Antonio Gramsci, the man and his thoughts.

From Marx to Lenin, Gramsci & Alinsky

Excerpts from The Keys of this Blood by Malachi Martin, 1990 [734 pages]

For further reading on the ideologies that impacted our world in the last century click here: http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communism/marx-gramsci.htm

13. Antonio Gramsci

"...the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism -- and certainly more than Stalinism -- to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West." [p. 243]


"By 1913, he was a member of the Italian Socialist Party. In 1919, he founded a newspaper, whose name alone—L’Ordine Nuovo, The New Order—gave clear indication of his bent of mind and of the fact that, like Lenin, he was both a visionary and a doer of deeds. In 1921... Gramsci [co-]founded the Italian Communist Party. The next year...Benito Mussolini came to power.... Italy became a Fascist nation. And Gramsci took off for what he no doubt expected would be the safer haven of Lenin’s USSR.


"Marxist though he was, and as fully convinced as Lenin that there was a force completely inner to mankind driving it on as a whole to the Marxist ideal of the 'Workers’ Paradise,' Gramsci was too aware of the facts of history and of life to accept other basic and gratuitous assumptions made by Marx, and accepted unquestioningly by Lenin....


"Gramsci himself rejected Christianity and all its transcendent claims. Nevertheless, he knew Christian culture existed.... For that was the force binding all the classes... into a single, homogeneous culture. It was a specifically Christian culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important things about human life transcended the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal lives.


"Gramsci agreed that the great mass of the world’s population was made up of workers. That much was just plain fact. What became clear to him, however, was that nowhere—and especially not in Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm. ...


"There would never be a glorious uprising of the proletariat. There would be no Marxist-inspired violent overthrow of the ruling 'superstructure' by the working 'underclasses.' Because no matter how oppressed they might be, the 'structure' of the working classes was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian faith and their Christian culture....


"The Marxist insistence that everything valuable in life was within mankind—was immanent in mankind and its earthly condition—was impotent against such a bulwark." [pps. 244-245]


"Gramsci did not live to witness Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and the failure of yet another plan for violent proletarian revolt.... Nor did he live to see even the first traces of the vindication and victory of his ideas. Nevertheless, when the first volume of what he had written in prison was published in 1947—a full ten years after his death—the voice of the long-dead Marxist prophet became a reality for which the world at large had no ready answer. A reality that would bedevil Joseph Stalin and each of his successors until Mikhail Gorbachev, who listened at last, would finally take the hand of Gramsci’s ghost and set off on the Leninist-Marxist road to the twenty-first century." [p. 247]


"A key element of Gramsci’s blueprint for the global victory of Marxism rested on Hegel’s distinction between what was 'inner' or 'immanent' to man and what man held to be outside and above him and his world—a superior force transcending the limitations of individuals and of groups, both large and small." [p. 247]


[The next section shows how the church must be adapted to this-worldly vision of a material paradise. The emerging church has already embraced this counterfeit vision of an earthly "kingdom of 'God.'"]


"Marxism's 'transcendent,' said Gramsci, was the utopian ideal....


"Gramsci argued that unless you can systematically touch what is immanent and immediate to individuals and groups and societies in their daily lives, you cannot convince them to struggle for any transcendent." [p. 248]


"...therefore, the call of Marx and Lenin to impose their 'transcendent by violent force was a futile contradiction in human logic. It was no wonder that... the only Marxist state that existed was imposed and maintained by for e and by terrorist policies.... If Marxism could not find a way to change that formula, it would have no future.


"What was essential,' insisted Gramsci, was to Marxize the inner man. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the 'Workers' Paradise' [the classless society] before his eyes.... And he was totally convinced that the material dimension of everything ... was the whole of it....


"Even Stalinist terror methods, Gramsci predicted, could not eliminate what he called “the forces of bourgeois reaction.” Instead, he warned,
those reactionary forces—organized religion, the intellectual and academic establishment, capitalist and entrepreneurial circles—all would be compressed by any such repression into dense streams of tradition, resistance and resentment. ...
"Clearly, if Gramsci was to change the common cultural outlook, the first order of business had to be to change the outward face of the Communist Party. For starters, Marxists would have to drop all Leninist shibboleths. It wouldn’t do to rant about 'revolution' and 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and the 'Workers’ Paradise.' Instead... Marxists would have to exalt such ideas as 'national consensus' and 'national unity'....
"Further, advised Gramsci, Marxists around the world ... would have to engage in the practical and normally accepted democratic processes, in lobbying and voting and the full gamut of parliamentary participation. They would have to behave in every respect the way Western democrats behave—not only accepting the existence of many political parties but forging alliances with some and friendships with others. They would have to defend pluralism, in fact." [p. 249-250]


