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Soft Totalitarianism, Hard Truth: A Roadmap To Fearlessness.

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The word “totalitarian,” like all alarming political terms, is much abused in the present-day United States. Along with “fascistic,” “dictatorial,” and “tyrannical,” “totalitarian” is now tossed about regularly as a means of insulting another’s politics. But the misuse of the term doesn’t render it illegitimate in all contexts. It just makes it harder to recall what the word actually means.

In Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher makes an excellent case that totalitarianism has just about arrived in the U.S., and he argues that there is vital wisdom to be gleaned in the lives of Christian anti-Communists who not only helped bring down the Soviet Union but also preserved their faith throughout their long, dark nightmare. Dreher, a Christian Orthodox writer and senior editor at the American Conservative, interviews several such dissidents or their families and distills their efforts into a few timely lessons: Preserve the memory of what is under attack; take religion as the basis of resistance; consider the family the primary fighting brigade; show solidarity with other dissidents; see the good in suffering; and, above all, “value nothing more than truth.”

Lies are the lifeblood of totalitarianism; to resist, therefore, is to hold fast to truth. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whom Dreher gets his book’s title, “One man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.” The quote is, interestingly, absent from the book. Perhaps this is because the work of the Christian dissidents profiled by Dreher seems actually to refute the point. To topple a tyranny, you need to foster a network or a culture of truth, requiring the commitment of families, friends, and fellow resisters.

Dreher is clear that what we face now is not the deadly totalitarianism of 20th-century monster regimes. It’s the “soft totalitarianism” of cultural institutions, universities, workplace bureaucracies, and big-tech behemoths that will drive you from the public square if you dissent from the prevailing radicalism. A totalitarian society, after all, is not defined by the looming threat of death. Rather, as Dreher writes, “it is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology.” He goes on: “A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.”

Anyone who’s ever been admonished for asserting that, say, only women have periods or that looting and arson do not a peaceful protest make, can attest to the efforts of our radical reality tinkerers. And precisely because the new totalitarianism is so different in appearance from that of the Soviet Union, it goes unrecognized by most Americans, including conservative people of faith. What’s more, the soft totalitarianism Dreher describes is less overtly intimidating than it is therapeutic. “It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing,” Dreher writes. “In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish.”

This sought-after happiness is a strictly individual and material matter. No longer do we see the good in pursuit of a common and transcendent purpose. In this way, Dreher argues, soft totalitarianism presents a greater challenge than the bloodthirsty variety. At least Communism sought to mold its victims to achieve a shared (but grossly mistaken) good. The unbridled autonomy of therapeutic culture presents a more radical break with the history of civilization than even the advent of socialism.

Soft totalitarianism thrives without opposition because we’ve been drugged into complacency by the high-tech comforts and hedonistic pleasures of the market state. This is also why, Dreher believes, we have welcomed into our lives the most extensive surveillance apparatus ever known, in the form of big data. The Christian dissidents with whom he speaks, men and women who risked their lives to evade the eyes and ears of the state, are flabbergasted at how we’ve signed up for the privilege of allowing Big Brother into our homes.

The present danger here—aside from the end of any quaint notions of privacy—is that big data functions as a propaganda arm for soft totalitarianism, excising the wrong messages from your user experience and funneling the right ones to you, all day every day. The danger coming down the pike is that it increasingly resembles an enforcement arm as well. Dreher notes that Twitter already considers the “misgendering” of trans people grounds for being booted from the platform, and PayPal consults the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s guidance in determining which organizations are so extreme that they should be denied service. “Consider how it would affect everyday communications,” he writes, “if social media and other online channels that most people have come to depend on—Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and others—were to decide to cut off users whose religious or political views qualified them as bigots in the eyes of the digital commissars?”

For Dreher, much of our misfortune is the inexorable result of our free-market system. “These cultural revolutionaries found an ally in advanced capitalism,” he writes, “which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires.” This is the only misstep in Dreher’s incisive and ultimately heartening book. Capitalism makes an expansive variety of goods and services available to an ever-greater number of individuals. And, yes, Dreher is correct that consumerism rivals religious faith as a motivating principle around which we organize our lives. But capitalism, advanced or not, doesn’t “teach” anything. In offering up its bounty of possibility, capitalism merely re-creates the larger dilemmas facing moral man: how to choose good things over bad, how to refrain from overindulgence, how to prioritize what is meaningful, and how to separate truth from what is illusory.

