A review of a new book on how the Left has (temporarily, I should hope) won the Gramscian 'long march through the institutions. Resist!
From MercatorNet
By Steven Tucker
TABOO: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolutionby Eric Kaufmann | Forum/Swift Press, 2024, 394 pages
Just as I was about to write this review of Professor Eric Kaufmann’s new book about the current woke takeover of the West, a news story broke which sums up several of its basic premises quite neatly. Following the victory of her own Labour Party in the recent UK General Election, a noted Far-Left black MP, Dawn Butler, posted the following racially triumphant image online, celebrating the large number of non-white politicians now sitting alongside her in the House of Commons:
Red Dawn’s only response was naked self-aggrandisement:
What “greatness” would this be, precisely? This relentlessly grievance-obsessed individual’s only prior notable contribution to the political life of Great Britain came in 2019, when she seemingly became tired and emotional at a queer awards evening and gave a bizarre podium speech erroneously claiming that “90 per cent of giraffes are gay” and that therefore there was no reason not to force small children to read books about ostentatiously homosexual penguins in UK schools, thereby triggering a noisy internal Party row.
Stealing a March
How the hell did identitarian idiots like this come to take over our entire public life? Looking at the photos of Dawn and her fellow Far-Left clones on her Twitter account, some might almost guess there was some kind of conspiracy going on in which every last one of our institutions had been systematically infiltrated and then subverted by revolutionary Marxists from within.
This idea is known as the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’, a plan advocated by the lamentably influential Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Observing how Communist revolutions rarely won mass majority support from the ordinary workers in whose names they were supposedly performed, Gramsci advised fellow travellers to perform their revolution by stealth instead, slowly winning jobs in fields like academia and the law, rising up through the ranks, and subsequently only appointing applicants of their own political ilk once older liberals and conservatives had retired.
Slowly, bit by bit, without a shot being fired, the West’s institutions would then fall, one by one, to Communism in a fashion so incremental that the average voter wouldn’t even really notice – until, one fine future day, the tipping point of societal control had finally been reached, and everyone woke up to suddenly find Dawn Butler and her kind “showing off the melanin” and lording it arrogantly over the quietly conquered proletariat.
As capturing industry and commerce would be much more difficult than infiltrating areas like academia and television, a key tactic of such Long Marchers was to subtly shift the very idea of what Marxism really was around from a primarily economic, to a primarily cultural, field – spawning the new movement of so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’.
The ‘capital’ now to be redistributed was no longer money and property, as for Marx and Engels, but ‘social capital’ instead, hoarded primarily by the traditionally socially normative portions of Western society – whiteness, maleness, straightness, sanity, able-bodiedness, Christianity and so forth. If you had any of these, then you had to be systematically robbed of the privileges such qualities allegedly gave you, such valuable social capital being reallocated instead to insane black female lesbian Muslims in wheelchairs like Dawn Butler aspires to be.
The fiendish Gramsci-following Cultural Marxists then used their increasing secret capture of our institutions to gradually expand and subvert the meaning of terms like ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia’ out from initially reasonable concepts like outlawing racial segregation, or decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults, to the point where wholly unreasonable new interpretations of the same terms now applied – such as it apparently now being ‘racist’ for a white man to object to a black woman tauntingly crowing about her melanin, or ‘homophobic’ to point out that, factually, giraffes aren’t 90 percent gay at all.
Eric the non-Red
That’s the whole Gramscian Long March conspiracy theory, anyway – but is it really true? One man who has just asked himself the very same question is the admirable and affable Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian-born liberal-cum-conservative-leaning academic and free speech advocate currently employed as a Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the UK’s University of Buckingham. This institution is, essentially, a safe space for dissenting non-Marxist academics who are fleeing the Marxism-friendly safe spaces that mainstream British universities have increasingly become.
Kaufmann himself has been the victim of spurious student- and staff-backed harassment and intimidation complaints in the past, and his book is full of similar examples of pointless woke persecution of academics, unearthed via anonymous surveys.
