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Ce texte [1] est une recension et une analyse critique du livre d’A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy : Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026), publié par Verso. L’article démonte les origines, les mécanismes et les contradictions de l’un des mythes politiques les plus influents de l’extrême droite contemporaine : le complot du « marxisme culturel ».

Voici le résumé des points clés développés dans l’article :

1. La définition et l’objectif du mythe du « marxisme culturel »

Le concept de « marxisme culturel » est un mot d’ordre utilisé par la droite radicale et les conservateurs pour désigner les mouvements progressistes modernes (féminisme, antiracisme, droits LGBT+, multiculturalisme, "politique du politiquement correct"). Selon cette théorie du complot, ces mouvements ne sont pas des aspirations démocratiques ou spontanées, mais le résultat d’un plan orchestré en coulisses par un groupe d’intellectuels européens — l’École de Francfort (notamment Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer et Herbert Marcuse) — visant à subvertir les valeurs traditionnelles et chrétiennes pour détruire la civilisation occidentale.

2. Le paradoxe et la distorsion historique

L’article souligne l’ironie totale et la déconnexion historique de cette théorie. En réalité, les penseurs de l’École de Francfort, loin de vouloir propager la culture de masse occidentale moderne, la méprisaient profondément. Adorno et Horkheimer ont théorisé l’« industrie culturelle » pour critiquer la manière dont le capitalisme, le cinéma hollywoodien, la musique pop et les médias de masse abrutissaient la population et neutralisaient tout potentiel révolutionnaire. Prétendre qu’ils ont conçu la culture de consommation et de divertissement moderne pour laver le cerveau de l’Occident est un contresens intellectuel complet.

3. La généalogie de la théorie complotiste

L’article retrace l’évolution de cette panique morale :

Les origines antisémites : La théorie s’inscrit directement dans la continuité de la propagande nazie du « judéo-bolchevisme ». L’École de Francfort étant largement composée d’intellectuels juifs allemands contraints à l’exil par le nazisme, l’extrême droite recycle les mêmes stéréotypes antisémites sur une élite occulte cherchant à corrompre la société.

Le rôle du mouvement LaRouche : Dans les années 1970 et 1980, le mouvement politique de Lyndon LaRouche commence à transformer l’École de Francfort en "agents dormants" dans ses publications.

La théorisation par William S. Lind : Dans les années 1990, le théoricien conservateur américain William S. Lind formalise le terme pour la droite américaine, expliquant explicitement qu’il s’agit d’un « outil de délégitimation ». Lind conseillait ouvertement de ne pas perdre de temps en recherches rigoureuses, mais d’utiliser le terme comme une étiquette infamante pour disqualifier toute opposition de gauche.

4. Un "signifiant flottant" au service du capitalisme

Aujourd’hui, le « marxisme culturel » fonctionne comme un « signifiant flottant » (un terme flou dans lequel la droite peut projeter tout ce qu’elle déteste). L’article explique que cette stratégie permet de détourner la colère populaire : plutôt que de critiquer les ravages socio-économiques du capitalisme néolibéral, la droite blâme une élite universitaire et culturelle imaginaire.

En fin de compte, l’article démontre que sous couvert de défendre la « civilisation occidentale » et la haute culture, les promoteurs de cette théorie du complot cherchent surtout à imposer un contrôle idéologique et à soumettre l’éducation et l’expression humaine à la seule logique marchande et conservatrice.

Résumé et traduction par Gemini

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Version anglaise :

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism ? is an inversion of a right-wing conspiracy, in which the prominence of the Frankfurt School is explained as the result of a plot to destroy truly revolutionary Marxism.
Patrick Iber ▪ Summer 2026

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism ?by Gabriel Rockhill Monthly Review Press, 2025, 416 pp.

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy : Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
by A.J.A. Woods Verso, 2026, 256 pp.

