Reviewed by Joseph Jamison

December 2025

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Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? By Gabriel Rockhill.

(NY: Monthly Review Press, 2025.  416 pages.)

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“He who pays the piper calls the tune” is the proverb alluded to in the title of Gabriel Rockhill’s outstanding new book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? subtitled “The Intellectual World War. Marxism Versus the Imperial Theory Industry.” [1] The title of Rockhill’s book calls to mind the British title of a well-known earlier book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders.[2] While rich in factual detail, the Saunders work rarely went beyond liberal outrage about CIA deceit, corruption, contempt for democracy, and brutal violence.

Gabriel Rockhill’s book is a far deeper and more ambitious work. It strives to make a number of advances in Marxist theory, and it focuses on a specific aspect of the Cold War of ideas by concentrating on the capitalist ruling class’s attempt to destroy its communist nemesis by consciously shaping a form of bogus “Marxism” — “Western Marxism” — that would not threaten the capitalist status quo.

Rockhill’s main contention is that much of what is known as “Western Marxism” — especially the strain associated with Frankfurt School and what he calls French Theory — was not a genuine revolutionary or anti-capitalist current. Rather, it functioned as a vehicle of ideological control under capitalism and imperialism. Rockhill shows through a massive amount of archival evidence that powerful capitalist interests — including states, foundations, and institutions tied to imperialist powers — actively funded and promoted this so called “critical theory” tradition.  The aim of all this funding and promotion was to produce a “compatible left” — a left-leaning intelligentsia that would appear critical but would ultimately serve the needs of the ruling capitalist order by diverting attention away from systemic class struggle, revolutionary social change, and the achievements of actual socialism.

Unlike Saunders, Rockhill uses a dialectical and historical materialist framework, arguing that ideas and intellectual production must be understood as embedded in material class relations and power structures.  He has carried out detailed archival and historical research tracing financial, institutional, and political ties between Western intellectual institutions (especially those associated with Western Marxism) and capitalist/imperialist powers. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? insists on a concept of class struggle that includes the intellectual world. Culture, theory, and ideology are also battlegrounds in the global struggle between capitalist-imperialist forces and revolutionary/communist and anti-imperialist movements.  Rockhill does not merely indict Western Marxism; he argues for an appreciation and continuation of anti-imperialist Marxism-Leninism  — committed to socialist transformation in the real world, not just cultural critique.  In other words, the book is a call to reject the deformed intellectual tradition of Western Marxism and to reconstruct a materialist Marxism rooted in class struggle, global solidarity, and real-world socialist praxis.

There is a problem with the term “Western Marxism,” which Rockhill acknowledges. Marxism, as everyone knows, was born in Western Europe. From the 1840s to the 1890s Marx and Engels labored in Germany, Belgium, France, and Britain to develop their revolutionary theories. In 1976 the term “Western Marxism” became widespread after Perry Anderson, a Trotskyist writer associated with the British journal New Left Review (now Verso), published Considerations on Western Marxism. Accordingly, “Western Marxism” is not all Marxist thinking in Western countries. There are plenty of authentic Marxists in Western countries, often enough in Communist parties. Rather, “Western Marxism” denotes a very specific perversion of Marxism. Rockhill would prefer the term “imperial Marxism” or “cultural Marxism,” but alas, thanks to Perry Anderson, we seem saddled with the geographic terminology.  Western Marxism was not an authentic, independent intellectual tradition that emerged organically from the workers’ movement or the Western intelligentsia but was largely a government endeavor during the Cold War to de-radicalize Marxism and steer leftist intellectuals away from revolutionary politics.

The author states,

This book, like the two to be published in its wake, focuses on the intellectual – and particularly the academic – front of this war on communism and more specifically, on the endeavor to shore up a form of compatible left critical theory. Since it has not been possible to simply eliminate Marxism due to its broad public appeal, clear explanatory power, and proven ability to transform the socioeconomic order, the managers of bourgeois society have been faced with a dilemma of how best to deal with its existence. As we shall see, their preferred tactic has been to use their monopoly control over the superstructure to internationally promote a commodified version of Marxism, often referred to as “Western” or cultural Marxism, as well as forms of edgy theory that purport to surpass Marxism in their radicality and sophistication. If we simplify things, we might say that the implicit mantra driving the imperial theory industry has been: if you cannot beat your competitors (the actual Marxists), then flood the market with seductive but cheap knockoffs, promote them to no end, and try to bury your competitors as passé.[3]