This is where religion comes in. One need not be a Christian to see the extraordinary value in the lives and works of those who marshalled their faith against the totalitarianism of the past. Those with whom Dreher speaks organized secret prayer groups and samizdat networks. They counseled the persecuted and contested the lies of the state by clinging to the transcendent truths of their faith. This was the best they could do while living under the boot—and it was magnificent.

It’s Dreher’s hope that Christians today—and people of faith more generally—model their lives on those of these brave men, women, and children and take a stand for truth against soft totalitarianism. He writes: “For many of us it will mean having to unlearn political myths that we have uncritically absorbed in a culture that until fairly recently thought and reasoned in broad Christian categories.” This is true. But to unlearn something is to learn or relearn something else. And relearning faith in the 21st century, while necessary in all the ways Dreher describes, might be the toughest challenge of all.

Karl Marx, as usual, was perfectly wrong when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Religion is a deep form of truth. And it is far more difficult to face the truth than it is to embrace lies. Lies are crafted to flatter and persuade. Living in truth, on the other hand, requires courage. Will we find the courage we need to face down soft totalitarianism? One Slovak dissident sees the matter squarely and gives reason to hope:

“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did— your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things, like join the Candle Demonstration.”

The lessons in Live Not by Lies are ultimately a roadmap to fearlessness. Take a step toward living in faith, family, solidarity, and truth, and you’ll find that fear gradually dissipates. Live in falsehood, and you’ll remain a coward before the mob.

Is There Any Reason To Believe The Chinese Communist Party Is Any Worse Than The Democrats And Republicans?

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Martin, you can never, ever trust the communists.” Those were the words of Martin Lee’s father to son Martin in 1949. Subsequent history vindicated his advice, or warning. Luckily the Lees were living in Hong Kong. It’s well known that the communism of the 20th century left behind a body count that The Black Book of Communism estimates to be 100 million.

Back in the 1980s, Hong Kong dissident Lee told journalist William McGurn about his father’s warning, and McGurn relayed it to readers in his most recent column for the Wall Street Journal. McGurn thinks the communists who lead the China of the present are pretty awful, even though the country’s broad economic liberalization has surely lifted “ordinary Chinese out of desperate poverty.” McGurn is simply not persuaded by the modern communists who “traded in Mao jackets for Brooks Brothers and sent their children to Harvard Business School.”

Ok, so China has some bad Communistleadership. That’s a given. But is it possible there’s a redundant quality to McGurn’s analysis? Consider Evan Osnos’s fascinating 2014 book about China, Age of Ambition. For many years Osnos served as Beijing bureau chief for The New Yorker. To some, his professional affiliations will disqualify him automatically as an out-of-touch elitist lefty, but that would be a mistake. McGurn is a “Main Street” man of the right, and the treatment of the protesters in China and Hong Kong plainly concerns him. So did this treatment concern Osnos.

At the same time Osnos acknowledged something that some on the right perhaps don’t. The focus on dissidents is itself a pretty rarefied activity. In writing his book, Osnos wondered in its pages if his journalistic interest in the romanticized dissidents wasn’t hiding a much bigger, and arguably happier story. In his own words, “the most famous image in China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square.” Osnos saw the flaw there given his acknowledgment that foreigners could “spend years in China without ever interviewing someone who had been tortured or locked up without trial.[my emphasis]” Translated, for the vast majority of Chinese citizens life is much freer, living standards exponentially greater, and the government itself somewhat of an afterthought. The rare dissident was largely “unknown to ordinary Chinese citizens,” and was much better known “in New York or Paris.”

Considering the communist party in China, Osnos observes that “At the lowest levels, the Party felt like a professional network.” Kind of like affiliation with Democrats and Republicans stateside? Without excusing the Party’s brutal, sickeningly murderous history for even a second (Osnos doesn’t shy away from the tragic fact that the “Great Leap Forward resulted in the world’s worst famine, which killed between thirty and forty-five million people”), it’s thankfully no longer what it was.

As McGurn well knows, true, collectivist communism is defined by horrifying desperation, endless lines at stores with bare shelves, and in its worst form, it’s all about killing. The China of today is nothing like that. It’s the opposite of communist, particularly in an economic sense. For an American to walk off the airplane there is for that American to arguably feel more at home than any Chinese citizen. All the street signs have English spelling, and then the shops and restaurants bring to mind a typical American city: McDonald’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Apple Stores, Polo Stores, Sunglass Huts, etc. Communism equates with the worst kind of poverty, while the China of today symbolizes a remarkable drive to improve. It’s a country in a hurry, and reality supports this. This is a long way of asking if it’s the “communists” McGurn actually looks at skeptically, or instead people in high places.

