Which Way, Western Marxism?, by Patrick Iber – Summer 2026

From Dissent

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

Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025), 416 pp.

A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (London: 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The 1776 Report, the pseudo-historical document Donald Trump commissioned as a rebuttal to the 1619 Project and the historical justification for his far-right agenda, contains a bizarre attack on “identity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.

[READ THE REST]

Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.

Which Way, Western Marxism?, by Patrick Iber – Summer 2026

More content from this blog