is not a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorists are in abundance today but to reduce this work to that is a misnomer. I have a review on Rockhill's Pipers that addresses its strengths and weaknesses, hopefully out soon. https://x.com/TuttReal/status/2044417730044956872 On Losurdo, a defense, https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/04/the-poverty-of-anti-stalinism-or-how-not-to-criticize/ , in reply to, https://www.newintermag.com/against-losurdo/?ref=newintermag.com , https://www.newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/?ref=newintermag.com , https://www.newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/ . A minor correction. Andrew : "Earlier the class warrior from the Hawkeye State (I just got that name by googling, I’ve only got a vague idea of where his homeland is), does not entirely focus on intellectuals’ ties to the CIA." Grew up not in Iowa, but, Kansas. Via https://monthlyreview.org/in-the-public-eye-gabriel-rockhills-who-killed-the-pipers-of-western-marxism/ MR Online: “An Insider Critique of the Imperial Theory Industry: Gabriel Rockhill Interviewed by Michael D. Yates” https://mronline.org/2025/11/21/an-insider-critique-of-the-imperial-theory-industry-gabriel-rockhill-interviewed-by-michael-yates/ “Michael Yates: Gabriel, what we are as adults is conditioned by our childhoods. Tell us something about where and how you grew up. How do you think this influenced who you are now? Gabriel Rockhill: I grew up on a small farm in rural Kansas, and manual labor was an integral part of my life from an early age. This included work on the farm, of course, but I also worked construction. My father is a builder and an architect, so when I wasn’t working on the farm, I spent most of my time, outside of school and sports, on construction sites. Andrew : "Amongst many cases of villainy he reveals that Ernesto Laclau (whose writing unlike most of the figures Rockhill cites, had some minor but real political influence), worked in research at one point for the Ford Foundation on some knavery (P 39-40)." Rockhill's footnote regarding Laclau and the Ford Foundation’s Proyecto Marginalidad (Marginality Project). Rockhill, Gabriel. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (p. 40). Monthly Review Press. Kindle Edition. 42. Néstor Kohan, La brújula y el mapa: Cultura, crítica y ciencias sociales en la revolución cubana (Cuba: Ocean Sur, 2022), 269. Also see Néstor Kohan, ed., Ciencias sociales y marxismo latinoamericano (Buenos Aires: Amauta Insurgente, 2015). Rockhill, Gabriel. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (p. 46). Monthly Review Press. Kindle Edition. A pdf of the first cited book by Nestor Kohan, "La brújula y el mapa: Cultura, crítica y ciencias sociales en la revolución cubana." https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/bitstream/handle/11336/233150/CONICET_Digital_Nro.65cde606-7b45-4df4-b6b0-3c39d4688a41_B.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y A pdf of the 2nd cited book, edited by Nestor Kohan ,"Ciencias sociales y marxismo latinoamericano." https://cipec.lahaine.org/b2-img/CienciassocialesyMarxismoLatNestorKohan2.pdf Among the documents reproduced in the chapter,"Dossier Daniel Hopen," are several polemicizing against the Ford Foundation’s Proyecto Marginalidad. Targeted scholar José Nun replied, https://aesthethika.org/A-50-anos-del-Proyecto-de . Google Chrome will auto translate, as it will, this review of the volume via La Jornada, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2015/05/08/index.php?section=opinion&article=019a2pol . Scrolling through Jose Nun's text, I see these anti-imperialist scholars noted as having been connected to the Ford Foundation’s Proyecto Marginalidad. Aníbal Quijano, Pablo González Casanova, Andre Gunder Frank. Eric Hobsbawm was one of the 3 foreign advisors.On Project Camelot, noted by Nun, see, https://nacla.org/rise-and-fall-project-camelot/ . An extended excerpt : "For a story of infamy This is the brief history of the Marginalidad project, irrefutable testimony to the stubbornness with which a group of researchers have defended their academic freedom and their scientific autonomy, facing at the same time the offers and the pressures that so effectively usually transform a twenty-year-old Cato into a helpful thirty-year-old ganapán. Like all transparent history, this is a public history, exposed on various occasions verbally and in writing, known to all who have been interested in this investigation which - like no other - has always been open to any request. (There are some small-time heroes or heroines out there who feel they deserve a guerrilla medal because they got one or two of our questionnaires: their remarkable feat is to have stolen what they didn't bother to ask for. They would have gotten it immediately and much more completely, of course with less emotion. And everyone knows what emotions they can afford). It was not easy to find reasons to criticize this project in front of the students. What's more: from the theoretical assumptions of the work to the personal trajectory of each one of those who participate in it, they were showing that this is one of the few sociological investigations of academic scope that is being carried out in Latin America to examine at an empirical level, from a rigorously critical conceptualization, the social problems posed by a dependent capitalist development. However, various interests were converging to promote the attack: from the most despicable ones—adventurism of the yellow press; subordinate grudges of those who were not hired by the Project; personal envy and hatred; maneuvers of some turiferaris of imperialism who seek to discredit our team in order to prevent the unfavorable