McGurn writes that communism “has always been far more about” the “getting and holding [of] power, rather than any economic arrangement.” Sure, but if so, how does this make it much different from politics in general, including politics as practiced here in the U.S.? Billions will be spent on the upcoming presidential elections despite the federal government’s “few and defined” powers. Is there jockeying for power at work?

Osnos described returning to China in 2005, and witnessing a fever. “The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life.” Which raises a basic question: if some free-thinking scholar attached Osnos’s line to de Tocqueville as he described 19th century America, would anyone but the most knowledgeable Tocquevillian question the scholar about the line being de Tocqueville’s?

Thinking about the quote in terms of China’s amazing economic evolution, it’s a reminder that the Chinese people are quite a bit freer than critics want to admit. Sorry, but suffocated people couldn’t have rebuilt Chinese cities into architectural marvels, with skyscraper density that makes Manhattan seem undeveloped by comparison. Thoroughly muzzled people wouldn’t be gorging on all things American at a rate that sets “communist” China up to soon be the largest market in the world for capitalist-produced American plenty.

Still, McGurn laments the present Chinese leadership. It sadly arrests dissidents, and so can’t be trusted. Per McGurn, we were duped in a sense for believing that having shed the Party’s thoroughly murderous past, its modern leaders would be “transformed into Jeffersonian democrats who play by liberal rules.” Sure, but who really believed that? Did even Thomas Jefferson believe those who came after him would be “Jeffersonian democrats”?

It’s worth asking when it’s remembered that in the last six or seven weeks the world’s most dynamic economy was transformed by the U.S. political class into command-and-control. Due to the imposition, tens of millions of Americans are out of work, millions of businesses are bankrupt or rushing toward bankruptcy, and there’s mass desperation as people wonder how they’ll start earning again thanks to a political crack-up that McGurn’s editorial page has described with growing contempt.

It’s worth thinking about as American conservatives continue to wring their hands about the Chinese communists. McGurn repeats at column’s end “Never, ever trust the Communists.” It says here there are tens of millions of Americans who would quickly correct him with “Never, ever trust politicians.”

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, and Vice President at FreedomWorks. This article first appeared at realclearmarkets.com.

Eastern Europe Sees Liberal Orthodoxy As Just As Tyrannical As Communist Orthodoxy, Charts Its Own Path.

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BERLIN—Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War in Europe, new political divisions are rising between East and West.

Despite the economic success of German reunification and the triumph of democracy across Eastern Europe, the two regions are drifting apart again in a clash of values that is threatening the cohesion of the Western alliance and the European Union.

In most of the West, mainstream parties, while increasingly challenged by insurgent politicians, are largely sticking to a postwar consensus forged around liberal values, the rule of law, fundamental human rights and time-tested institutions.

Much of the East is a mirror image, where nativist parties that favor more authoritarian rule and reject immigration, ethnic and religious diversity, gay rights and feminism as signs of weakness and moral decadence are either in power or on the ascent.

Some Eastern European countries that once fought against Soviet oppression, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, are now ruled by governments that vehemently reject some liberal Western values.

Even some former East German democracy activists are now marching against the establishment with far-left or far-right movements, including the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party or AfD, now among the country’s largest.

Vera Lengsfeld, a German author, academic and former legislator, received the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s highest peacetime honor, for battling the totalitarian regime of the former communist east. She was imprisoned after her husband, a poet, informed on her to the secret police.

But three decades after she watched the Berlin Wall crumble, Ms. Lengsfeld is unsheathing her quill for a new fight: against the liberal government of Chancellor Angela Merkel that she once supported.

Ms. Lengsfeld says she rejects the AfD, but she shares their criticism of Ms. Merkel’s generous asylum policy, and has campaigned against mass immigration. She says political correctness is threatening free speech, leading to her views being dismissed as extremist.

“I think the West has forgotten what democracy means,” she said. “The gap between the governments and the governed is widening, and the former despise the latter.”

In a series of interviews last week in German media, Ms. Merkel said such claims made in a free democracy like Germany were strange, and warned that freedom of expression doesn’t constitute the right to have one’s opinion unchallenged.

To be sure, the divides in Europe aren’t clear-cut. Some parties in Italy, France and Austria have rejected immigration and Islam, while eastern countries like Slovakia have chosen liberal governments. Recent elections ushered in a crop of liberal mayors to countries run by nativist parties, including Hungary and Poland.

Citizens of the former East Germany say they are less satisfied than those in the West, and are more likely to support the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party.