The 1776 Report, the pseudo-historical document Donald Trump commissioned as a rebuttal to the 1619 Project and the historical justification for his far-right agenda, contains a bizarre attack on “identity politics.” According to the document, “the modern revival of identity politics stems from mid-20th century European thinkers who sought the revolutionary overthrow of their political and social systems but were disillusioned by the working class’s lack of interest in inciting revolution.” It is Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the report says, who argued that the “focus should not be on economic revolution as much as taking control of the institutions that shape culture.” Gramsci’s heirs in the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, developed identity politics, and then his disciples created critical race theory. “Following Gramsci’s strategy of taking control of the culture,” the report argues, “Marcuse’s followers use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of Americans.”

In this telling, the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay liberation are not responding to real forms of discrimination. Instead, the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960s can be dismissed as the influence of radical foreign Marxists who have undermined the foundational unities of American life through their control of cultural institutions. It is poor intellectual history, but powerful pseudo-history. It frees the believer from considering the demands of people facing oppression as legitimate and justifies the destruction of knowledge-producing institutions. For the right, it replaces hard questions with obfuscation, using obscurity to create a false sense of clarity.

How did we get here ? The Frankfurt School, of course, is real enough. A group of Jewish scholars gathered at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, after it was established in 1923. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Marcuse, three central figures who went on to fame, sought to unify the insights of Hegel and Marx with Freudian psychoanalysis. With the rise of Hitler, they had to leave Germany and, at different times, came to the United States, where they continued research on German fascism, the “authoritarian personality,” and the role of mass media in creating social conformity.

Along with Gramsci, the Frankfurt School is often considered the core of “Western Marxism,” which had a different intellectual and institutional trajectory than the variety that developed as an official state ideology in the Soviet Union. Among other things, Western Marxism had to confront the failures of revolutionary socialism in Western Europe and explain the fact that the working class spent the First World War fighting itself rather than overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Gramsci and the Frankfurt scholars alike gave considerable attention to understanding culture and the institutions of civil society that existed in Europe. To reduce complex debates to two sentences : the Western Marxists recognized the shortcomings of Leninist models of revolutionary change for Western Europe and argued that socialists would have to convince people that their lives would be better off under socialism. That meant working in and through cultural institutions, such as universities and the media.

Given these facts, Western Marxism is generally understood as more academic. Already by the 1930s, Frankfurt School scholars doubted whether the traditional working class would be the agent of historical change and called for intellectuals to unify with oppressed people without fetishizing the working class. In the 1960s, these arguments proved influential on the student left. In Germany, Adorno was a major media figure and helped shape New Left thinking about forms of repression that continued even in liberal democracies. In the United States, the arguments of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man influenced the countercultural refusal to accept consumerist conformity as freedom. After the 1960s, their rather abstruse works moved into academic seminars in the humanities and social sciences, encouraging attention to questions of culture and political economy.

But “Cultural Marxism” is having something of a moment. It is not that it is resurgently popular. It is that it has been dragged posthumously into the arena of dispute, where the world’s worst bullfighters are waving red flags in front of its body. A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is a spry genealogy of our strange reality, which traces the conspiracy from Lyndon LaRouche through the New Right to the Tea Party. Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism ?, by contrast, offers a left-wing inversion of the right-wing conspiracy, in which the prominence of the Frankfurt School is explained as the result of a plot to destroy truly revolutionary (“Eastern”) Marxism. The gap between these books is big enough to have been carved over millennia by the Colorado River, and offers an object lesson in the difference between intellectual history that can inform intelligent political action and “intellectual history” that will guide those who believe it straight into the canyon wall.

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism ? starts from a wholly incorrect premise and does not improve from there, arguing that Western Marxism is a deviation from true dialectical and historical materialism. “Since it has not been possible to simply eliminate Marxism,” Rockhill writes, “due to its broad public appeal, clear explanatory power, and proven ability to transform the socioeconomic order, the managers of bourgeois society have been faced with the dilemma of how best to deal with its existence.” That dilemma, Rockhill says, was solved with psychological warfare from the U.S. Cold War state—in collusion with major capitalist foundations like Ford and Rockefeller—that promoted non-revolutionary and anticommunist Marxism to divide the global left. His book—the first of three volumes, lord help us—is an attempt to demonstrate that the dominance and good reputation of the Frankfurt School is the result of collaboration with the U.S. security state and its foundation auxiliaries.

