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Marxism And Revolution

These Are The 4 Pillars Of The Marxist Framework At Work in 2020 America. Ignore At Your Peril.

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Anti-Marxist liberals have labored under numerous disadvantages in the recent struggles to maintain control of liberal organizations. One is that they are often not confident they can use the term “Marxist” in good faith to describe those seeking to overthrow them. This is because their tormentors do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.

The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.

The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:

1. Oppressor and oppressed

Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order is no different in this from any other, and it tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.

2. False consciousness

Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.

3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society

Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class, and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. He even specifies that liberals will supply the oppressed with the tools needed to overthrow them. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.

4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms

Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified.

Marxist political theories have undergone much development and elaboration over nearly two centuries. The story of how “neo-Marxism” emerged after the First World War in the writings of the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci has been frequently told, and academics will have their hands full for many years to come arguing over how much influence was exerted on various successor movements by Michel Foucault, post-modernism, and more. But for present purposes, this level of detail is not necessary, and I will use the term “Marxist” in a broad sense to refer to any political or intellectual movement that is built upon Marx’s general framework as I’ve just described it. This includes the “Progressive” or “Anti-Racism” movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. This movement uses racialist categories such as whites and people of color to describe the oppressors and the oppressed in our day. But it relies entirely on Marx’s general framework for its critique of liberalism and for its plan of action against the liberal political order. It is simply an updated Marxism.

Have We Reached A Revolutionary Situation? When The Intelligentsia Can’t Bring Itself To Condemn Violence, Yes.

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The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, however, are more revealing. The violence in 1992 came after a court verdict; the beating and arrest of Rodney King had happened more than a year before. This year’s riots came within days of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis officers. The riots of 1992 were mostly confined to poor and working-class areas of Los Angeles. This week saw mayhem all over America, and in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere the rioters targeted wealthy streets and neighborhoods.

But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else.

Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”

Mr. Morson, 72, is a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University and an accomplished interpreter of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Obviously we haven’t arrived at anything like what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation,” Mr. Morson says, but we have arrived at a situation in which well-intentioned liberal people often can’t bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong.

In late czarist Russia, some political parties and other groups—the Social Democrats, the anarchists, the Marxists—explicitly endorsed terrorism. “The liberal party—the Constitutional Democrats, they called themselves—did not condone terrorism,” Mr. Morson says. “But they refused to condemn it. And indeed they called for the release from prison of all terrorists, who were pledged to continue terrorism right away. . . . A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’ ”

The lesson seems highly relevant today. “When you’re dragged along into something you don’t really believe yourself—because otherwise you are identified with those evil people, and your primary identity is being a ‘good guy,’ not like those people—you will wind up supporting things you know to be wrong. And unless there is some moral force that will stop it, the slide will accelerate.”

Mr. Morson, ensconced in his delightfully untidy and book-laden office in Chicago as we chat on Zoom, concedes that a scholar who spends much of his time thinking and writing about Russia’s revolutionary period will tend to look for parallels between that time and our own. The parallels don’t obtain in every way.

But some of them make the analogy worth considering. One is that many of today’s revolutionaries are wildly successful and privileged. Take Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, both New York lawyers in their 30s, who have been criminally charged for attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. Mr. Mattis was educated at Princeton and New York University, Ms. Rahman at Fordham.

Why do people at the top want to destroy the system that enabled them to get there? “No,” Mr. Morson says, “you have it wrong. When you’re such a person, you don’t feel you’re at the top. The people at the top are wealthy businesspeople, and you’re an intellectual. You think that people of ideas should be at the top.”

The word “intelligentsia,” he notes, comes from Russian. In the classic period, from about 1860 to the First Russian Revolution in 1905, “the word did not mean everybody who was educated. It meant educated people who identified with one or another of the radical movements. ‘Intelligents’ believed in atheism, revolution and either socialism or anarchism.