Rockhill is careful to avoid oversimplifying matters. He rejects the idea that intellectuals either act completely autonomously or are rigorously controlled by external forces as a massive oversimplification

The Agency [the CIA] promoted this non-communist left, from behind the scenes, precisely because it was one of the best ways of fragmenting the left, and most importantly, waging an all-out war on the “incompatible” left of the communists. To be clear, connections to this project do not, in and of themselves, invalidate the entirety of a scholar’s contributions…. An intellectual did not have to collaborate directly with the CIA to play a role in the intellectual world war on communism.[4]

Rockhill begins Who Paid the Pipers with an account of the CIA’s drive to kill Che Guevara. After the CIA assassinated Che in Bolivia in 1967 there arose a battle to kill his ideas, specifically his ideas written in his Bolivian diary, which came into the possession of the Bolivian dictator Rene Barrientos who sought to auction the publication rights to the highest bidder. The CIA and its allies and agents published false versions of the diary. After long and fierce struggles Fidel Castro and Ramparts magazine eventually published the real diary.   Rockhill notes that Che as a young medical doctor in Guatemala had been radicalized by watching the US propaganda campaign preceding the Guatemalan coup which portrayed progressive Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz as a Soviet stooge. The US propaganda campaign facilitated the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. Later, in Cuba Che would organize Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and later still he would organize Prensa Latina, an anti-imperialist press agency. Che’s experience in Guatemala gave him an acute sense of the importance of ideology in revolutionary class struggle. Ideology’s importance is a key theme of Rockhill’s book.

Rockhill states that Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? took him three decades to write.[5] In the intervening time, one volume has become a projected three volumes. When he was in college in the early 1990s in Iowa, he had sought out the most radical form of theory available because he wanted to change a world characterized by exploitation and oppression. What was on offer was French Theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, and trends in the English-speaking world inspired by these traditions.  In the fall of 2001 at age 29 he was studying and teaching philosophy in Paris, France. He thought he was on top of the world, studying with the leading lights of French Theory (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou et al.).

When the attacks of September 11, 2001 took place, he was asked to make sense of the events in a public lecture in one of the institutions where he was teaching.  In a moment of road-to-Damascus self-discovery, it dawned on him he had nothing intelligible to say. “Here I was after years of vigorous study at premier institutions in Paris, and I was ignorant of imperialism and the geopolitical world in which I was living. I knew so much about things that mattered so incredibly little, and I knew nothing about what counted most in the world and was literally an issue of life or death for the majority of humanity and the biosphere… What I had been trained in, most fundamentally, was imperial ignorance.”[6]

It took more than a decade of studying and teaching in Paris as well as nearly two decades of activism and his own research on the history of anti-imperialist Marxism and the global socialist movement to disenthrall himself from Western Marxism and to grasp the truth: what he thought was education was in fact indoctrination. Then, as he tried to publish his initial heretical conclusions, he came up against the “awesome power of the gatekeepers of the imperial theory industry.” It took even longer for him to grasp fully the power dynamics of knowledge production and publishing.

Rockhill’s counter-history challenges the standard narrative that “Western Marxism”[7] was a natural evolution of Marxist theory in the West. Instead, he argues, it was selectively promoted by specific institutions to create a “safe,” philosophical, and culturally focused Marxism that would not threaten the capitalist status quo.

The “pipers” in the title, of course, refers to the paymasters. Rockhill painstakingly documents how major American foundations with deep ties to the U.S. foreign policy establishment—primarily the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation and the CIA-front the Congress for Cultural Freedom established in 1950 —systematically funded academic positions, conferences, and research centers focused on Marxist theory, key journals (like Encounter magazine in English, or Der Monat in German) and other anticommunist publishing ventures, as well as individual intellectuals, often by providing fellowships, grants, and prestigious platforms.

This financial support, he argues, was not benign, disinterested philanthropy but a subtle form of control. The primary goal of all this funding, according to Rockhill, was to divorce Marxism from revolutionary praxis, to shift its focus from political economy, class struggle, and organized revolution to abstruse philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural criticism. It also aimed to promote a “Critique-Without-Alternatives” and to foster a Marxism that was hyper-critical yet politically impotent, focused on alienation and culture rather than building revolutionary parties or challenging capitalist state power. Finally, its goal was to wage the Cold War on the intellectual front and create a “respectable” leftist counterweight hostile to actually existing socialism (the USSR, China, the Eastern European states, etc.) that was fundamentally aligned with Western liberal democracy in its anticommunism and anti-Sovietism and that was “compatible” with capitalism. This all served to split the global left.

