Gramsci marches on

I had to re-publish this letter (originally sent to Quadrant) because it so eruditely sums up my understanding of the cultural battle.

The Malevolent Elite

SIR: I have read Nick Cater’s recent book, The Lucky Culture. I have read Greg Melleuish’s Australian Intellectuals: Their Strange History and Pathological Tendencies. Now I have read your Chronicle in the June Quadrant.

I can’t help thinking that all these works are too generous to the “elite” classes. It takes real malevolence to accuse your own countrymen of genocide and then fabricate the evidence to support it. It takes real malevolence to dream up a climate scare and then fabricate the evidence to support it. The identification of this deep malevolent intent, and its origins, are completely missing from these texts. There are references to the left leanings of this group, but the description of the radical environmentalists who support the global warming scare as “watermelons” is now too widespread to need explanation. Your own scholarship of the “Stolen Generations” traces the origins of the myth to the Victorian Communist Party in the 1930s. The fact that the activities of the new “elites” and the Gramscian agenda run parallel suggests to me that this may be no coincidence and that this left leaning requires much more exploration.

Peter Saunders, looking at the “elite’s” push for same-sex marriage, sums up my concerns:

gay marriage will not bring the bourgeois social order crashing down, but it is one more step in Antonio Gramsci’s call in the 1930s for a revolutionary “march through the institutions”. Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, realised that Western capitalism would not be destroyed by economic class struggle, for it is good at meeting people’s material needs. What was needed, therefore, was a long-term campaign against the core institutions through which bourgeois culture is transmitted to each generation. Break the hold of the churches, take over the media, subvert the schools and universities, and chip away at the heart of the citadel, the bourgeois family, and eventually, the whole system will fall.

While describing the natural history of the “elites” in these recent publications, an analysis of their tools of trade, their principal weapons—“political correctness”, “critical theory” and “cultural relativism”—should never have been left out. This may not be economic Marxism or political Marxism, but it is certainly cultural Marxism.

Clearly, not all of the new “elite class” are self-identified Marxists, but they are arguably remnants of Joseph Stalin’s “useful idiots” and fellow travellers, still engaged in Mao’s “Long March”, but without a Mao to bring it to an end.

Alistair Crooks
Walkerville, SA