The Ghost in the Machine

How the CIA created the modern Left and why the Right still think its a Marxist plot

1 The Postwar Socialist and Communist Surge in the West (1945–1955)

Although largely erased from history, in the wake of WWII, socialist and communist parties across the Western world experienced a dramatic surge in popularity. The devastation of war, the collapse of the ancien regime and memories of capitalism's prewar failures - like the Great Depression - all contributed to an unprecedented political realignment.

From France to Italy, the United Kingdom to Greece, socialist ideologies once relegated to the fringes of the political spectrum surged into mainstream politics, backed by mass movements of workers, intellectuals, and war-weary populations.

In Western Europe, socialist and communist parties were quick to position themselves as champions of reconstruction, social justice, and peace. The old elites were widely discredited after the war—tainted by either collaboration or incompetence. In contrast, communists had often led anti-fascist resistance movements and emerged with enhanced credibility.

The Red Army’s role in defeating Nazi Germany added to the prestige of communism, and the Soviet Union was admired by many in the West as an alternative model of industrial development and anti-fascist strength.

In the US, the popularity of communism and socialist movements led to the Second Red Scare; the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting American society and the federal government prompting a panic that culminated in the Truman Doctrine and series of harsh domestic administrative purges ending in the McCarthy trials.

Now scrubbed from popular memory, the post-1945 decade remains a rare moment when revolutionary socialism seemed like a possible future for the West

2 The Marshall Plan (and the hidden annex)

Public admiration for the socialist left soon collided with rising Cold War tensions as the US and its allies launched a sustained campaign to suppress communist influence. The Marshall Plan (1947) aimed to counter the electoral popularity of communist parties by reconstructing Europe in a social-democratic model.

But the Marshall Plan went much further. In an effort to combat the appeal of revolutionary socialist politics, America’s intelligence services financed a covert revolution of their own—one that now, to some extent, still haunts them. They set out to construct an anti-communist social, cultural and intellectual ecosystem. An alternative ‘anti-establishment left’ that eschewed class politics and rejected revolution in favour of a radical individualist interpretations of social transformation.

By the early 1950s, the Cold War had escalated into a global contest—not just of armies and economies, but of ideas, aesthetics, and intellectual legitimacy. The Soviet Union offered a vision of history, class, and progress. In response, the United States launched its own ideological offensive—not with overt pro-capitalist propaganda, but with beat poetry, modern art, and obscure leftist journals.

Marshall Plan offices - like the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and later the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) provided crucial logistical cover. CCF conferences, publications, and events could be facilitated through ERP offices abroad, masking the CIA's direct involvement. Funds were sometimes laundered through ERP accounts or related foundations.

3 Creating the Ghost in the Machine

Orchestrating this quiet war of ideas was the CIA. Behind the façade of private foundations, literary reviews, and elite academic conferences, the Agency bankrolled a vast ecosystem of anti-communist left-wing intellectuals through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Later, groups like the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations would inherit elements of this mission.

What began as an effort to promote liberal democracy and contain Stalinism birthed an entirely different beast. In financing radical artists, Trotskyists, post-Marxists, and disaffected academics, the CIA helped incubate a culture of critique—one that would ultimately turn on liberalism itself.

Today, the ideological descendants of this milieu are frequently referred to as the “woke” left. To many conservatives, particularly in the United States, they appear as the culmination of a decades-long Marxist subversion.

Ironically, the origins of this movement lie not in Moscow, but in Washington, Langley, and New York boardrooms.

4 Creating the Anti-Communist Cultural Front

In 1950, the CIA formally launched the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a sprawling initiative designed to cultivate a liberal, democratic, anti-Communist cultural elite across the West.

Spearheaded by agents such as Michael Josselson and then head of CIA counter-intelligence and a lover of modernist verse James Jesus Angleton, the CCF became a cultural superpower.

It organised conferences, funded writers and artists, and subsidised over 20 prestigious journals including Encounter (UK), Der Monat (Germany), and Preuves (France). It financed book translations, art exhibitions, and academic events. By the late 1950s, it had become what Frances Stonor Saunders, in her seminal 1999 book Who Paid the Piper?, called “the most significant patron of intellectual life in Western Europe.”

The mission was straightforward: win hearts and minds by backing a left that rejected communism, class consciousness and class conflict; a left which did not question the material structure of capitalism but retained the aura intellectual radicalism. Unlike the American right, which saw socialism as a monolith, the CIA distinguished between different shades of red. Disillusioned communists, Trotskyists, social democrats, and ex-Marxists were seen as useful counterweights to Marxist class analysis.

