The phrase “cultural Marxism” has a convoluted history. Its origins arguably go back a century, to when the Nazis spoke of “Judaeo-Bolshevism” and “cultural Bolshevism” to cast communism as a Jewish conspiracy. In the postwar era, it was occasionally used by left-wing academics such as Dennis Dworkin, whose Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (1997) is a history of the New Left and the rise of cultural studies. More recently, cultural Marxism has become refashioned as a weapon for the reactionary right to wield in the culture wars to explain the decay of Western civilisation. In The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, the historian AJA Woods is interested only in this last incarnation. His story is as much about the right’s engagement in the culture wars as it is about cultural Marxism.
Central to the contemporary right’s claims about cultural Marxism is the Frankfurt School, a label applied to a disparate intellectual tradition that emerged from the Institute of Social Research, established in Frankfurt in 1923 by a set of Marxist intellectuals seeking to marry Marxism with psychoanalysis and classical sociology. It became famous for its development of “critical theory”, which insisted that sociology should not simply describe society but seek also to transform it. The school’s major figures – including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse – were Jewish and had to flee to the US. This relatively obscure intellectual current became transformed, half a century later, into an explanation of American decline.
Woods’s story begins not with the right but on the far left, with a strange, conspiracy-driven American group called the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). In the 1960s its leader, Lyndon LaRouche, saw the emerging New Left and student protest movements – both of which fed off the ideas of the Frankfurt School – as agents of the CIA, “zombie brainwashers” preparing the way for a fascist takeover by dismembering Western culture. It was a perspective that led the group on to the terrain of right-wing civilisational despair. Michael Minnicino, a close associate of LaRouche, condemned the century-long “conspiracy to popularise theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judaeo-Christian civilisation”. The “single, most important organisational component of this conspiracy was”, he insisted, “the Frankfurt School”.
“Without the NCLC’s attacks on the Frankfurt School,” Woods argues, “the ideas of cultural Marxism’s as they stand today would likely not exist.” That is questionable. Nevertheless, in the work of LaRouche and his associates, the reactionary right found not just familiar language and themes but also a demonology.
In 1987, William Lind and William Marshner published Cultural Conservatism: Towards a New National Agenda, the first offering of the newly established Institute for Cultural Conservatism. Lind was the institute’s director and Marshner a theologian. The degradation of culture, they wrote, was “emptying” the “nation’s values of their content”. Divorce, abortion and the decline of religion were rotting America from within. Conservatives had to create “activist movements built around values, lifestyles and other non-economic issues” and make them “vanguards” of change.
The institute had been established by Paul Weyrich, dubbed by admirers as “the Lenin of social conservatism’”. He helped found myriad conservative think tanks and action committees, from the Heritage Foundation to the Moral Majority. The aim was to foment realignment on the right, giving voice to people disappointed by Ronald Reagan’s failure to halt America’s cultural decline. Many of those uncomfortable with mainstream conservatism adopted the label “palaeoconservative” to distinguish themselves from pro-Reagan “neoconservatives”, Cold War liberals and former Trotskyites, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, who had moved to the right but were less concerned with cultural issues than with economics and geopolitics. Palaeoconservatism would evolve into a strand of the future “Maga” movement.
Palaeoconservatives blamed US decline on “cultural radicalism”. They borrowed from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci the belief that the conquest of power comes only after the conquest of culture. In this, they followed the French right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist who had already adopted a strategy of “right-wing Gramscianism”. Such ideas soon crossed the Atlantic. “Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, put it.
In the 1990s, Lind relabelled “cultural radicalism” as “cultural Marxism” and, following Minnicino, fingered the Frankfurt School as the principal destroyer of American culture. This argument has since seeped into the mainstream right, as for instance in the Republican senator Ted Cruz’s book Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America (2023). Critiques of wokeness and critical race theory are now presented as battles against “race Marxism” and “identity Marxism”. The cultural Marxism conspiracy theory provides a convenient one-stop explanation for American decline, a wrapper for a critique of everything from abortion to wokeness.
While the contemporary right’s use of “cultural Marxism” is not straightforwardly anti-Semitic, it provides anti-Semites with a code for discussing Jews. “Talking about the Frankfurt School is ideal for not naming Jews as a group,” one poster on the neo-Nazi website Stormfront observes, “but naming the Jew by proper names. People will make their generalisations by themselves – in the privacy of their own minds.”
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is a fascinating trawl through the backwaters of today’s culture wars. The biggest issue with the book, paradoxically, is with its account not of the right but of the left. In his conclusion, Woods presents a defence of identity politics against those who seek a “return to more foundational class-based struggles”.
To understand Woods’s point, we need to recognise that the postwar left, like the right, took a cultural turn following the decay of class politics. It is a process that culminated around the turn of the 21st century, with the coming of neoliberalism, the assault on the labour movement, and the disintegration of the left.
The demise of class politics made space for the politics of identity. Many began to regard cultural differences as more significant than class distinctions. It also spawned a profound social pessimism as the possibilities for society’s radical transformation faded. In the 1960s and 1970s, identity politics was linked to wider struggles for social change. By the 21st century, these had largely disappeared and identities had become ends in themselves, more places of refuge than sites of struggle.
Pessimism shaped the character of today’s identitarian movements. Consider critical race theory, the bête noir of anti-woke warriors. The most significant figure in its development was the legal scholar and civil rights activist Derrick Bell. Racism, he wrote in Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), is a “permanent and indestructible component of this society”. Aiming for “unobtainable” racial equality would lead only to “frustration and despair”, causing black people mental harm. Or, as the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates put it two decades later in his acclaimed book Between the World and Me (2015), just as “the earthquake cannot be subpoenaed” nor “the typhoon… bend under indictment”, neither can racism be eradicated through human action. The irony of the right-wing critique of critical race theory is that, far from being part of a cultural Marxist conspiracy to take over society, it developed out of a sense of pessimism and failure.
Against this background, Woods dismisses those who want to place greater stress on class-based politics as seeking to “abandon certain social groups – immigrants, minorities, transgender people – that have become the main targets of the right’s anti-woke rampage”. It is a bizarre characterisation. While some on the left have adopted regressive views on immigration or equal rights, the key debates over class and identity are not about whether we should tackle racism or misogyny, or oppose anti-immigrant sentiment, but about how to do so. It is disappointing that in attempting to understand how the right has exploited conspiracy theories about decline to try to shape the culture wars, Woods ends up with such a clumsy, distorted answer to the question he himself raises: “What can we do to resist and overcome this onslaught?”
Kenan Malik’s books include “The Quest for a Moral Compass” (Atlantic)
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy
AJA Woods
Verso, 256pp, £16.99
[Further reading: Weimar from Goethe to Hitler]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment