How the Left Got Fucked, Part One

Cultural Marxism, the "New Left," and the CIA

Just as with Christianity where the only alternative to the Christian god is not another god but Satan (a being created by that very same god…), the left we’ve known has never offered a real threat to capitalism.

And that’s exactly why the CIA funded it in the first place.

You’ll have no doubt noticed that I haven’t written about anything political for quite some time. I’ve a few reasons I could cite and a few excuses I could proffer. Not much in the world makes sense at the moment, and as my friend

Caroline Ross

mentioned to me a few days ago, very little of what people are saying about the world makes any sense, either.

But if I were to be honest, which is what I unfortunately too often end up being, I’d admit it’s really because I read something so horribly depressing that I’ve needed a few months just to recover from it.

Yes, such a piece of writing exists. And yes, I’ll direct you to it. But it will need some background, some garden metaphors, and a few other bits to help you understand why reading something could have so thoroughly put me off even thinking about politics for so long.

If you’ve read me for a while, you’ll know that I’m a “leftist,” whatever the fuck that means anymore. And you’ll probably know that I wrote a book, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other, that traces the ideological shifts in leftism over the last twenty years. Those shifts — which have brought many of us to a strange position where suddenly we didn’t recognize leftism any longer — were from class-based analysis of capitalism towards what’s generally understood as “Woke” or “social justice” leftism.

That older version of leftism started from an understanding that the rich (as a class of people) exploit workers (also as a class) and arrange all of society in a way to keep their own wealth and power intact. By looking at and understanding this very basic and self-evident situation, leftists of that older iteration then sought to organize workers in a way that they could exert their own collective power against their much wealthier bosses.

This was the starting point of what used to be known as leftism, though there were plenty of variations between what the ultimate goal of that organized class struggle was to be. Anarchists, for example, proposed that abolishing the state along with the rich would lead to the best situation for everyone. Communists, on the other hand, proposed the organized collective of workers would need to become the state in order to ensure the rich could not exploit people again. And between those two were countless other variants admixing elements from those two conclusions.¹

Communists tended to be the most powerful and effective of those two poles in leftism up until the end of the 1960s. Much of this had to do with the fact that there were really-existing communist experiments in the world, while anarchism has never really existed in any place for more than a couple of months. Another aspect that made communism more influential was its organizational power, as anarchists are extremely suspicious of group leadership structures. And, of course, some communist groups received funding and other support from the Communist Party in the USSR.

That being said, anarchists had once been quite successful in the place where communists often failed: the United States.² Also, because anarchism wasn’t tied to any country, government, or funding mechanism, it was able to escape the inevitable and justified criticism that communists faced when the Soviet communist experiment became totalitarian under Stalin. Thus, not having ever been really put to the test, anarchism has never had to answer for past failures.

The “New Left”

As I said, communism was the dominant pole within leftism until the end of the 1960s. That period saw the birth of “the New Left,” which was the first real shift within leftism away from class analysis and towards more nebulous ideas such as liberation and justice.

The creation of the New Left has quite a few stated causes and one very rarely stated but even more important cause. First of all, it’s generally said that the New Left was born from revelations about Stalin and the internal failures of the USSR. Because communism had become so thoroughly identified with the USSR and especially with the person of Stalin,³ many communists became disillusioned upon learning about Stalin’s totalitarian methods.⁴ But Stalinist communism was not the only kind, and other communist parties — especially those aligned with Trotsky’s ideas — generally tended to absorb these defectors.

Another explanation proffered is that the “cultural revolution” of the 60s naturally led to the need to create a new leftism that took into account individuals’ desires for sexual liberation. In this explanation, older communist and anarchist ideas were too based in conservative or even reactionary family models and thus continued the capitalist and Christian repression of women and homosexuals. The upsurge in drug experimentation and “free love” events had helped humans get back in touch with their primal urges, and the New Left needed to take up the banner of erotic chaos.⁵

An important problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t mention that this cultural revolution wasn’t actually taking place across the world, only in certain urban centers. Sure, there were orgies and drug parties happening in certain neighborhoods of New York, West Berlin, Paris, and London, and plenty of these things also occurred on a few college campuses. What was really happening, though, was that a small subgroup of people who were never going to do manual or industrial labor anyway were getting really high and fucking lots of strangers.

Other explanations include a shift to “the East” and Asian cultural values inspired by resistance to the Vietnam war, pressure from African-Americans and feminists to take minorities and women more seriously, and a general historical evolutionary force that finally brought 19th century leftist ideas up to date with the current world.

