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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- Western Marxism and the War of Ideas | Gabriel Rockhill
#WesternMarxism #GabrielRockhill #RedStar
In this week's episode, Red Star collaborates with the Critical Theory Workshop to host Gabriel Rockhill. We discuss the place of China in anti-colonial history, the influence of imperialism on Western Marxism, and the dangers and opportunities for the Left in the current conjuncture.
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Fantastic conversation. I really have to agree, regarding the arrogance of Western Marxism. It was mind changing and really humbling to get into the Marxist tradition of my fatherland, Angola and related African projects. It showed how utopian and just chauvinist the Western current is, in completely disregarding almost 100s of years of Marxist praxis, because it "contaminates" the purity of their utopian conception of Marx.
It seems that successfully resisting imperialism generally requires a nuclear deterrent, or the political will to grind down the populace in the service of rapidly establishing productive forces. Both instances come with the understanding that eternal economic war from the west via sanctions is probable.
Damn I've loved the introductory educational vidoes but didnt know Red Star was so based, hell yeah lol.
I wish those leftists who have this idealized image of what socialism should be (if a socialist country doesn't comply with that image, it's not "real" socialism), applied the same rigor to capitalism, because according to their logic capitalism isn't all bad, it just needs some government supervision and tinkering. However, they don't use that same argument to defend actually existing socialism.
How about one way to judge socialism, if workers run the show?
All Anarchists are socialists but not all socialists are Anarchists.
@@AntonioGarmsci-cy5vt We can see what happens when a country takes on a socialist project without a central power to defend the revolution. Chile is a great example of what happens to a socialist movement that hasn't consolidated the powers of the state to defend itself. The Paris Communes, and the Spanish collectives are another few examples of decentralized, worker run collectives trying to liberate the workers in an imperialist world that surrounds them. Read State and Revolution by Lenin.
I call them national liberals who then at their best are national socialists, still in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie, but with new deal hopes.
Ofcourse if AES does new deal stuff, thats "just capitalism", or "fascism" now, citing the ultra left maoists.
Just say ur a useful idiot idealist- utopian liberal(all have trot/anarcho/crit theory backgrounds). Some are undoubtedly Feds, which is a hustle i can respect more (people like Fed (Chris) Cutrone/ Platypus etc).
@AntonioGarmsci-cy5vt Engels explained it well in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" Anarchism is a tactical ally at best for the real-life struggle against this fascistizing capitalism, but you need a Marxist lens (which is a systems analysis) to be an actual ideological threat to the bourgeois paradigm. The theory should constantly be updated by praxis and vice versa, which requires understanding the conditions on the ground.
That's the problem with Western Marxism, they get sucked in the theory so much that there's little to no consideration for those who are actually doing the praxis on a day-to-day basis, that's why the host and the guests called them dogmatic armchair Marxists, because they see "good" Marxism [my quotes"] as something ideal, smooth, without violence, something that can only be imagined, idealized, it's the fruit of the human mind divorced from the material world and its development.
That's what Anarchism lacks to arrive at that better world we all want deep down. It goes without saying that it would be contrary to dialectical materialism to ape the exact same things that past and present day socialist countries did to achieve and practice socialism, because those happened in a different environment with different conditions.
I just read something very interesting exactly on these lines in first as tragedy then as farce by zizek
I love that Gabriel enjoyed China. Fantastic interview
Brilliant conversation
Good show thanks
You could say the imperialist left propose a blitzkrieg approach. Compare the western fighting doctrine in Ukraine: no tactical reverses, an obsession with territory (even if there’s nothing there as in the case of Kursk), the inability to accept reality and compromise to preserve your nation and your people. Now the Russian approach: the aim is to destroy the enemy’s army even if progress seems slow. It involves attrition which requires time and draws on industrial capacity, its cautious. In the end Russia achieves its goals and destroys its enemy. The cautious approach of the Soviets under Stalin and of the Chinese under Mao and Deng and now under Xi will protect themselves as they achieve their goals.
Great talk! Highly appreciated. Thank you!❤️🤚🧠
Love 💕 sir thank you for great work of humanity and love you sir Ammar Ali jan ❤️ comard❤ thank
So hyped for this. Gabriel Rockhill is so dope
Hahahahaha
Long live Communism
Fantastic bringing Rockhill...his work has been eye-opening for me
Rockhills assertion that CPC supports Hamas is perfectly mendacious . They absolutely do not.
Hey, why lying? They f*ckin united the whole Palestinian resistance movement … with all its fractions! Are you only consuming CNN or are you just surrounded by student-radical Trotskyist or Maoist ultra-leftist left-communists? Why??