Let us take this claim as seriously as possible. After all, there was a conspiracy of sorts. The title of Rockhill’s book is a nod to the pathbreaking work by Frances Stonor Saunders on the “cultural Cold War,” which was published as Who Paid the Piper ? in the United Kingdom. That book, released in 1999, described a wide range of the cultural and intellectual activities of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including the promotion of abstract expressionism in painting, jazz in music, and the noncommunist left in politics. The most prominent single institution developed for this purpose was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, created in 1950 to push back against the Soviet propaganda apparatus that was trying to attract Western artists and intellectuals through its “peace” campaigns. Since the right was already on board with anticommunism, liberals in the CIA reasoned that if they were going to shift the thinking of leftists around the world away from a kind of ambient anti-Americanism, they would have to speak to the authentic concerns of the left. They published and supported a number of sophisticated magazines of literature and politics for this purpose ; the big foundations, like Rockefeller and Ford, contributed too.

There were, relatedly, a number of real connections between the Frankfurt School scholars and the U.S. national security state. During the Second World War, several scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research took up positions in the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s wartime predecessor. The United States was building a foreign intelligence apparatus largely from scratch and therefore relied on available academic experts. The Research and Analysis branch of OSS drew from so many left-leaning scholars that wits at the time joked that its initials stood for “Oh So Socialist.” Marcuse, for example, worked in the OSS and then moved to the Department of State’s Research and Intelligence Service in the years after the war before eventually settling into university positions. Rockhill’s best argument is that this wartime service helped the Frankfurt School scholars advance their careers in the United States. The work at OSS was fundamental to the construction of postwar social science. Many people that the Frankfurt scholars had worked with moved into prominent positions in academia and the major foundations. These were useful networks to which to belong.

But the book’s strong version of this thesis—that the Frankfurt School’s prominence is the result of a deliberate conspiracy to advance Frankfurt thinking as an alternative to successful, revolutionary Marxism—doesn’t come close to being sustained by the book. Rockhill is aware that he will be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. Such accusations, he warns, are “often mobilized as weapons of class warfare whose principal objective is to peremptorily exclude as beyond the pale certain forms of materialist analysis.”

What would mark the difference between a conspiratorial approach to this topic and a convincing one ? Conspiratorial thinking, rather than serious intellectual genealogy, makes no distinctions between flimsy connections and deep ties. Instead of attempting to understand the reasons that intellectuals study certain problems and reach certain conclusions, it views everything through the lens of the interests that those ideas advance. Rather than understanding the objectives and cultures of distinct institutions, it understands them all as part of a unified bloc with the same goal. Conspiratorial thinking is unable to process contradiction, irony, contingency, or simple happenstance.

But when he tries to argue that the OSS-CIA-Rockefeller patronage network (which “served the interests of the world’s leading imperialist state while traducing communism”) is the reason that the Frankfurt School version of Marxism became so prominent, he does fall into conspiracy, seemingly unable to read evidence in context. Examples throughout the text are abundant, but a few will have to do. Adorno and Horkheimer published a couple of papers in 1949 in Der Monat, the German intellectual magazine then financed by the U.S. military government. Later it was folded into the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s network. Its editor, via the CCF, had many CIA ties. But Der Monat was also one of the only magazines operating in Germany in the years after the war. In the absence of a sustained relationship, it’s just not particularly meaningful.