“The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were. So what you take from your education would be the ideology that would justify this kind of activity—justify it because the wrong people have the power, and you should have it. You don’t feel like you’re the establishment.”

Is American society, shaped by Protestant Christianity and dominated by a kind of dovish, humanitarian left-liberalism, ever likely to fall into the barbarity of the Russian Revolution? Aren’t we too—I fumble for a word as I formulate the question—soft for that sort of totalizing violence?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Morson answers after a long pause. “I don’t know if that means people won’t go as far as they did in Russia, or if it just means there will be less resistance to it.”

The danger begins, he thinks, when complex social and political problems can’t be debated any longer. “You get into a revolutionary situation because people can’t hear,” he says. “Can there be a dialogue on important questions, or is there only one thing to say about every question? Are people afraid to say, ‘Well, yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that’? . . . When you can’t do that, you’re heading to a one-party state or a dictatorship of some sort. If one party is always wrong and another always right, why not just have the right one?”

Mr. Morson speaks with conviction about the peril of “ideological segregation”: “It was very easy for white people to believe evil things of black people when they never met any. But when you live with somebody, you realize that they’re no worse than you are. . . . We’ve increasingly had ideological segregation on both sides. Each side has caricature views of the other.”

The assumption of historical inevitability may play a part here. You hear it in our political language: A favored policy is “an idea whose time has come,” a disfavored one is “on the wrong side of history.” This sort of teleological thinking—history has a direction, and that direction is identical with our political views—is fervently, if unconsciously, embraced by highly educated people today. It was also “one of the central arguments of late-19th-century Russian thought,” Mr. Morson says.

“Does history have a direction? And is later necessarily better? The greatest thinkers—Tolstoy, Alexander Herzen—answered no, later is not always better. They believed that sort of thinking was an importation of religious providentialism into history—the determinism of Hegel and Marx. The difficulty of this form of thinking is that it paralyzes you from acting. Between the wars, it was common for people to say: ‘Yes, you may like liberal democracy, but that’s of the past. We fascists are of the future.’ Or ‘We communists are of the future.’ People would resign themselves to the inevitable and conclude, ‘Well I can’t fight the future, I can’t resist the fascists or the communists.’ ”

I suggest that the American left is very fond of this teleological language—Barack Obama spoke in his first inaugural address of the “worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” But Mr. Morson reminds me that Ronald Reagan used similar rhetoric. “Part of being a revolutionary is knowing that you don’t have to acquiesce to the tired, old ideas of the past,” he said in a 1985 speech.

Another marker of the Russian intelligentsia was the sheer contempt its members had for the peasants and workers they claimed to represent. “How many workers, how many peasants, were even in the Bolshevik Party? Very few. . . . Lenin’s whole idea was that ‘the working class, left to itself, will never develop more than a trade-union consciousness.’ That’s his famous phrase. They had to be led by the intelligentsia and completely disciplined. No matter what you say, they will do it, no matter how violent. They don’t have to understand the reasons, they’ll just do it. Because they’re the agents of history, as Marx described them. . . . That implies a contempt for the working class and a greater contempt for the peasantry.”

The supposition that America is moving toward anarchy or revolution because we’ve had a week of riots—or three years of bad faith and acrimony, or three decades of polarization—still seems hard to accept. Mr. Morson is careful not to predict the course of events. He uses the phrase “insofar as the Russian example applies” more than once.

But, he says, “we have a major depression, we have terrible fear from the illness, and now we have mass riots in the street, which our leaders do not seem to know how to handle. That’s a very rapid slide from only a year ago. And there’s no reason to think it will slow down. The slide could well continue.”

And history can unfold in unpredictable ways. Who would have guessed 20 years ago, he asks, that the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee would become passé on the liberal left? “I used to get a laugh from students by quoting a Soviet citizen I talked to once. He said to me, ‘Of course we have freedom of speech. We just don’t allow people to lie.’ That used to get a laugh! They don’t laugh anymore.”

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, where this article was first published.

