The New Left are adherents of neo-Marxism. Neo-Marxism is a political school of thought from the 20th century that questioned classical Marxism while retaining revolutionary communist ideas. Historically, neo-Marxism was strongly associated with the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt, where the development of critical theory as the “Frankfurt School” began.313
Among the best-known representatives of the New Left are Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis. The central distinguishing feature between Marxism and neo-Marxism was the rejection of the inevitable course of history in historical materialism. Neo-Marxist theorists dealt with Marx’s failed prediction that capitalist societies would inevitably develop into socialist societies.314 From this, they concluded that Western, capitalist societies prevent communist revolutions through culturally conditioned exercise of power: while, from the perspective of classical Marxism, the working class was still oppressed by economic conditions, for neo-Marxists it was primarily system-maintaining cultural values that mattered (see Socialisation). Both the working class and the middle class had been pacified by culturally mediated values and were no longer sufficiently aware of their own oppression.315
Neo-Marxist intellectuals developed the concept of false consciousness for this purpose to explain the observed system-conforming behaviour: broad sections of the population would act against their own interests due to bourgeois values.316
The new-left Marxist Antonio Gramsci regarded religion, family, education, media, and law as the most important societal pillars through which a bourgeois cultural hegemony is anchored. Only after their communist transformation would communist revolutions be promising in the long term.317 To break the power of capitalist hegemony systems, these institutions are to be secretly infiltrated by activists in order to gradually establish a new hegemony.
The neo-Marxist/new-left ideologies were very successful: in the course of the 1968 movements, new-left activists spread to universities, where they applied a so-called “strategy of the long march”. Critical theories became dominant in the social sciences towards the end of the 20th century and later also in other academic fields.318 Through this intellectual influence of the New Left already gained in the 1970s, neo-Marxist theory became very influential (see Critical Theory and Conflict).