Woke Silmarillion
Woke Silmarillion
Antonio Gramsci: before the beginning
Every history has its pre-history. Lord of the Rings has its Silmarillion, Greek Pantheon has its Theogony, Titans and Cyclops and all that jazz. The Church of Woke has Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937), an Italian Marxist politician and equally Marxist philosopher.
According to Jacobin,
Gramsci was the first Marxist to write that culture is not simply the expression of underlying economic relations but, most important, one of the elements of hegemony… His sophisticated analysis of social power … in which institutions as well as mass popular and literary cultural production play a subtle role, has turned out to be at ease across the world, from India to Argentina, Spain, and the African continent, and from the United States to Britain.
In short, Gramsci invented the “long march through the institutions,” the very events we have been are experiencing for an awfully long time. And he is being slowly recognized for that1.
Here is CNN, in 2016, where Gramsci “advises” Hilary Clinton to fight dirty to win the election.
And here at UMB2:
[Gun violence] is a clear and present threat to the public good – to how we regard our sense of security, care for our citizens, and reconcile differences. It threatens our freedom not to fear. We are long past tipping points. People are angry, frustrated, and disappointed. But as Antonio Gramsci reminded us in another era of hatred and violence, if we are pessimistic by intelligence, we will remain optimistic by will.
In fact, CNN appears to be liking the Gramsci’s quote above.
Richard Horton, the Editor-in-Chief of Lancet (yeah, THAT Lancet), just published, in his Lancet of all places, Gramsci’s biography; in the same space, Horton mumbles something about Gramsci’s “war of position” and our “war of position.”3
The story of the Greek gods ends with the Trojan War. When will this story end… and how?
Unrelated but interesting: the first American translator of Gramsci is the father of our current Secretary of Transportation.
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, UMB Chancellor, in a pan-university-email on gun violence, c. May 2022.
Yes indeed. "What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be ... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media ..." -- Antonio Gramsci, c. 1929
And, in honor of Randi Weingarten, more Gramsci: "The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education ... I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem."
He wrote the blue print for the disaster that has been imposed on to Western society.
Interestingly enough, Gramsci joined the socialist party in 1913, while Mussolini was expelled from the same party (its highest echelons, in fact) in December of 1914, so they have been party comrades for more than a year. In 1916, Gramsci became a regional editor of the same party organ Mussolini was editor-in-chief for more than 6 years.
In addition, he was a Stalinist sycophant, denouncing real and alleged Trotskyites within the Comintern with zeal. And he was very much an admirer of Lenin's policy of mass murder of peasants.