In his recent book, “The Light That Failed,” Ivan Krastev, a Vienna-based Bulgarian academic, explores how the two parts of Europe embraced each other, only to diverge again. Mr. Krastev cites studies about how despite the East’s economic surge, majorities who say they are satisfied with their lives still vote for antiestablishment nativists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Mr. Krastev said Mr. Orban and other self-proclaimed illiberal leaders pander to voters who rebel against what the academic calls the “replacement of communist orthodoxy with a liberal orthodoxy.”

In Mr. Krastev’s view, the dictate of communist apparatchiks in the East was replaced by the patronage of the EU and other international organizations who presided over painful economic overhauls.

Millions of people have left Eastern Europe for the West since 1989, robbing entire regions of their educated elites. In the former East Germany, which has lost nearly four million people since reunification, the AfD is particularly strong in places where more people have left.

The view of emigration as a threat to fragile communities also in part explains widespread opposition to immigration in the region, say some experts, Mr. Krastev says.

Eastern Europe, once among the world’s most diverse regions, was carved up by the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and German empires until those multinational states perished in the wars of the 20th century. The forced exchange of populations that followed yielded homogenous societies.

Branko Milanovic, a New York-based economist from Serbia, said the revolutions of 1989 were struggles of national emancipation more than a broad democratic uprising. Even as 1989 offered democracy followed by EU membership and rapid economic growth, Eastern nations never embraced ethnic diversity, Mr. Milanovic said.

Ironically for a region where citizens were banned from freely traveling during the Cold War, a study by Mr. Krastev for the European Council on Foreign Relations found that 50% of Poles and 49% of Hungarians favored making it illegal for their own citizens to leave for long periods as a policy response to migration.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling party, has asked the U.S. to abandon the process of lifting visa requirements for Polish citizens for fear it could further fan emigration, according to two officials. Aides eventually persuaded him to give up his resistance to the visa waiver, which was then seen a diplomatic coup of his administration.

The Polish and Hungarian governments have both been accused in the West of curtailing freedom of the press and capturing the courts and other institutions of state. Both have been remarkably successful at the polls.

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis has stoked similar controversies. Pavel Telicka, a former ally of Mr. Babis who left the prime minister to form his own, liberal party, said he became disillusioned by the populism of his old ally. But he admits that politicians like Mr. Babis have successfully tapped into economic angst and frustration.

Despite strong growth, the former communist regions—including east Germany—haven’t caught up with Western income levels. And the cradle-to-grave state support of the Soviet era is gone.

“The inability of traditional political parties to provide solutions to people’s problems has maybe helped the rise of populism,” said Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek. He cited the EU’s failure to resolve the eurozone and refugee crises as a cause for disillusionment in his country.

Witold Waszczykowski, Poland’s former foreign minister, said the definition of liberalism changed within the West itself, expanding to include values such as ethnic diversity and LGBT rights after politicians embraced what he calls left-liberal democracy.

Helmut Kohl, the late German chancellor and architect of German and European reunification, foresaw the current backlash, according to Daniel Biskup, a photojournalist who documented the fall of the Wall and its aftermath in three books.

Mr. Biskup took a now iconic photograph of Mr. Kohl as he promised 100,000 people in the eastern state of Thuringia in 1990 to turn the impoverished land into “blooming landscapes.”

“He knew there could be trouble. He told me the blooming landscapes would only come if everyone—especially the West and its industry—pulled together,” Mr. Biskup said. “But that didn’t happen. We left market forces do their work.”

In October this year, the AfD won nearly 24% of the vote in Thuringia and became the second-biggest party, behind the radical left.

Back in East Berlin, Ms. Lengsfeld, the former dissident, said the social change that she herself helped bring about has now made her think about emigrating.

“If I were younger, I would emigrate myself. Maybe not to Prague, it’s overrun by tourists, but perhaps somewhere further East,” she said.

By Bojan Pancevski at wsj.com
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

The Left’s Long March Through The Institutions Is Now Pretty Much Complete, And It’s A Disaster.

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There’s little debate that modern-day American universities, public education, mainstream media, Hollywood and political advocacy groups are dominated by Leftists. This is no accident, but part of a deliberate strategy to pave the way for communist revolution developed more than eight decades ago by an Italian political theorist named Antonio Gramsci.

Described as one of the world’s most important and influential Marxist theorists since Marx himself, if you are not familiar with Gramsci, you should be.

The Italian communist (1891 – 1937) is credited with the blueprint that has served as the foundation for the Cultural Marxist movement in modern America.

