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There has been a flood of posts attacking Gabriel Rockhill's book, "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism." Most of the critics admit to not having read the book, and where no such admission is made, the criticisms often indicate that the writer could not have read the book. Yet, they offer often vicious, ugly, and unhinged comments. No doubt one thing that bothers them is that the book is doing so well and has received a great many positive responses and reviews. Here is one of the best reviews. (Note: I served as primary editor for the book).
In Defence Of Gabriel Rockhill’s "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism": Anti-Imperialist Marxism Versus The Imperial Theory Industry
Bisharat Abbasi
I. Rockhill’s crime: applying historical materialism to Western Marxism itself
Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism represents a qualitative rupture within contemporary Marxist debate, not because it invents a new doctrine, but because it commits what is, for the imperialist-compatible left, the ultimate theoretical sin: it applies historical materialism to the producers of Western Marxist theory (imperial theory industry), to their institutions, their funding streams, their circuits of prestige, and their geopolitical embeddedness within imperial power. Western Marxism and Trotskyism, which have long enjoyed the privilege of presenting themselves as eternal critics standing above history, suddenly find themselves dragged into history—into class struggle, into the Cold War, into imperial strategy, into foundations, universities, journals, and cultural fronts. This is why the reaction has been so hysterical. Rockhill has not merely criticised Western Marxism; he has de-sacralised it, stripping it of its moral halo and revealing it as a historically produced ideological formation that emerged, matured, and consolidated itself within the imperial superstructure of monopoly capitalism. The fury of figures like Sebastian Budgen is therefore not accidental, nor is it merely personal: it is the reflex of a class fraction whose symbolic capital has been placed under materialist scrutiny.
What Rockhill demonstrates—systematically, archivally, and theoretically—is that Western Marxism’s defining features are not random errors or unfortunate deviations, but functional traits: its hostility to actually existing socialism, its obsession with “authoritarianism,” its evacuation of political economy in favour of culture and discourse, its moralism in place of organisation, its allergy to state power, sovereignty, and revolution. These traits rendered it not only tolerable but useful to imperialism. This is what it means to say that Western Marxism is imperialist-compatible: not that every individual theorist consciously served the CIA, but that the tradition as a whole was cultivated, rewarded, circulated, and canonised precisely because it neutralised Marxism as a revolutionary science and transformed it into a critical aesthetic, an ethical posture, or a scholastic discourse safely quarantined from power.
II. Sebastian Budgen’s outburst: panic, not critique
Sebastian Budgen’s grotesque outburst—replete with sneers, class contempt, biographical mockery, and open boasts of censorship—confirms, far more eloquently than any footnote, that Rockhill has struck a nerve. Instead of engaging the book’s arguments, archival evidence, or theoretical framework, Budgen resorts to the classic repertoire of a threatened gatekeeper: pathologisation (“paranoid style”), guilt-by-association (chemtrails, 9/11 trutherism), sneering psychologism (“midlife crisis campism”), and, most revealingly, institutional intimidation (“permanent life-ban from all HM spaces”). This is not Marxist polemic; it is ideological policing. It is the language not of theory, but of power—of someone who knows that the terrain he occupies cannot withstand open materialist examination.
Budgen’s slur is especially revealing in its open contempt for the masses. The imagery of “unwashed American basement-dwellers,” “peasant consciousness,” and “credulous forms” betrays the deeply elitist and colonial unconscious of Western Marxism. Here we see the real class character of this milieu: an academic–journalistic stratum embedded in metropolitan institutions, whose radicalism is carefully curated so as never to threaten imperial interests, and whose disdain for popular, revolutionary, or Global South Marxism is barely concealed beneath layers of irony. It confirms Rockhill’s thesis that Western Marxism functions through gatekeeping, exclusion, and the monopolisation of legitimacy, rather than through open scientific debate.
