Posted on 04/03/2019 5:36:15 AM PDT by crusher
Yesterday, the Washington Examiner did its best to confirm that South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg is officially a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. As befits a bona fide challenger, the Examiner took a peek into his past and pulled out an interesting nugget. As it turns out, Buttigieg was raised by a Marxist. To wit:
The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.
Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.
He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists….
Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.
"They’re part of a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago. Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a 'long march through the institutions,' such as film, media, and especially education," Kengor told the Washington Examiner….
The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci….
Buttigieg was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world who are interested in Antonio Gramsci's life and work and in the presence of his thought in contemporary culture.”
In 2013, Buttigieg spoke at a $500,000 outdoor New York City art installation honoring Gramsci.
As you might have guessed, given the quotes we chose to pull from the longer article, the thing that interests us about the elder Buttigieg is his affection for Antonio Gramsci. University Marxists are a dime-a-dozen. Every moron with a Ph.D. can – and often does – claim to be a communist or a socialist or some other variety of leftist. But a genuine devotee of Gramsci is much rarer. To follow Gramsci requires a little more inquiry and, frankly, a little more intelligence.
We wouldn’t say we’re fans of Gramsci. He’s a Marxist, after all. But we do think that he was a great deal smarter than most of the rest of the Marxists, particularly those of the same era. He and the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács both came to the same conclusion about the failure of the Marxist revolution to materialize. They both concluded that the bourgeois cultural hegemony prevented the proletariat from recognizing its true interest and thus rebelling. Both therefore also concluded that in order to overcome this defect in Marxist theory, the culture would have to be changed, changed by taking over the institutions by which it is transmitted. Lukacs, in turn, became one of the intellectual founders of what would become The Frankfurt School, which would then carry the “cultural revolution” to the United States and to its institutions of higher education. All of which is to say that the cultural Left that plagues our politics and society today are direct intellectual heirs to the work of Gramsci and Lukacs. They saw what the others didn’t. They saw that the culture was the key to everything else.
Given all of this, and given that Joseph Buttigieg was such a fan, we’ll end today with a preview of Know Thine Enemy, Volume II, from the chapter fittingly enough titled “Gramsci and Lukacs.”
We will begin our story of the birth of cultural Marxism in 1927. Lenin has been dead for three years. Hitler is on the rise in Germany. The place is a prison cell in Turi, Italy, where there resides a tiny, sickly, and brilliant, thirty-six-year-old hunchbacked fellow named Antonio Gramsci, who is serving a twenty-year sentence on a trumped-up charge of being involved in an assassination attempt on Mussolini. He has had a difficult life, marked by malformation of the spine that stunted his growth, severe health problems, childhood poverty, and the class discrimination that he, as a Sardinian peasant, suffered at the hands of the mainland Italians.
His saving grace is his high intelligence, which gained him a scholarship reserved for needy children to study at the University of Turin, where he became friends with the soon-to-be leaders of the Italian socialist movement. In 1911, he began a career in journalism. By 1916, he was co-editor of the Socialist Party’s official organ, Avanti! and one of Italy’s leading leftist intellectuals and socialist organizers.
In 1921, he had helped found the Italian Communist Party, which had Lenin’s support. A few years later, he went to Moscow to work for the Comintern. He returned to Italy in May 1924 as leader of the parliamentary opposition to the fascist government. Mussolini eventually tired of the concept of parliamentary immunity, and Gramsci was arrested and tried as a dire threat to society. In fact, during his trial, the prosecutor famously remarked, “For 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning.” But prison does not accomplish this task. In fact, Gramsci is busy writing and smuggling out of prison some 2,848 pages of handwritten notes.
As a dedicated Marxist, he is deeply distressed by the Left’s troubles. Bernstein had started it all with his traitorous screed against the Master. Then along came Maurras, Sorel, and Mussolini, who had abandoned some of the most fundamental tenets of Marxism and established a New Leftist model based on nationalism. Nationalism, of all things; the antithesis of the Marxist understanding of a natural bond between working men of all nationalities.
Worse yet, the “workers of the world” had spent the preceding four-plus years killing each other in a war that was eventually won by the capitalists, who then established a patently reactionary, global organization called a League of Nations run by the capitalists. The result was that all across Europe, confused leftists were engaged in internecine battles for leadership of an ideology that they themselves were destroying….
The one partially bright spot was Russia, where the Bolsheviks had staged a successful revolution and established what they said was a communist government. But this presented another severe problem. You see, Marx had maintained that the revolution would first occur in the most highly industrialized states when capitalism had reached its apex and the inherent tension that it creates between the workers and the owners had reached a boiling point. Yet its only success to date had occurred in the largely agrarian and still feudal state of Russia. Moreover, while Lenin claimed to be dedicated Marxist, he was himself a revisionist. So like Lenin before him, Gramsci asks, “What must be done?”
His answer begins with the assertion that Marx was wrong when he stated that the driving force behind all of mankind’s history was the iniquitous, pecuniary relationship between “freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman.” In fact, he determines that the fault line between these two classes is not economic at all, but cultural. And with this newly recognized truth in mind, he adopts the hackneyed conclusion that all vestiges of the old culture must be destroyed and a new one must be created in its place.
To begin this process, he argues that the Left must forsake the effort to inform the proletariat about the wrongs they are suffering at the hands of capitalists as well as the Marxist expectation that they will eventually conduct a violent revolution. Instead, he maintains that the communists must take control of all of the cultural institutions within the target nation, beginning with the educational establishment and the mass media and culminating with the total destruction of the Christian religion and replacing it with Communism.
In short, to quote Löwith, Gramsci agrees with Marx, that “the destruction of the Christian religion is the prerequisite for the construction of a world in which man is his own master.” And while he is not the first person to view communism as a spiritual alternative to Christianity, he may be the first to openly compare the two on that basis.
More to come….
WOW ! Should we call them a Triumvirate ?? Suspect some would say TRINITY however...../sarc
A gay marxist. That’s what the dems want for this country.
President and Mister Butt******. No.
Marcuse was the philosophical leader of the cultural revolution of the New Left in the United States in the 60's. He was a founding member of the International Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. His ideas were a synthesis of Marx, Freud, and Hegel.
Antonio Gramsci... the most dangerous man of the 20th century and one of the least known.
Is it possible to link directly to this article? It looks like it is behind some premium content....
It is amazing, that a 37 year old small city mayor, is being touted as a presidential candidate.
I know he’s special to liberals because of being homosexual, but, what has he accomplished in his life, to qualify him to be president? At age 37, and mayor of a small city, what major executive/management has he had in life, to prepare him for the job of president?
Beavis and Buttigieg.
I clicked through several links and got to the blog page containin the article (or a synopsis). No cost.
More than Obama? This is identity politics bearing fruit. The Dems are all jockeying to curry favor with blacks, Hispanics, women, gays. trannies seniors, commies, mommies..... With as many candidates as they have, it’ll be interesting to watch...especially if the default old white guy gets Gropegate hung around his neck.
“Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a ‘long march through the institutions,’ such as film, media, and especially education,””
Gramsci’s strategy has been unbelievably successful. Is there any institution left that the left has not taken over?
I can’t wait to hear the nickname President Trump gives him!
I want to say Trump will humiliate him but how do you humiliate someone who....... well you know.
He also is a scholar of the Bible.
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