I was honored to be featured on Jules Taylor’s podcast “No Easy Answers.” Click here to listen. We had a wide-ranging conversation about fascism and anti-communism, and we also discussed my research into the US National Security State and the promotion of French philosophy within the global theory industry.
My most recent article, which is part of a larger book project, is now available here on Liberation School. It is entitled “Fascist Plots in the US: Contemporary Lessons from the 1934 ‘Business Plot.'” A special thanks to all of the comrades who provided insightful feedback on it prior to publication!
Excerpt: “A major segment of the capitalist class thus conspired to use its financial resources, network of elite operators, and control of the media to hire a charismatic leader, raise and arm a fascist militia of poor veterans, overthrow the elected government, and establish a fascist dictatorship in order to roll back the New Deal and thereby increase their profits. If they had succeeded in doing so, it is arguable that the history of the twentieth century would have been remarkably different” […read more].
In collaboration with Liberation School, I was thrilled to be able to interview the Director of the People’s Forum, Claudia De La Cruz, about the role of culture in popular education, movement building and revolutionary struggle. Click here to read or watch.
It was a pleasure to be featured on Ron Placone’s “Get Your News on with Ron.” We discussed fascism, anti-communism in the media and academia, labor struggles, organizing, general strikes, and the ultimate systemic disease: capitalism.
“Foucault, Anti-Communism & the Global Theory Industry” was just published in “The Philosophical Salon” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It is a reply to critics regarding my earlier article, on the same platform, entitled “Foucault: The Faux Radical.”
Excerpt: “The widespread promotion of identity politics and French theory within the dominant apparatus of knowledge under global capitalism should serve as a clear indication to anyone who’s paying even scant attention that they are not a threat to the system. On the contrary, they are some of the primary intellectual forces driving what I’ve referred to as radical recuperation. By this I mean the tactic of producing the appearance of radicality—including symbolic systems of signification that are so inordinately intricate that many have trouble seeing how unmoored they are from actual socioeconomic struggles—in order to better recuperate insurgent forces within the extant system. ‘All symbol, no substance’ is their mantra, and they have made an enormous contribution to the intellectual world war against the very idea of communism.”
Chris Hedges me entrevistó para su programa de televisión “On Contact,” y la transcripción ha sido traducida al español: “La clase capitalista estadounidense financió el ascenso del fascismo.”
Me siento honrado de que uno de mis artículos recientes, “El poli bueno y el poli malo del capitalismo,” se haya traducido al español para Rebelión. Haga clic aquí para leerlo. Extracto: “El análisis materialista demuestra que liberalismo y fascismo, al contrario de lo que mantiene la ideología dominante, no son opuestos; son socios dentro del sistema capitalista criminal.” Haga clic aquí para leer más.
Here is my opening lecture from the Critical Theory Workshop‘s online summer program 2020. Click here for the call for applications for the 2021 summer program, which will take place online and–hopefully–in person.
Me siento muy honrado de que uno de mis artículos recientes sobre el fascismo se haya traducido al español para Rebelión. Haga clic aquí para leerlo. Extracto: “El concepto burgués de fascismo pretende singularizarlo como un fenómeno idiosincrático, en gran parte o completamente superestructural, con el fin de imposibilitar cualquier examen de su ubicua presencia en la historia del orden capitalista mundial. Por el contrario, el enfoque materialista histórico propone un análisis a múltiples escalas de la totalidad social con el fin de demostrar que es más adecuado entender la coyuntura específica del fascismo europeo de entreguerras como un fenómeno enmarcado dentro de una fase estructural de la guerra de clases capitalista y, en último término, de la historia sistémica del capital, que vino al mundo –en palabras usadas por Karl Marx para describir la acumulación primitiva– “exudando sangre y mugre por todos los poros, de la cabeza a los pies”.” Haga clic aquí para leer más.
I was very honored and pleased to participate in this dialogue with Diana Wechsler and Leandro Martínez Depietri for BIENALSUR 2021. One of the central points of discussion is the role of culture in class struggle. Drawing on the work I’ve been doing with Jennifer Ponce de León for our current book project, I distinguished between the aesthetics of power–meaning the diverse ways in which the power elite creates an image of itself, and how this image serves its class interests–and the power of aesthetics to both diagnose the various uses of culture as a weapon for the ruling class and channel an alternative world of sense making. All Power to the Creative Labor Power of the People!
GABRIEL ROCKHILL 