repercussions that may cause its current liquidation—even those who are linked to a permanent and disloyal ideological struggle against the orientation that informs our task. How then to mount a scandal? Of course, touching naive ears with the subject of subsidies. Later I will refer to this point in more detail. However, it is worth insisting: for some reason the notoriously exceptional circumstances that have surrounded this particular subsidy are ignored and for some reason the matter is invoked precisely when the subsidy has just been cancelled. But, even distorted, this argument was not sufficient for a complaint. As there was no other , it has simply and plainly resorted to infamy, to such an extreme that it only serves to define the calamity of these unfortunate and self-imposed censors. I am going to collect some of his slanders, not to defend the investigation - which does not need it - but to illustrate to the students about the moral stature of those who intend to become their mentors. 1) First of all, it is about exploiting the " anti-Camelot reflex ". For this, it is not only miserably hidden that - while these brave accusers had the prudence to keep their mouths shut - the Latin American institutions and researchers linked to our Project were the first to publicly accuse the Camelot Plan, but because of ignorance or bad faith - or, what is worse, for both reasons at the same time - the true scope of that Plan is misrepresented. The Camelot Plan was an investigation: a) organized by the US Armed Forces, unrelated to any scientific priority and based on strictly military interests ; b) executed by Yankee professionals whose sole task was to discover subversive nuclei in Latin America ; c) based on surveys of a national dimension, for which initial funding of the order of six million dollars was available ; d) tending to obtain confidential data that would be processed and analyzed in the US and e) explicitly aimed at strengthening imperialist domination in our continent . At the other extreme, the Marginalidad project is an investigation: a) organized exclusively by Latin American scientific institutions to study a topic chosen by them and whose priority character was indicated by the most diverse currents of opinion (entities such as CEPAL, DESAL, CEUR, Institute of Peruvian Studies, Universities of Mexico, Santo Domingo, San Pablo, Chile, Guatemala, Colombia, etc.; sociologists such as Aníbal Quijano, Fernando H. Cardoso, Pablo González Casanova, Florestán Fernández, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Orlando Fals Borda, José A. Silva Michelena, Julio Cotler, Francisco Weffort, etc., economists such as Aníbal Pinto, Celso Furtado, Andrew Gunder Frank, Zygmundt Slawinski, Osvaldo Sunkel, etc.); b) executed by Latin American professionals who try to conceptualize and expose the various mechanisms of exploitation of the working class that operate on the continent; c) based on different observation techniques, limited to very small sectors of the population, exploratory and only useful for the formulation of theoretically significant hypotheses, for which purpose there is a total funding of the order of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, of which only twenty thousand are intended for field workers who are fulfilled in Argentina and Chile; d) tending to obtain absolutely public data that are processed and analyzed in Latin America and over which the research team is the only one that exercises control and e) explicitly aimed at showing the negative effects of imperialist domination on the development of our countries. Undoubtedly, ignorance is fertile ground for slander. But in this case it is required to be twice ignorant: about the Camelot Plan and about the Marginalidad project. 2) The second series of infundios belongs to a classic chapter in the repertoire of infamy: " police informants ". With a baseness worthy of scoundrels of the worst kind, he has not hesitated to invent that some of our interviewees from Chaco were arrested by the police... because of the way they answered our questionnaire. The frankly terrifying thing about a resource of this type is that it is not only a monstrous and conscious lie, but it is with the type of individual capable of propagating it that fascism is built and the torturers and the McCarthys are manufactured. Who but a psychopath can imagine a falsehood of this nature and intend to use it as an instrument of ideological struggle? Who but an imbecile can assume that the police need our scattered three hundred Chaqueña surveys—still not even processed—to organize their action? And who but a poor spirit can have such a low regard for professional decorum and ethics to listen to such statements? 3) It is thinking about this that one does not manage to laugh, but to be saddened in the face of what would appear to be a joke of the underprivileged: another "proof" of our sinister machination would consist in the fact that we asked the interviewees from Chaco for data on relatives or friends who have come to the capital... As any student of sociology should know, this is the well-known indirect sampling technique that has been used for half a century to analyze migration processes: information is obtained in the place of origin to then locate the migrants at the point of destination and see what their luck has been, what problems their mobility project has faced, etc. Pues bien: the sick mind of our inspired critics tries to fabricate the chilling image of something like an attempt to get Buenos Aires "hostages" from our Chaco respondents. The only thing this slander serves is to illustrate a classic proposition: "tell me how you think and I'll tell you who you are". And there are plenty of reasons for concern when subjects capable of thinking (?) in this way, not only circulate in the country but call themselves "leftists" and friends of the people. 