Right-wing conspiracies cannot explain the left’s crisis
Kajsa Ekis Ekman raises in his review for Aftonbladet culture Gabriel Rockhills “Who paid the pipers of western Marxism” to the skies. In the book, Rockhill tries to show how Marxist intellectuals in the West have been used as tools by the US security service C.I.A during the post-war period. The goal has been to isolate the influence of the Soviet Union through the communist parties of the West.
This is not news. While there was a frantic hunt in American society for suspected communists in the 50s, the CIA simultaneously funneled cultural contributions to European liberal and left-wing writers. In this way, they tried to create a cultural scene that was free from Soviet influence. Or, in Rockhill’s view, get cultural workers in Europe to become anti-communist. Here in Sweden, writers who Vilhelm Moberg, Harry Martinson and Birgitta Stenberg such financial support, without transparency where the money came from.
Gabriel Rockhill tries in his book go one step further. It was not only the writers of the 50s who were financed with CIA money, but also a large part of the Marxist intellectuals who left the communist parties in Europe after Stalin’s crimes became known. From that he builds a dagger thrust legend for the European left.
Is it the case that the Marxist theories that emerged in the post-war period in Western Europe aimed to kill the left. That critical theory, postmodernism, gender studies and queer theory are just part of an evil plan?
It is the fault of these Western intellectuals that the left in Europe has become so paralyzed, says Ekman.
The analysis becomes noticeable idealistic. It is not because of globalization or neoliberalism in the West, with its factory closures and fractured factory working class, that the left is weakened. Instead, it is because Marxist intellectuals have started to spread complicated academic theories, speak fig language and left Stalinism, that the great workers’ parties in the West are crumbling.
A few hip sponsored academics were enough to push back the strike waves of the 60s and 70s.
Here Rockhill and Ekman’s analysis of the Western Marxists becomes not only idealistic, it becomes conspiratorial. The new theories are described as a dangerous poison, a virus that has spread and killed the left.
“Everyone on the Swedish left should take a good look at their values and examine where they come from,” writes Ekman.
This paranoid we have seen the show before. It is just a repackaging of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy, which the conservative right-wing populists worldwide have named as their number one enemy. A ghost with many names: woke, political correctness or gender ideology.
At the same time as Rockhill’s book came out AJ Woods “The cultural marxism conspiracy – Why the right blames the Frankfurt school for the decline of the west” on Verso. Woods describes how the Marxist so-called Frankfurt School, Jewish Marxists who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany, are made a scapegoat for everything the American conservative right sees as problems in society.
Woods traces the ideas to a sect around Lyndon LaRouche within the American student movement in 1968, sees how they gain a foothold through the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party. They spread within the extreme right and appear in as well Anders Breivik manifesto after the massacre at Utöya and i Mattias Karlsson speech for the Sweden Democrats. Now they are official policy for Trump’s administration.
Cultural Marxism is claimed to have infiltrated the political institutions to overthrow Western civilization. The ideology has spread like a “woke mind virus”, with Elon Musk’s words, causing children to want to be trans, families to break up and men to be demasculinized.
The only way to protect society is to bring out the chainsaw. University educations, school libraries, cultural grants and discrimination laws must be slaughtered.
In Rockhill’s book, this conspiracy is recast in a left-wing package. The enemy is the same, the Frankfurt School and the Western Marxists as a hidden threat that has infiltrated and corrupted society from within, through a cultural struggle.
In its right-wing variant, it is Western civilization that the cultural Marxists want to crush, in the left-wing version it is Eastern real socialism.
In Rockhills and Ekman’s bottling gives the theory a new anti-imperialist spin. The Western Marxists became an anti-communist tool for the CIA to crush the Soviet Union, the only bloc that could give support to anti-colonial movements.
Today, the Cultural Marxists are carrying out the same attack on the anti-imperialist bloc, by refusing to support China, Russia and Iran – the only countries left that can arm resistance movements. That is, the Axis of Resistance with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Today’s left is characterized, writes Ekman, by the fact that it “condemns resistance movements but which does not even manage to remove Israeli oranges from Ica”.
Why is culture warfare so important for today’s right-wing populism? That question is left unanswered. If these Western Marxists are now an opposition created by US imperialism to crush the left – then why is the right worldwide waging a “war against the woke”?
How can the resistance against the “gender and trans ideology”, anti-racism and minority rights today be so central to the right? Why is there a hunt for “activists” in authorities, chainsaws are put in university courses and climate commitments are torn up?
There, Rockhill and Ekman fall silent. They have no say in that matter. It becomes too obvious that they have nothing to object to that right-wing reaction.
Mathias Wåg is a journalist and monitors the far-right media and activist environment. He is responsible publisher for the magazine Brand.