They united all the fractions of the resistance movement. Period.
No such thing. The tried to force obedience to the imperial-zionist henchmen PA, whom they also sponsor, and they failed.
No such thing. They tried to force resistance groyps obedience to the imperial zionist henchman PA, whom they also spinsor, and failed.
@@jorgi6335 no such thing, they tried to force all the resistrance groups to bey the imperial zionist henchman the PA, whom they also sponsor, and failed
Hong Kong is #1 in life expectancy, USA #47. Let that sink in. A 5.5 year spread.
Hong Kong is no longer #1. China as a whole is way below that and we can't even trust those statistics.
Stoked
Great interview! Thank you all.
I am sorry, Gabriel Rockhill you’re all talk and no Praxis
47:40 and yet you hate the ACP, why don’t you actually get involved with a party whose members you actually have supported in the past-
He's doing more than most are. It's easy to critique someone from your keyboard. Go out and organize and let others do the work they are able to do. There isn't one type of praxis that is pure. All work, either intellectual or physical, is needed to organize a effective movement.
ACP is the only ML Vanguard party in the U.S based in the Proletariat.
The rest are subcultural groups(despite their funding like the PSL) based in nyc.
Have you noticed the shit show the ACP has become. The latest fiasco around Haz has revealed deep problems with the organisation as it exists presently. This is not to defend the DSA. On the contrary. I am a supporter of MidWestern Marx and was excited by the emergence of ACP initially. It will not help the ACP to continue like it is without making changes to avoid the mistakes that have come to light. I wish any non-imperialist left organisation well.
@@simonjlkoreshoff3426 That was a coordinated recoking job possibly involving fed work.
There is no fiasco. ACP is an actual communist party. Which is why that and more attempts will be expected. You should follow what happened instead of buying into bad faith actors propaganda.(Who then had to back track and disappear for a while once Dan Cohen came out with aome truth telling).
The DSA is a social fascist petitebourgeois clique and subcultural pmc/student outfit. They are liberals and that is reflected in their class composition and priorities. Its not an antiimperialist communist outfit. Infact its an anti communist servant of the imperialist bourgeoisie (state dept) /DNC. Its fine we all have to start from somewhere, i too supproted it once bt i was also once a high school student.
@@simonjlkoreshoff3426 Haz is the reason why i see the hegemony of social fascism, of pmc- npc liberals larping radicality in the service of reaction will be broken , as it is finally in the U.S through the ACP. But its just a start although it has started in the right areas (the proletariat and the deproletarianized workers through a vangaurd party).
China is not anti-imperialist, it is anti-hegemonic. China has not problem with capitalism. China is against American capitalist-imperialist hegemony. Only for this reason , Marxist-Leninists should support it against the US hegemony.
China is not socialism with Chinese characteristics, but capitalism with Chinese characteristics. China officially describes itself as "one country, two systems". But this is not true either. A mixed economic capitalist (Keynesian) model is implemented in China. This model may evolve into monopoly state capitalism and imperialism. However, it is not possible for this real experience spontaneously evolve into socialism. The dynamic in this functioning is capitalism.
Meanwhile, Maoism is "maoist", not Marxist-Leninist. Marxism-leninism is only a reference arising from its pragmatic needs. Just like Confucianism. In my opinion, what the Maoists said yesterday and what they say today, theoretically and politically, on behalf of Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary socialism are generally revisionism and oportunism. The "thought of Mao Zedong" is a method that fits ancient Chinese pragmatism. It is a method that still works in China today, although its excesses have been trimmed down. It is not correct to compare Deng's China with the Soviet NEP. Today, China's claim to socialism is purely ideological, in the negative sense of the term.
History will be the judge.
100% disagree. According to Marx and Engels "socialism" means: 1) a Party that firstly represents the working class runs the State; 2) advanced public sector and State control of the economy.
In China both of these conditions are real! 60% of its capitalization comes from State owned enterprises, Five Year Plans, big Welfare... China is socialist by the definitions of The Manifesto!
Please explain why China executes billionaires
Read
EXPLORING THE CHINESE
SOCIAL MODEL
Beyond Market and State
WEIDONG LIU, MICHAEL DUNFORD, ZHIGAO LIU
AND ZHENSHAN YANG
So, when they talk about how shitty western Marxism is, and how elitist and purist, they meant YOU.
Thanks Camrads❤❤❤
Thanks for sharing
Yeah but he didn't see the other pathologies like age discrimination, the 996 culture, the constant white worship, the Ted talk worship, etc. I wish these guys were more honest about China.
