I write to defend Gramsci.
Not because he wasn’t a deluded communist nutcase, which he was. But because he had no or only a very minor part in what happened.
He did not inspire much, in fact. Certainly not the “long march through the institutions” - which phrase he did not actually write, that was a German communist decades later.
What he did write was a mass of stuff, in prison or in hospital, some apparently on toilet paper. This was not exactly an immediate influence, coming out only slowly in translations. The first English edition did not come out till the 1970’s.
In the meantime, the “long march” was already underway, influenced by other people, notably Marcuse and the Frankfurt institute, Foucault, Fanon, etc. At this time Gramsci was mostly unread, unless one was Italian, or sometimes German.
Gramsci’s ideas didn’t really enter the English world until Hardt & Negri’s “Empire” came out in 2000, making a big deal of “cultural hegemony”, used exactly as Gramsci did, as an obstacle to selling communism to the masses. Hardt & Negri saw the power of institutional control as an enemy, bourgeois-capitalist thing.
Since then, Gramsci’s became an explanatory model of how the LEFT had taken over institutions. Rush Limbaugh, of all people, spoke quite a bit about Gramsci’s model.
So - Gramsci did not come up with the “long march” battleplan. At best he predicted it. His model was used as an explanation for the phenomenon after the fact.
Gramsci is not popular in the left at the moment. For understandable reasons, as his “hegemony” idea is too easily turned against them.
The Cultural Left looked to Mao as an example more than anything.
What we are seeing now is the fruition of Alinsky’s cultural war. Alinsky had hoped he could spark a revolution in the US in 1968 along side Mao’s revo. What Alinsky lacked was a rigid presence in local governments and institutions. His followers under the title of community organization spent the next 50 years doing just that. Bunkering in and changing local and federal policies a little bit at a time. Its no longer communism we are fighting but Alinsky Marxism and it is in every government, business and institution.