June 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?

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.

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........

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