Antonio Gramsci's Anti-Marxist Strategy for Undermining the West

Gary North - July 21, 2020

Remnant Review

Gramsci was right. Marx was wrong. Lenin was wrong. Stalin was wrong. I have argued this point for decades.

Gramsci was a leader of the Communist Party in Italy in the 1920's. He spent the 1930's in an Italian prison. Here, he wrote his essays.

He argued that culture and especially religion are the foundation of society. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin said the mode of production is. They said that culture and religion are products of the mode of production.

Now Daniel Ajamian has added to my analysis. He delivered this lecture to the Mises Institute's annual undergraduate seminar, Mises University. Lew Rockwell has reprinted it here.

He discussed Gramsci's formula.

What is that formula? Gary North explains: Noting that Western society was deeply religious, Gramsci believed that…

…the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system derived from Christianity.

Religion and culture were at the base of the pyramid, the foundation. It was the culture, and not the economic condition of the working class, that was the key to bringing communism to the West. To be fair to Gramsci, he didn’t start this ball rolling; the West was doing a fine job of damaging its cultural tradition.

He provided the background of Gramsci's intellectual development. Gramsci was a revolutionary from an early age.

It was during his time in prison when he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, describing the contents as “Everything that Concerns People.” It comprised over 2,800 handwritten pages. Twenty-one of the notebooks bear the stamp of prison authorities. Given the risk of censorship, he used bland terms in place of traditional Marxist terminology.

Though completed by 1935, these were only published in the years 1948 – 1951, and not in English until the 1970s. By 1957, nearly 400,000 copies had been sold.

Suffering from various heart, respiratory and digestive diseases, he was eventually transferred to a prison hospital facility. On April 25, 1937 – the same day that he received news that he would be released – he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later.

Through his notebooks, he introduced several ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory, and educational theory. Most important was the idea of Cultural Hegemony, which was the unifying idea of Gramsci’s work from 1917 until he died.

Cultural Hegemony: Why hadn’t the Marxist Revolution swept the West by the early twentieth century? Gramsci suggested that capitalists did not maintain control simply coercively – as Marx would describe it – but also ideologically. The values of the bourgeoisie were the common values of all. These values helped to maintain the status quo, and limited any possibility of revolution.

While Lenin felt culture was ancillary to political objectives (as do many libertarians), Gramsci saw culture as the key. The working class would need to develop a culture of its own, separate and distinct from the common values of the larger society. Control their beliefs and you control the people. This was only possible if the hegemony of the ruling class was in crisis.

Ajamian told students what they are never told, either by anti-Communists or pro-Marxist professors.

Gramsci is, perhaps, the foundational theorist for what we now call Cultural Marxism. When it comes to the importance of the culture and the value of mass media in influencing the political and economic system of a country and economy, Gramsci’s work spurred the growth of an entire movement in the field of cultural studies.

Gary North describes Gramsci as “the most important anti-Marxist theorist ever to come out of the Marxist movement.” He was anti-Marxist because, unlike Marx, he did not place the mode of production at the center of social development. Paul Piccone furthers this point: Gramsci’s vision contradicted official Marxist-Leninist ideology, providing an ethical and subjective dimension superior to the former’s materialism.

According to Angelo Codevilla, Gramsci even had scorn for Marxism’s focus on economic factors: “stuff like that is for common folks.” It was a little formula for half-baked intellectuals. Economic relations were just one part of social reality; the chief parts were intellectual and moral.

He concluded his lecture with this warning.

Friedrich Nietzsche would write, in Twilight of the Idols: “If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet.”

What is Christian morality, if not, at minimum, the non-aggression principle? Antonio Gramsci understood this more than eighty years ago. It is his political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in universities, government, and society more broadly speaking.

I hope it is helpful to you to understand this background, and also, perhaps, gain some insight into why libertarians such as Hoppe and Rothbard concern themselves with matters of culture, tradition, and objective values when it comes to law and liberty.

In any case, it would be helpful if more libertarians took Gramsci seriously. Liberty’s enemies certainly are doing so, and by doing so, they are advancing. And this is what makes Antonio Gramsci the greatest political strategist in history.

We are involved in a great battle for the minds of men. Gramsci understood this far better than Karl Marx ever did.

Ultimately, this is a battle for the souls of men. I think Marx did understand this. His conversion from Christianity in the summer after he graduated from the equivalent of high school was the turning point in his life. He became a materialist. In doing so, he self-consciously moved away from the idea that there are human souls. His philosophy rejected the very concept of a battle for the souls of men. But that did not eliminate the reality of this battle.

What about Marx's own beliefs? In 1841, in a poem titled "The Fiddler" (also "The Player"), he wrote this.

"Fiddler, with scorn you rend your heart.
A radiant God lent you your art,
To dazzle with waves of melody,
To soar to the star-dance in the sky."

"How so! I plunge, plunge without fail
My blood-black sabre into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wists,
It leaps to the brain from Hell's black mists.

"Till heart's bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.

"I must play dark, I must play light,
Till bowstrings break my heart outright."

I wrote this in a footnote in my 1968 book, Marx's Religion of Revolution. Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a victim of many years of torture in Communist prisons, concluded that Marx made some sort of pact with the devil: Marx and Satan (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1985), ch. 2.

Wurmbrand cites Albert Camus, who claimed in 1951 that the Soviet Union's Marx-Engels Institute has suppressed the publication of 30 volumes of materials by Marx: The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage, [1951] 1956), p. 188. Wurmbrand wrote to the Institute, and received a reply from M. Mtchedlov, who insisted that Camus was lying, and then went on to explain that over 85 volumes are still unpublished, due to the effects of World War II. He wrote this in 1980. This was 35 years after the War ended. Marx and Satan, pp. 31-32.

In short, Marx may have agreed with Gramsci after all. His entire materialist philosophy can legitimately be understood as a gigantic intellectual deception. In the name of materialism -- a world without souls -- Marx presented to mankind a choice between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.