There are few denials these days, if any, that in most Western countries a cultural war rages, characterized by an intense and sometimes very personal disagreement involving politicians, intellectuals, activists and an assortment of ideologues. This war, or rather these wars, have been raging for some time already, at least since the Second World War. Their origins can be traced back to the intellectual legacy of a little-known Italian communist who lived in the first half of the twentieth century.Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 in Sardinia. He enrolled in linguistics and literature at the university in Turin in 1911, and on all accounts he was a brilliant student. Financial problems, poor health and his increasing commitment to his political activities forced him to abandon his studies by 1915. By this time he had imbibed the ideas of various Italian intellectuals, each of whom promoted a different kind of Marxism.
By 1914 Gramsci was writing for socialist newspapers and had become a successful journalist. He later became an editor, at one point starting a weekly newspaper, while at the same time a prolific producer of political theory. When the Italian Communist Party was formed in 1921, Gramsci became its first leader. He espoused a brand of Leninist Communism, and in 1922 traveled to Russia to meet with Soviet leaders. In his absence, Fascists under Mussolini took over the government in Italy.
Gramsci’s career was cut short in 1926 when Mussolini’s police arrested him on trumped-up charges after an attempt on the life of Il Duce. Mussolini started a campaign against communists and socialists some years prior to the arrest, and finally found a reason to move in on Gramsci. At his trail the prosecutor apparently said that "…this is a brain that must be stopped for twenty years…" and Gramsci was sentenced to a five year jail term. This sentence was changed to 20 years in 1927. In solitary confinement his health deteriorated, and after he was released early in 1934, he died in Rome in 1937. He was forty six years old.
In jail Gramsci wrote his political ideas in a series of Prison Notebooks which were published and distributed by his followers. Eventually, his thoughts and political discourse infected Western thought, and would eventually change Western social and political life, particularly in the years following the Second World War.
Gramsci’s ideas and ideology constitute proof that history is a non-linear and arbitrary process. The short intellectual life of this unlikely figure as a Marxist had dramatic consequences which still influence and in some cases dominate modern political and social ideology.
Communists of Gramsci’s day assumed that a Worker’s State would be created by a spontaneous uprising of the exploited and worker’s classes in Capitalist societies. However, in places such as Italy, in spite of tremendous economic problems and rampant poverty, this did not happen. Instead, Fascism rose out of the ashes of the First World War. This puzzled many Communist thinkers who believed that Capitalism was imposed by the ruling classes and Bourgeoisie and that the resentment of exploited workers would naturally lead to a revolution (such as in Russia in 1918) which would overthrow Capitalism.
Gramsci explained this apparent contradiction. In an important insight, he realized that Capitalism (as an exploitative economic system) was locked in place not only through political and economic pressure from the ruling class and the Bourgeoisie, but also by an ideology and a national culture which framed the economic debate in favour of Capitalism. Capitalism could not be overthrown by a spontaneous uprising because the entire cultural ideology of the day provided for a vocabulary and understanding of the economic system which limited the worker classes’ ability to understand that they are the victims of exploitation. Because Capitalism and the cultural order of the day did provide for the meagre meal on their tables, workers were unwilling to revolt and were even loyal to the system.
Thus, Capitalism was kept in place by the fundamental inability of workers to understand it as exploitative. Underlying this inability was the cultural order of the day and the closed economic debate. And this cultural order and set-up was grounded in the ideology and culture of the populace.
The entire system is stabilized by a Cultural Elite and a Ruling Class who maintain the cultural system by imposing cultural uniformity on workers, and by disciplining anyone who deviates or challenges cultural norms. Gramsci was decades ahead of other ideologues.
The implication of Gramsci’s understanding was that to undermine Capitalism, one must first undermine the culture and ideology of the workers and of the Bourgeoisie. This would affect a change in the cultural reference points and framing of the political debate, or would destabilise these to the point where the cultural adherence of workers to Capitalism could be weakened. The fates of entire societies and countries could be changed. In this respect, the American philosopher and educator Allan Bloom remarked somewere in his book "The Closing of the American Mind" that the study of political ideology is the most important of intellectual activities.
These ideas are indeed very subversive. They discard, for example, notions such as good and evil grounded in Christianity. Instead, good and evil became subjective concepts with meanings which only depend on framing the debate in terms of culture and ideology. Change the meaning of culture, and you also change the meaning of good and of evil. It was not long before Gramsci’s insights infiltrated Western life. The dominance of a ruling culture, and the self-maintainance of this culture was called "cultural hegemony", and Gramsci’s perception that Capitalism was held in place by the hegemonic ruling culture had important influences on leftist Western ideology. Leftist activists (including gay rights activists, pro-abortion crusaders, feminists, desegregationists and others) took up the challenge to undermine and change Western culture and so to affect the perception society had of their causes.