What, then, is Western Marxism? In Rockhill’s own words,

Western Marxism is the specific form of Marxism that has arisen in the imperial core and been spread around the world through cultural imperialism. The history of capitalism has developed the core countries of Western Europe, the United States, etc., by underdeveloping the rest of the world. The former have seized or secured at a pittance natural resources and labor from the latter, while using the periphery as a market for its goods, creating an international flow of value from the global South to the global North. This has led to the constitution of what Engels and Lenin called a labor aristocracy in the core countries, meaning an upper crust of the global working class whose conditions outstrip those of the workers in the periphery. This top layer of workers profit—directly or indirectly—off the value flow just mentioned. Such a global stratification of the working class has meant that the more privileged workers in the core have a material interest in maintaining the imperial world order.[8]

Rockhill argues that the institutional machinery created in the Cold War  such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom actively constructed a canon of “Western Marxism.” It decided which thinkers were to be celebrated, translated, and discussed, while marginalizing others—particularly those from the Global South or from revolutionary traditions outside Europe such as anti-colonial Marxism. The narrative of a “humanist,” “philosophical” Western Marxism versus a “dogmatic,” “degenerate” Soviet Marxism was, in his view, a Cold War propaganda tool.

The ultimate consequence, Rockhill contends, is that the dominant Marxist tradition inherited in Western academia is one that is de-politicized. It is a tradition born from and shaped by the very capitalist powers it claimed to critique, making it ill-suited for building a concrete revolutionary alternative.

How the Book is Organized

The book is divided into three main parts. Part I “Imperial Knowledge” is devoted to outlining the Marxist method he uses for the project as a whole, namely dialectical and historical materialism. It also surveys the “imperial intellectual apparatus”:  that is, the institutions that waged the battle for hearts and minds. For example, the British Information Research Department (IRD) served as a model for many American Cold War institutions.   The vast funds of the Marshall Plan (1948-52), supposed to stimulate the revival of the Western European economy, were often diverted by the US into clandestine political and psychological warfare activities. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the leading American intelligence agency in the war against the Axis morphed into the CIA in 1947 whose main antagonist was communism and the Soviet Union, with many OSS top personnel moving directly into the CIA.

The centerpiece of the CIA’s cultural Cold War was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF was run by an undercover CIA operative Michael Josselson based in Paris.[9] The CIA’s investment in the CCF was tens of millions of dollars. The CIA did not have to account for its spending to any legislator on Capitol Hill.

At its peak the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism toward a view more accommodating of “the American way.” The CCF’s honorary presidents included big names such as Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Theodor Heuss, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Bertrand Russell, and Leopold Senghor. Saunders claims that its reach was so broad that wittingly or unwittingly almost every intellectual, writer and cultural producer in postwar Western Europe was somehow caught up in its web.[10]

The “Imperial Theory Industry” is one of the most important chapters, where Rockhill posits a “theory industry,” just as there is a “music” industry and a “movie” industry. He claims “the theory industry’s radical fringe” is linked to the imperatives of militarism and imperialism, although the primary form that it takes is an intellectual war on communism, meaning a theoretical battle waged against the greatest impediment to imperialism.[11]

Part II “Compatible Critical Theory” concentrates on the Frankfurt School, which served as a major part of “the theory industry’s radical fringe.” The Frankfurt School, founded in 1923, officially named the Institute for Social Research, was a group of German scholars such as Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse who had been working in the Marxist tradition but who were anti-Bolshevik. Rockhill states “Far from being Marxist revolutionaries, as we shall see, they opportunistically integrated themselves into the bourgeois order and curried favor with powerful elements in the capitalist class and leading imperialist states.”  Fleeing Hitler, they moved from Germany in 1933 to the US where many of them worked for the US government and its intelligence (e.g., the Office of Strategic Services) and propaganda agencies, government service that helped some of them move into elite US academic positions after the war.  In 1949-50 the Frankfurt School moved back to West Germany where they worked contentedly under the conservative, anti-Communist regime of Konrad Adenauer which paid little heed to any promises made in 1945 to de-Nazify West Germany.