Rockhill is angry that Adorno appeared in the CCF magazine Encounter in 1969. But what appears there is the translation of an interview Adorno granted to Der Spiegel, and there is no evidence that Adorno even approved it. Is the article evidence of the CIA’s mighty Wurlitzer cranking out a tune on behalf of Cultural Marxism ? Adorno’s writings had been inspiring to the student left in Germany, but some students had started to turn on him. In 1969, he called the police after an occupation of the Institute for Social Research, and three young women later interrupted his courses, exposed their breasts, and dropped flower petals on him. He canceled his lectures. The interview explores those tensions, and the interviewer repeatedly challenges Adorno on the quiescence of his philosophy, while at the same time questioning whether these students, inspired by him, had gotten out of hand. Adorno does not have particularly satisfactory answers. It makes neither him nor the students look particularly good, which is what you would expect from Encounter, which was a haughty magazine written from the right wing of social democracy. Rockhill, meanwhile, can only sneer that Adorno condemns “the totalitarian states.”

Rockhill’s infelicitous interpretation of evidence is systemic, driven by his inability to imagine that someone might have principled objections to Soviet communism. For example, he quotes a piece of Adorno’s writing with Horkheimer, that states : “Our philosophy, as a dialectical critique of the overall social tendency of the age, stands in the sharpest opposition to the politics and doctrine that emanates from the Soviet Union. We are unable to see anything in the practice of the military dictatorships disguised as people’s democracies other than a new form of repression.” Rockhill faults an “overwhelming lack of materialist analysis,” given that “even the CIA recognized that the Soviet Union was not a dictatorship.” He cites a 1955 report, in which, he says, “the Agency clearly stated that the Western idea of a Soviet dictatorship was exaggerated because there was collective leadership in the USSR, even in Stalin’s time.” I looked up the document in question, which appears to be a summary of a conversation with a human intelligence source and wasn’t indicative of the agency’s position. The source is making a point that the Soviet system doesn’t rely on a single person ; they were not disputing its authoritarian character. To imagine this as the CIA’s confession is historically (and generally) illiterate.

Here and there, Rockhill has found interesting documents. It is interesting that One-Dimensional Man was partially written with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and it would be more interesting if Marcuse did not say so in the book’s acknowledgments. But there is no evidence of a massive conspiracy to replace revolutionary Marxism with the Frankfurt School on behalf of the security state. There are continuities between the work Frankfurt scholars did in intelligence agencies and as academics, but it is not right to say, for example, that when Marcuse left Washington, he was “simply pursuing his intelligence work under academic cover.” It would be at least as accurate to put it the other way around. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism ? builds a faulty model of the world, interprets evidence poorly in support of that model, and does so in support of a delusional political program.

How could it be that such flawed alternatives to “true” Marxism came to be seen as trendier and superior ? Rockhill does not consider the possibility that the Frankfurt School’s influence, such as it was, was better integrated into social struggles meaningful to key groups in postwar Western Europe and the United States. For Rockhill the answer is that these ideas were capable of being integrated into the causes of the U.S. national security state, the “greatest purveyor of intellectual war in the contemporary world.” In this way, he says, Western Marxism “is an ideological construct aimed at transforming the greatest theoretical weapon of class struggle from below into an ineffectual philosophical position that is accommodationist toward capitalism, and even imperialism.”

Rockhill is not able to countenance why even people who identified with the Marxist tradition—like those in the Frankfurt School—felt it necessary to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. As a result, he exhibits the worst tendencies of the Marxist ideologue, without the virtues of the Marxist scholar. When an author reaches a conclusion he dislikes, he describes their thinking as insufficiently materialist. His conviction that true Marxism was displaced by a conspiracy of capitalists and imperialists does not engage in any meaningful way with the history of Marxism or communism. Where there have been troubles in actually existing socialist states, Rockhill argues, “it should always be remembered . . . that these histories have not unfolded smoothly due to the persistence of racist, misogynist, and homophobic ideologies driven by capitalism and sharp contradictions generated by the need to develop the productive forces to fend off imperialist onslaught.” This is rank campism masquerading as such : it didn’t even bother to bring its mask to the ball.

Rockhill’s notion that if we could all agree on the correct interpretation of Marxism then we could finally make the revolution is, I’m afraid, belied by the entire history of Marxism. (It is also, I must say, not very materialist.) His book is an extreme case of a fallacy that crops up, in less acute forms, too frequently on the left. When we assume our moral and analytical superiority, and then cast about for purely material explanations for why others don’t share our analysis, it is not a good way to build trust or power, except perhaps in the context of cultish micro-sects.