A bourgeois, respectable left that drank espresso in Paris cafés, not vodka in Kremlin halls.

5 Trotskyists, Abstract Artists, Atonal Musicians and the Strange New Left

Many of the thinkers the CIA supported through intermediaries were formerly aligned with Marxism or Trotskyism. Irving Kristol, co-editor of Encounter and later a founding figure of neoconservatism, was once a youthful Trotskyist. Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, was a former Comintern member turned anti-Soviet polemicist. They, and many like them, became ideological mercenaries in the Cold War battlefield of ideas—compensated not just with salaries but with prestige and platforms.

But it was not just ideas that were funded—aesthetics was, too. In one of the most surreal chapters of the Cold War, the CIA covertly championed Abstract Expressionism, an art movement then seen as radical, nonconformist, and defiantly individualistic. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning—all seen today as quintessentially American artists—were promoted internationally as evidence that liberal societies could produce avant-garde creativity, unshackled by censorship or socialist realism.

Music, too, was weaponised. Atonal and twelve-tone compositions by Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez were promoted across Europe as a dischordant metaphor for freedom and complexity. The Soviets preferred Tchaikovsky and symphonic socialist anthems; the CIA offered dissonance and spontaneity.

• Pierrot lunaire Op.21 : I Mondestrunken · Giuseppe Sinopoli by Arnold Schoenberg

Though the artists and composers often had no idea their careers were being advanced by Langley, the institutional support shaped cultural prestige—and the intellectual terrain that followed.

6 The Frankfurt School and the Expansion of Cultural Critique

As the CIA funded what it considered the “respectable” anti-communist left, another intellectual current—parallel, but not disconnected—was fermenting in American academia.

The Frankfurt School, formally known as the Institute for Social Research, had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and reconstituted itself at Columbia University in New York. Thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and later Jürgen Habermas rejected class politics and attempted to reinterpret Marxism through the lens of culture, psychology, and ideology.

Dissatisfied with the Stalin's Soviet model and sceptical of capitalist democracy, they argued that culture—not class—was the new battlefield. They attacked mass media, consumerism, and technocratic rationality as tools of social control. Their work laid the theoretical foundations for what would later become critical theory, identity politics, and the quagmire of modern “social justice” discourse.

While the CIA did not fund the Frankfurt School directly—indeed, the relationship was sometimes hostile—its cultural infrastructure created an atmosphere in which their ideas could thrive. The Agency’s investments in academic freedom, humanities departments, and anti-communist intellectuals paved the way for radical critiques of capitalism to re-enter polite conversation—albeit through cultural, rather than class, lenses.

By the late 1960s, Herbert Marcuse had become the guru of the New Left, with works like One-Dimensional Man denouncing both capitalist and communist societies as systems of repression. His most enduring idea—repressive tolerance—argued that liberal tolerance enabled domination by allowing reactionary ideas to flourish. This paradox became a central tenet of campus radicalism and later progressive orthodoxy.

• Herbert Marcuse, 1977, the Frankfurt School.

7 From Cold Warriors to Campus Revolutionaries - the Ideological Framework Fractures

By the 1970s, this anti-communist intellectual ecosystem had begun to fracture. The Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and economic crises led a new generation to question not only Soviet-style communism but also American liberalism. Campus radicals who had read Marcuse and Fanon began targeting not Stalin, but the Pentagon, Wall Street, and the university boardroom.

Ironically, they did so from within institutions built by Cold War liberalism—and often funded by it. Many had academic posts thanks to the university expansion boom of the 1950s and 60s, itself underwritten by the national security state and philanthropic organisations like the Ford Foundation.

Ford, which had collaborated with the CIA in the early Cold War period, continued funding programs in race relations, women’s studies, post-colonial theory, and international development well into the 1980s. These grants unintentionally supported radical critiques of Western hegemony, patriarchy, and capitalism—the intellectual pillars of what would become known, by its enemies, as “woke ideology”- identity politics, intersectionality and systemic critique.

8 Enter Yuri Bezmenov

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB informant and self-proclaimed propaganda expert who defected to the West in the 1970s. After settling in Canada and working with the CIA and other offshoots of the Western intelligence community, he began giving lectures and interviews warning of a long-term Soviet strategy of ‘ideological subversion’ - or ‘active measures’ as he also called them - to undermine the US and other Western democracies from within.

