GRAMSCI III

Antonio Gramsci was a rather famous Italian Marxist( insert bogus liberal yaaawwwwwnnnns here) who bequeathed to revolutionaries the idea of winning power through the patient build up of ideological hegemony. My task this morning is NOT to dissect Gramcian ideological musings, but rather share with you PRACTICAL examples where these ideas have been applied.

Guess who is the new Premier of South Africa's North West Province? And why is the South African Communist Party praising the provincial government of Mpumalanga?

Check out this statement on Cooperatives and the Financial Sector from Blade Nzimande, the General Secretary of the South African Communists and this document about setting up a party school in Kwa Zulu Natal. Drink in some more red analytical wine from Madiba country please before you chew in the deeper significance of the ANC/ SACP/COSATU 2004 electoral victory at both NATIONAL and PROVINCIAL levels

Do you know WHERE Kerala state is?

Well I will show you. Look below:



Yes it is in India.

This is its government Kerala has the DISTINCTION of providing the world with what many consider to be its FIRST DEMOCRATICALLY elected Communist government and even today, Kerala is considered India's most LEFT WING STATE and it is not for NOTHING that socialists and communists have been elected and reelected in this progressive Indian state as you can see from this article on how Kerala's development record compares to the rest of India. Here is more information about Indian Communists that you can use comfortably in Isiolo, Nanyuki or Runyenjes. Did you know that Communists have ruled

ANOTHER Indian state,

West Bengal, WITHOUT INTERRUPTION from 1977? In fact some people argue that it is NOT Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh or Castro who is the MOST SUCCESSFUL Communist leader in history, but


this person

I could cite examples of how Communists have controlled municipal governments in various Italian cities, or point out that the mayor of

London is not exactly a conservative but I think you have grasped the point I am trying to put across.

GRAMSCI II

Gramsci was a clever Italian neo-Marxist who realized that the West, due to its prosperity, its increasingly-wide access to education and opportunity, social mobility, and its readiness to repair injustices (due to its Judeo-Christian morality), would never be amenable to a violent proletarian socialist revolution.

Plan B, "Gramscian tactics."

Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

Thus Western "hegemonic culture" became the enemy - even more so than "the ruling class," which was simply a reflection of bourgeois culture. And defeating that enemy could not be done with guns. It required a "long march through the culture" to slowly discredit and undermine its institutions, values, and foundations.

A central component of the culture war he envisioned was the war on religion

Gramsci stated that, in the West, bourgeois cultural values were tied to Christianity and therefore much of his polemic against hegemonic culture is aimed at religious norms and values. He was impressed by the power Roman Catholicism had over men's minds and the care the Church had taken to prevent an excessive gap developing between the religion of the learned and that of the less educated. Gramsci believed that it was Marxism's task to marry the purely intellectual critique of religion found in Renaissance humanism to the elements of the Reformation that had appealed to the masses.

Strong Father Model Reaction:

the attacks on Christianity, the family, individual freedom, morality and moral judgements; multiculturalism; the cult of victimhood, "tolerance," political correctness, the replacement of the roles of family, religion, individual responsibility and choice with government rules, laws, and regs; the expansion of the State and the Welfare State and the Nanny State; anti-tradition, anti-capitalism, anti-success, anti-nationalism, anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, Green movement
suppression of the individual soul and spirit - his freedom, autonomy, initiative and self-definition, in pursuit of a collectivist utopia run by "them." In short, it's about the location of power and money

The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism

The genius of Gramsci was his realization of where the progressivism of the late 19th, early 20th century was heading. The Marxian emphasis on the French model of violent revolution, terror included, was discredited by the failure of 1848 to fullfill the prophecy of historical determinism. Where to go? Gramsci assumed the socialist utopia was a practical goal although Marx's prophetic timeline hadn't played out. The cultural 'base' of family, faith and patriotism was never fully considered by Marx as the support for capitalism, only a symptom. Gramsci saw that base as the support for the whole capitalist infrastructure and as a kind of conspiratorial plot to protect 'capitalist' interests at the expense of the workers. The workers themselves held to such values and that had to change. Political correctness as wel as moral/ cultural relativism are relatively new phenomena in the 'Christian' west but are fully 'Gramscian'. The devaluing of 'old fashioned morality' was possible through the 'progressivism' and scientism he saw rising around him. As state power became more centralized through the acceptance of progressive thought ,top-down statism and central planning became more acceptable to the intellectual class of the time, gramsci knew that all his revolution rquired was the right people at the top. Gramsci's insight was his understanding that the top-down revolution of 'intellectuals' in power was practical as opposed to Marx's vision of bottom-up mass revolt of workers brainwashed by a thousand years of the conspiracy of 'western culture'.