Christianity and its dominant institutions (especially marriage) came under direct assault and the Social Sciences and Humanities departments at universities became battle grounds where the youth could be indoctrinated and their cultural assumptions be challenged.
The Long March through Western institutions started in earnest after the Second World War in analogy to Mao Tse Tung’s march to Beijing. Its principle goal is the overthrow of Capitalism, and the destination is Utopia.
The Long March is of course a fundamental idea in Marxist ideology. The political and cultural destination of Marxists (even those of the "neo-" kind) remain the creation of an earthly Utopia; a place where in the words of Marx there would be taken from people "according to their ability" and where there would be given to people "according to their needs". It would be a place of equality, of sharing and of peace where diverse peoples live in harmony.
Utopian journeys are always to a heavenly destination on earth, and this often justifies the grim decisions travellers have to make while en route. Mao Tse Tung’s Long March, Collectivisation by Lenin and Stalin, and more recently, the journey of the ANC through exile to a "democratic South Africa" in the period 1960 to 1990, were all journeys to Utopia where excesses and brutality were necessary offerings required to remain on course. Utopian promises by Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk of a "New South Africa" in 1994 and the "Transformation" of South Africa by the ANC in the period since 1994 are the new Utopian journeys grounded in the Long March. Its excesses, sometimes violent, often repressive and consistently discriminatory, are justified by the importance of the destination.
Utopia is the earhtly paradise where people live in perfect harmony. While Christianity offers a heavenly Paradise after death, Marxism promises Paradise.on earth. A Paradise that is achievable through revolution and transformation. It is a place of abundance and peace; and a place where the past is irrelevant.
Historicism is a direct consequence of Gramsci’s insight and one of his mayor contributions to Marxist ideology. While most Marxists acknowledge objective historical truths, Gramsci had the view that history is only true in a social and relative context. This relativist approach to history has since been exported to other fields of knowledge, and matured as Relativism after the Second World War.
History, and the way in which it frames perception, provides cultural reference points which often urge men to defend their cultural inheritance tenaciously. It must therefore be deconstructed and discarded or scaled down if a Utopian transformation is to take place. A Long March requires that the perception of history be changed.
Western ideology and culture were fully founded in a historical Christian ethos which defined a Free Man and his fundamental rights to act economically and socially in free will in Gramsci’s day. In contrast to Marxism, Chistianity presented an alternative ideology of absolute truths and absolute good and evil. It promised a heavenly Paradise after death in contrast to the earthly Utopia of Marxists. Thus, Christendom was isolated as an essential opponent. The Long March is also an atheist journey.
Why did Gramsci’s ideas spread so wide, and influenced the Western World so profoundly after the Second World War ended? The answer is twofold. Firstly, the War destroyed Fascism as an alternative ideology. Secondly, and this is quite ironic, there was already the example of a New World in the United States of America.
The Second World War destroyed the historical political order in Europe. The ethnic nation states which once so completely dominated the World were left insecure and without strong social and political cohesion. This ideological vacuum was filled by liberal democratic systems imported from the New World, while ethnic solidarity was discouraged because it was apparently responsible for the disasters that two World Wars brought over Europe. Ethnic Chauvinism and Fascism were regarded as despicable ideologies in the West.
The New World is a social project where the past was viewed as both unimportant and even as a mythological construct which may be given arbitrary meaning. New immigrants shook off their ethnic pasts in Europe and elsewhere to melt into America, a place where history and ethnicity are put aside with the goal of creating a great society which viewed their diverse pasts in Europe as quantum mechanical and of uncertain quality. America often discounts her own past or reflects negatively on the long memories of other peoples. It is a society resolutely looking towards the future. This affected Europeans in the period after the war, and they similarly started to disgard their pasts as well as the historical cultural bonds of Chistianity.
Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony and historicism can certainly in the narrowest sense be understood as a reaction against Italian or European Fascism. The importation of liberal democratic ideals into Europe, the rising tide of relativism under Europeans, the defeat of Facism and a confident Communist society in the Soviet Union which defeated the Nazis, had the effect that Gramsci’s ideological insights spread very quickly through the intellectual community in Europe and to a lesser extent also in North America and elsewhere.
Activists and other leftist ideologues including Marxists and Socialists, realised that Gramsci’s ideas created a methodology which can be used to undermine a hegemonic ruling culture and through revolution import an alternative Utopian order. The journey to Utopia, where sexism, racism and other undesirable -isms have been banished, could now be undertaken, and Leftists everywhere put on their walking shoes and started on the Long March through the institutions.