But for the rarely-mentioned and much more important cause, it’s finally time for my promised garden metaphor.

Choking Out Alternatives

Let’s say you’ve got a very small garden plot and four different seeds. You plant them, and then you decide you’ll only water and fertilize one of the resulting seedlings, while you’ll let the three others rely only on unpredictable rainfall and whatever nutrients are already available.

That seed you’re feeding and watering is obviously going to do a lot better. And if the area is small enough and the other seedlings are rather close to that one, the one that’s getting the extra help is going to start choking out the others. The leaves and the roots of the faster-growing one will eventually take away what the others need and they’ll die, leaving only the one that got the extra help.

And now, let’s say that you show the plants to someone else, but you don’t tell them that you were helping one of them but not the others. Instead, you give the impression that they were all growing in equal conditions. That person would be likely to conclude that the taller plant was merely more successful, while the others had defects or were inherently weaker.

That metaphor tells you exactly how the New Left was born, but you have to replace the word “seedlings” with “leftist tendencies” and “fertilizer and water” with “money from the CIA.”

I’ll be honest with you: it always sounds crazy when I think about this, let alone when I dare to write it. So if it doesn’t sound plausible to you, you have my sympathy. Unfortunately, it’s true anyway, and very well documented.⁶

What happened is this. The CIA, worried about the influence of the USSR and the potential for a communist workers revolt in the United States, created several funding mechanisms to channel money into cultural events and organizations that would showcase American creativity and capitalist freedom of expression.

Sounds benign, perhaps, until you remember the garden metaphor I gave you. See, many of the activists, writers, artists, musicians, and organizations may never really have attained their level of cultural and ideological influence without that funding.

Now, not all — in fact, very few — of those being promoted or funded by the CIA actually knew who was behind it. This was because the CIA had created several front organizations through which they distributed the money. The most notorious of these fronts was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast funding network that created and paid for large intellectual conferences, art galleries, musical tours, and a series of literary journals (including The Paris Review). The CCF also funded pre-existing cultural, political, and intellectual institutions within the “anti-communist left,” including the Iowa Writers Workshop and the National Student Association.

To get an idea of how effective the CCF and other CIA mechanisms were in shaping what we think of culture now and the eventual direction of the “left,” here’s a short list of individuals who received either direct or indirect funding and promotion: Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Louie Armstrong, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Miller, Eugene Fodor, Michael Polanyi, W.E.B. Du Bois, Isaiah Berlin, and Gloria Steinem.

Consider some of these names and their influence. The CIA-funded popularity of Pollack and Rothko’s paintings created the movement of “abstract expressionism,” and there’s a very good argument to be made that they’re responsible for making art appreciation an elitist activity no longer accessible to the working classes. The idea of “white privilege” being a barrier that first must be overcome before black and white workers can unite against the rich can be traced directly to W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin. Eugene Fodor, the founder of Fodor’s Travel Guides, is responsible for our modern conception of tourism as a liberal practice of “cultural exchange” and a method of individual enlightenment. Michael Polanyi is significantly responsible for shaping the way we see consciousness and order as something that arises out of complexity, laying the groundwork for ideas such as the Singularity and technologies such as A.I. The kind of feminism that came to see the “patriarchy” as a more oppressive force than capitalist exploitation of poor women became popularized by Gloria Steinem (who was openly quite proud of her anti-communist work with the CIA). The CIA also funded and supported non-American “anti-communist left” political theorists like Hannah Arendt (who worked willingly with the CCF), George Orwell (who’d reported on friends and associates for their communist sympathies), and even the primary theorist of “decolonization” himself: Franz Fanon.

Now, of course, just because someone was supported or funded by the CIA doesn’t mean their opinions were controlled or even shaped by them. Remembering again the garden metaphor, what is important here is the effect the CIA’s backing had on which ideas and cultural movements grew and which ones were choked out. By funding individuals and groups they saw as more aligned with American capitalism, they were able to make sure more radical anti-capitalist movements failed to take hold.

The Frankfurt School

Here, it’s worth mentioning one peculiar group of anti-communist “leftists” who received massive amounts of funding: the Frankfurt School. While at least two of its leading members, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, wrote for and participated in CCF-funded projects, the clearest influence the CIA had on the Frankfurt School was funding its re-establishment in Germany after World War II:

… the U.S. government supported the Institute’s move back to West Germany with a very significant grant in 1950 of 435,000 DM ($103,695, or the equivalent of $1,195,926 dollars in 2022).⁷

There’s a really bizarre irony here. The Frankfurt School’s ideas are more popularly known as “cultural Marxism,” and the majority of opponents to cultural Marxism tend to be aligned with the right, not the left. In fact, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and others within the current United States regime have repeatedly cited cultural Marxism as a primary enemy of capitalism and American values, while conveniently ignoring the fact that it was CIA funding which helped ensure these ideas took root.