 

The End Looks Near For Iran’s Ayatollah Regime.

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Since November 15, protests have swept through Iran, erupting in at least 165 cities. Ostensibly triggered by a gasoline price hike of up to 300%, the unrest soon found a new focus: the overthrow of the ruling regime in its entirety.

The speed with which the protests spread was a clear indication that the explosive society was just waiting for an opportunity to call for regime change. In the first two days, the protests spread to over 100 cities, with unified chants of “death to the dictator.” “death to Rouhani,” “death to Khamenei,” and “neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”

The public’s thirst for change and penchant to stand up to the regime far exceed that seen in the 2018 uprising. On day one, people closed streets, tore down or burned posters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and attacked government buildings. According to the state-run Fars News Agency affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), in only one province, 100 state-owned banks and 56 other government locations were set ablaze in the first two days; that is double the number in the entire country in 2018. According to our information, over 1,300 government buildings, banks, Bassij headquarters, and clerical seminaries have been attacked and set ablaze, unprecedented in the past three decades.

Sensing a growing fissure within the three branches of his regime, Khamenei spoke on day two, endorsing the price hike and ordering the security forces to crack down. In the first two days, at least 61 people were killed, more than all those killed in 2018.

Tehran doubled down on the use of violence after Khamenei’s ominous speech, killing at least 251, injuring over 3,700 and arresting more than 7,000 as of this writing. But the brute force failed to stop the protesters, and by the second day the regime shut down the internet despite a massive international backlash and financial losses estimated at $370 million a day.

Still, the unrest continued.

Four Decades of Oppression

There is nothing spontaneous about these protests, as the regime’s leaders have conceded. The editorial in the state-run Jomhouri newspaper on November 19th is telling: “The rioters operated in groups of a few individuals at predetermined locations guided by a certain command center, caused damage, set fires, provoked people, chanted slogans not related to gasoline rationing and the price rise … Their aim was something more important than causing a riot.” In his Nov 17th speech, Khamenei pointed to the main Iranian opposition organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which has a vast network in Iran including its Resistance units, as well as a significant presence abroad.

The conscience of the nation is coming back to haunt the regime. The Friday prayer leader of Rasht said on Nov 20th that the main organizers of the protest cells are “the children of the MEK members who were executed,” referring to the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners.

The root cause of the uprising is 40 years of repressive rule. The clerics’ plundering of the wealth and dignity of a nation, astronomical corruption, denial of basic freedoms, and suppression of women are over the top.

Some have argued that as during previous protests, the regime would weather the storm. Not so. This uprising clearly has one message, which is not about “moderates,” vs. “radicals”; it is all about the overthrow of the entire clerical system along with their repressive forces, e.g., the IRGC. The gains of the 2018 uprising turned the page, which has now opened a new chapter. Whatever ups and downs ahead, this marks the beginning of the end of the regime. The situation will never return to what it was.

The maximum pressure policy by the United States has played its part, and did not rally the Iranian people around the flag, as some armchair pundits predicted in Washington. To the contrary, people increasingly see the regime as the main cause of their economic misery and lack of freedom.

And things will only get worse for the mullahs. Weeks before, the Iraqi people – led by the Shiite majority – revolted against their regime, calling for an end to Iranian influence in their country, as did the Lebanese people in their quest to dethrone Hezbollah. A new era has begun.

President Trump, Vice President Pence, and bi-partisan congressional leaders have condemned the killings and sided with the protesters. It is time to recognize the right of the Iranian people to change the repressive regime and establish a democratic, pluralistic and non-nuclear republic based on separation of mosque and state. Providing a safe and secure internet to the Iranian people that cannot be blocked by the regime would be a tangible step in that direction.

Alireza Jafarzadeh is the deputy director of the Washington office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Do You know the Names Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and Brecht? They’re The Ones Destroying American Values.

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Have you ever heard of Antonio Gramsci? How about Herbert Marcuse? Or the Frankfurt School?

