When Marxist Intellectuals Collaborated With the CIA

In agreement with the highly respected recent work of Daniel Immerwahr and David Vine and other contemporary radical scholars, Garbriel Rockhill’s new book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, The Intellectual World War. reinforces the by now quite widely-held notion that there is a US empire. Following World War II and the establishment of cold war and the US national security state, a global intellectual contest was underway between those promoting and those opposing the political/philosophical hegemony of US imperial interests. A key element in the political economy of the US knowledge production system was (and is) a CIA partnership with elite universities and Cold War scholars, key corporate foundations, federal research projects, and the top leaders of the corporate mass media. Utilizing wide-ranging archival documentation, Rockhill’s book establishes these interconnections anew (previously adumbrated by Parenti, Mills, Domhoff, etc), and he does so in admirable depth. There was a concerted endeavor to draw critical social commentary into the “compatible” (150) Western Marxist camp and away from what Rockhill sees as the incompatible revolutionary Marxism practiced by Che (whom he lionizes in his first several pages and sees as emblematic of a Marxist fighter and leader in Cuba and Bolivia, in the end assassinated by CIA-linked operatives. Rockhill views Che’s legacy as consistent with other leading lights, such as Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro (338), who were at the helm of real socio-economic alternatives to capitalism in practice.

Given the accompanying context of ideological contestation, Rockhill investigates the systems of US knowledge production and counterrevolution for what they were [and continue to be]. This is a worthy project, and Rockhill’s skepticism is warranted with regard to radical intellectuals (like Marcuse, Neumann and many others) serving with the intelligence services of the US government during and after WW II, especially in connection with certain New Left criticisms of Old Left policies. He sees himself as defending anti-imperialist Marxism against the “imperial theory industry.” This industry is considered to be part of the US imperial project, and his mission is unveiling the intellectual “pipers” it paid and those who paid them.

Postmoderists and posthumanists like Foucault and Derrida figure prominently in Rockhill’s generally perceptive critique. The most pernicious “franchise” (157) of this industry is taken to be the critical theory of Frankfurt School, however. Rockhill makes a strong case against Horkheimer and Adorno as anticommunists caught up in various ways in CIA front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with Adorno publishing in the CIA-funded journal, Der Monat (183); this, in spite of being under surveillance for over a decade by the FBI while in exile in the US! A telling sign of their intellectual compliance was their realigned focus on the empirical methods of American sociology and psychology upon their return to Frankfurt after the war to lead the reconstituted Institute for Social Research. The Institute was funded in large measure through US government support, as well as from UNESCO, and German government sources. Rockhill’s research in this regard rewards the critical reader, who may already have some intimation of the politically conservative side of Adorno and Horkheimer’s perspective on Marxism. There are many discouraging revelations, too numerous to enter into here, and Rockhill’s criticisms are perfectly cogent and unobjectionable.

Rockhill is careful enough to state that his book’s purpose is not to argue that we should completely disregard the work of the Frankfurt School and other Western Marxists: “we should learn anything that we can from them” (331).  Still, his work on Herbert Marcuse in particular carries forward the rather inflammatory articles from Progressive Labor Magazine, “Herbert Marcuse’s Philosophy of Cop Out” (Israel and Russell, 1968) and “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop” (N.A. 1969). These pieces articulated the fundamentals of Rockhill’s  Marcuse critique more than fifty years before his latest book.