III. Why they cannot refute Rockhill (and therefore must slander him)
The reason Budgen and his circle do not refute Rockhill is simple: they cannot. To refute him, they would have to do precisely what they have been trained never to do: analyse foundations, state institutions, Cold War cultural strategies, imperial geopolitics, and the class location of intellectual labour. They would have to abandon the comfort of moral critique and descend into the dangerous terrain of political economy and state power. They would have to explain why Marxism that defends China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, or the Soviet experience is systematically marginalised, while Marxism that denounces these projects is endlessly platformed, funded, translated, and promoted. They would have to explain why “anti-authoritarian” Marxism flourishes in the imperial core while revolutionary Marxism flourishes in the Global South. In short, they would have to explain their own existence as a privileged intellectual stratum within empire.
Unable to do this, they resort to slander. Rockhill is not wrong; he is “delirious.” His evidence is not inaccurate; it is “paranoid.” His politics are not anti-imperialist; they are “neo-tankie.” This rhetorical strategy is as old as bourgeois ideology itself: when materialism threatens legitimacy, pathologise it. When critique exposes power, delegitimise the critic. What is remarkable is how openly this is now done, without even the pretence of scholarly engagement. The mask has slipped. The imperialist-compatible left no longer even tries to appear democratic or pluralistic; it simply bans, excludes, sneers, and moves on.
IV. A Global South Marxist verdict: nothing new, and everything confirmed
From a Global South Marxist perspective, none of this is surprising. For us, Western Marxism has long appeared as a strange and sterile phenomenon: endlessly critical, perpetually sophisticated, and utterly incapable of producing or defending revolution. While our peoples fought colonialism, imperialism, sanctions, coups, and underdevelopment, Western Marxists wrote essays about discourse, pessimism, and negativity, often aligning—explicitly or implicitly—with imperial narratives against socialist states. For us, Marxism was never a lifestyle or an identity; it was a weapon of survival, a theory of development, a guide to state-building, and a science of sovereignty. That Western Marxists should recoil in horror at Marxism that actually takes power, builds states, disciplines capital, and defies empire is therefore entirely logical. Their Marxism was never meant to win.
Rockhill’s intervention is thus profoundly important for the Global South, because it re-legitimises our historical experience against decades of metropolitan condescension. It names Western Marxism not as the universal standard of Marxist thought, but as a regional, historically specific, and politically compromised formation. It restores Marxism to its real protagonists: the revolutionary movements, socialist states, and anti-imperialist struggles of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the broader periphery of capitalism. From this standpoint, Budgen’s tantrum is not offensive; it is diagnostic. It reveals the fear of a tradition that knows its hegemony is cracking, that the Global South no longer seeks validation from Jacobin, Verso, or Historical Materialism, and that Marxism is once again becoming what it always was meant to be: a science of revolution, not a parlor game of critique.
V. Conclusion: the verdict of history, not journals
In the final analysis, the significance of Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism lies not in whether Gabriel Rockhill is liked, published, or invited into “HM spaces.” Those spaces, as Budgen himself admits, are policed precisely to prevent such interventions. Its significance lies in the fact that it marks a shift in the balance of theoretical forces: the re-emergence of anti-imperialist, state-oriented, Global South–aligned Marxism as a confident intellectual current that no longer seeks approval from the imperial core. The hysterical reaction of the imperialist-compatible left is the sound of a monopoly losing control.
Rockhill has not merely embarrassed Western Marxism; he has historicised it. And once historicised, it can no longer pretend to be universal, innocent, or radical. That is why the slurs are so vicious, the bans so open, and the tone so nakedly authoritarian. History, however, is not written in editorial boards or podcasts. It is written in struggles, revolutionary states, and social transformations. On that terrain, the imperialist-compatible left has nothing to show—and Rockhill, whatever they may call him, has told the truth they most feared hearing.
(More power to yo comrade Gabriel Rockhill ✊️.png✊️.png✊️.png✌️.png)