A Century of Ideological Struggle

A Century of Ideological Struggle

Peter Kopa, Prague, April 24, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkjW6fJEpQ

In this article, we will examine how seven thinkers have managed to change the world with their flawed ideological theories.

Following the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917), revolutionary attempts in Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom failed. The video above explains how the Frankfurt School transformed failed economic Marxism into cultural Marxism, which, instead of seizing power by force, exerted a regrettable influence on universities, the media, art, and politics.

In 1923, the Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt, funded by a communist millionaire, with a stated Marxist objective: to understand why the Marxist revolution failed in the West and to devise a new strategy. The six intellectuals who devised this strategy are: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and Walter Benjamin. Here is a brief summary of their false ideologies:

Horkheimer and Adorno led the Institute, merging Marx with Freud, and concluded that capitalism not only exploits economically but also dominates culturally through the family, sexual morality, religion, education, and art. They proposed that, if the problem is cultural, the solution must be a gradual cultural revolution: taking over universities, the media, education, and the arts to instill Marxist values in the collective consciousness

In exile in the United States, they refine “critical theory” as a method that critiques all Western institutions (oppression, domination, injustice) without offering constructive alternatives. In “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” they maintain, without proving it, that Western reason, science, and progress do not liberate, but are rather sophisticated forms of domination.

Herbert Marcuse: In “Eros and Civilization,” he argues that sexual repression sustains capitalism; the traditional family and Christian sexual morality are mechanisms for producing obedient workers. He proposes “total sexual liberation” and the destruction of the family as a path to liberation; this ideology formed the basis of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and of current gender ideology. In the 1960s, he became a leading figure of the New Left at universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and especially Berkeley.

He considers the Western proletariat to be conservative and opposed to the Marxist revolution. For this reason, he shifts the focus of the revolution toward racial minorities, students, and feminists as expressions of a counterculture, thereby launching identity politics and victimhood as a virtue.

Erich Fromm: He developed a Marxist psychoanalysis in which capitalism generates an “authoritarian personality,” and he associates any defense of authority, hierarchy, or tradition with fascism.

Wilhelm Reich: He argued that sexual repression produces fascism and that the monogamous family is the cell of the fascist state; he had a major influence on the counterculture of the 1960s.

Walter Benjamin: He argues that traditional art and the “aura” of a unique work of art are elitist; he proposes a reproducible, politicized, and activist art, presenting it as the origin of contemporary art centered on provocation and ugliness.

From the ideological laboratory to cultural alienation.

Following the closure of the Institute in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, these thinkers went into exile in the United States and became affiliated with Columbia and other universities, where critical theory took root. After the war, Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany, but Marcuse remained in the U.S. and became the central figure of the new university left.

In 1967, student leader Rudi Dutschke formulated the “long march through the institutions”: he advocated not seizing power by force, but infiltrating it, and transforming universities, the media, education, culture, and the government itself from within. The student protests of 1968 (Paris, Berkeley, Berlin, London) were the result of twenty years of indoctrination in critical theory. They cannot be viewed as spontaneous outbursts or demonstrations.

Second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, anti-psychiatry, and contemporary art all fit within the ideologies of the Frankfurt School: the family as patriarchal oppression, sexual morality as repression, mental illness as a social construct, and classical art as elitist.

Merger with Postmodernism and the Birth of “Wokism”

https://thinktanklatam.org/la-infiltracion-woke-i/

In the 1980s and 1990s, Frankfurt’s ideas merged with French postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard): all knowledge is power, all meaning is unstable, and all grand narratives are oppressive. This combination generates, according to the video, a “lethal ideological cocktail” where there is no truth or human nature and everything is a social construct to be destroyed if perceived as oppressive.

From this emerges Critical Race Theory (Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw), which views American society as structurally racist and proposes reverse discrimination and the “deconstruction of whiteness.” In this ideological flowering without scientific basis, gender studies (Judith Butler) emerge as performative constructions. Postcolonial studies (Edward Said) present Western culture as shameful imperialism and a permanent feature of the West.

The foundation of these falsehoods is critical theory: identifying oppression, criticizing without building, destroying traditional norms, granting absolute moral authority to victims, and making identity politics the central axis.

Contemporary Wokism and Scruton’s Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh8YWYzmfb4&t=39s&pp

“Wokism” is critical theory disseminated massively through social media: it is the ideological breeding ground of the Frankfurt School with 21st-century technology. The effects of Marxist dialectics are scandalous: between 70 and 80% of university faculty have been progressive leftists, and the humanities are still steeped in critical theory. Corporations tend to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion as the Frankfurt School’s ideological language applied to business. Governments and the media use identity politics, quotas, and reverse discrimination, and activist journalism operates in these waters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=how23YO8vgM

Roger Scruton is the great British critic who saw this evolution before anyone else, especially in his book *Thinkers of the New Left*, and was canceled for speaking out against it. “Cultural Marxism” is therefore not a conspiracy theory, but a documented history with names, dates, institutions, texts, and a strategy: the long march to take over institutions and the cancellation of traditional values that led to today’s wokism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

Cultural Marxism has managed to spread because it exploits the baser tendencies of human nature, all the more so if a person has not had a family to provide them with an upbringing grounded in virtue and faith. It is evident that the traditional teachings on the seven deadly sins (pride and arrogance, greed, gluttony, lust, envy, wrath, and sloth) reveal that ideologies derived from Marxism draw their apparent strength from these human basenesses. This is how communist and Nazi crimes, the crime of promoting free love, the dismantling of the family, etc., are justified. However, this deception is coming to an end because men may be foolish, but not for more than a hundred years.

This entire process shows us the enormous importance of universities, professors, and intellectuals, especially in the field of the humanities. But if they do not start from the premises of the great Greek and Judeo-Christian philosophers, they will end up succumbing to ideological seductions seasoned with human baseness. It is interesting to note that the right has always produced and built, while the left has always distributed and destroyed.