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.
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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.
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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.
While
Lenin felt culture was ancillary to political objectives (as do many
libertarians), Gramsci saw culture as the key. The working class would
need to develop a culture of its own, separate and distinct from the common
values of the larger society. Control their beliefs and you control the
people. This was only possible if the hegemony of the ruling class was in
crisis.
John Cammett expands on this point.
Hegemony is described as an order diffused throughout society in all
institutional and private manifestations. All tastes, morality, customs,
including religious and political principles, are infused with its spirit.
This tone is set from the top – one class or group over other classes.
From Cammett:
The
fundamental assumption behind Gramsci’s view of hegemony is that the working
class, before it seizes State power, must establish its claim to be a ruling
class in the political, cultural, and “ethical” fields.
There
are three phases to the revolution in this regard: first, take claim to be the
ruling class in culture; second, seize State power; third, transform completely
the economic base. You can decide how far along we are in this path.
A
second important idea was Gramsci’s focus on Intellectuals. Gramsci
believed that the working class would have to develop their own intellectuals,
with values that were critical of the status quo. This would require the
takeover of the educational establishment and institutions. These
intellectuals, through the educational establishment and the state, had almost
free reign to push forward the revolutionary idea.
Gramsci’s idea of
intellectuals is much broader than academicians and the like. From the
book Gramsci’s Politics, by Anne Sassoon, Gramsci
identifies two groups of these intellectuals: organic intellectuals, coming
from the working class, and traditional intellectuals – the clergy,
philosophers, academicians. This latter group presents a false air of
continuity from their predecessors. Today I would include thought leaders
from entertainment, sports, business, and politics into one or the other of
these two groups.
Gramsci is, perhaps, the
foundational theorist for what we now call Cultural Marxism. When it
comes to the importance of the culture and the value of mass media in
influencing the political and economic system of a country and economy,
Gramsci’s work spurred the growth of an entire movement in the field of
cultural studies.
Gary
North describes Gramsci as “the most important anti-Marxist
theorist ever to come out of the Marxist movement.” He was anti-Marxist
because, unlike Marx, he did not place the mode of production at the center of
social development. Paul Piccone furthers this point:
Gramsci’s vision contradicted official Marxist-Leninist ideology, providing an
ethical and subjective dimension superior to the former’s materialism.
According to Angelo Codevilla, Gramsci even had scorn for
Marxism’s focus on economic factors: “stuff like that is for common
folks.” It was a little formula for half-baked intellectuals.
Economic relations were just one part of social reality; the chief parts were
intellectual and moral.
Many
libertarians, like Marx, are equally focused on the mode of production as the
key to liberty, but on the other side of the coin. They are focused on
economic freedom as the means to deliver liberty for all, and, like Marx, they
virtually ignore or even despise any cultural aspects. Gramsci knew
better, and – as should be obvious by the comparison I am drawing – he offers a
lesson for libertarians who believe that broader cultural questions beyond the
non-aggression principle are irrelevant for liberty.
Continuing with North:
Gramsci
argued, and the Frankfurt School followed his lead, that the way for Marxists
to transform the West was through cultural revolution: the idea of cultural
relativism. The argument was correct, but the argument was not Marxist. The
argument was Hegelian.
The Frankfurt School further
developed the concept of Critical Theory. Critical Theory teaches one to
be critical of every prevailing norm, attitude, and cultural attribute in
society; the purpose is to challenge power structures and hierarchies.
Spelling out precisely the discourse of tolerance that we are faced with today,
Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School would write:
…the
realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward
prevailing policies, attitudes, [and] opinions, and the extension of tolerance
to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.
Violent revolution was not
the answer. From Malachi Martin:
While
firmly committed to global Communism, [Gramsci] knew that violence would fail
to win the West. American workers would never declare war on their middle-class
neighbors as long as they shared common Christian values.
Martin
continues:
The
main weapons would be deception, manipulation and infiltration. Hiding their
Marxist ideology, the new Communist warriors would seek positions of influence
in seminaries, government, communities, and the media.
