Antonio Gramsci was the founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921. Following is an overview of Gramsci’s plan to Marxise the inner man and thereby create a new West: “What was essential, insisted Gramsci, was to Marxise the inner man. Only when that was done could you successfully dangle the utopia of the ‘Workers’ Paradise’ before his eyes, to be accepted in a peaceful and humanly agreeable manner, without revolution or violence or bloodshed. What Marx and Lenin had got wrong, Gramsci said, was the part about an immediate proletarian revolution. Gramsci had a better way. A subtler blueprint for Marxist victory. Use Lenin’s geopolitical structure not to conquer streets and cities, argued Gramsci. Use it to conquer the mind of civil society. Use it to acquire a Marxist hegemony over the minds of the populations that must be won. They must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must enter into every civil, cultural, and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread. If there was any true superstructure that had to be eliminated, it was the Christianity that had created and still pervaded Western Culture in all its forms, activities, and expressions. Marxist action must be unitary against what he saw to be the failing remnant of Christianity. And by a unitary attack, Gramsci meant that Marxists must change the residually Christian mind. He needed to alter that mind—to turn it into its opposite in all its details—so that it would become not merely a non-Christian mind but an anti-Christian mind. Everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all else. Accomplish that, said Gramsci, and you will have established a true and freely adopted hegemony over the thinking of every formerly Christian country. 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” (Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 1990, pp. 247-251). Martin was a Roman Catholic and did not understand fundamental spiritual issues, but he did understand cultural Marxism.
(Friday Church News Notes, November 20, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)