Provide some actual evidence. You just made a bunch of claims that aren't even cogent. I don't know what point you are trying to make.
@eveningchaos1 you can look up everything I mentioned by some simple Internet searching. I can't post links here.
@@niket527 So I see that 996 work culture has been outlawed and they are working on reigning in that kind of work culture. This isn't unique to China. Lots of workers in my native Canada work those kinds of hours to make ends meet, and some are still homeless.
White Worship isn't really a thing that's unique to China either, and it's not really about "whiteness" as there is a huge amount of Black pop culture in the West, too. Culture's around the world look to the imperial core for entertainment and media as the imperial core has all the resources to produce tons of pop culture garbage. I live in Canada, and we also look to the US for most of our entertainment and culture.
I couldn't find anything about Ted Talk worship in China, or anywhere for that matter. Not sure where you mined that idea from.
I don't think Rockhill or the rest of the panel discussed these ideas as they are tangential at best, and more suited for a discussion about the influence of pop culture from the West in the periphery. Something that countless TH-camrs talk about. It seems like you were trying to dangle a red herring to try to criticize the discussion without actually addressing the ideas presented within it. Just bringing up what was left out by citing some obscure and irrelevant topics isn't really a good critique, but that's my opinion. YMMV.
@eveningchaos1 yeah I mean the word outlawed is really doing some heavy lifting there. I personally know people who work 996.
Also look into a video called Would Chinese Date Foreigners by the channel Mandarin Corner and you'll see people straight up say bigoted stuff.
As for age discrimination, look into leftover women and the curse of 35. Also look at university admission requirements and scholarships for Chinese universities and you'll see that there are hard age limits for who can apply and be admitted. For example, you have to be under 25 to do an undergrad degree, which leaves out so many people who may have had to work instead of go to school.
As for the Ted talk stuff, that's from my observation that in China the trends are some years behind those of the West, so while we shake our heads at pretentious Ted talks, they think they are these super sophisticated things worthy of respect. I mean now they are taking that mtbi personality test pseudo science seriously.
@eveningchaos1 yeah I mean the word outlawed is really doing some heavy lifting there. I personally know people who work 996.
Also look into a video called Would Chinese Date Foreigners by the channel Mandarin Corner and you'll see people straight up say bigoted stuff.
As for age discrimination, look into leftover women and the curse of 35. Also look at university admission requirements and scholarships for Chinese universities and you'll see that there are hard age limits for who can apply and be admitted. For example, you have to be under 25 to do an undergrad degree, which leaves out so many people who may have had to work instead of go to school.
As for the Ted talk stuff, that's from my observation that in China the trends are some years behind those of the West, so while we shake our heads at pretentious Ted talks, they think they are these super sophisticated things worthy of respect. I mean now they are taking that mtbi personality test pseudo science seriously.
On most occasions Rockhill claims the comunist leadership of China in the Mao era plunged almost the entire population of China into 'extreme poverty' from which he claims, citing the ruling class' World Bank, that Deng's forced mass sterilization, abolition of the iron rice bowl and reexpropriation of all the people's property rescued most. Here he contradicts himself and admits that _communist_ revolution achieved enormous improvement in material life for everyone in China (as well as liberty from overlords required for human dignity, which he doesn't mention being of the belief following Losurdo and Deng and Milton Freidman etc that the masses need exploiter-masters to 'incentivise' them otherwise they're too lazy to go down into the mines or spend 14 hr days in the sweatshop for the greater good of fast trains and a razed Gaza watetfront and a class of staggeringly rich slaveowning worldowning overlords of diverse ethnicities and personalites)
6:59
if i eliminate everyone from the cities who wear hats, do you get to proudly announce your entire country is hat free? 😂
“ohhhhh i never saw any hats in the cities i visited!” - says everyone who didnt see the hats
“Marxism is a Capitalist scheme”……. Fredrick Hayek
Quite a salmagundi of postures. Refledcting the Zizekian "training" he claims to have had. At 56 mins Rocmhill says the genocide in Gaza is the consequence of the rise of China and CPC's increasdd power in Palestine and the world, but doesnt explain why he continues to insist Gazans should welcome their annihilation and even abet their sacrifice for this great cause of Huawei etc..
Because he did not say that or even imply it.
That's something happening in your head.
Meh! You three area all defending the same Dengist position and even daring to blame the criticism as some sort of ivory tower academicism, when you are all ivory tower academics (I'm not, I'm a grassroots activist of many decades without any PhD or similar). It's ridiculous: have some serious debate!