In 1996 I visited the Frankfurt Marcuse archive, where I acquired copies of the studies Marcuse  produced while he was undertaking research for the Office of Strategic Services. Separately from my investigations, these archival materials were published by Douglas Kellner in War, Technology, and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume 1 (1998) and Peter-Erwin Jansen in Feindanalysen (1998). Rolf Wiggershaus tells us that in 1941 Horkheimer had lowered Marcuse’s Institute salary as a means of pressuring him into finding other sources of income and ultimately into separating himself monetarily from the Institute and its foundation, while continuing to identify intellectually with it (Wiggershaus 1988, 295, 331–332, 338). Thus, Marcuse found employment during World War II doing research on German fascism with the research branch of the OSS. I acquired copies of the archived projects from this period like “The New German Mentality,” “State and Individual Under National Socialism,” “German Social Stratification.” One of the most radical pieces, written immediately after his government service in 1947 has uncanny currency given the rise of neofascism in the US today. This study was titled “33 Theses toward the Military Defeat of Hitler-Fascism” ([1947] 1998, 215). It theorizes neofascism as the emergent political expression of totalitarian governance in the advanced industrial countries of the anti-Soviet post-war West. “[T]he world is dividing into a neofascist and a Soviet camp. … [T]here is only one alternative for revolutionary theory: to ruthlessly and openly criticize both systems and to uphold without compromise orthodox Marxist theory against both” ([1947] 1998, 217). I discussed all of these materials in my Art, Alienation and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse(SUNY Press 2000). I found that Marcuse was doing assiduous work against fascism at a time when the US and USSR were allies against Hitler. “33 Theses,” in contrast to Rockhill’s main criterion of Marxist revisionism, does notdraw social theory into a camp compatible with US imperialism, quite the contrary. Marcuse did not hesitate to see the US as itself tending towards a neofascist future.  Marcuse’s most militant and lengthy critique of fascism/neofascism is in a 1972 piece, “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy”—never published until Kellner’s 2001 volume 2 of Marcuse’s archival papers. In the context of the Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency, Marcuse concluded that “bourgeois democracy no longer presents an effective barrier to fascism ([1972] 2001, 176). It is a “regressive development of bourgeois democracy, its self transformation into a police and warfare state” ([1972] 2001, 165) supported by the sadomasochistic tolerance of a “free” people—“tolerance of the crooks and maniacs who govern them” ([1972] 2001, 171).

Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958) was written while working at the Russian Institute of Columbia University and the Russian Research Center at Harvard. It depicted Soviet philosophy and politics as expressions of a technological rationality, promoting bureaucracy, and reducing art to aesthetic realism, etc., all of which were regarded as untenable (one-dimensional) in his critical Marxist terms. Marcuse’s book did something unique and unexpected distinguishing his Soviet Marxism from Cold War-fueled political writing: he fearlessly risked censure in the US by comparing US and Soviet culture, finding them both wanting. He saw the US and Soviet systems as equally worthy of fundamental social critique. “It has been noted … how much the present ‘communist spirit’ resembles the ‘capitalist spirit’ which Max Weber attributed to the rising capitalist civilization” (Marcuse [1958] 1961, 169). Marcuse in 1958 did not back away from profound criticisms of US culture in Soviet Marxism that led him also to be branded as “anti-American.” This was a major departure from the much more cautious politics of the Horkheimer inner circle as well as from the conventional wisdom in the US academic sphere. Marcuse utilized a clearly dialectical perspective in Soviet Marxism, and this was crucial in the development of critical theory.

Subsequently, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization specifically criticized American schooling as single dimensional, opposing “… the overpowering machine of education and entertainment … [which unites us all] … in a state of anesthesia …” ([1955] 1966, 104). One-Dimensional Man (1964) would consolidate his incisive new type of Marxist criticism of US culture. According to its famous first sentence: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress” (Marcuse 1964, 1, emphasis added). ODM argues that there is a tendency for the wholesale integration of the individual into mass society. His expanded theory of alienation emphasizes the trend toward the total absorption of the personality into the processes and systems of capitalist commodity production. This gives rise to a new kind of totalitarianism, unlike that formerly characteristic of fascist societies. With this work, Marcuse established his key and characteristic argument that US culture is politically and economically coordinated, “totally administered” (1964, 85) with conventional discourse “fixed, doctored, loaded” (1964, 94).  His next works, An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) promote an explicitly activist politics against US war-making and imperialism.

As a makeshift Marxist and critical theorist myself, who–full disclosure–has published four monographs on the life and work of Herbert Marcuse in the past twenty-five years (with no funding other than a single semester-long research sabbatical from my community college), I do find Rockhill’s “deep dive” (61) into Marcuse’s work to be astonishingly faulty  in depicting his work as that of an archetypal pied piper paid to use Marxism in a defanged manner that also somehow defends the imperial world project of the US. Nothing in Marcuse is a defense of Western society in Marxist or any other terms. Marcuse had the civic courage and also the philosophical means—due to his association with the traditions of classical German philosophy, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School—to break through what he explicitly criticized in ODM as the “pre-established harmony between scholarship and the national purpose” (19) and the paralysis of critique characteristic of our mid-century US triumphalism and parochialism.

Rockhill condemns a person as anticommunist for criticizing the Soviet Union—much as right wing Israelis condemn a person as antisemitic for criticizing Israel today.