Gramsci
agreed with Lenin that there was an inner force in man, driving him to the
“Worker’s Paradise,” but he felt that the assumptions underlying this Marxian
view were too basic and gratuitous. Yes, the great mass of the world’s
population was made up of workers, but this was insufficient, as Martin would
note:
What
became clear to [Gramsci], however, was that nowhere—and especially not in
Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from
the ruling classes by an ideological chasm.
These
workers would not rise up against their co-religionists, those with whom they
shared culture, custom, and tradition. They would certainly not offer a
violent overthrow as long as these traditions were held in common. Again,
citing Martin:
Because
no matter how oppressed they might be, the ‘structure’ of the working classes
was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian
faith and their Christian culture.
Gramsci
found the logic of Marx as it found its home in Lenin to be futile and
contradictory. Was it any wonder that the only state in which Marxism
took hold was the state which held it together by force and terror?
Without changing that formula, Marxism would have no future.
A common culture, grounded in
Christianity, would always stand in the way, requiring ever-increasing
terror…or requiring a different path. Gramsci’s path. Murray
Rothbard noted the Gramscian “long march through our institutions” in
1992, writing so colorfully: “Yes, yes, you
rotten hypocritical liberals, it’s a culture war!”
Angelo Codevilla writes that there would
be no need for brute force – at least not on the front end; again, contrary to
the general Marxist view. Transform the enemy into the soldier you need;
he will then do the rest. Gramsci’s method would be more Machiavellian
than Marxist; in the place of the Prince, it would be the party.
This
method would eliminate the very possibility of a cultural resistance to the
communist’s progressivism. There would be no cultural force standing in
its way. As Gramsci believed human nature is not fixed and immutable, it
would be the modern Machiavellian prince’s job to change human nature.
Destroy
the old laws, the accustomed ways of living; inculcate new ways of thinking and
speaking – in essence, introduce an entirely new language. Language is
the key to the mastery of consciousness. Language can achieve what force
never could. Reform the morals; reform the intellect. In this way,
people who would otherwise never spend a minute on such things would become the
most rabid soldiers.
A
blunt force hammer would not work. Ranting about a revolution or a
dictatorship of the proletariat would only make enemies of the working
class. The educational system was the key. Gramsci’s path to revolution
would take much longer than that proposed by Marx or Lenin, but it would be
much more thorough and successful.
In
the meantime, use their rules against them: the democratic process, lobbying
and voting, full parliamentary participation. Behave just like the
Western democrats – accept all political parties, forge alliances where
convenient. Unlike the majority of Marxists, Gramsci would make common
cause with all leftists – communist and non-communist alike; every group with a
bone to pick with tradition and Christian culture was an ally. Knowingly
or unknowingly, they would assist in the communist cause. Martin writes:
Marxists
must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws
oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and
subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner,
they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation,
patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.
Regarding these
alliances, Fr. James Thornton adds:
In
Gramsci’s time these included, among others, various “anti-fascist”
organizations, trade unions, and socialist political groups. In our time,
alliances with the Left would include radical feminists, extremist
environmentalists, “civil rights” movements, anti-police associations,
internationalists, ultra-liberal church groups, and so forth. These
organizations, along with open Communists, together create a united front
working for the transformation of the old Christian culture.
The
method would be described as seduction, as opposed to the rape advised by Marx
and committed by Lenin and Stalin. This would subvert Western culture; it
would redefine itself without the need for picking fights with it.
Gramsci
was writing in the interwar years. Christianity was an already weakened
foe: The Enlightenment divorced God from both the individual and reason.
Nietzsche announced the death of God in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. World War One was the crushing blow, leaving Christian Europe
reeling. Gramsci spotted a wounded enemy, and he knew that this is where
the fatal blow to the West must be struck.
Whatever
was left of the Christian mind must be changed. Every individual, every
group in every class, must think about life’s problems without reference to God
and God’s laws. No Christian transcendence; at minimum, antipathy, and
even positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals. These
could not possibly be allowed in the conversation regarding the treatment and
solution to the problems of modern life.