One typical example involved an unnamed professor who was disciplined by superiors and his HR Department after writing a paper which, unacceptably, “had not explicitly condemned conservatism as immoral”. He explained that, as it was supposed to be a piece of neutral academic research, he didn’t think it was “appropriate” for him to abuse his position to “subjectively pass judgement” on a matter of politics. However,
“This ruffled a few feathers: someone even reported me to the police. Honestly, I can’t stop laughing. My morning message to those people is, get used to me celebrating my greatness, I will not play small to make you feel better about yourself.”
What “greatness” would this be, precisely? This relentlessly grievance-obsessed individual’s only prior notable contribution to the political life of Great Britain came in 2019, when she seemingly became tired and emotional at a queer awards evening and gave a bizarre podium speech erroneously claiming that “90 per cent of giraffes are gay” and that therefore there was no reason not to force small children to read books about ostentatiously homosexual penguins in UK schools, thereby triggering a noisy internal Party row.
Stealing a March
How the hell did identitarian idiots like this come to take over our entire public life? Looking at the photos of Dawn and her fellow Far-Left clones on her Twitter account, some might almost guess there was some kind of conspiracy going on in which every last one of our institutions had been systematically infiltrated and then subverted by revolutionary Marxists from within.
This idea is known as the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’, a plan advocated by the lamentably influential Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Observing how Communist revolutions rarely won mass majority support from the ordinary workers in whose names they were supposedly performed, Gramsci advised fellow travellers to perform their revolution by stealth instead, slowly winning jobs in fields like academia and the law, rising up through the ranks, and subsequently only appointing applicants of their own political ilk once older liberals and conservatives had retired.
Slowly, bit by bit, without a shot being fired, the West’s institutions would then fall, one by one, to Communism in a fashion so incremental that the average voter wouldn’t even really notice – until, one fine future day, the tipping point of societal control had finally been reached, and everyone woke up to suddenly find Dawn Butler and her kind “showing off the melanin” and lording it arrogantly over the quietly conquered proletariat.
As capturing industry and commerce would be much more difficult than infiltrating areas like academia and television, a key tactic of such Long Marchers was to subtly shift the very idea of what Marxism really was around from a primarily economic, to a primarily cultural, field – spawning the new movement of so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’.
The ‘capital’ now to be redistributed was no longer money and property, as for Marx and Engels, but ‘social capital’ instead, hoarded primarily by the traditionally socially normative portions of Western society – whiteness, maleness, straightness, sanity, able-bodiedness, Christianity and so forth. If you had any of these, then you had to be systematically robbed of the privileges such qualities allegedly gave you, such valuable social capital being reallocated instead to insane black female lesbian Muslims in wheelchairs like Dawn Butler aspires to be.
The fiendish Gramsci-following Cultural Marxists then used their increasing secret capture of our institutions to gradually expand and subvert the meaning of terms like ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia’ out from initially reasonable concepts like outlawing racial segregation, or decriminalising homosexual acts between consenting adults, to the point where wholly unreasonable new interpretations of the same terms now applied – such as it apparently now being ‘racist’ for a white man to object to a black woman tauntingly crowing about her melanin, or ‘homophobic’ to point out that, factually, giraffes aren’t 90 percent gay at all.
Eric the non-Red
That’s the whole Gramscian Long March conspiracy theory, anyway – but is it really true? One man who has just asked himself the very same question is the admirable and affable Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian-born liberal-cum-conservative-leaning academic and free speech advocate currently employed as a Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the UK’s University of Buckingham. This institution is, essentially, a safe space for dissenting non-Marxist academics who are fleeing the Marxism-friendly safe spaces that mainstream British universities have increasingly become.
Kaufmann himself has been the victim of spurious student- and staff-backed harassment and intimidation complaints in the past, and his book is full of similar examples of pointless woke persecution of academics, unearthed via anonymous surveys.
One typical example involved an unnamed professor who was disciplined by superiors and his HR Department after writing a paper which, unacceptably, “had not explicitly condemned conservatism as immoral”. He explained that, as it was supposed to be a piece of neutral academic research, he didn’t think it was “appropriate” for him to abuse his position to “subjectively pass judgement” on a matter of politics. However,
“I was told that there are some subjects I shouldn’t remain neutral on, and that I have a moral duty to condemn those on the political right. I was told that, if I insisted on remaining impartial within my research, I was not to further research this subject and warned I may face disciplinary hearings if I did.”
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