The methodology included the destruction of cultural and social institutions, the undermining of historical certainties through deconstruction and re-interpretation, the use of terminology and related techniques to discipline individuals and to change their perceptions of their environment. Thus political correctness was born, and vulnerable institutions such as universities become hotbeds of activism. Entire departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences had joined the walk to Utopia.
The Christian Church and its related institutions (marriage, the nuclear family as the cradle of childhood education, the notion of an original sin, and a heavenly Paradise) was singled out as enemy number one by these activists as with the Communists before them. In some cases activists cynically exploited or recruited the Church to join their projects and alienated ordinary members from their own insitutions of faith. The result was a cultural assault on Christianity in Europe and to a lesser extent in the New World. This in turn has led to the creation of a post-Christian society in which religion is still less important than in anti-Christian Marxist states where religion was out-lawed.
During the 1920s, the primary goal of the Long March was economic reform of the Capitalist state. Modern cultural wars therefore constitute mere skirmishes on the way. Extreme feminism and anti-racism caused parallel Gramscian cultural battles, and these continue unabated even fifty years later with the main goal being the undermining of contemporary culture and its transformation into a supposedly more egalitarian and equal society. They have severely affected once strong Western cultural and social institutions such as the church, marriage and educational institutions.
Finally, there is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Leftists and other Marxian activitists could not foresee that their attacks on Christianity and Western culture would fatefully undermine the demography of Western states.
The post-war baby boom generation is the largest, healthiest and richest generation in the history of the West. They are also the generation who came of age while Gramscian cultural wars rage on. This generation, influenced by the new cultural order, has rejected the culture of their forebears en masse, and revels in a cultural revolution inspired by events which occurred decades before in a different place and for different reasons. As this generation now marches into late middle and geriatric age, its legacy will be coming up for review. The largest and best educated of all Western generations, it should have produced a large number of geniuses, artists, and notable political and social figures. But as someone remarked, this generation only invented safe sex, and rock and roll. And of course, we’ll forget about the rock and roll in due course.
The Gramscian revolutions have left a cultural vacuum, and as the baby boomers are dying leaving few children, this is compounded by a demographic vacuum, particularly in Western Europe. These vacua are being filled by Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. Empty churches and vibrant mosques are becoming an essential part of Europe, and it is more often the mosques which are filling the cultural and demographic vacua left behind by a retreating Christendom. Migration from Muslim nations to Europe would have been of little consequence if Europe had a strong demographic profile. However, the migration in European states with declining populations will have remarkable results.
Diminishing the influences of Christianity and overthrowing the cultural and religious order in Europe did not lead to Utopia, as many of Gramsci’s fellow travellers believed it would. It has led to a vacuum which is being filled by a fundamentalist religion unaffected and at odds with the transformation of society promised by Marxists and their fellow travellers.
It is in this sense that the Gramscian cultural wars in the West led to a new cultural war between a branch of fundamentalist Muslims and the remains of Christianity and other liberal democrats in the West. This cultural war is compounded by globalisation and brings different belief-systems and cultures previously seperated by distance together.
It is also fundamentally not of the Gramscian type. It is an irony that many Western observers have become so limited by the intellectual hegemony of Gramscian ideology, that they are not able to understand this fact. Most Westerners are still on a Long March to Utopia, where they believe that different cultures and religions will live in harmony in a state which is basically atheist as promised by the Marxist radicals of Gramsci’s age. Radical Muslims have a completely different destination in mind. This disparate views of the future in Europe are causing great discomfort to many Europeans educated in the mold of a Great Society of diverse peoples living in harmony, as Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and French author Jean Raspail, among others, have discovered.
The shortcomings of modern Western intellectual thought, especially on the left of the political spectrum, make the development of a proper framework for the new cultural war all but impossible. In their confusion their sympathies are often with the fundamentalists in the cultural war they believe to be Gramscian in nature, rather than with the defenders of historical democratic Western principles which made the West once so powerful and succesful.
While defenders of Western values are still a majority in most Western nations, the exponential laws underlying demography are already working against them. In the medium-to-longer term, momentum and advantage are on the other side, and their eventual and perhaps inevitable triumph will change some Western nations, especially in Europe, at the most basic level. As the Canadian commentator Mark Steyn remarked in a recent opinion piece: (and I paraphrase) "If a bunch of gay men in Amsterdam think that they will be able to continue freely with their gay lifestyle in a Holland with a population which is 40% or 50% Muslim, or if they think that they will be able to pull up roots at will and fly away to San Francisco, then they live in a fool’s paradise".
But we are all bystanders.