I
could say the same things about many libertarians. Yet, who do you
believe has a better understanding of human nature, of the direction where such
a path leads: Antonio Gramsci or any libertarian who views the broader culture
as ancillary or even irrelevant to liberty? The Christian culture is
being destroyed; this we know. Who has been more successful given this
path of removing Christianity? Is liberty – defined as rights in life and
property – blossoming in the wreckage of its wake, or is it the other
thing? To ask the question is to answer it. Martin continues:
All
the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained
within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and
now.
With
this material view offering the limits of our meaning, is it merely coincidence
that the West is at the same time going through a crisis of meaning? We
have no idea who we are, where we come from, or where we are going. Given
that we are told to believe that we are nothing but the result of random atoms
smashing together randomly, why would we?
Another
utopia, requiring yet another new man. The perfectibility of man was now
man’s responsibility, not God’s. We have a war on cancer, a war on drugs,
a war on poverty, a war on terror, a war on a virus. We must eliminate
bigotry, racism, prejudice. We must embrace diversity: we are all
different. In the same head and at the same time we must embrace
equality: we are all the same.
Academic
institutions were already well on their way. Proud of their position as
vanguards of forward-looking thinking, these new Marxist interpretations of
history, law, and religion were like red meat to a hungry lion. Throw in
easy-to-get student loans, extend the college experience to all, and add a
couple million newly indoctrinated crusaders every year to the cause.
Secularization
in Catholic and Protestant churches would aid and accelerate this reform.
Everything is material, nothing is transcendent. In case this wasn’t
obvious to us before, what could be more secular than Christian churches
closing during Holy Week – the week that gives meaning to the entirety of
Christianity. How pathetic we must appear to Christians from centuries
past, who comforted the sick during real pandemics.
Speak
of man’s dignity and man’s rights. Speak of these without reference to
the Christian transcendence that underpins these; in fact, speak of the
Christian transcendence as standing in the way of these.
Tim Cook of Apple gave
a speech that was precisely along these lines: man’s dignity
and rights. While finding a way to mention Muslims and Jews, he made no
mention of Christianity. As Jonathan Pageau offers,
what Cook is describing is a totalizing system, a system that includes
everything – except Christianity.
From
Cook’s speech, there are only two values that matter: total inclusivity, and
don’t oppose the system. Total inclusivity means no borders: not physical
– whether state or private property, not mental, not emotional. Not even
of your body. If you don’t embrace total inclusivity, by definition you
are opposing the system, therefore you are to be excluded. This was
Gramsci’s message – and it is Cook’s.
Consider
all of the systems of belief and thought that find common cause with Gramsci’s
grand strategy: secular humanism, materialism, progressivism, the new atheists,
various new-age religions, Critical Theory, post-modernism, even those
libertarian strands that find an enemy in Christianity and in traditional
norms.
Jeff
Deist describes such libertarians, who believe that…
…
liberty will work when humans finally shed their stubborn old ideas about
family and tribe, become purely rational freethinkers, reject the mythology of
religion and faith, and give up their outdated ethnic or nationalist or
cultural alliances for the new hyper-individualist creed. We need people to
drop their old-fashioned sexual hang-ups and bourgeois values, except for
materialism.
I
will ask you to read this quote again, but just replace the first word,
“liberty,” with the word “communism.” The sentence works perfectly for
Gramsci. This “hyper-individualist” that many libertarians have in view
was precisely the type of individual Gramsci desired for his project.
From Piccone:
…Gramsci
considered the constitution of individuality resulting from the revolutionary
process to be an irreversible development preventing any subsequent
disintegration. For Gramsci, the fully individualized ego is not the
starting point of sociopolitical revolution, but the result.
Hans Hoppe also offers that
libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture
and religion. He writes:
…logically
one can be – and indeed most libertarians in fact are: hedonists, libertines,
immoralists, militant enemies of religion in general and Christianity in
particular – and still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics.
Hoppe says libertarians can be this way in theory,
but liberty will not be the result:
You
cannot be a consistent left-libertarian, because the left-libertarian doctrine,
even if unintended, promotes Statist, i.e., un-libertarian, ends.