Bezmenov, who was most likely a low-level KGB operative and opportunist, claimed to have high-level knowledge of Soviet foreign and espionage policy.

Bezmenov claimed the Soviet Union was engaged in a long-term program of ideological subversion. A slow, systematic process of changing the domestic population’s perception of reality, particularly through academia, media, and cultural institutions.

He identified the four main stages of subversion as:

1. Demoralization – Undermining values and national identity (taking 15–20 years).

2. Destabilization – Targeting the economy, foreign relations, and defence systems (2–5 years).

3. Crisis – A violent change of power or structure.

4. Normalization – A new regime solidifies control under the guise of restoring order.

• Yuri Bezmenov, 1984, explains the long-term stratey of the Soviet Union to subvert the West.

He claimed that the majority of Soviet intelligence work was not espionage in the traditional sense but was engaged in influencing opinion and ideology.

Bezmenov's fantasy convinced the conservative elements most horrified by the emerging 'anti-establishment left' the monster they feared was a Kremlin inspired communist conspiracy.

His claims chimed perfectly with the Zeitgeist of newly elected President Ronald Reagan's 'Morning in America' program and the broader, creeping establishment paranoia that the system was running out of control.

• Donald Rumsfeld, on WMD in 1976 and 2002. Bezmenov’s conspiracy fuelled the neo-conservative ideological project.

This meticulously constructed fantasy bolstered the claims of a nascent neo-conservative movement determined to escalate Cold War tensions; secured the support of the most paranoid elements of the Security State; and bought him a seat on the US intelligence community celebrity gravy train.

But his lasting legacy was cementing the existence of a long-lasting Marxist conspiracy theory among populist right-wing ideologues.

9 Open Society, the Globalization of Cultural Critique and the Collapse of Objective Reality

The anti-establishment sentiment tolerated and sponsored by the intelligence state encouraged criticism of capitalism to be viewed through a cultural lens. Never a class lens. It ended up espousing a radical transformation of society not through class consciousness or material analysis of productive forces but through the radical – and ultimately subjective - transformation of the individual.

Banned from questioning the material structure of capitalism its vision emphasised symbolic gestures, aesthetic choices and championed a subjective interpretation of reality.

As the Cold War ended, a new player entered the scene: George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. In the post-Socialist States of Eastern Europe, Soros began pouring billions into education, civil society and media initiatives. In the U.S. and Western Europe, it funded academic departments, social justice initiatives, and trans-rights activism. Unlike the CIA, Soros made no secret of his mission and his ambition was global.

The line from CCF to Ford to Soros is not one of direct causality but of institutional ecology. Each built upon the networks and assumptions of the previous. Each justified its means by arguing their version of ‘freedom of thought’ was the best bulwark against communism and therefore the best way to preserve the power structure of the West.

The result was a global elite of professors, journalists, artists, and activists steeped in social critique, relativism, subjectivity and moral urgency.

Although still steeped in the cultural legacy of the CCF and the radical left it inspired, George Soros' Open Society’s network of NGOs and media organisations have become tools for reshaping reality into something that accommodates and acquiesces to the necessities of global capital.

The constant fragmenting of group identity and the downward spiral of subjectivity has created an atomised society of isolated and disempowered individuals inoculating society against solidarity.

By promoting aesthetic change as revolution and focusing on the subjectivity of individual human experience it has descended into nihilism. Modern leftist thought has become ideological plasticine that can be reshaped to accommodate the needs of the ruling elite.

It has become a social control mechanism for societies disillusioned with the democracy they were promised, alienated from their ruling elite - and each other - and increasingly contemptuous of the technocrats that now govern with little pretence of legitimacy.

10 The Enduring Myth of a Marxist Plot

Due to the contribution of intellectual mercenaries, frauds, opportunists, spooks, kooks and paid propagandists, many conservatives still believe the ‘modern left’ is part of a grand Marxist conspiracy to subvert society. Indeed, 'Cultural Marxism' has become a catch-all slur for leftist academia and activism.

Although the CIA did not directly invent critical race theory, trans-rights activism or the other extremities of the modern left, by funding the creation of an artificial, anti-communist intellectual ecosystem, it helped finance the infrastructure of critique—philosophical, artistic, and institutional—that birthed the modern cultural left.

That legacy, now fractured and repurposed to fit the needs of global capital, continues to serve not just as a bulwark against communism, but against any form of collective action to halt the army of anodyne technocrats and kleptocratic hedge-fund managers stumbling toward an apocalyptic dystopia.