Review of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? by Gabriel Rockhill (Monthly Review Press, 2025)
“All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again — the sh-t about the ‘class line,’ the ‘role of the working class,’ the ‘trained cadres,’ the ‘vanguard party,’ and the ‘proletarian dictatorship.’ It is all back again, and in a more vulgarized form than ever.” So declared the anarcho-ecologist Murray Bookchin in his 1969 pamphlet, Listen, Marxist!
Sixty plus years later, do these words ring true again? Some of the phrases remain on the margins. Yet something that spooked Bookchin is afoot in our troubled land: a return of Marxist-Leninist slogans and the eclipse of a New Left esprit. A sign of the times: A new book from a socialist publisher, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, exemplifies and ratifies this revival.
Its author, Gabriel Rockhill, draws a sharp contrast between the supposed virtues of Soviet-inspired Marxism and the supposed failings of the New Left’s leading intellectuals, notably those associated with the Frankfurt School. But he fails to deliver a fair criticism of his subjects. Rather, he resorts to innuendo and guilt by association in a bid to demolish their reputations. He might be viewed as a Marxist-Leninist in the school of Donald Trump: use any means to defame your foe.
The New Left emerged in the late 1950s as the outcome of political events and generational shifts. As the baby boomers became teenagers, civil rights and antinuclear movements roiled the national political scene. These movements took place amid a fraught global situation, with the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of his predecessor in 1956, and uprisings in the Soviet sphere from Berlin to Budapest.
The phrase ‘Western Marxism’ first emerged in the 1920s as an insult used by Soviet spokesmen.
The workers revolted against the avowed workers’ states, only to be suppressed by Soviet troops. For…
Auteur: Russell Jacoby