4) Being crafty, our prosecutors have taken some of the questions we use out of context and present them as new evidence of who knows how many crimes. Here it is worth recalling, first of all, certain basic rules of research that, surprisingly, not all aspiring sociologists seem to know. The first is that, in a study like ours, the researcher is the only one who has access to the data and commits his responsibility and his honor in guaranteeing the character and anonymity of all the information he obtains. Secondly, only statistical totals are disclosed, which makes it impossible even to indirectly identify the natural or legal persons who are interviewed. But for an almost didactic purpose, let's take one of the questions that has most deliberately been tried to exploit: it is the one that asks the respondent to indicate whether he participated in any act or political demonstration in which there was violence and, if so, requests that he explain in detail the circumstances of the fact... Here, apparently, is a police model: chosen for purely theoretical reasons). Of course, the malicious observation falls at its base before the natural secrecy and anonymity of the questionnaire. But let's go a step further: neither the meaning of a question can generally be understood at the level of the questionnaire itself, nor can it really be known what information is being sought without knowing the instructions that the interviewer carries. In the example I'm referring to, this question - along with others - seeks to transcend the superficial - or "unobjectionable" - political participation/non-participation dichotomy, discriminating between the passivity of those who never intervened in politics and those who suffered negative experiences that led them to retreat. An indicator of such experiences are, of course, situations of a political nature in which the interviewee has been the victim of some type of repression. But it makes the technique of a questionnaire eliminate as much as possible the ambiguity of the answers: in this case, an affirmative answer creates doubts about the effective coincidence between the definition of violence with which the respondent handles it and the one implicit in the question. That is why the interviewer is instructed to deepen the answer by asking for some general details of the aforementioned event, so as not to confuse different types of violence later in the analysis. Almost as unfortunate as having to explain basic issues like this is that slander can take advantage of the poor sociological training of many who, in good faith, lend an ear to it. And the most serious thing is that questions like the one mentioned, with which we seek to uncover the latent mechanisms of repression, which inhibit popular participation at different levels, are distorted in bad faith. 5) Of course, when there is free stone for indecency, any trick is valid. It had to be shown that so-called left-wing intellectuals were "pro-bourgeois". This could not be done from the theoretical perspectives or the hypotheses of our work; it has then appealed to a children's gadget. Along with the questionnaire that we applied to Chaco workers, the complainants stole a letter that we sent to industrial establishments in Greater Buenos Aires anticipating the visit of our surveyors. This one gives details about the investigation and that one, no. Conclusion: the Project is discriminatory because it provides employers with more information than workers... Please note: as the robbery was incomplete, these sharp detractors do not have the similar letter of introduction shown to each Chaco worker. But it is not only the incomplete nature of the robbery that must be attributed to the bad faith of the imputation: already in the first year of sociology a student must know that the questionnaire is an instrument that is used exclusively by the interviewer and that it is not displayed or given to the interviewee . Therefore, neither the questionnaire intended for workers nor the one intended for companies contain the explanations that, instead, include the presentation letters addressed to companies and workers . And for that reason, only an ignorant or a scoundrel can think of the absurdity of trying to compare a cover letter with the cover of a questionnaire. The importance of the Marginalidad project The facts are stubborn and it is to them that I refer. A general report has already been published, which sets out the overall theoretical framework and strategy of the investigation (Nun, Marín and Murmis, op. cit.); a detail of the stages and the empirical universes of the work (CIS Informa, 1968); a historical introduction to the categories that are used (Laclau, CIS, 1968). There are half a dozen documents and communications in the process of printing. Gradually, during 1969 and 1970, the different results of our studies will appear. This is and will be our contribution; let those who can discuss it. Because the most remarkable thing about our slanderers and what definitively proves the nature of their motives and their guts is that they have not found an argument to question a single one of our hypotheses or our theoretical propositions, nor have they been able to debate the validity of a single one of the different aspects of our approach to the subject . The only thing they succeed in is trying to weave lies by distorting valuable parts of the study...." <SNIP> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41493): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41493 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118877363/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