These names are probably meaningless to all but a small minority of scholars academics and political theorists throughout the world. Yet, Americans — and indeed all those who treasure the religion, culture and history of Western Civilization — should become acquainted with these names if they are to understand the forces that are currently tearing society apart.

Marxism appeared on the scene in Europe in the mid-19th century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thesis that capitalist society was doomed to demise as the “proletariat” — the working class — rose up to overthrow their oppressors, the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class of property owners. Marx and Engels saw world history through the prism of a perpetual class struggle between these two implacable enemies. Marx predicted that socialist revolutions would spring up throughout the West as the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and established dictatorships in the name of the “people.”

Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for Marx, his prediction fell short.  The socialist revolutions largely failed to materialize in Europe or America. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 arrived in Russia — vanguard of the East — and had as much to do with the tragic casualties and deprivations of World War I as anything to do with the wealth of the propertied classes. Subsequent communist revolutions that attempted to replicate what Lenin achieved in Russia — be they in postwar Hungary under Bela Kun or Germany under Rosa Luxemburg were either short-lived or failed altogether.

Aside from Mao’s communist takeover of mainland China in 1949 — which again happened in the East, not the West and again on the heels of a major destructive world war — most communist successes in the post-World War II era occurred not as a result of a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat but at the point of a bayonet. Communist regimes were forcibly imposed by Moscow on most of central and eastern Europe as an Iron Curtain darkened the continent for the next 40 years.

The intellectual followers of Marx were disappointed. Their vision of a worldwide uprising against the propertied classes — based on economics alone — had not caught fire.

It was time for a new strategy. These left-wing academics — with names like Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer and Brecht — collectively represented something called the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School — associated with the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Germany — was an assembly of political dissidents and malcontents who determined that Marx had gotten it  backwards. Instead of an economic revolution igniting a cultural revolution, they believed only by a “long march through the institutions” of the West could they achieve their communist objectives.

To that end, they launched a broad-based attack on all the traditional institutions of Western society: The universities, the media, publishing, motion pictures, as well as the church and the family. Everything was fair game, if it reflected the traditional Judeo-Christian values of existing society — from sexual mores to national sovereignty.

According to Cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, a “cultural hegemony” of the capitalist class was using institutions like traditional marriage as an instrument of oppression. Everyone was now a victim of these cultural oppressors: Women, racial minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims — it was the rise of identity politics embraced by today’s Democratic Party that attempts to pit one group against another in order to achieve permanent political power.

As Gerald Warner wrote in Breitbart News: “By the post-War era the Cultural Marxist program had a wide-reaching agenda of destruction. It aimed to destroy the family, denying the specific roles of the father and mother, and advocated the teaching of sex and homosexuality to children; mobilization of women as revolutionaries against men, through aggressive feminism; large-scale immigration to abolish national identity; dependency on the state and state benefits; control and infantilisation of the media.”

Of course, most Americans began recognizing the signs of cultural upheaval in the 1960s, particularly after 1965, culminating in what Pope Benedict XVI called the “Revolution of 1968.” Suddenly, everything was under attack; even the very notion of civil government and law. Authority was automatically to be questioned and anything and everything associated with the established order and traditional societal norms and values, traditions and ideas was to be wiped out.

Cultural Marxism is the father of the Democratic Party’s identity politics and political correctness. It is the father of transgender insanity and racial polarization. It is the father of open borders and rights for illegal immigrants. And, yes, it is even the father of the anarchy and nihilism that gives rise to mass  shooters and to Hollywood movies that portray hunting human beings for sport as  “entertainment.”

Yes, Marx’s economic theories may have failed, but his wicked offspring in the Cultural Marxist movement are having the last laugh on all of us who believe in a society rooted in religion, morality and law. The fact that their “culture-first, economics-second” strategy is working can be seen in how the millennials — brainwashed for years by their Cultural Marxist professors in America’s colleges and universities — are now so enthusiastic about socialism.

James Veltmeyer via Washington Times

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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