Posted on 11/07/2023 9:59:22 AM PST by Signalman
The New Left of the early 1970s knew they could not mount a violent revolution against the government. Not if they wanted to be successful. They could no longer throw bricks through windows, scream at police officers, and hold unruly demonstrations in the public square if they wanted to win hearts and minds to their cause — at least not yet.
For now, they had to take the ideas of Marx, the ones that they had worked so hard to bring to the United States, and quietly slip them into the minds of people in some other way.
The question was: How?
The answer, oddly enough, came in part from an obscure series of political essays called Prison Notebooks, selections from which had just appeared in translation in the United States, in 1971.
These notebooks were written by a man named Antonio Gramsci, who had been imprisoned in the last years of his life, from 1926 to 1937, by Benito Mussolini shortly after Mussolini became dictator in Gramsci’s home country of Italy. For years, Gramsci had been an active member of the Italian Communist Party, attempting to overthrow the government and bring about a worker’s paradise on Earth just as his hero Karl Marx had envisioned.
As the writer Nate Hochman recently described in National Review, Antonio Gramsci set out a plan that would require any would-be Marxist revolutionaries to “engage in a longer, more covert counterhegemonic struggle, waged via a ‘war of position’ against the ruling cultural consensus. That war of position would not, as in the East, culminate in a single violent, cathartic victory. It would require a protracted, multifront battle for control of the civic structures that form the social consciousness.”
Antonio Gramsci died before he could begin that struggle in his home country. Unlike many reformed revolutionaries, my father among them, he died without ever seeing the error of his ways. And the writing he had done in prison eventually made it out to the world, where it was picked up by young Marxists eager to conduct exactly the kind of covert war he’d described.
One of these people was Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in Germany who had already achieved considerable success by the 1960s when he encountered Gramsci’s ideas. Using these ideas as well as the work of other Marxist scholars, Dutschke proposed what he called “the long march through the institutions.” According to this vision, Marxist revolutionaries would no longer simply protest in the streets and try to tear down existing structures. They would, rather, infiltrate those existing structures in an attempt to change them from within. Given his talent as a public speaker and a campus organizer, Dutschke was able to spread his ideas quite widely across the globe.
At some point in the 1960s, they reached the United States, and by the end of the decade the New Left in America was already beginning to burn out. The primary means of transmission was a professor named Herbert Marcuse, who had done some organizing with Dutschke before coming to the United States and who’d grown to admire Dutschke’s plan for the “long march through the institutions.” In a letter to Dutschke written in 1971, Marcuse said that the long march would be “the only effective way” to bring about a true left-wing revolution in the United States.
Marcuse described the strategy in detail in a book published the next year. He described how leftists would now work “against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within,’ rather by ‘doing the job,’ learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.”
In other words, the activists who had once planted bombs in buildings and torched cars to bring about revolution would now have to calm down, get jobs, and pretend to be productive members of society (“doing the job”). All the while, though, they would maintain their revolutionary ideas (“preserving one’s own consciousness”) and work to insert those ideas into the work they did, indoctrinating as many people as possible in the process. Those who became university professors would treat figures like Karl Marx kindly while attacking capitalists and other revered figures from American history. Those who went into information technology would design systems with a subtle liberal bias. Those in journalism would work to transform the newspapers — and, eventually, the cable news networks and internet startups — into propaganda organs for the left.
The long march through the institutions.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (German: Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen)
Karl Marx
They are not Marxists.
They are envious, hate-filled, anti-capitalist (and if elected to high office, vote-buying) scumbags.
and don’t forget silencing any opposition. remember “The only way to make a bad idea seem like a good idea is to silence the good idea that shows just how bad the bad idea really is” L.Star
That’s what Bill Ayres did, and he got his boy, Obama, into the White House.
And that was all she wrote!
Bfl
Great piece, but the legal system/Justice Dept was also worth calling out.
The headline is all you need.
More and more Americans seem to be waking up to the situation in education but is it too late?
Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale in 1951.
The rot was well established long before the 1970’s.
Well then, I guess us good guys should slowly infiltrate institutions.
Obama, Clinton, and many DC insiders have studied the works of both Alinsky and C-P. And are following the plan, which is a long term, multi-generational strategy to lead us into the NWO, regardless of the willingness of the people to be taken down that path.
The treatment of the Jan Sixers is a modest prelude to what lies ahead for those of us who seriously resist. At 70 years old, I fear not for myself, But I look at my four grandkids and fear for that which lies ahead for them; .
As usual... The Federalist is about 7 decades behind reality...
Maybe, next, they will start publishing “newly discovered” verses from the Bible...
Every time.
The first serious signs of pro-big-government/anti-individual freedom encroachment began in the mid 1800’s at, of course, the university level when “Progressivism” (”govnet is smarter than you”) began to be touted as more desirable than a free constitutional republic.
It seems intellectuals are the first ones to fall for this anti-individual-freedom spirit of antichrist. But why? It seems that generally there’s a prideful condition with intellectuals who think they don’t need God which makes them an easy target for Satan who is much smarter than they and can relatively easily deceive them.
It’s a slow process, but the attractive deception works it way into academia and the hearts and minds there.
The same today with the launch of the “Transgender Movement” in the 1980’s by a bunch of queers who were also academics.
They get a spot on a Board of a Conservative not-for profit..preferably one holding hundreds of millions if not billions of assets. The then start behaving rudely and crudely. When others call them out on it...they get called racists and sexist in return. The members of the board start resigning ...they have options in the world and don’t have to sit around and be dealt with rudely and crudely when all they wanted to do was support and extend what they believed in for their community and country.
Those refusing to resign ...even in the face of the newer “liberal” members ...will be prosecuted for alleged “racism” and “sexism” ...or worse. Costing them money, time , and ego bruising notoriety. Assuming the lawsuits don’t work against the remaining conservative board member holdouts...their pets start disappearing, their car tires are flat and their cars keyed. At this point their very lives are in danger if the remaining original members persist.
What is important to note is that this means and mechanism is the only way by which the small-minded and mean can “get ahead” in this world and after 10-20years of this sort of conduct on a board and in an institution, it is theirs by default. Their bad behavior is rewarded with the control of the assets of a wealthy, formerly constructive foundation or institution. They will then turn the resources toward the left.
The rest of us have always had other options in the world-that by virtue of their ideas, conduct and behavior could never achieve.
Note that this is primarily FINANCIAL; NOT IDEOLOGICAL. They could care less about the ideology. They will spout whatever nonsense they think they have to to drive you out of their life and off the board to make room for their fellow travelers. They have perfected a hostile financial takeover-and the means by which to propagate their “success”
i agree
i think it started at the beginning of the 20th century
.
To pick a single year, in 1913 they created the Federal Reserve, direct election of Senators, and the income tax.
But you could go back further. None of that in 1913 would have happened but for
Ellis Island.
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