Fakhry Al Serdawi: Why Anti-Fascists Hate Chris Cutrone and Anti-Communists Hate Gabriel Rockhill

By Fakhry Al-Serdawi; (He is currently in the Caspian steppes of Central Asia, engaging in Soviet Hujum against Q-pop “Qazaq-pop” bands)

More than a year after the start of the Ukraine War, Chris Cutrone told Douglas Lain that the Democratic Party-led West had built a totalitarian system that Soviet Leaders could have only dreamt of. Gabriel Rockhill, on the other hand, in his book Counter History of the Present, questioned the double standard of claiming that the historical experience of communism led to totalitarianism, while refusing to apply the same standard to bourgeois democracy.

Anti-totalitarian theory has been around for the last ninety years, eulogizing the death of the social revolution in Europe and Eurasia, with a focus on Nazism in Germany and Communism in Russia. But because there have never been totalitarian regimes in the Anglo-American world, American and British state capitalism has been, not fully, but substantially exempted from critique. As in the words of Russell Jacoby during his Jacobin Magazine critique of Gabriel Rockhill;

“The Europeans mulled over the differences between the industrialized West with a large working class and an agrarian Russia with a much smaller working class and a vast peasantry. The West needed, they believed, not vanguard parties but vanguard intellectuals. The issue in the West was less how to subvert the state than how to subvert a bourgeois culture that had seduced its populations”.

While the Frankfurt School tried to balance between criticizing Western culture, Soviet Stalinism, and Anglo-American institutions, the New Left adopted the overwhelming critique of (racist and sexist) culture at home and Cold War Liberals attacked Stalinist institutions abroad. The result was a timid critique of the Anglo-American capitalist state, or worse, a glorification of it (with the Frankfurt School’s refuge in America serving as a feel-good story), under the pretext of living not only under the better, but the only and the last remaining liberal institutions within which the Left can be organized.

But what makes Anglo-American institutions better is not the fact that they are immune to despotism -any claim of such is metaphysical- what makes them better is that their decay is slower. The New Left and Cold War Liberals did not realize during the 1950s and the 1960s that they were living through a two-century decay cycle, slower than the 10-year cycle between the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power, and the other 10-year cycle between the October Revolution and Stalin’s seizure of power.

The Allies’ war against the oppressor of the Frankfurt School, the Nazis, was necessary, but it has accelerated Anglo-American institutional decay through the Cold War. The Civil Rights Movement was necessary, but it has created the mirage of Anglo-American gradual institutional improvement. In 1979, Cold War Liberals and New Leftists fused in the Carter administration. Ten years later, Anglo-American exceptionalism was solidified; not only did the Frankfurt School choose America over the Soviet Union, but the whole world in 1989 chose America over the Soviet Union, and those who thought that Soviet institutions were worth saving, even traditional Trotskyists, were sidelined.

Decades later, came the most significant disruptor of this paradigm, which was not corrupt Billionaire Donald Trump, but Trumpism; the American populist vote that made an expression of opposition towards the contradictions of Anglo-American institutions. As a result, the United States went into cultural mass hysteria between 2016 and 2023, in which the theory of anti-totalitarianism within Anglo-American institutions reached its logical conclusion: an internal crisis between New leftists and Cold Warriors for the first time since the Carter-era synthesis in 1979.

Cold Warriors would claim to be fighting communism in the guise of the Democratic Party and the European Union (where banal DSA libertine types and toothless members of the European Parliament became overhyped by the Right as some sort of Soviet Kommissars). An example of this is Jacob Siegel, who claimed to fight the New One-Party State during Biden’s presidency, while excusing the same American State power during Trump’s second term because of his support for Israel’s blitzkrieg behavior in the Middle East. New Leftists, on the other hand, would redesignate attack on culture as a struggle against fascism to the extent of the 1619 Project which served to claim that suddenly there was nothing that could be saved in Anglo-American institutions (or at least in American institutions against the British Empire), and that the American project was criminal from its beginnings, just like the New Left concluded about the crimes of the Chinese and Soviet projects in 1968.

In these times, intellectuals like Chris Cutrone questioned the New Leftist attack on culture by asking Why Not Trump? While Gabriel Rockhill provided a body of work that eventually asks; Why not the Soviet Union? (Which is nothing like the Democratic Party left). The methodologies of Cutrone and Rockhill were different; the first was forced by the descendants of the New Left to work on reclaiming the Frankfurt School, and the second was forced by Cold War liberals to work on getting rid of the Frankfurt School.

Yet Cutrone continued to idolize Trump even in 2026, not being aware that the 10-cycle for the decay of the Trumpian electoral revolution had already been concluded. While Rockhill continued to demonize the Frankfurt school to the extent of falsely connecting them to fascism, in his new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? As a result, either Trump is completely innocent, or Western Marxism is completely guilty; either Cutrone thinks that the deep state is out there to get Trump (even after it actually took hold of him and domesticated him), or Rockhill thinks that the Frankfurt School part of the deep state and out there with the CIA to get “true socialists”.