Gramsci
understood exactly that which Deist and Hoppe describe. Gramsci believed
that the destruction of these traditional values would lead to communism; many
libertarians believe that destruction of these same values will lead to
liberty. Who do you think knows better?
Murray Rothbard would
add:
Contemporary
libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other
only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily
born into a family, a language, and a culture. …usually including an ethnic
group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions.
Rothbard offers that
Gramsci’s hyper-individual is not a human being; yet hyper-individualism is the
view of many “contemporary libertarians.” Hoppe summarizes, regarding
what are known as left-libertarian positions, from his book Democracy: The God That Failed:
The
views held by left-libertarians in this regard are not entirely uniform, but
they typically differ little from those promoted by cultural Marxists.
In
other words, the cultural views of libertarians such as these cannot be
differentiated from Gramsci’s. This is not to say that these libertarians
have communism in their sights. Yet, look around us today: is freedom
advancing or retreating? We are sitting at a time when the evidence could
not be more clear.
We
live in a narrative. The West had a narrative. There will always be a
narrative. Destroying the traditional narrative will not leave a void; a
new narrative will take hold. We see it on the street: kneeling, the
washing of feet, sitting with arms raised to heaven, the sainting of a
Minneapolis martyr.
Once
we lose our story, our narrative, our tradition, we are lost. We are
easily manipulated, not having any foundation of meaning. With no
foundation, we blow freely in the direction of the new, loudest narrative.
Narratives
are always exclusionary – and if you don’t embrace the total inclusivity of
this new narrative, you will be excluded. Christianity teaches one way of
handling those who are excluded – those on the margins: love. This new
narrative teaches another, and it does not bode well for liberty…or life.
Returning to Gramsci, from Martin:
Total
materialism was freely, peacefully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name
of man’s dignity and rights… autonomy and freedom from outside constraints.
Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from
the laws and constraints of Christianity.
Create
the autonomous, completely sovereign individual, freed from all hierarchies and
freed from all responsibilities. Martin continues:
By
just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci…has Western culture deprived
itself of its lifeblood.
There is only one way to
fight this battle – an embrace of objective values in ethics. Murray
Rothbard knew it. He would write:
What
I have been trying to say is that Mises’s utilitarian, relativist approach to
ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be
supplemented by an absolutist ethic — an ethic of liberty, as well as of other
values needed for the health and development of the individual — grounded on
natural law, i.e., discovery of the laws of man’s nature.
Natural
Law. Ethics beyond the non-aggression principle. I seem to recall
hearing something about this earlier this week. An idea flowing from
Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, C. S. Lewis, and Murray Rothbard – among many
others. Available for all to discover – Christian and non-Christian alike
– through right reason.
It
strikes me that the true political divide in society today is not based on the
stereotypical left and right or liberal and conservative labels or even
libertarian and statist, but based on where one sits regarding Natural Law and
objective ethics.
Rothbard takes this idea of
Natural Law and objective ethics quite
seriously:
…I at
no time believed that value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism (the
standard social philosophy of economists) can ever suffice to establish the
case for liberty.
Rothbard makes a more blunt
point in his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto:
…the
natural law provides the only sure ground for a continuing critique of
governmental laws and decrees.
Conclusion
Friedrich Nietzsche would
write, in Twilight of the Idols: “If you give up
Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your
feet.”
What
is Christian morality, if not, at minimum, the non-aggression principle?
Antonio Gramsci understood this more than eighty years ago. It is his
political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in
universities, government, and society more broadly speaking.
I
hope it is helpful to you to understand this background, and also, perhaps,
gain some insight into why libertarians such as Hoppe and Rothbard concern
themselves with matters of culture, tradition, and objective values when it
comes to law and liberty.
In
any case, it would be helpful if more libertarians took Gramsci
seriously. Liberty’s enemies certainly are doing so, and by doing so,
they are advancing. And this is what makes Antonio Gramsci the greatest
political strategist in history.
He delivered this talk at the
2020 Mises University.
Daniel
Ajamian is a member of the board of the Mises Institute.
Copyright © Daniel Ajamian