"And—heresy of all Leninist heresies—Marxists would even have to defend different types of Communist parties in different countries. The Central Committee of the CPSU would still be the operational center of world Marxism—would still direct this new style of world revolution by penetration and corruption. But no Communist Party in any country outside the Soviet Union would be a forced clone of the CPSU.
"On top of all that, Marxists must imitate, perfect and expand the roles already invented by Lenin and his 'intelligence expert.'... Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.
"Even such a pervasive blueprint as that would not work in the end, however, unless Gramsci could successfully target Marxism’s greatest enemy. ... the Christianity that had created and still pervaded Western culture in all its forms, activities and expressions. ....
"For this purpose, Gramsci felt the timing was rather good. For though Christianity appeared on the surface to be strong, it had for some time been debilitated by unceasing attacks ag failing remnant of Christianity. ... Marxists must change the residually Christian mind... so that it would become not merely a non-Christian mind but an anti-Christian mind." [p.250]


"...he needed to get individuals and groups in every class and station of life to think about life’s problems without reference to the Christian transcendent, without reference to God and the laws of God. He needed to get them to react with antipathy and positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals or the Christian transcendent into the treatment and solution of the problems of modern life." [p. 251]


"...Gramsci was a Marxist through and through. And the bedrock essence of Marxism—the cornerstone of the Marxist ideal of a this-worldly Paradise as the summit of human existence—is that there is nothing beyond the matter of this universe. There is nothing in existence that transcends man—his material organism within his material surroundings."
"...such goals, like most of Gramsci’s blueprint, had to be pursued by means of a quiet and anonymous revolution. No armed and bloody uprisings.... Rather, everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights.... [The new world must not only move beyond -- it must learn to despise] the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all. ...


"Do that, he promised, and in essence you will have Marxized the West. The final step—the Marxization of the politics of life itself—will then follow." [p. 251]


"Liberation Theology was a perfectly faithful exercise of Gramsci's principles. It could be launched with the corruption of a relatively few well placed Judas goats. Yet it could be aimed at the culture and the mentality of the masses. It stripped both of any attachment to the Christian transcendent. It locked both the individual and his culture in the close embrace of a goal that was totally immanent; the class struggle for socio-political liberation. [p. 260-261]


"In the United States and Europe, meanwhile, the poor were too small in numbers, too isolated and too uninterested to serve as a primary target for Gramscian opportunity. No matter, For in both areas there were major seminaries that were already a... anti-traditional in their theology. They rapidly enshrined Liberation Theology as the new way of thinking about all the old questions. [p. 261-262]


The process of secularization in the Catholic and Protestant churches progressed so rapidly and with such energy that, just as Gramsci had foreseen, it fed into other streams of anti-Church influence in the West. Those were streams that, seemingly independent of Marxist influence, advocated a materialistic interpretation of all sectors of human through, investigation and action. [p. 262]


"...the academic faculties of Europe and America, already proud of the position in the vanguard of liberal and forward-looking political thinking, took like ducks to the rising tide of Marxist interpretations of history, law, religion and scientific inquiry.


"(Dawkins -- no God -- just aliens - Look Who's Irrational Now).... All the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and now." [p. 262]


"The 'liberalized' culture of the West nations essentially converged with the process of mounting secularization, sharing freely and solidly in the new sacred principle that all the life, activities and hopes of mankind rested on the solid structures of this world alone. [see WSJ article on religious superstition]


...secular systems of beliefs-- Humanism, Mega-religion and the grab bag of New Age....forged their own not-so-strange alliances with Gramsci's heirs, rushing into the religious vacuum of formerly Christian societies. For they too, were united in insisting... that faith had no function expect to help all mankind to unite and be at peace within this world, in order to reach its ultimate peak of human development." [p.264]


"...Gramsci's ghost had captivated them all into his "Marxist hegemony of the mind.." The transcendent had bowed to the immanent. Total materialism was freely, peace fully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name of man's dignity and rights... autonomy and freedom from outside constraints. Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from the laws and constraints of Christianity." [p.265]


"George Orwell once wrote that 'at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy -- a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact.'... What now passes for philosophy is nothing more than a hybrid complex of fashions... and impulses and theories ant mold public opinion..." [p.266]


"They join with the Christian churches in brotherly dialogue and in common humanitarian ventures. But the object is to confirm the new Christianity in its anti-metaphysical and essentially atheistic pursuit of liberation from material inconvenience, from the fear of a nuclear holocaust, from sexual restriction of any kind and, finally, from all supernatural constrictions.... Total liberation is to construct the long-dreamed Leninist-Marxist Utopia.... By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci... has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood." [p.267-268]

"Mikhail Gorbachev burst upon the world scene as the first Soviet leader big-minded enough to appraise, appreciate and fully embrace the Gramscian formula.... Gorbachev is being very faithful to his hard-core Leninism, while adding his own updating and correctives." [p.272]