Later dubbed by 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions,” Gramsci wrote in the 1930s of a “war of position” for socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside in an attempt to compel it to redefine itself.

Gramsci used war metaphors to distinguish between a political “war of position” – which he compared to trench warfare – and the “war of movement (or maneuver)” which would be a sudden full-frontal assault resulting in complete social upheaval.

A Shift in Strategy

In the 1998 book “The Antonio Gramsci Reader,” edited by David Forgacs, Gramsci’s development of a new form of strategy for ushering in the socialist revolution is made clear.

Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917 “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”

As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.

In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.

Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 which made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different, must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.

His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a different tactic. A tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations as the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.

“The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the ‘trenches’ and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely ‘partial’ the element of maneuver which before used ‘the whole’ of war, etc.,” he wrote.

Gramsci argued that a ‘frontal attack’ on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation – with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.

War of Position vs. War of Movement

It is important to bear in mind that Gramsci’s ultimate goal is still socialism and overthrow of the capitalist order. His contribution was to outline a different strategy for this to occur.

As described by Forgacs, “War of movement is a frontal assault on the state whereas war of position is conducted mainly on the terrain of civil society.”

Gramsci argued that a war of position is necessary in advanced capitalist societies where civil society has become a “very complex structure” which is resistant to “incursions” such as economic depressions that would otherwise weaken the current power structure in terms of ideological support. In other words, civil society provided a support system for the current political structure and those in power that could help it withstand otherwise negative shocks like economic recessions.

Gramsci believed that in advanced capitalistic Western societies, the prevailing ideological support system for a capitalistic economic structure and bourgeois values would shield the current ruling class from any organized opposition.

As a result, he believed it essential to study in depth “which elements of civil society correspond to the defensive systems in a war of position.”

Gramsci’s Analysis of ‘Civil Society’ and Hegemony

Gramsci defined civil society as the “ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private.’”

More directly, he described civil society as that sphere of social activities and institutions not directly part of the government. Primary examples included political parties, trade unions, church organizations and other popular voluntary associations.

Gramsci noted that dominant social groups in civil society organized consent and hegemony – they assumed a leadership position by the consent of members. Their leadership role includes fostering an ideological consensus among their members. Gramsci envisioned that these groups would organize their opposition to the existing social order.

Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State – which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.

“In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.

In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.

Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as being organizations needing to be invaded by socialist thinkers.

The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses – led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.

As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.

The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses, in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provided to the current capitalist state.

Gramsci further emphasized the role of a political party to assume leadership and philosophical direction of all these civil society alliances. Additionally, and critically, one of the main goals of the party would be to place foot soldiers in the revolutionary war of position in actual state institutions as well, such as legal institutions, police, councils and influential bureaucracies. There needs to be established, argued Gramsci, a foundation of socialists upon which to run the apparatus of the state once its overthrow was complete.

Priming Conditions for the Frontal Attack

As Gramsci described it, a war of position involves a “passive revolution” of sorts; transitioning from the dominant bourgeois order to one of socialism without any violent social upheaval.

For social transition to occur, the “necessary conditions” in society must have “already been incubated,” according to Gramsci.  Here he is referring to a new collective will among the masses, coincided with having the right people in strategic positions among civil society and state bureaucracies.

Gramsci pointed to the example of the Italian fascism of his time as an example of passive revolution. As he noted, economic fascism “consists in the fact that the economic structure is transformed in a ‘reformist’ way from an individualistic to a planned economy (command economy).”  This ‘intermediate economy’ could serve as the starting point for the next transition to total state control of the means of production, a transition that could occur “without radical and destructive cataclysms of an exterminating kind.”

Economic Fascism takes a step toward collectivization of the means of production without seizing them from the capitalists, Gramsci argued. Fascism serves to “accentuate the ‘plan of production’ element” of the economic structure, making it easier to transition to complete collectivization. This shift helped to facilitate widespread acceptance of the notion of greater centralized control over production, without actually wresting control over the means of production from the capitalists or eliminating profit. Yet.

Once all these conditions are in place – i.e. a new collective will, ideological control over institutions of civil society, revolutionaries in strategic positions in the state – the time would be right for the final and conclusive “war of movement.”

This full-frontal war of movement to overthrow the existing state and social order will be assured to not only be successful, but permanent. For according to Gramsci, “in politics, the ‘war of position’, once won, is decisive definitively.”

The Left’s “long march through the institutions” is a deliberate attempt to create conditions right for the final overthrow of our private property society. Their success spells disaster.

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