The historical Frankfurt School was quite socially conservative and far from what is now described as "woke". The actual issue with the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is not that the Frankfurt School somehow didn't exist; it's that they were, quite simply, not involved in the kind of conspiracy that they're sometimes clumsily accused of. Did Western radicals rip off some broad ideas from the Frankfurt School back in the 1960s and 1970s? Of course they did; and "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" was even a common slogan at the time. But really, the bulk of their idealogical memeplex was coming from Marx and especially Mao (as influenced by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four), whilst they mostly ignored what Marcuse would've said.
If we want to debate exactly how much influence the Frankfurt School had - that’s the kind of thing about which reasonable people can disagree-although I still think it had greater influence than you do. See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus...
For me, the big issue is that labelling one side of the discussion as a “far right antisemitic conspiracy theory” is not conducive to having a nuanced historical debate about the topic, instead it is an attempt by one side to shut the discussion down. It is true that some voices in the debate verge on the conspiratorial, or are antisemitic - it is wrong to smear everyone on the same side as that though. Zubatov, who I link to above, is writing in a respectable (right-leaning) Jewish magazine, and I’m guessing is quite possibly Jewish himself - he might be wrong, but I don’t think it is fair to accuse him of promoting a “far right antisemitic conspiracy theory”
I do agree a lot of criticisms from the right turn historical left(-ish) thinkers into caricatures - to give a different example, Foucault. While many want to blame him for contemporary “wokeness”, I think if he were still alive today, he’d be far more critical of it than supportive-especially the censoriousness and corporate entanglements of so much of it. While he was unapologetic about his own same-sex sexual desires, at the same time he criticised “homosexuality” as a historically contingent cultural construct-which is a long way from how most of the contemporary LGBT movement views it. All that said, while many on the right are guilty of this, it wouldn’t be fair to say they all are.
The Tablet article you link to engages in a regrettably common misconception of what Marcuse was actually up to with his Repressive Tolerance. The point there was not to defend society against anything ideologically problematic, but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. That's why it was proposed to favor the most strongly censored and unfashionable ideas at any given time and strive to platform them everywhere, even irrespective of their actual merits. It's quite simply a "chaos monkey" approach to the whole problem of what we now call communication 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers'-- or pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name. It's really sad that more people don't give Herbert Marcuse the credit he is due for that whole idea.
Anyway, the broader point is that Zubatov is not taking a very nuanced view of the historical Frankfurt School here, and critically he's missing their loosely socially-conservative leanings - something that scholars seem to broadly agree on, and a key reason to dismiss purported links between the School and what often passes today as "radical" or sometimes as "socially progressive" thought.
Does Zubatov misunderstand Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School more broadly? Maybe you are right that he does.
But even if he does – that's a long way off being a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory". People, on both left and right, misread history (and especially intellectual history) all the time. Just because someone's got their history wrong, doesn't make them a "conspiracy theorist", much less a "far-right antisemitic" one.
> and critically he's missing their loosely socially-conservative leanings - something that scholars seem to broadly agree on, and a key reason to dismiss purported links between the School and what often passes today as "radical" or sometimes as "socially progressive" thought
I don't think that necessarily follows. Coming back to what I said about Foucault – on the one hand, it is true that attempts to blame Foucault for "wokeness" tend to greatly oversimplify him. On the other hand, I don't think the right has any monopoly on misreading him – I think a lot of people on the left are guilty of reading him in overly simplistic ways, and if one was to claim that some of the excesses of contemporary progressivism have their (partial) origin in left-leaning misreadings of Foucault–that doesn't seem so implausible to me. But if that might be true of Foucault, might not it also be true of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School?
