Cultural Marxism

I came across an essay on Cultural Marxism today:

Cultural Marxism is the primary strategy of the American and European Left.

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci posited that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion, as they provide the social cohesion necessary to a healthy functional society. Transform the principles that these embody and… you can destroy the society they have shaped.

His seminal thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals, many of whom are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.

Gramsci believed that a society could be overthrown, if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.

So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out.

This strategy is being carried out to the letter.

And this does appear to be more or less exactly what is happening. Smoking bans, for example, turn cultural values upside down, and both destroy communities and depress economies. They are acts of wanton destruction. And many of the prime movers in this have been Leftists of one sort or other. e.g. Sir Richard Doll.

Furthermore, the ‘science’ that is used to justify such bans is itself a parody of science. It is science that has been turned upside-down.

Much the same could be said of climate ‘science’. That also has become (and perhaps always was) a parody of science.

Everywhere, cultural values are being inverted. One of the latest of these being the push by our current ‘Conservative’ Prime Minister to legalise gay marriage – something which strikes me as nothing other than turning the institution of marriage upside-down, and making it the negation of itself – if only because homosexuals can’t have children, which is the central purpose of marriage.

The ‘long march’ appears to have culminated in victory. All our institutions would seem to be completely riddled with Gramscian marchers.

But the net result will be the destruction of Western society, and its self-induced economic collapse, accompanied most likely by the mass death of hundreds of millions of people from cold and starvation and disease. But, as the economy collapses, it will also sweep away all the Gramscian-riddled institutions, and everyone inside them. The Gramscians will find that they have not only destroyed the society that they so hate, but also themselves. They will go down with the ship that they have scuttled. Is this what they wanted?

It probably isn’t. Probably most of them imagine that once the old order has been demolished, it can be reconstructed anew with a new set of institutions and a new set of values. You just take out one set of values, and slot in another set, much like you replace the CD playing on a hi-fi system with a different one. You just replace the smoking, alcoholic, heterosexual, carnivore CD with a non-smoking, non-alcoholic, homosexual, vegetarian CD. And once this new music is playing on all radio and TV stations, and has been adopted by all political parties and professions and universities, society is seamlessly and effortlessly redirected along a new path, as everybody starts dancing to the new music.

This is, I believe, a radically mistaken and unrealistic view of human society. It is the view that, if you can change the way people think, you can change what they do. It supposes the primacy of human ideas and values and beliefs, from which everything else follows. Change the ideas governing it, and you change the society. And this is why these Gramscians set out to capture all the intellectual institutions.

The truth of the matter, it seems to me, is that society actually works more or less exactly the other way round, and it is what people do that changes the way they think. It is the result of personal experience of one sort or other – in industry, in commerce, in science, in the military, or wherever – that people acquire beliefs and values which represent their accumulated body of experience.

Doing things comes first. Thinking things comes second. And the things that are thought are reflections on what have been done.

And none of these Gramscians has ever done anything. They have spent all their lives in universities and government offices, dreaming up hare-brained schemes of one sort or other. All their schemes are unworkable and unrealistic, because they are not the product of experience. None of it has ever been tested. So one can say with perfect confidence that, whatever their schemes for the transformation of Western society, it will be a colossal failure.

And one can also predict, with perfect confidence, that as their unworkable schemes demonstrate their unworkability by simply not working, the ordinary people whose unpleasant experience it is to endure the conditions imposed upon them will rise up and overthrow them, and kick them out of all the institutions and all the government offices and everywhere else that they congregate. It’s bound to happen.

I am myself perhaps something of a thinker. I love playing around with ideas. But in everything that I think, I am always trying to understand the world in which I find myself, not to change it or destroy it. Idle Theory, for example, is all about trying to understand economics and ethics and biology and evolution. And when I’m thinking (as I have been a lot for the past year) about how cells grow and divide, it has been to offer another explanation of how and why this might happen. And it’s probably the wrong explanation, of course.

What I am not trying to do is to treat the world as a blank canvas on which to paint some idealistic new picture, some new work of imaginative art. Such an approach seems to me to be horribly arrogant and conceited. I have no wish to transform the world, or to demolish anything. I would hope to leave the world much as I found it, only perhaps slightly embellished with one or two new ways of thinking about it and understanding it.

It is not that these people are intellectuals that bothers me. I think people should think, and should have ideas. But nobody has the right to impose their vision on everybody else the way these people have set out to do.

We must be rid of them. We must kick them out of the institutions in which they are kept, almost entirely at public expense. We must kick them all out. In any case, pretty soon we’re not going to be able to afford to keep them in the luxury to which they are accustomed, as their poisonous and destructive schemes wreak more and more havoc everywhere.

…

I read today that 53-year-old Andrew Marr, one of the BBC’s frontline political TV presenters and interviewers, has been hospitalised a stroke.

BBC presenter Jonathan Dimbleby summed up what many of us are thinking, saying: “I’m very shocked that someone so energetic, fit and young should have a stroke.”

Pehaps, Mr Dimbleby, that should suggest to you that your notions of the value of being “energetic”, “fit”, and maybe even “young” might be gravely mistaken.

I hope that Andrew Marr recovers. But since I’ve long regarded him as being the ugliest man on TV, it may be something of a blessing for those people who have the misfortune of owning a television set to not see him for a while.

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