Mural of Theodor Adorno by Justus Becker and Oğuz Şen. Senckenberganlage, Frankfurt Vysotsky (Wikimedia), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SAJune 17, 1969. Prominent left-wing German political philosopher Herbert Marcuse is delivering a lecture at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. Marcuse is in mid-flow when someone in the audience interrupts him:Herbert, tell us why are you getting paid by the CIA?The heckler was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the most high-profile figures associated with the student movement of the 1960s and the New Left – a political and cultural tendency with which Marcuse himself was associated. Marcuse’s reply suggests this was not the first time such an allegation had been levelled against him. “I have been accused of being paid,” he snapped, “by the Kremlin, by Beijing, by capitalism, by Wall Street.” The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West – A.J.A. Woods (Verso)These quotes come from Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Published in 2025, the book caused a stir in leftist circles. Rockhill argued that, throughout the Cold War, the CIA and a network of allied foundations and cultural organisations covertly sought to shape the direction of left-wing thought in the West. The goal, he claimed, was not simply to combat Soviet influence, but to encourage forms of dissent that appeared radically critical of the existing order, while ultimately remaining compatible with the broader political and economic priorities of the Western capitalist order.According to Rockhill, the postwar intelligentsia became entangled in these webs in several ways, some knowingly, others unwittingly. The result was a version of Western Marxism that privileged cultural critique and detached reflection over revolutionary politics and organised class struggle. This is where Marcuse enters the frame. Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School, a band of German-Jewish intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research. Founded in Frankfurt in 1923, the institute brought together thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer and, later, Marcuse. They wanted to understand why the revolution predicted by Marx had failed to materialise in the advanced capitalist societies of the West. As Stuart Jeffries notes in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his intellectual biography of the group, what distinguished the Frankfurt School was the way its members drew on psychoanalysis and philosophy to explain why capitalism had proved far more durable than many Marxists had expected. They also engaged with the rise of what they called the culture industry and thereby explored a new relationship between culture and politics, where the former served as a lackey of capitalism and yet had the potential, mostly unrealised, to be its gravedigger. In this fashion, the Frankfurt School helped redirect Marxist inquiry towards questions that lay beyond the factory floor and the sphere of formal politics. Jeffries makes the point that the Frankfurt School was often better at identifying the problems of modern capitalism than the energies capable of overcoming them. Adorno, for one, remained deeply sceptical of student activism, even as many students embraced his critique of capitalist society. Marcuse took a different view. He saw in the student protests the possibility of a new type of political resistance emerging beyond the bastions of the traditional industrial working class, upon whom Marx and his inheritors had once pinned such high hopes. Still, Rockhill is correct to identity a shift in emphasis. The Frankfurt School changed the theoretical terrain on which many subsequent Marxists would operate. Questions of culture and consciousness assumed a prominence they had not previously enjoyed, reshaping the priorities of academic Marxist inquiry for decades to come. Whether this enriched the Marxist tradition or diluted its radical force remains an open question. Herbert Marcuse giving a lecture in Berlin, 1967. Isaactrius, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Inventing ‘cultural’ MarxismThis is worth keeping in mind as we turn to intellectual historian A.J.A. Woods’ excellent book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. Woods’ analysis, like Rockhill’s, is grounded in the customs of historical materialism, drawing in particular on the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. The story Woods tells, however, is very different. In December 2021, Woods writes, the term “cultural Marxism” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. If the OED entry was anything to go by, it was an expression “with a sinister and controversial past”. It can be traced back to the 1930s. It made an early appearance in a publication associated with British fascism. Yet for much of its history, the phrase languished in relative obscurity. Not so now. Cultural Marxism – sometimes referred to as the “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory” – has become a staple of contemporary right-wing discourse. In the United States, politicians, including Pete Hegseth and Ted Cruz, have employed the term to explain social changes they regard as harmful or destabilising. Similar claims have been made in Latin America, where leaders like Javier Milei and Jair Bolsonaro have warned of what they regard as its pernicious influence.The theory holds that the Frankfurt School, having concluded that capitalism was unlikely to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions any time soon, developed a new strategy for communist subversion while living in America during the 1930s and 1940s, having fled from Nazi Germany in fear of their lives. In this telling, as Woods observes, “the Frankfurt School and their devotees are blessed with a magical level of agency that can overcome all contradictions and countervailing forces”. The argument, in a nutshell, is that Adorno and his nefarious affiliates strove to undermine Western society from within, gradually infiltrating university campuses and corrupting impressionable young minds. Other key institutions would follow. The ultimate goal was to forever upend the cultural foundations of modern life.Narrative of declineThe theory has proven remarkably durable. Woods notes that it has been used to account for developments as varied as feminism, political correctness, the growing visibility of LGBTQ+ communities and, more recently, movements such as Black Lives Matter and efforts to address climate change. The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, Woods emphasises, is not a historical account of the Frankfurt School, per se. Its concern is not the origins of a coterie of German intellectuals, but the historical conditions that made a conspiracy theory about them possible. Nor is the book an attempt to debunk the sprawling theory that has grown up around it. Instead, as Woods put it, the volume seeksto work out a series of critical puzzles. Why does this narrative of cultural degeneration focus so much on a collective of German Marxists? How does it continue to convince and excite the forces of political reaction? Woods’ answer to those questions takes the form of a genealogy. It tracks the development of the conspiracy theory across a wide range of contexts, following its movement from the political fringe into mainstream public consciousness. Along the way, we meet a host of conservative politicians, self-styled intellectuals, cult leaders and assorted