I’m am in agreement with you. I am from an area where many of us could not afford to go to the university he teaches at this whole thing falls flat for me because I am interested in organizing on the ground,getting food in the stomach’s of those who are struggling, and clothes on their bodies not cheerleading for a rival capitalist block and then calling it anti-imperialiism. To me they are mistaking inter-imperialism for anti-imperialism. Regardless of what they say I still wonder if these people think that only they are the sole arbiters of truth and that the rest of us somehow didn’t study this -it has the air of talking down to us on high as opposed to talking to us. Some of the things mentioned here like the clean air were improved under capitalism as well under the clean air acts of the 1970’s especially when we talk about cities like New York so that to me is unconvincing. This “lifting out of poverty” talk if based on the world bank metric is like $6.85 a day. It may be a marginal improvement but hardly a resounding success and questionable given how the world bank likes to rig data. Have you read N.B. Turners book “Is china imperialist” thoughts and considerations?
@@RedHoosier - I'd say it's complicated, especially now that they have begun to re-collectivize some strategical industries (although that's something capitalists also do it has reduced the fraction of capitalist economy significantly). On one side they look very much like Bismarck's Germany 140 years ago (Bismarckian planned capitalism was also copied by Japan, among others, with great success), including his silk-glove international imperialist policy. They behave very much as opportunist imperialists in many regions (and IMO the case of Morocco is one of the most outstanding ones but there are others like inviting Uganda, a US-dependent subimperialist actor, to BRICS, or the SCS conflict, where China is clearly imperialist). I'd say that they are even imperialist against the less developed parts of China itself (internal colonialism). On the other side sometimes they serve as balance or show socialist tendencies like when developing renewable energies or when favoring open source over proprietary intellectual property. Is somewhat of a mix bag and I would like a honest debate on the matter, yet this was not honest nor debate even.
Red China exists today and socialist Chile doesn't. Why do you think that is? You can critique existing socialist societies, but keep in mind that they are trying to construct a socialist transitional program in a world of capitalist imperialism. Grass roots will get you started, but without a central power to defend the revolution, the imperialists will use whatever means necessary to bring the powers of reaction to bear on the socialist project.
You guys should read the Communist Manifesto, first.
Then realize why China is not capitalist just because the commodity hasnt been abolished or because relations of production havent been transformed completely.
@@danyalghaznavi6818 - We all have read the Communist Manifesto several times and it's pretty much irrelevant in this discussion (else please point me to the relevant paragraphs so I can know WTF you're talking about). What is relevant is that Communism or Revolutionary Socialism is done by collectivizing, by expropriating the plutocrats (the bourgeoisie, the rich), and not by expropriating collective, social, proletarian property in benefit of a handful of parasites.
The latter is called Capitalism.
If in your view the ruling party of China, not the people of Palestine, is 'the core of the antiimperial struggle today,' then we can all draw our conclusions about your objectives, your real class allegiances and your contempt for humanity.
For you, the people of Palestine are the ‘perfect victims’-those you can pity, shout about in front of an angry crowd, and chant slogans like ‘This is wrong! Enough is enough! Down with imperialism, hey hey! Down with imperialism, ho ho!’ before patting yourself on the back, satisfied that you’ve done your duty ‘for humanity’ for the day.
But if you _truly_ support the Palestinian people, that support must extend to _actual_ anti-hegemonic forces in our existing imperialist world system. If the Palestinians ever had the chance to develop real, significant power-enough to threaten the dominance of imperialist proxies and puppets in the region-I strongly suspect that, like so many other ‘Western Marxists,’ you would condemn them. You would likely brand them an ‘authoritarian regime,’ an ‘anti-human theocracy,’ or some other pejorative label fed to us by our oh-so-free press.
On the contrary Palestinians are in the sights of tbe empire because the transnat overlords including in China believe they and the resistance allies (hezbollah, ansarullah in yemen, their Syrian state support the global rc just annihilated) pose/d the last obstacles to total reconquest and renslavement of that region. China is also putting the screws on Venezuela and Cuba in partnershop with the US, the last obstacmes to reenslavemdnt if that region. Their aim as they are frank about is 'win-win' partnership with fascist regimes worldover, e.g. the US Israel India KSA etc etc.
@@jorgi6335 on the contrary, Palestinian people and resistance are the in sights of empire because the transnat ruling class including those domiciled in China deem them the last obstacles, along with their resisstance allies Hezbollah and the Syrian admin and state they just annihilated, to total reconquest and reenslavement of the region, China is also partnered with the US putting the screws on Venezuela and CUba, deemed the last obstacles to reconquest of that region,.
@@mollyklein6355 Nope. Everything you said was wrong.