With this laborious introduction out of the way, let’s begin. The political strategist of whom I am speaking is Antonio Gramsci. Malachi Martin summarizes the importance of Gramsci, in his book The Keys of this Blood:
…the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism – and certainly more than Stalinism – to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West.
What is that formula? Gary North explains: Noting that Western society was deeply religious, Gramsci believed that…
…the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system derived from Christianity.
Religion and culture were at the base of the pyramid, the foundation.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/daniel-ajamian/the-greatest-political-strategist-in-history/
The year 2020 is not passing quietly. We are witnessing events unthinkable even a few months ago: keep your anti-social distance, wear a mask when entering a bank, follow the arrows on the floor of the supermarket, all sporting events cancelled, homeschooling – even for university students – is approved by all corners of government and society. Most relevant to this discussion: pot shops, liquor stores, and abortion clinics are essential, churches during Holy Week are not.
Add to this the protests – more specifically the riots. Police told by government officials to stand down. Those who intend to defend their lives and their property are the ones judged – by the media, and potentially by government prosecutors and courts. Oh yes: protesting and rioting wards off viruses – no need for masks.
What, of all of this, is directly relevant to you? Why did I feel it appropriate to change the topic of this lecture in the last days? We are living through massive cultural changes. While culture always evolves, in the last several decades the changes have been revolutionary – and I use that term purposefully. These changes are aimed right at you and those who sat in your place over the last decades. The purpose is to create soldiers for the revolution.
What I hear of college, and it also is true in business and government, are stories of various cultural indoctrinations – made ever-more intense given the pretext for these recent riots. Politically correct speech to include even compelled speech, cancel culture, self-flagellation, a fight for the gold medal in the oppression olympics. If you disagree with any of this, you are a fascist. To further cement this indoctrination, a requirement to take classes that tear down Western Civilization – even saying those two words in anything other than a scornful tone could be costly.
There is a purpose behind this, a strategy. Events that we have been living through recently are not spontaneous or random. This is not accidental. These events are the result of a political strategy designed to strip us of our liberty. It is an insidious strategy. It is also very effective.
Whether knowingly or not, those carrying out this strategy are using the playbook of the most successful Marxist thinker in history. Given the damage this strategy has done to the freedoms of the West, I consider him to be the greatest political strategist in history.
And this is what I would like to discuss. Before beginning, I must give you fair warning on two points: First, much of this Marxist playbook sounds an awful lot like the wishes of simplistic libertarians – libertarianism for children, as a good friend once labeled this. I will come back to this point more than once.
Second, there will be a lot of discussion of western tradition and culture in this lecture. Inherently this will include Christianity. But if you want to understand the enemy’s playbook, then this cannot be avoided.
Now, I know many libertarians push back hard on this topic: Christianity is unnecessary for liberty, in fact it is an enemy to liberty. I will only ask that you keep in mind: the most successful Marxist thinker in history believed that Christianity is the enemy of communism; it’s what stood in the way of communism’s advance in the West. For now, I ask that you stay open to the possibility that he was right – because, when I look around me today, he sure appears to have been right.
With this laborious introduction out of the way, let’s begin. The political strategist of whom I am speaking is Antonio Gramsci. Malachi Martin summarizes the importance of Gramsci, in his book The Keys of this Blood:
…the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism – and certainly more than Stalinism – to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West.
What is that formula? Gary North explains: Noting that Western society was deeply religious, Gramsci believed that…
…the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system derived from Christianity.
Religion and culture were at the base of the pyramid, the foundation. It was the culture, and not the economic condition of the working class, that was the key to bringing communism to the West. To be fair to Gramsci, he didn’t start this ball rolling; the West was doing a fine job of damaging its cultural tradition.
One can point to elements of medieval Catholicism, the Reformation and Renaissance, the Enlightenment (as I have previously discussed), and postmillennial pietist Protestants (as Murray Rothbard so clearly demonstrated), as all contributing to this destruction long before Gramsci hit the scene. But without these cracks in the armor, Gramsci would never have been successful.
What is our current condition relative to Gramsci’s objectives? I could speak to the destruction of the family, the loss of all meaningful intermediating governance institutions, the absurdity of a good portion of what passes for university studies today, especially in liberal arts and humanities – all of which are symptoms of the crumbling of the ultimate target at which Gramsci aimed. We have, this year, been given indisputable evidence as to the success of his political strategy, in the response by Christian leaders to the coronavirus. Just as one example, from Kentucky:
When I asked [Bishop John Stowe of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington] what he would say to a pastor planning Easter worship, he was blunt: “I would say it’s irresponsible,” he said. “It’s jeopardizing people’s lives.”
I know we live in a fact-free world, but was it ever wise to believe that we were facing the Black Death? In pre-modern plagues, did Christian leaders act this way? The simple answer to both questions is no, yet we have churches closed during Holy Week. I cannot think of a better symbolic representation of the destruction of Christianity in the West. Such is the success of Antonio Gramsci.
Who is Antonio Gramsci? He was an Italian Marxist (more accurately, an Italian communist), writing on political theory, sociology and linguistics. His work focused on the role that culture and tradition plays in preventing communism from spreading through the West.
Gramsci was born in 1891 and died in 1937, the middle of seven children. Hunchbacked, either due to a malformed spine from birth or a childhood accident, it is not clear. One of the stories has him falling from the arms of a servant down a steep flight of stairs. Though his family gave him up for dead, his aunt anointed his feet with oil from a lamp dedicated to the Madonna. Ironic.
Continuously sickly, until the age of fourteen a coffin for him was kept at the ready in his bedroom. His father was thrown in prison for political cause and his mother, somehow, kept the family alive.
Prior to leaving Sardinia for Turin and university, he was a nationalist – Sardinia for the Sardinians. Upon arriving in Turin, he came upon the automotive factories of Fiat. It was here that he found the class struggle: workers and bosses.
World War One made this clear: half a million Italian peasants died, while the profits of industrialists rose. He left university and began writing. He founded a newspaper: L’Ordine Nuovo, The New Order, with its first issue delivered on May Day 1919. He was a founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy, and a member of Parliament.
With Parliamentary immunity suspended by Mussolini, he was sent to prison. Several years later, a prisoner exchange was proposed by the Vatican: send Gramsci to Moscow in exchange for a group of priests imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Mussolini put a stop to these negotiations in early 1933.
It was during his time in prison when he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, describing the contents as “Everything that Concerns People.” It comprised over 2,800 handwritten pages. Twenty-one of the notebooks bear the stamp of prison authorities. Given the risk of censorship, he used bland terms in place of traditional Marxist terminology.
Though completed by 1935, these were only published in the years 1948 – 1951, and not in English until the 1970s. By 1957, nearly 400,000 copies had been sold.
Suffering from various heart, respiratory and digestive diseases, he was eventually transferred to a prison hospital facility. On April 25, 1937 – the same day that he received news that he would be released – he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later.
Through his notebooks, he introduced several ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory, and educational theory. Most important was the idea of Cultural Hegemony, which was the unifying idea of Gramsci’s work from 1917 until he died.
Cultural Hegemony: Why hadn’t the Marxist Revolution swept the West by the early twentieth century? Gramsci suggested that capitalists did not maintain control simply coercively – as Marx would describe it – but also ideologically. The values of the bourgeoisie were the common values of all. These values helped to maintain the status quo, and limited any possibility of revolution. Read the rest of this entry »