Our comrade in this Substack, Tibor Szamuely, attacked Cutrone’s question Why Not Trump? By the claim that he “could just as well have asked why not Clinton”. This brings us back to the infamous Noam Chomsky and John Halle article about the lesser of two evils voting in 2016, a quest to bring everyone back to the party line of the New Left’s attack on Culture. This reifies the disenchantment with Trump’s second term into something that delegitimizes the popular oppositional expression of the 2016 vote against Hilary Clinton.

The important question is not Why Not Trump? But: why should Trump go? Which leads us to the question: Why should Saddam Hussein go? Which leads us to the question: Why should the Soviet Union go? Which leads us to Gabriel Rockhill once again. It is no surprise that Russel Jacoby says that Rockhill must be: “viewed as a Marxist-Leninist in the School of Donald Trump”, this is a Freudian compulsory attachment to the Lesser of two evils paradigm.

Even if the accusations against Cutrone and Rockhill were true, even if the Platypus Affiliated Society is a cult, even if Stalinist researchers are Orwellian falsifiers, it is obvious here that the critics of those two Leninists practice a certain kind of self-vindication as the solicitors of the Lesser Evil. Matt McManus, in his critique of Rockhill in Damage Magazine, not only points out that Rockhill’s work is full of fallacies, but he also wants to tell you that Rockhill is the very Stalinist threat to the West that the Frankfurt School was talking about. This is very hand-holdy, in a context where we are no longer in the 1930s, bewildered by the power of international communist parties asking for allegiance to the supreme leader, and any individual can search on the internet what Rockhill gets right or wrong; (this is the same hand-holdi-ness that takes place when lefties think they are saving the Global South when they declare Platypus as a “Zionist” organization).

This helicopter-parent impulse is motivated by the defects of fetishized anti-totalitarianism in the West, with Cold Warriors alarmingly acting as if totalitarianism is the emergence of this all-arching history-eating absolute evil, a historical moment where middle-class intellectuals fleeing oppression in central and eastern Europe become considered as the most beautiful and pure category of the oppressed, which has created a moralistic litmus test in Western Marxism, similar to the victims of colonialism paradigm within the anti-imperialist left. William Pietz described how the anti-communist intellectual perceives his own intelligence when faced with the task of defeating this absolute evil:

“By recognizing the truth of totalitarianism and embracing an enlightened anti-communism, the intellectual arrived at the end of ideology as such, thereby perfecting his or her vocation as an intellectual, that is, as a critic of the ideological corruption of the intellect. Thus, the essence of being an intellectual was actualized in the theory of totalitarianism, and the praxis of the cold war struggle against socialism”.

This narcissistic self-image of the anti-totalitarian intellectual, especially when reproduced under the capitalist conditions of the Anglo-American society of the spectacle, where the Frankfurt school fled and took refuge, the New Left was established, and anti-communist intellectuals invented the practice of campism, while accusing everybody of campism, all this might have actually led to the “corruption of the intellect”, where it is easy to attack someone asking Why Not Trump? of supporting death worship, and it is easy to attack someone asking Why not the Soviet Union? of supporting death in Soviet Camps.

Jacobin Magazine, in an earlier criticism against Rockhill, claimed that “Western Marxism is not a Monolith”, but the fact is, all factions of Western Marxism are unified by their participation in the Olympics of anti-totalitarianism, including Rockhill himself. But Russel Jacoby attacks Rockhill’s definition of totalitarianism because he equates fascist capitalism with bourgeois democracy and puts both under the same enemy category. This critique is facile for two reasons: first, the connection between bourgeois democracy and fascism is not a polemic; Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, key figures of the Frankfurt School, elegantly showcased the judicial history of the transition from parliamentary democratic legalism to national socialist legalism. Second, Cold War anti-totalitarian theory itself did not distinguish between fascism and communism, and this has already been debunked by the fact that Nazim went away only with the destruction of Europe, while Communism has given its own civil society the tools to overcome it peacefully, leaving this world with grace in 1989 (which is exactly why it deserved a second chance).

Probably Cutrone and Rockhill can’t stand each other; maybe each one of them thinks of the other as an abomination and a symptom of defeat, but it is exactly the reason why one can only provide a good-faith defense if it is only for both, not one. There is a certain honesty in the pain of Cutrone and Rockhill’s resentment against the left’s radicalism in attacking culture, creating an endless culture war, coupled with utter explicit and implicit acceptance of Anglo-American state capitalism, even as it heavily erodes.

And if anyone argues that resentment does not create politics, well, let me break the news about the second characteristic that makes Western Marxism a monolith: infighting, even Damage Magazine has a section called Oh the Left, because the mean gossip of it all is so irresistible. Russel Jacoby starts his critique of Gabriel Rockhill by mocking the return of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party tradition. Of course, the sacred battle against totalitarianism requires preventing the return of Lenin and his Central Democratic Principle; disagreement in opinions, and unity in decision-making. Contemporary Western Marxism, chewing the bitter taste of “freedom”, is exactly the opposite of that; it’s disagreement, disagreement, disagreement, and getting nothing done.