- Aug 4, 2009
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tl;drI think it will happen as other issues sweep the current crop ofwhining victim mongers into the ash heap of history, but who knows?
The Left's long march will be hard to stop
Because the Left has politicised so much of public life, particularly in areas that affect mass opinion, such as the broadcasting media and education, the dismantling of that process itself becomes a political act: appointments that might once have been non-partisan and politically neutral must now be part of a campaign to counteract a deliberate manipulation of public influence. Having created the problem, Labour then gets mileage out of its opponents’ need to unravel it.
But let’s leave that aside. Michael Gove can fight the small battle of who will be the chairman of Ofsted with his usual unblinking determination. Deciding who is to be head of this, and director of that, is the least of the problems that his department, and any Conservative government that truly wants to change social attitudes, has to face. By far the more insidious – and more intractable – power-grab of the past generation was by the hard, not the soft, Left, and it was quite independent of any government direction. It was, in fact, a phenomenon about which New Labour was deeply ambivalent.
Faith and Freedom Daily: Marxism and the "Long March Through American Institutions"
Sometimes the indoctrination in public education is so blatant, it makes it into the news cycle, but for the most part the indoctrination continues quietly and daily. It is subtle and powerful. And it has changed our culture.
How did it happen?
It didn't just happen, in fact there has been a very deliberate well thought out agenda that has followed a plan. And it didn't begin in the 1960's.
William S. Lind is a highly respected historian, author and lecturer and recognized authority on the history and impact of Marxism.
I am using his extensive research for the following overview.
What has happened to American traditional culture, which had grown up over generations from our Western, Judeo-Christian roots, is it has been swept aside by an ideology.
We know the ideology best as "Political Correctness" and "Multiculturalism."
Lind says it is really "Cultural Marxism" taken from failed Marxist economic ideas and integrated with new cultural ideas.
It goes back not to the 1960's, but back to World War I.
Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted into war, the working class in every European country would rise in revolt, overthrow their government and create a new Communist Europe.
However, when war broke out in 1914, it didn't happen as the Marxists had thought. Marx had miscalculated.
Instead workers in European countries lined up by the millions to fight for their country.
After the war, Marxist leaders asked themselves what had gone wrong. They regrouped.
They concluded a Marxist Communist revolution would likely not be possible in the West because of the Western culture and the Christian religion that dominated it.
They concluded both should be destroyed.
Antonio Gramsci and George Lukacs carried the torch and created a strategy for destroying both Christian influence and the Western culture itself.
Instead of calling for a communist revolution, as they had in Russia, they decided they should seize political power last, after what they called "A Long March Through The Institutions" of the West.
This march would include the schools, the media, even the churches---every institution that could influence the culture.
They began the long march with little fanfare---no press releases. Years of hard work and complete dedication to the task would follow. This commitment was born out of their hatred toward the West.
Although Mussolini had recognized the danger Gramsci posed and jailed him, Gramsci's writings had been discovered and were circulated, particularly the "Prison Notebooks".
Gramsci, Lukacs, Felix Weil, a multi-millionaire, and others worked tirelessly to advance their cause.
They established a "think tank" at Frankfort University in Germany. Although it was originally called "Institute for Marxism," they soon decided that was not a good name and called it the "Institute for Social Research," then later, "Frankfurt School."
Other Marxist progressive elites joined the effort.
Simply stated, these young intellectual Marxists redefined Marxism before they redefined Western culture. Instead of the old Marxism, they designed a new Marxism that was intellectually based and directed toward a psychological conditioning campaign.
Antonio Gramsci: Take over the Institutions!
In his own day, Gramsci didn't believe that the working class had a collective will, unlike the capitalists. Instead that collective had to be created by middle-class Marxists such as himself. However, despite the abstract reality of the working class, it is still made up of a “plurality of demands, political initiatives, traditions and cultural institutions” (Ernesto Laclau). That plurality is inherently unstable from a Marxist perspective. And, again, this is where Gramsci and the Gramscians step in. It is up to them to provide a sense of stability to that plurality by creating a determinate class-consciousness -- or a new hegemon -- for the working class. And, in Gramsci's case, that could only be done by “taking over the institutions” (or “becoming State”), not through the classical violent (Marxist) revolution.
However, traditional Marxists believed that such a hegemonic consciousness (or class consciousness) would come naturally to the working class as capitalism inevitably led to the increasing polarization of society. The more polarized, or poor, the working class became, the more class-conscious they would become. But, of course, that didn't happen. There was no necessarily increased polarization. Thus the working class didn't become more class-conscious, hegemonic, or revolutionary.
This is where the Gramscians, again, stepped in.
If economic alienation and polarization didn't automatically make the working class more class-conscious (or if Marx's prophesy of “pauperization” didn't occur), then Gramsci and other middle-class Marxists would make the workers class-conscious. As I said, according to Marx's “natural laws of capitalism”, the failures of capitalism would inevitably raise the consciousness off the working class and turn them into revolutionaries. That didn't happen.
In other words, middle-class Marxists had to provide the “hegemonic articulation” of what was best for the working class. Capitalism itself, or its increased polarization, didn't do that.
This means that the Gramscian position effectively turned the Marxist base-superstructure model on its head. Instead of the “modes of production” generating human consciousness (or class-consciousness), here we have Gramscians attempting to generate consciousness (or ideology) instead. In a sense, Gramsci had returned to Hegel's position; which, of course, Marx himself had inverted.
Now how best to create a new working-class -- or Muslim today -- consciousness? Simple: take over the institutions in which ideas/ideologies -- rather than “material conditions” -- are primary. Or, alternatively, only by “becoming the State” -- not by violently seizing the state (as in a revolution) -- could the consciousness of the working class -- or Muslims today -- be changed in the ways middle-class Leftists wanted it to change.
The left has been wildly successful, but in large part that has been due to most being focused on the militant Marxism that was threatening our extermination.
As the public grows more aware of the Marxist core to Multiculturalism and Identity Politics, this is likely to be reversed.
But will the Deep State cooperate with us or fight us having already been taken over by the Marxists?