Why There Is A Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

Gramscian damage

Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant

Suicidalism

Gramsci & Hegemony | Peter D Thomas | Counterforum | London | 3 May 2010

GRAMSCI

Gramsci and Political Theory by E. J. Hobsbawm

GRAMSCI IN COMIC BOOKS

The definition of subversion will be based on Antonio Gramsci's social theory of hegemony.

Gramsci defines two important terms in his theory: hegemony and counter-hegemony. Intricately connected to these terms are the concepts of reproduction and reification. Hegemony is the ideological power structure in any given society; the status quo. In Gramsci's Marxism, Carl Boggs describes hegemony as follows:

In Gramsci's view, class domination is exercised as much through popular 'consensus' achieved in civil society as through physical coercion (or threat of it) by the state apparatus, especially in advanced capitalist societies where education, the media, law, mass culture, etc. take on a new role (p.17).

Hegemony, therefore, implies that all aspects of society and culture are tools of the current dominant order, either on a conscious or subconscious/subliminal level. Hegemony, like counter-hegemony, is an organic process. And as an organic process there are occasional shifts. These shifts allow an opportunity for change and involve consciousness, action, history and especially language. A question of language is an indicator that other problems are about to emerge, a possible [End page 131] reorganization (Gramsci, 1985:183-84). Gramsci refers to this process as praxis.

Gramsci (1985) conceived that true liberation required the creation of "a new 'integrated culture'" (p.17). This culture would create a different world-view and thereby change the current hegemony. Counter-hegemony is the force behind true revolution and a counter-hegemonic structure is the only force capable of subverting "the capacity of dominant elites to manipulate attitudes, values, and life-styles through media, education, culture, language, etc. ..." (p.40). Changing societal world-views is not an easy task. Hegemonies have two powerful tools (of which the United States is an expert user), namely, reproduction and reification. Reproduction is simply the propagation of the hegemony; it is carried out through mass culture, folklore, language, the media- all the elements that are used by the dominant hegemony to control the subaltern group, the working class as well as any minority or sub group being dominated by hegemonic powers

A more insidious tool is reification, where the hegemony absorbs counter-hegemonic elements and presents them to the masses as their own. This process dilutes the original revolutionary strength; it dilutes and distorts a new world- view into something more like the old-world view

The term reification has been borrowed from Georg Lukacs and is used interchangeably with rationalization, alienation, and commodification. The reason for relating reification with alienation is that the process takes away the identity of the subaltern group as a group. The process of reification is also closely related to Gramsci's "passive revolution" (p.50).

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach that attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate. In other words, it is a theory and practice of helping students achieve critical consciousness. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as

"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)

Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. It is a continuous process of unlearning, learning and relearning, reflection, evaluation and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students who have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by traditional schooling.

Critical pedagogy was heavily influenced by the works of Paulo Freire, arguably the most celebrated critical educator. According to his writings, Freire heavily endorses students’ ability to think critically about their education situation; this way of thinking allows them to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded."^[1] Realizing one’s consciousness ("conscientization") is a needed first step of "praxis," which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education. "Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level."^[1]

Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories all play a role in further explaining Freire’s ideas of critical pedagogy




Contemporary critical educators, such as bell hooks appropriated by Peter McLaren, discuss in their criticisms the influence of many varied concerns, institutions, and social structures, "including globalization, the mass media, and race/spiritual relations," while citing reasons for resisting the possibilities to change.^[1] Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have created the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy at McGill University

Authors of critical pedagogy texts not only include Paulo Freire, as mentioned above, but also Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Howard Zinn, Suresh Canagarajah, Alastair Pennycook, Graham Crookes and others. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Other critical pedagogues more known for their anti-schooling, unschooling, or deschooling perspectives include Ivan Illich, John Holt, dead prez, Ira Shor, John Taylor Gatto, Matt Hern, and Carlo Ricci. Much of the work draws on anarchism, feminism, Marxism, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, Khen Lampert, postcolonialism, and the discourse theories of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Radical Teacher is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to critical educators. The Rouge Forum is an online organization led by people involved with critical pedagogy.

Peter McLaren