As the West spirals ever further into the abyss of Wokeness and Cultural Marxism, one of the most common phrases one hears is, “Where did this all come from?” Forget history, the present is a nightmare from which ordinary people are trying to awake, with no clue as to how the bad dream even started.
People who’ve been putting their super aside for retirement find that big super funds are using their money to peddle causes they would want nothing to do with. People who had little reason to trust the media in the first place find that the mainstream media is almost entirely populated with lying, left-wing propagandists. Parents who assumed that their children were being taught to read and do maths are appalled to find their kids coming home spouting the most ludicrous gibberish about race and gender.
Where did this all come from?
It’s called the Long March through the Institutions and it’s been white-anting the West for nearly a century — when the Western left began, dimly, to recognise that Marxism was failing. Marxism, it must be remembered, is primarily an economic theory, and within a few years of the Russian Revolution, it was more than obvious that it was an abject failure.
But, rather than man up and admit that their grand ideology was a bust, the Marxists simply changed gears. Culture became the name of the Marxist game.
When tracing the origins of the culture wars, the British conservative politician Michael Gove, in Celsius 7/7, identifies the Frankfurt School established in Germany during the 1920s: “In the place of traditional social democracy and conventional communism a variety of new trends drove leftist thinking. The thinkers of the Frankfurt School revived Marxism as primarily a cultural rather than an economic movement” […]
While not part of the Frankfurt School, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci is another significant figure in the culture wars.
From the Frankfurt School emerged so-called “Critical Theory”. This ideological cancer was coined in a number of fields of the Humanities by people such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Jürgen Habermas and Herbert Marcuse. Anyone whose studied any Humanities discipline at university in the last 50 years will certainly recognise the names, having been force-fed their writings.
Critical theory did not aim to tear down the economic base of Western society … It aimed rather at tearing down the cultural superstructure which supposedly reflected the powerful controllers of the economic system and this would enable the collapse of Western civilisation.
Gramsci coined the concept of “cultural hegemony”, which argues that capitalism maintains itself by “conditioning” the people with a “false consciousness” that they are not oppressed, even if they “falsely” imagine themselves to be well-off and happy.
Similar to cultural hegemony is the French Marxist Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus. Capitalist states maintain control and reproduce themselves, he asserted, by employing violence and physical force, what is termed the “repressive state apparatus”, and also by ensuring citizens accept as sensible and natural what is inherently unjust and inequitable.
Having convinced themselves of these premises, the next logical step was concluding that, to overthrow capitalism, the left had to destroy its institutions. These institutions of “repressive state apparatus” include everything from businesses and the public service, to schools, churches, even service clubs.
Lest you be tempted to dismiss as the paranoid rantings of anti-communist obsessives — which, I’ll grant, is exactly what it sounds like — don’t take my word for it. Simply read what the founders of the Long March through the Institutions, German communists Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse, openly said they were going to do.
The two agreed on a strategy of, as Marcuse wrote, “working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others”.
Schools and universities are targeted as institutions guilty of enforcing capitalist ideology. A belief in meritocracy, competitive examinations and the traditional academic curriculum is seen as inherently unjust, as only the already privileged and materially well-off students achieve success […]
Those committed to a neo-Marxist view of education believe working-class and migrant students living in low socio-economic status (SES) communities are always disadvantaged and in need of positive discrimination.
Quadrant Online
Is all this starting to look familiar?
But, still, where did all this “gender” stuff come from? Why are our kids being taught how to write sex personals and put on condoms, but not how to read or do maths at an internationally-competitive level? Why is the left sliding more and more into open paedophilia advocacy?
That dark and sleazy saga will be the subject of Parts II and III. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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