The chapter that will perhaps interest US readers the most centers on Herbert Marcuse, the best known Frankfurt School intellectual who became a symbol of the New Left, and famously a mentor of Angela Davis. Rockhill calls him “The Radical Piper of Western Marxism.”  In an interview with Michael Yates of Monthly Review, Rockhill states:

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised myself when I first started to piece together the study that became, over the years, the last chapter of the book. By reading some excellent scholarship in German, working through Marcuse’s long FBI file, consulting State Department and CIA records, and doing research at the Rockefeller Archive Center, it became crystal clear to me that Marcuse was being disingenuous in the interviews where he was asked about his work for the US state. He actually did regularly collaborate with the CIA, and Tim Müller revealed that he was involved in the drafting of at least two National Security Estimates (the highest level of intelligence of the US government). His collaborations with the US national security state did not at all end when he secured a university position, and he continued to have close ties to current or former state operatives until the end of his life. He was also the leading intellectual in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Marxism-Leninism Project, where he worked hand in glove with his close friend, Philip Mosely, who was a high-level, long-term CIA advisor. This extremely well-funded, transatlantic project had the explicit mission of internationally promoting Western Marxism over and against Marxism-Leninism. [12]

In his Part III “Conclusion: Imperial vs. Anti Imperialist Marxism, or the Scourge of Western Marxism,” Rockhill argues that the Western Marxists have significantly contributed to promoting a version of Marxism that is not at all incompatible with capitalism and imperialism.

Rockhill relies for documentation of his theoretical analysis on the substantial literature now available covering much the same ground as the Saunders book,[13] as well on what must have been years of his own exhaustive archival research. Seldom has this reviewer complimented an author on his footnotes, but the many footnotes amply support his theses and are an excellent guide to further reading.

A fascinating 56-page Appendix contains such gems as a facsimile of a May 16, 1952 memorandum of the Psychological Strategy Board. Established in 1951, its job was to coordinate the psychological warfare operations of the CIA, the State Department, military services and other government agencies. The memo is called “Ideological Warfare.” It calls for “attacks on Communist ideology developed in Marxist terms,” and an “attack on the Stalinist deterioration of Marx, again in Marxian terms, but on the assumption that the basic premises are correct” and “a defense of Western society in Marxist terms.”  Rockhill points out this is precisely what Western Marxism (i.e, anticommunist Marxism) and the Frankfurt School did.

Gabriel Rockhill is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He earned PhDs at Paris 8 University and Emory University. An accomplished scholar, he has published works for many outlets, both in the United States and in France. He is the editor of the English edition of Domenico Losurdo’s book Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, also published by Monthly Review Press.

Conclusion

This book is generally written in clear, compelling prose, but if there is one minor shortcoming, it is that the author in a few places lapses into academic speak. The shortcoming, however, is overshadowed by the immense political contribution of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?  This work enriches the Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism by bringing to light much new material on exactly how US imperialism waged ideological and psychological war against the communist left and the socialist countries in the years of the Cold War, 1945-91. Imperialism largely won the Cold War. But there are already new Cold Wars, and authentic partisans of socialism must master the bitter lessons of the last Cold War to ensure, next time, that imperialism is thwarted and a different and better outcome results. Professor Rockhill’s work is an enormous contribution to that end.

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Endnotes: 

[1] It is the first volume of a trilogy.  Forthcoming volumes will be Volume II French Theory Made in the USA and Volume III Radical Theory’s Infantile Disorder.

[2] Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. (London:  Granta Publications, 1999, 509 pages) When the American edition of Saunders’s book came out, the bitterly hostile reviewer at the  NY Times apparently found the British title offensive. He wrote: “the C.I.A. connection is not a new tale; it was first told in 1967 and later embellished in many books and articles. Now, Frances Stonor Saunders, a young British writer and filmmaker, serves up the story again. Wisely, her American publisher has dropped the British title, above, in favor of the more neutral ”Cultural Cold War.” NYT April 23, 2000.

[3] Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (WPPWM?) p. 151.

[4] Ibid. p. 39

[5]  Ibid. p. 47. “Some books take a decade to write. This one took three [decades]”

[6] WPPWM? p. 49

[7]  Major figures of Western Marxism were: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Zizek, Margaret Mead, and many others.

[8] “An Insider Critique of the Imperial Theory Industry: Gabriel Rockhill Interviewed by Michael Yates,” MRonline. November 25, 2025

[9] WPPWM? p. 118.

[10] Ibid. p. 121.

[11] Ibid. p. 147.
[12]“An Insider Critique of the Imperial Theory Industry: Gabriel Rockhill Interviewed by Michael Yates,” MRonline November 21, 2025.

[13] For example, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, 2008; Tim Müller’s Krieger und Gelehrte [Warriors and Scholars]  2011.