On this week’s release of “On the Barricades,” host Maria Cernat speaks to the French-American writer, cultural critic, and activist, Gabriel Rockhill. Gabriel completed his graduate studies under the direction of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou, and is now a professor of philosophy at Villanova University. Gabriel’s work in academia led him to a very close understanding of the bourgeois cultural and intellectual apparatus for its fundamental, historical role of bringing leftist thinking in line with the interests of the corporate elites and capitalist order. He wrote an article called “The CIA and the Frankfurt school’s anti-communism,” the content of which is the starting point inspiration for today’s discussion.
In this episode Maria and Gabriel piece together a view of this bourgeois cultural apparatus and how it operates, touching on the historical role of the CIA in relation to the major arts and cultural institutions, as well as the main theoretical foundations for contemporary academic discourses– the Frankfurt school in Germany and the French school. These were funded by, under direct collaboration with, the US government. Gabriel outlines how this system of knowledge production serves to divide and conquer the left, rendering a “critical school” that’s devoid of systemic critique of imperialism. It promotes “anything but socialism”, that is, it refuses to promote an alternative to the problems of the capitalist system. The careers of the Frankfurt school philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in particular Horkheimer’s pro-Vietnam war position (which is comparable to Slavoj Žižek’s pro-Ukraine war leaning), illustrate this propagandistic function.
While being fundamentally a tool of US imperialism and capitalist international social relations, the “critical theory” school that arose from the traditions of the French and German (Frankfurt) schools of philosophical thought have provided some potentially useful, although strictly limited, critique of capitalism. At core they have served to generate a capitalist-compatible left and discredit a communist left. But that doesn’t mean we can arrogantly brush the ideas aside. In fact they can be analyzed to expose the forces involved in the war of ideas taking place in society, which we see especially in the US and West.
On this week’s release of “On the Barricades,” host Maria Cernat discusses this topic with the French-American writer, cultural critic, and activist Gabriel Rockhill. In this episode they continue with the question of evaluating critical theory for its contribution and non-contribution to the wider historical social struggle for liberation and genuine Marxist tradition around the world. They discuss a deep history of social chauvinism in Western so-called Marxism, which tends to place greater value on revolutionary ideas developed in Europe and abandon the defence of socialist revolution as soon as it materializes elsewhere. One famously-debated trend in the postmodern modality of thinking is “identity politics,” a counter-revolutionary political project pitted against the Marxist tradition, and which has links to the neoliberal assault on the socialist movement as developed from the 1970s on. Gabriel explains how this reduction of politics to identitarian issues and culturalism works.
Gabriel completed his graduate studies under the direction of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou, and is now a professor of philosophy at Villanova University. He founded the Critical Theory Workshop. His background and current study led him to such revelations on, and critique of, the bourgeois cultural and intellectual apparatus.
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