Overview
Three separate things share this name, and almost every argument about it is really a failure to keep them apart.
There is the Frankfurt School, a real group of philosophers and social scientists who produced a substantial body of work. There is a small, unrelated academic usage of the phrase "cultural Marxism" in British cultural studies. And there is the claim that the first of these wrote a deliberate plan to destroy Western civilisation, which is the subject of this article.
The claim has a documented history. It can be traced to particular texts, by particular authors, published in particular years — which is more than can be said for the plan it describes.
The Frankfurt School
The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923. Max Horkheimer became its director in 1931 and set its intellectual agenda. Its associated thinkers included Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and later Jürgen Habermas.
What they produced is generally called critical theory: in the Stanford Encyclopedia's description, a family of theories aiming at "a critique and transformation of society by integrating normative perspectives with empirically informed analysis of society's conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies."
The Institute's history is not obscure. It left Germany after 1933, relocating via Geneva to Columbia University in 1934 and to Los Angeles in 1941. It returned to Germany after the war, with Horkheimer directing from 1951 to 1958 and Adorno from 1958 to 1969. Its best-known works are Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), The Authoritarian Personality (1950), and Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964).
One point matters for what follows: "cultural Marxism" is not a term these thinkers used of themselves.
The other cultural Marxism
There is an unrelated and entirely uncontroversial scholarly use of the phrase, describing a British postwar intellectual tradition — E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall — and the emergence of cultural studies at Birmingham. Dennis Dworkin's history of it was published by Duke University Press in 1997.
That lineage is British, postwar, and separate from the Frankfurt School. The political scientist Jérôme Jamin has written specifically about how the same phrase migrated from this register into a conspiracy claim, describing his subject as "Cultural Marxism as a regular theory in social sciences with its own history, and as a global conspiracy theory," and asking when one became the other.
The claim
The conspiracy version holds that the Frankfurt School's purpose was to destroy Western culture from within, that its members set out to do this deliberately, and that what is now called political correctness is the result.
Its canonical statement is by William S. Lind, in a booklet the Free Congress Foundation published in November 2004. Lind's formulation is direct: "Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism — Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms." He had given the same argument in an address in February 2000: "In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today."
The 2004 booklet describes the Institute as founded by "a group of Marxists" for that purpose, and quotes György Lukács as having stated its aim: "Who shall save us from Western Civilization?"
That sentence is worth pausing on, because it does not fit the historical record on its face. Lukács was not a founder of the Institute for Social Research, and the account of the Institute's 1923 founding and Horkheimer's 1931 agenda does not describe an organisation established to translate Marxism into cultural terms. The quotation is load-bearing for the claim and is attached to the wrong person.
Where it came from
The best-known early full statement of the claim is an essay titled "The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'," published in the winter of 1992 in Fidelio, a journal of the movement around Lyndon LaRouche. It calls the Institute "the single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy" and states that its task was "first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an 'abolition of culture'."
The essay carries no byline on the archive copy that survives, but it is attributed to Michael J. Minnicino by Martin Jay and others who have traced the genealogy.
Jay — who wrote the standard history of the Frankfurt School in 1973 — describes the essay's provenance as "particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult."
It was not quite the beginning. The journalist Andrew Woods has documented LaRouche-network attacks on the Frankfurt School going back to 1974, including a three-part series by Minnicino himself in 1988, though those earlier texts did not use the phrase. What 1992 supplied was the full, quotable synthesis.
From there it moved rightward. Jay records that in 1999 the Free Congress Foundation broadcast "an hour-long, skillfully crafted exposé of 'Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School,' which was put together largely by William Lind." Lind's addresses and the 2004 booklet followed. Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West, published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2002 — some sources give 2001 — carried it further into general circulation.
Woods also reports something the claim's later users rarely mention: after the 2011 Norway attacks, Minnicino publicly disowned his own essay, writing that his research on the Frankfurt School had been "hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support" LaRouche.
The older charge
The most substantial scholarly observation about the claim concerns not its 1992 origin but its resemblance to something much older.
Jay describes the term as "a recycling of the old Weimar conservative charge of 'cultural Bolshevism' aimed at aesthetic modernists." Kulturbolschewismus was a real propaganda category in Germany before and during the Nazi period, applied to modernist art and thought as culturally corrosive and alien.
That continuity is Jay's judgment rather than a settled finding, and it is stated here as his. It carries particular weight because he is the historian who wrote the School's history, and because he is describing a resemblance between a charge made against the Institute in its own lifetime and a charge made against it seventy years later.
The structure of the claim
The leading figures of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, and fled Germany because of it. This bears on how the claim is built, and the scholarship addresses it directly.
Joan Braune, writing in the peer-reviewed Journal of Social Justice in 2019, argues that the theory "trades on the Frankfurt School's perceived Jewishness and amplifies antisemitic tropes." Her specific observation concerns the shape of the story rather than any slur in it: proponents present the School as having arrived in America and turned on its host, which she reads as "harkening back to Nazi portrayals of the Jews as unpatriotic backstabbers in World War I."
Jay makes a related observation about how the argument works without saying anything explicit. "Although there is scarcely any direct reference to the ethnic origins of the School's members," he writes, "subtle hints allow the listener to draw his own conclusions about the provenance of foreigners who tried to combine Marx and Freud." On the claim that the exiles set out to attack the country that sheltered them, he notes the difficulty plainly: it treats "the very people who had to flee the Nazis" as though they "had been responsible for what they were fleeing."
Braune sets against this a set of facts about what these people actually did during the war. Adorno's work was substantially concerned with authoritarianism and antisemitism. Marcuse and Franz Neumann worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the American wartime intelligence agency, and contributed to denazification planning.
The men described as having plotted the destruction of the West spent the war helping the United States defeat fascism.
2011
On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed seventy-seven people in Norway. His manifesto, running to around fifteen hundred pages, was organised around the cultural Marxism claim, and cited the 1992 essay directly.
Jamin's chapter on the subject traces the term "from its origins to its use in Anders Breivik's manifesto released shortly before the Oslo and Utøya massacres," through Buchanan's use in the 2000s and its reappearance in Breivik's text and at his trial.
This is stated as documented fact and nothing more. A great many people have used this phrase without any relationship to that act, and it would be false to suggest otherwise. What is true, and worth recording in an article about where an idea came from, is that the manifesto was built on it and cited its source text.
Where it stands
Jay, writing before the Norway attacks, described the trajectory as one in which "what began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public."
The factual position is narrow and can be stated without argument. The Institute for Social Research existed and its work is available to read. The claim that it authored a plan to destroy the West is not found in that work; it appears first in a movement journal in 1992, was popularised by a Washington foundation later that decade, and reproduces the structure of a charge levelled at the same institution by its enemies in the Weimar Republic.
The reason it works is that it is unfalsifiable in a specific way: it explains any cultural change the reader dislikes as the product of a plan, which makes the absence of the plan a feature rather than a problem.