Reconstructing the Lost Context of Marxism: A Critique of Gabriel Rockhill
Haz Al-Din
Abstract
This article critiques Gabriel Rockhill’s account of Western Marxism as primarily the product of CIA influence and institutional co-optation. While acknowledging the reality of ideological management within bourgeois academia, it argues that Rockhill’s framework substitutes exposure for construction and negation for praxis, offering no substantive account of how revolutionary theory can be rebuilt under contemporary Western conditions. The article contends that the crisis of Western Marxism cannot be reduced to funding streams or French theory, but must be understood in relation to the historical expansion of the division of mental labor and the resulting fragmentation of worldview. Drawing on Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, it argues that revolutionary breakthroughs historically required reconstructing the lost conceptual context of Marxism through engagement with philosophy and ontology. Dismissing such engagement, including with figures like Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Žižek, reflects a philistinism incapable of grasping social totality. Revolutionary theory, the article concludes, cannot survive by repetition or institutional critique alone. It must consciously reconstruct the integral worldview fractured by modern specialization, thereby restoring communism as a living, world-historical project.
Keywords
Western Marxism, division of labor, revolutionary theory, alienation, Lenin, Mao Zedong, ontology, praxis, Haz Al-Din