Also, the “Marxism” part of Cultural Marxism is quite inaccurate. The primary legacy of the Frankfurt School was to strip Marxism of its core revolutionary threat. Instead of starting from an analysis of historical forces and class struggle, Adorno and the others presented a psychological framework in which sexual repression and internalized mental structures were the true causes of economic inequality and authoritarian violence. None of these ideas were actually Marxist or communist, and the Frankfurt School had a very strong fear of — and often outright hatred for — the habits, lifestyles, values, and potential power of the working class.

The ideas that came out of the Frankfurt School will be familiar to any leftist now. For example, the idea that sexually-repressed people are more likely to become fascist than those who lived sexually-fulfilled lives comes from Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Also from Marcuse, the left inherited the idea of anti-oppression as the true goal of radical struggle, laying the groundwork for social justice theory.⁸ The idea that the family is a repressive structure where children are disciplined into becoming good capitalist subjects, and those with strict parents tend to become political authoritarians, comes from Theodore Adorno. From Horkheimer, we got the roots of the current leftist belief that Western philosophy and reason are (as Audre Lorde later put it) “the master’s tools,” and therefore are useless in the hands of non-Westerners. Other ideas that many of the Frankfurt School members shared and propagated included the belief that the working class needs to be educated about their own oppressive beliefs before they can then be trusted to build a better society, as well as the insistence that modernity and liberal democracy are good things that capitalism created and shouldn’t be opposed.

Thanks to the funding the Frankfurt School and other groups and individuals received, a third kind of leftism — neither communist nor anarchist — took hold. This “New Left” choked out earlier and rival leftisms, starving them of attention and exposure. It became the leftism taught in universities, creating a new generation of radicals more interested in debating the finer points of gender, racial, and colonial oppression than figuring out a way to fight the rich.

Government-Approved Resistance

That’s why it’s quite difficult to find significant examples of large political movements during the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s within the United States. Instead, unions and other organized attempts to combat the expansion of capitalist exploitation slowly withered right at the time that new economic pressures made it harder for a family to survive on one wage alone.

It was only at the turn of the 20th century and the anti-globalization movement that leftism even became relevant again. But it wasn’t the formerly powerful communist tendency that re-surged; instead, this time it was the anarchists.

Though that story will be for the next installment of this essay, it’s worth looking at what I’ve already laid out to understand how fucked up this all really is.

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the protaganist sets off in search of the primary enemy of the state, a revolutionary leader named Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein is so hated by the government that it hosts recurring screamfests (“Two Minutes Hate”) where the people vent all their personal frustrations out on a depiction of Goldstein. But when Winston, the protagonist, is able to ask an inner party member about Goldstein’s banned book, he’s told that it was actually written by the party.

Though there’s some ambiguity in the story as to whether or not the official account is true,⁹ what actually happened in the real world is a lot like the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein. The left that survived in the decades after World War II and even past the fall of the USSR was funded and shaped by the CIA. That’s the only left most of us have ever known, and it’s the same left that then formed the foundation of the social justice identity politics that came after.

The effect of that funding and support was to choke out other leftist frameworks such that we came to believe there was really no alternative except for the one presented to us. Just as with Christianity, where the only alternative to the Christian god is not another god but Satan (a being created by that very same god…), the left we’ve known can never truly threaten capitalism. And that’s why the CIA funded it in the first place.

(Part Two: Anti-Globalization, Anarchists, and the FBI)

1. The word “spectrum” could also apply, but that word’s been overused so much that it often makes me want to vomit.

2. The only general strike ever to occur in the US was organized and led by an anarchist organization, the International Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”).

3. Stalin’s tight control of communist party doctrine was key to his continued power, and also key to communism’s failure.

4. Especially after Stalin’s successor denounced him in an official speech, called the “secret speech” though it wasn’t really very secret.

5. See my essay at Unherd on the Kinderläden for one of the manifestations of this embrace of erotic chaos on the left.

6. Even on the CIA’s website itself.

7. This thoroughly-researched article is really worth your attention: https://www.thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/

8. Marcuse — and not Karl Popper — is also responsible for the leftist belief that intolerance for right wing, discriminatory, or reactionary ideas is the only way to create a truly tolerant society.

9. … and Orwell himself was an anti-communist informant…