By Musa T. Bey

In the long struggle against capitalist domination, the mid-20th century witnessed a profound rupture—an intellectual and political insurgency that redefined the meaning of revolution, oppression, and liberation. This rupture found its expression in two interlinked movements: the New Left and the Frankfurt School. Emerging from different yet overlapping traditions, these movements broke with the rigidity of Stalinism, the economism of orthodox Marxism, and the hollowness of Western liberalism. They challenged not only the economic foundations of capitalism but also its psychological, cultural, and ideological apparatuses.

Where the Old Left had often been fixated on the “base”—the factory floor, the industrial working class, the wage relation—the New Left and the Frankfurt School turned their gaze toward the superstructure: the family, the school, the prison, the media, and the internalized structures of domination embedded within the modern psyche. Together, they revived Marxism as a living critique and infused revolutionary praxis with a deeper understanding of culture, desire, and power.

The New Left: A New Politics for a New Era

The New Left emerged in the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s, driven by a generation of students, intellectuals, artists, and organizers who were disillusioned with both the Western liberal order and the authoritarianism of Soviet-style communism. It was born in the context of decolonization, civil rights struggles, anti-war resistance, and global student uprisings. Across the world—from the Black radical tradition in the United States to the anti-imperialist revolts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—a new constellation of revolutionary forces began to emerge that refused to be boxed into traditional leftist paradigms.

The New Left emphasized the totality of human liberation. This was not a movement interested solely in questions of wages or nationalization; it was a movement that interrogated alienation in the classroom, racism in the streets, sexism in the home, and imperialism abroad. It championed participatory democracy over party centralism, grassroots organizing over bureaucratic politics, and consciousness transformation over mechanical economic determinism.

In the United States, groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) voiced a generational revolt against both capitalism and Cold War conformity. Their 1962 Port Huron Statement called for a radical reimagining of democracy—one grounded in human dignity, agency, and collective self-determination. Simultaneously, the Black Power movement, the Chicano movement, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation emerged not as side currents, but as essential pillars of a new revolutionary imagination. The New Left saw oppression as intersectional—rooted in race, gender, sexuality, and colonial domination, as much as in class exploitation.

Perhaps most critically, the New Left revived revolutionary subjectivity—placing the question of who the agents of change could be at the center of theory and practice. No longer was the white male industrial worker the exclusive engine of revolution. In his place stood the colonized, the student, the woman, the queer, the prisoner, the artist, and the insurgent poor.

The Frankfurt School: Rethinking Marxism from the Inside Out

Parallel to this political ferment, the Frankfurt School—formally known as the Institute for Social Research—had been forging a radical critique of modernity since its founding in 1923 in Weimar Germany. Comprised of thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and later Jürgen Habermas, the Frankfurt School combined Marxism, psychoanalysis, German idealism, and cultural critique into a powerful intellectual weapon aimed at the heart of modern capitalist society.

The Frankfurt theorists understood that the failures of classical Marxism were not merely strategic or organizational—they were theoretical and philosophical. Why, they asked, had the working class in the West not risen up, even amid deepening alienation and inequality? Why had fascism triumphed in the most advanced capitalist societies? Why was revolutionary consciousness being eclipsed by mass apathy, consumerism, and conformity?

Their answer lay in a new understanding of ideology and subjectivity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the very rationality which had promised human liberation had instead become a tool of domination—producing instrumental reason, bureaucracy, and the culture industry. The media, entertainment, and mass culture did not simply reflect society—they shaped it, pacifying rebellion and manufacturing consent.

Marcuse, the bridge between Frankfurt theory and the New Left, brought these critiques into sharper political focus. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), he argued that advanced industrial capitalism had created a system of repressive desublimation—offering superficial freedoms (sex, consumption, lifestyle) to contain deeper desires for real emancipation. True liberation, for Marcuse, required the abolition of both economic exploitation and the internal psychic structures that kept people tethered to systems of domination.

What made the Frankfurt School revolutionary was its refusal to reduce people to mere economic categories. They insisted on understanding how capitalism shapes our dreams, our fears, our pleasures, and our internal contradictions. They showed that power is not only external—it is also internalized, woven into our habits, our language, our very consciousness.

Convergence and Legacy: Reclaiming Total Liberation

Though distinct in form, the New Left and the Frankfurt School were bound by a shared urgency: to renew the revolutionary tradition by confronting the totality of capitalist domination—not just in the workplace, but in the mind, the body, and the soul.

This convergence became especially clear in the 1960s and 70s, as Marcuse’s writings inspired a generation of students, feminists, Black radicals, and Third World revolutionaries. Marcuse mentored and influenced Angela Davis, who herself became a powerful voice in the intersection of Black liberation, prison abolition, and critical theory. The Black Panther Party, with its critiques of fascism, colonialism, and psychological warfare, embodied many of the insights pioneered by the Frankfurt School—albeit reinterpreted through a revolutionary nationalist and anti-imperialist lens.

The Frankfurt School’s emphasis on ideology, repression, and culture helped radical thinkers understand why racism, sexism, and nationalism persist even among the working class. It helped illuminate the cultural and psychological conditions that reproduce capitalism even in the absence of overt coercion.

Meanwhile, the New Left opened the gates for intersectional and decolonial politics. It shattered the myth of a universal proletarian subject and elevated the struggles of women, queers, colonized peoples, and the Global South. It expanded the revolutionary terrain to include not just factories and fields, but also kitchens, classrooms, bedrooms, prisons, and minds.

Conclusion: Toward a New Synthesis

Today, amid the resurgence of authoritarianism, the commodification of every sphere of life, and the climate catastrophe of racial capitalism, the insights of the New Left and the Frankfurt School are more urgent than ever. They remind us that no true liberation is possible without a transformation of both material conditions and human consciousness. That emancipation requires not just seizing power, but dismantling the systems—economic, cultural, psychological—that make domination feel natural.

To inherit their legacy is not to repeat their theories, but to extend them—to forge new revolutionary practices rooted in today’s struggles: abolition, decolonization, mutual aid, and collective healing. It is to believe that another world is possible—and to recognize that the terrain of that struggle runs not only through capital and the state, but through memory, desire, and imagination.

The New Left gave us a vision. The Frankfurt School gave us tools. The task of our time is to wield both in the service of total liberation