Speaking of Israel, Rockhill accuses Marcuse of supporting Israel’s settler colonial project. Quite the contrary is the case. Marcuse remarked on Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1972— “The national aspirations of the Palestinian people could be met by the establishment of a national Palestinian state alongside Israel. [This] would be left to the self-determination of the Palestinian people in a referendum under supervision by the United Nations. The optimal solution would be the coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs as equal members of a socialist federation of Middle Eastern states. This is still a utopian prospect” (Marcuse 2005a, 182). Of course, “prerequisite to anything must be the idea of the continuation of an Israeli state” (2005a, 181) able to defend itself and “capable of preventing the repetition of the holocaust” (2005a, 180). To be serious as social critics, Marcuse admonishes us, we must understand clearly that we live in a world where another “Auschwitz is still possible” (2019, 49). He never knew how darkly ironic that realization would become.

Marcuse addressed the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts of the ’60s and ’70s in four disparate yet direct statements—“Thoughts on Judaism, Israel, etc.” ([1977] 2005a); “Israel is Strong Enough to Concede” ([1972] 2005b); his conversation with Israeli Defense Minister Mosha Dayan ([1971] 2012); and in the “Interview with Street Journal” ([1970] 2014). We owe it to Israeli scholar Zvi Tauber (2013; 2012), who has studied these and other Marcuse materials closely, such that we have a conclusive account of Marcuse’s critique of Israeli policies vis à vis Palestine well prior to the Israel-Gaza War of 2023–2025: “Marcuse’s view regarding the State of Israel stands in contrast to the prevalent Zionist ideology on a crucial matter: he does not recognize the historical-mythical rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, rights ostensibly originating in the Bible or in some belief in the Land’s primordial belonging to this people, ostensibly valid throughout history to this day … [T]he very establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and its conquests in the Six-Day War were for Marcuse also unjust to the Palestinians … ” (Tauber 2013, 129). “Marcuse was surprised to hear an explicit admission from then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan … that the State of Israel was in fact established on Palestinian land” (Tauber 2013, 129–130).

Tauber makes it clear that Dayan, in sharp contrast to Marcuse, thought that Israel had a right to the land. Marcuse was struck by how this admission undergirded the case one could make that Israel’s history is in fact that of a colonial settler state. After having been a defender of Israel’s policies earlier in his life, by 1970 Marcuse had had a radical change of heart after an Amnesty International report of the Israeli torture of Arab prisoners and learning that 32 children had been killed in a bombing near Cairo: “Now if these reports are correct, it seems to me that precisely as a Jew and as a member of the New Left, I can no longer defend Israeli policies, and that I have to agree with those who are radically critical of Israel” (Marcuse [1970] 2014, 354).

I recognize much that is worthwhile in the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and also much that is worthy of criticism from the point of view of a classical dialectical and historical materialism. It is true that One-Dimensional Man has been often misunderstood as an anti-manifesto of the paralysis of the critical mind, oppositional politics, and a deep philosophical pessimism. There are reasons for this in Marcuse’s text: one clear example is the heading to his Introduction, “The Paralysis of Criticism: Society Without Opposition.” It is also true that Marcuse is noted for his contention there that that labor, narcotized and anaesthetized by consumerism and in collusion with business priorities, lacks a critical appreciation of the potential of its own politics to transform the established order. Marcuse’s 1966 conference presentation to the Prague Hegel Symposium seemingly also rejected a central tenet of Marxist philosophy: internal contradiction as the essence of dialectics. Marcuse’s philosophy has, at key junctures, displaced the paradigm of historical materialism with a dialectics of love and death encapsulated within tragic paradox and an aesthetic ontology (Reitz 2000). Today, viewing Marcuse’s life’s work as a whole, however, I recognize that there is a double line of interpretation that emerges in his philosophizing in which two robust paradigms are dialectically intertwined, yet both have distinctive criteria for critical insight (Reitz, 2019, 2023. 2025). The ontological/hermeneutic paradigm is subjectively self-contained and considers meaning in self-referential (i.e. human) terms. That is, in terms of the internal turmoil and distress supposedly inherent in the depth dimension of the human condition (with Eros and Thanatos as the core sensual forces). This conflict is theorized as revealed, enclosed, and preserved by the aesthetic form, and its truth is untethered to societal and historical particulars. In my view, the historical materialist side of Marcuse’s critical social theory ultimately gains greater explanatory power and retains a malleability and freedom from apriori categorization because it remains externally referential. Because it continually implicates art and knowledge in a structural and historical analysis of social life, it possesses a capacity to construct and engage that context. It can also raise the problems and prospects of intervention against the material structure of oppression in ways the ontological / hermeneutical approach brackets out.