cranks. What emerges is a story of adaptation and reinvention. Woods opens in the 1960s. The period was marked by antiwar activism and decolonisation. It was also a moment when established social hierarchies came under sustained pressure and previously marginalised groups acquired a new public visibility. At the same time, powerful forces mobilised in defence of the existing order. Max Horkheimer (L) and Theodor Adorno (R) in 1964. Jeremy J. Shapiro, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA Culture occupies a central place in this picture. One of the most significant developments of the postwar era, Woods posits, was the dramatic expansion of the category of culture itself: as advanced countries shifted away from industrial production, “culture burst into the foreground of day-to-day life”.The consequences were profound. Mass media began, in Woods’ words, “to exert tremendous power and influence over the rhythms of everyday life”. Questions of identity, youth culture and lifestyle acquired a political heft they had not previously possessed. A corresponding “cultural turn” reshaped intellectual life, spurring scholarly inquiry into the production and circulation of meaning. The long 1960sIt is against this setting that the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory should be understood, deriving as it does from right-wing “efforts to resist and reverse the social changes that started to unfold in the long and global 1960s”. Rather than treating these phenomena as historical developments, the theory’s proponents wove them into a narrative of ideological takeover. The Frankfurt School became a convenient scapegoat in a much larger story about cultural change and the perceived decline of the postwar order.Woods’ account moves chronologically. The first chapters take us back, quite literally, to Marcuse and his heckler in Rome. The focus here is on the expansion of higher education and the fragmentation of the New Left in the latter part of the 1960s.One figure looms especially large in this section of the book. American political activist Lyndon LaRouche started out on the radical left before constructing a cultish movement of his own. Woods shows how LaRouche and his paranoiac band of fellow travellers gradually transformed the Frankfurt School into a convenient explanation for the social and cultural developments they deplored, as well as for their own failure to achieve anything approximating political influence.LaRouche’s attacks served a political purpose. By the 1970s, thinkers such as Adorno and Horkheimer were being blamed for everything from changing sexual mores to the rise of rock music. For anyone even remotely familiar with the writings of the Frankfurt School, the irony is jaw-dropping. Adorno, in particular, spent much of his career castigating popular culture, which he regarded as a vehicle for standardisation and social control. In LaRouche’s version of events, though, Adorno became one of pop culture’s principal architects. The point is not that LaRouche got the Frankfurt School wrong, although he obviously did. It is more that he helped forge a narrative that others would subsequently refine and carry into the political mainstream.We see this process at work in the book’s second chapter. LaRouche established the basic contours of the theory, but paleoconservative William S. Lind provided the language through which it would achieve wider circulation.An American think-tank strategist and activist yoked to the New Right, Lind coined the term “cultural Marxism” in 1994, in a co-authored journal article published by the US Marine Corps. The essay, Woods attests, was conspicuously short on detail when it came to explaining who was responsible for translating “Marxism from economic into social and social terms”. This changed a year later. In 1995, Lind identified the Frankfurt School as the missing link. In a new twist, he charged its members with being the driving force behind political correctness, a blight that was stymieing freedom of speech across America. The vision Lind depicted was bleak. Political correctness, he claimed, was transforming the country into a totalitarian state. Universities stood at the centre of this ominous worldview. Once hallowed sites of higher learning, they had now, allegedly, become incubators for a new ideological orthodoxy. The culprit, Lind contended, was Critical Theory. Developed by Frankfurt School intellectuals through a fusion of Marxism, Freudianism and linguistics, it had, he charged, turned the United States into a society governed by “radical egalitarianism”: a country where traditional values could be undermined and ideological conformity endorsed.Lind insisted that it was not enough merely to warn people about the scourge of cultural Marxism. Concerned conservatives, he reasoned, needed to engage in educational activism in order to expose this danger to relatives, friends and neighbours. The theory had to be popularised.Conjunctural intellectualsWoods’ third chapter examines what happened next. The rise of the Tea Party in 2007 provided an ideal environment for the dissemination of cultural Marxism narratives. A decentralised political movement sustained by inchoate rage, online blogs, social media and legacy media outlets, the Tea Party fostered the emergence of what Woods calls “conjunctural intellectuals” – self-appointed patriots who used emerging digital platforms to mobilise supporters and spread ideas, irrespective of whether they were true or false.Tea Party activists were not passive consumers of political data, but active participants in its dissemination. In this alternative information ecoystem, stories about cultural Marxism – often refracted though assaults on multiculturalism and social justice issues – found a receptive audience and a powerful new means of distribution. The final chapter of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy brings the story into the present. The political upheavals of the 2010s and 2020s supplied the conspiratorially-minded with a fresh set of enemies. Woods traces how older anti-Frankfurt School narratives were repackaged through campaigns waged against Critical Race Theory, “gender ideology” and, eventually, “wokeness”. Read more: Critical race theory: What it is and what it isn’t The Black Lives Matter protests provide an important backdrop here. Woods outlines how conservative activists and institutions reframed debates about racism and structural inequality through the language of ideological capture, with Critical Race Theory becoming a particularly potent target. Donald Trump’s ad nauseam attacks on “left-wing indoctrination”, the 1776 Commission and the Intellectual Dark Web all feature prominently in the concluding pages of the book. Woods refuses readers of a left-wing persuasion easy consolation. The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy does not indulge the comforting fiction that these developments can be explained away by misinformation or manipulation, insisting that the shortcomings of the political left play a role in all of this.Nevertheless, the book eschews fatalism. The current moment, Woods writes, is a “terrain on which we are forced to organise and act”. If there is a note of hope in this otherwise sobering tract, it lies in the insistence that political outcomes remain contingent rather than predetermined. As Woods reminds us, the maze in which we are seemingly stuck may contain many false exits, but there is a way through.Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.