Book review?
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Anyone know anything about this guy? Perhaps his latest book might be interesting to review?
‘Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?’
by Gabriel Rockhill
Published by: Monthly Review PressFrom the blurb shown on this page it’s a worthlessly Leninist (stalinist? maoist? critique of Frankfurtism: https://nyupress.org/9781685901356/who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism
I’d take WSWS-brand anti-Frankfurtism over this kind of ‘actually existing socialism’ cheerleader garbage any day.
ZJW – You don’t have to agree with a book to review it. Your attitude doesn’t really help with starting dialogue with those who disagree with us – just sounds like sectarianism.
Gabriel Rockhill co-organises a Critical Theory Summer School in Paris each year. I’m not too sure what his politics are, you could find out through here:
https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/On a similar theme, I have this book in my reading pile: ‘The Domestication of Critical Theory’. Michael J Thompson’s other articles and books I have read have been good:
‘The Domestication of Critical Theory’ by Michael J Thompson reviewed by Neal Harris
“ZJW – You don’t have to agree with a book to review it. Your attitude doesn’t really help with starting dialogue with those who disagree with us – just sounds like sectarianism.”
Good point, but if the language of this book is anything like the language of its publisher’s blurb, then run a mile.
Rockhill’s book is a Stalinoid-campist take-down of the Frankfurt School that no one can take seriously. We do not have to agree with any writers or organisations to do a book review; on the contrary, it is much better to do a book review of opposite conceptions because we can explain our own.
His conceptions are not new; most of them have been previously covered by Raya Dunayevskaya, Kevin Anderson, Peter Hudis and Andrew Kliman from the Marxist Humanist point of view, by News and Letters, the Marxist Humanist Tendency and the International Marxist Humanist organisation, and they have written several books, articles, conferences, and book reviews. They have done a much better analysis, and they have written extensively in a critical way about the Frankfurt School
Kevin Anderson has debunked the concept of Western Marxism because they have done a profound investigation into Marx’s ethnological notebooks, which is more wider anthropological study than Engels book on the Family, pre-capitalist societies and the state, and the Asiatic despotic mode of production, which is different to European feudalism, and they have considered that Marxian theory is not a Western or Eurocentric conception, it does cover and it applies to the whole world
The idea that Marx’s conceptions are not anti-colonial or lack the knowledge of colonialism has been debunked too, after the apologists of socialism of the XXI century made allegations that Marx and Engels were not aware of “third-world” ( in the traditional sense, instead of the real definition ) colonialism when they wrote hundreds of articles about that, the problem emerged when Marx letter on Simom Bolivar calling him the Latin American Napoleon, which is not an incorrect analysis of simon bolivar, and he knew what he was saying
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