Classical Marxist continuities are present throughout Marcuse’s writings. Marcuse maintained that the most important duty of the intellectual was to investigate destructive social circumstances — and be engaged in activities of transformation toward justice and peace. “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible” (1964 xiii).

Marcuse’s collected works directly address what concerns us most today: neofascism, genocide and ecocide in Gaza; ecological destruction of the planet, as well as the crisis of the university. In Marcuse one encounters what is lacking in other members of the Frankfurt School: an analysis of advanced industrial society and a view of labor as resource with strategic power ([1974] 2015). “The working class still is the ‘ontological’ antagonist of capital ….” ([1979] 2014). He is the singular member of the Frankfurt School to occupy himself with wide-ranging ecological issues (Reitz 2019). He also stands out as having declared that Marxism needs feminism ([1974] 2005c). It is distressing and sad that Rockhill excludes Marcuse categorically, grouping him with the others he has quite rightly criticized. It’s bittersweet to note that Marcuse wrote approvingly of Che in 1969 (as does Rockhill today) as the symbol of the Cuban revolution, who was “very far from the Stalinist bureaucrats, very near the socialist man” (1969). Marcuse was not an antagonist to revolutionary Marxism, but a critical ally to anyone struggling against US imperialism and its knowledge production system.

Works Cited

Jansen, Peter-Erwin, ed. 1998. Herbert Marcuse, Feindanalysen, Über die Deutschen. Lüneburg, Germany: zu Klampen Verlag.

Israel, Jared and William Russell. 1968. “Herbert Marcuse and his Philosophy of Cop Out” Progressive Labor, V. 6, N. 5.

Kellner, Douglas, ed. 1998. War, Technology, and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 1.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1947] 1998a. “33 Theses toward the Military Defeat of Hitler Fascism,” in Douglas Kellner (Ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism: Volume 1, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1955] 1966. Eros and Civilization. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1958] 1961. Soviet Marxism, A Critical Analysis. New York: Vintage.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1969] 2014. “Interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte” in Marxism, Revolution and Utopia, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6. Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1970] 2014. “Interview with Street Journal,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (Eds.), Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia: Volume 6, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1971] 2012. “Protocol of the Conversation between Philosopher Herbert Marcuse and Israel’s Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan (December 29, 1971),” Telos, Number 158.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972] 2001. “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Volume 2, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972, 1977] 2005a. “Thoughts on Judaism, Israel, etc.,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge. The 1977 material repeats many of Marcuse’s 1972 statements from: “Isreal is Strong Enough to Concede,” same volume.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1972, 1977] 2005b. “Isreal is Strong Enough to Concede,” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2015. Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974. Edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen and Charles Reitz. Philadelphia, PA: International Herbert Marcuse Society.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1974] 2005c. “Marxism and Feminism” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Volume 3, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. [1979] 2014. “The Reification of the Proletariat,” in Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds.) Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution, and Utopia, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. Volume 6. New York and London: Routledge.

Marcuse, Herbert. 2019. Ecology and the Critique of Society Today: Five Selected Papers for the Current Context. Philadelphia, PA: The International Herbert Marcuse Society.

N.A. 1969. “Marcuse: Cop-Out or Cop?” Progressive Labor, V. 6.

Reitz, Charles. 2025. Herbert Marcuse as Social Justice Educator. New York and London: Routledge.

Reitz, Charles. 2023. The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse: Ecosocialism and the EarthCommonWealth Project. Cantley, Quebec: Daraja Press.

Reitz, Charles. 2019. Ecology and Revolution. Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System. New York and London: Routledge.

Reitz, Charles. 2000. Art, Alienation, and the Humanities:  A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Tauber, Zvi. 2013. “Herbert Marcuse on Jewish Identity, the Holocaust, and Israel,” Telos, Number 165.

Tauber, Zvi. 2012. “Herbert Marcuse on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: His Conversation with Moshe Dayan,” Telos, Number 158.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1988. Die Frankfurter Schule. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

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