The right wing is constantly warning us that a great danger stalks the free West: “cultural Marxism.”
It’s an ideological fiction with a long lineage. It’s been the obsession of the feverishly conspiratorial U.S. right since the 1960s—a time when conservative sought a culprit to blame for dramatic social change, for the ungodly counterculture of the era, and for the new forms of resistance to oppression that emerged then.
Author A.J.A. Woods’ The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy is a work of intellectual archaeology, tracing the etymology of this conspiracy theory to Nazi Germany and the subsequent (and antisemitic) hostility of right-wing U.S. commentators to the political interventions of Frankfurt School philosophers.
The U.S. right was the progenitor of what would become a global conservative fixation because its villains—figures such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, and Habermas—had mostly decamped to New York after leaving Germany in 1935.
Woods has set himself the task of unearthing how the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory has been formulated in right-wing narratives.
This is the simultaneous story of how, in Gramscian terms, new forms of knowledge production and the intellectuals created by them have attained influence in the postwar era by concocting false coherence from motley theories in order to fashion a discernible enemy.
It would be wise for the left to understand the genealogy of this conspiracy theory and its relationship with capitalism because it continues to spawn new adversaries such as Critical Race Theory, “gender ideology,” and “wokeness.”
Woods explains how and why cultural Marxism has been constructed by the right in their efforts to blame the left for dramatic changes in Western societies over the past 60 years.
He shows how a broad spectrum of right-wing thinkers have argued that, with the aim of triggering the collapse of Western society, Frankfurt School philosophers invented all the “ideologies” they despise most: multiculturalism, feminism, and environmentalism.
By catering to the demands of petulant minorities, Marxists who had failed to bring about a revolution through class struggle could simply do so by taking control of cultural institutions, or so the argument goes.
Woods begins his analysis in the tumultuous 1960s, when social protests over race, gender, sexuality, class, and generation spawned bold movements for change that collided with the explosion of mass media and cultural consumption.
While this was a period of cultural dissent, it was also one of Establishment reaction in which extreme violence was just one of the tools deployed to conserve the social order.
Woods writes: “Various right-wing and reactionary political movements ventured into this conjunctural terrain to defend the existing hierarchies of a pristine Western civilization … All cultural Marxism narratives derive from these efforts to resist and reverse the social changes that started to unfold in the long and global 1960s.”
The author argues that there is no single form of cultural Marxism, only variations on a theme formulated by different actors to suit the needs of the moment, and hence there is no clear definition or linear evolution of this idea.
He studies four main incarnations of the conspiracy: the cultish mission of Lyndon LaRouche to prevent a “new Dark Age”; the efforts of conservative writer William Lind to delegitimize liberalism; the Tea Party movement’s demonization of Barack Obama’s reformist agenda; and the Trump-era culture warriors’ contemporary “war on woke” and CRT.
In the final analysis, what we witness is ultimately an effort by the forces of reaction to build a cultural narrative with concrete economic consequences and able to justify coercive measures against gender, race, and labor rights that best serve the expansion of capitalism.
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West
By A.J.A. Woods
Verso Books, 2026, 256 pp.
Order here.
This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Morning Star.
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