It is the great revelation of A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy that the major parts of the right’s arguments about the malign influence of the Frankfurt School on contemporary society have roots that reach into just such a leftist micro-sect. You can see it in Rockhill : he is upset that the social movements of “the 1960s”—which produced more inclusive societies along lines of race, gender, and sexual orientation—have not overthrown capitalism. Because this New Left was sometimes inspired by the Frankfurt School, he blames it for being insufficiently revolutionary. Today’s right-wing idea-mongers have produced a palette-swapped version of this critique. They think it’s good that there hasn’t been an economic revolution, but they think that the 1960s—under the influence of the Frankfurt School puppet masters—did produce a social revolution that they understand as undermining the foundations of “Western civilization.” Just as Rockhill needs a conspiracy to explain the present because he can’t imagine that anyone would, in the absence of psychological warfare, not affirmatively choose communism, today’s right needs a conspiracy because it can’t process social changes downstream of “the 1960s” as meaningful advances in freedom.

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy argues that the way to understand the emergence of these narratives is as weapons developed for a particular ideological struggle. And that particular ideological struggle was control of the student movement, all the way back to the 1960s. Accusations that Marcuse was working for the CIA, such as those sustained by Rockhill, were made in the 1960s as well. Woods traces them to the literature of the Progressive Labor Party, then a Maoist party. PL disagreed with Marcuse’s conclusion that workers were not a revolutionary class, and argued that his idea was part of a CIA mass manipulation strategy. PL also charged that the Black Panther Party and the Viet Cong were revisionist. Furthermore, PL also opposed the countercultural elements of the New Left, including long hair, drug use, and greater sexual freedom. When the Students for a Democratic Society split in 1969, with one faction led by a front group of the PL, the organization collapsed. “In a certain sense, PL played a much greater role in the collapse of the organized student movement than the supposed CIA asset Marcuse,” Woods writes.

One member of PL was Lyndon LaRouche, who blended the roles of political organizer and cult leader. Drawing from Gramsci, Woods describes LaRouche as an “arbitrary intellectual.” Where the classic Gramscian organic intellectual would try to build a viable political coalition, the arbitrary intellectual, by contrast, “pushes a fanatical agenda that does not meaningfully resonate with most people.”

Central to LaRouche’s management of his cult was the idea that they constituted a political elite that would oversee the creation of a new golden age, if they could overcome the evil “counter-elite”— in this case, those inspired by Marcuse, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt School. LaRouche blamed what he described as “Rockefeller Fascism” for attacks on his personality and, like Rockhill does now, used Marcuse’s wartime service and the fact that he had solicited grants from the Rockefeller Foundation as evidence of a major conspiracy. In LaRouchite publications, Adorno was the mastermind of the counterculture ; Horkheimer was said to have invented the “authoritarian personality” to undermine Judeo-Christian civilization, and the whole Frankfurt School were at the center of the counter-elite used to brainwash the masses. Rockefeller Fascism created the New Left to prevent the true radicalization of students. Even the prison term of Marcuse’s student Angela Davis was presented as a marketing stunt by the state to drive left-wing recruitment to the Communist Party, of which Davis was a member, rather than LaRouche’s faction.

How did LaRouche’s cultish pseudo-leftism bleed over onto the right ? In the 1980s, some of his pet themes resonated with right-wing views of what was wrong with America. LaRouche loved Beethoven ; his publications argued that rock music was a conspiracy to demolish the difference between humans and beasts. Adorno, for the record, was a classical pianist, but LaRouche held him responsible for the counterculture, and thus the popularity of rock music. Many right-wing social critics had similar grievances about American popular culture. Allan Bloom, for example, in The Closing of the American Mind, grumbles that “Rock music provides premature ecstasy . . . like the drugs with which it is allied.”

That was just one point of convergence. Homophobia was another. LaRouche believed that acceptance of gay and lesbian sexuality was part of a plot by the counter-elite to exterminate the human population (which he connected to the Rockefeller Foundation’s programs on “population control”). The Rockefeller Foundation had also long been an object of suspicion, resented for its support of liberal social programs and grants to left-wing scholars such as, say, Marcuse. Conspiracies flew around it. The far-right John Birch Society saw the Rockefeller Foundation as the center of an internationalist conspiracy to destroy American sovereignty.

The key text to the crossover from left to right was LaRouchite Michael Minnicino’s 1992 three-part essay on Adorno’s co-authored 1950 work The Authoritarian Personality, which Minnicino called “an anti-Western hoax.” He called the Frankfurt School “the single, most important organizational component of [the] conspiracy” to weaken “the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization,” with the development of an apparatus for ideological warfare to spread cultural pessimism, including the doctrines of “political correctness.” And, in an appeal to conservative opposition to affirmative action and the cultural shifts since the 1960s, Minnicino argued that the “importance of the individual as a person gifted with the divine spark of creativity . . . was replaced by the idea that a person is important because he or she is black, or a woman, or feels homosexual impulses.” The gambit worked. A Washington-based activist on the New Right found Minnicino’s essay and then, fatefully, started to do his own “research.”

Woods describes the networks of right-wing activists that began to rely on the Cultural Marxism conspiracy more and more. The activist Paul Weyrich described political correctness as Cultural Marxism, at war with traditional American culture. The writer William S. Lind decided that Gramsci had developed a theory that the masses were too attached to Judeo-Christian values to overthrow the capitalist system, and set about devising a plan to destroy people’s religious faith. It was obvious nonsense, but that didn’t matter. What was most important was that it provided a kind of Grand Unified Theory of conservative grievance.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it seemingly confirmed for many figures on the right that they had lost the culture. The American people had chosen the product of many of the things they held responsible for American decline : a professor, a product of interracial marriage, a child of divorce. How could it have happened ? When the anti-Obama Tea Party exploded, several right-wing entrepreneurs emphasized the Cultural Marxism conspiracy to provide an answer. In the 2010 film Cultural Marxism : The Corruption of America, featuring Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, LaRouchite Rockefeller Fascism was replaced by the “Corporate Fascism” of the Federal Reserve, but the attacks on the Frankfurt School remained, replete with fake quotes and stereotypical accents to activate antisemitic feelings in the audience without having to speak antisemitic words. If you could not imagine that the United States would elect Obama, then the public must be brainwashed. QED.

Woods takes the reader from the Tea Party through Gamergate to Christopher Rufo’s campaigns against critical race theory (inspired by the Frankfurt School, naturally) to Trump. Trump frequently insists that Democrats can only win elections if they cheat. This can manifest as a suspicion of voting machines, but the more sophisticated conservative will tell you that the unfairness is in Democratic control of the production of information. The right-wing attempts to shape universities and the media, especially in Trump’s second term, are the product of what Woods describes, in reference to the media provocateurs Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh, as “right-wing Gramscianism,” in which politics is downstream from culture. Cultural Marxism has not won, but the Cultural Marxism conspiracy has, at least for now.

It won’t last forever. Conspiracy theories can bind their believers together, but their distance from reality becomes a liability for effective action. Even Rufo has recently lamented, wearing his best hot-dog costume, that “The Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing.” Being able to see the world clearly, to identify its problems and take action, remains an asset, at least in the long run.

Rockhill tried to write intellectual history and produced conspiracy ; Woods wrote an intellectual history of a conspiracy. Their methods and analysis are better, and, not surprisingly, so is their political diagnosis. Witnessing the political success of anti-wokeness in 2020, some on the left have argued for abandoning identity politics for the primacy of class. “For some, this is an honest attempt to draw more people into a progressive coalition,” Woods judges. “For others, it is a way to promote a class-reductionist conception of left-wing politics that, at best, regards culture war issues as epiphenomenal.” But ultimately, cultural issues are not mere distractions : they are about the ways we live together. They too, if you wish, have a material foundation. “No one,” Woods writes, “deserves to be left behind.”

Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.