Revolutionaries Without a Cause

In the week-plus since the latest attempt on President Trump’s life, many on the Right and in the political Center are, at long last, waking up to the possibility that the political opposition today is not entirely normal. It’s not unprecedented either, but it’s far from what we have come to expect in the so-called “civilized” world. As the polymath and public intellectual Eric Weinstein put it on Twitter/X, “These aren’t deranged liberals. They are normalized revolutionaries.”

By now, the story of how these revolutionaries came to be normalized is well-worn. In the aftermath of World War I, during which the workers of the world failed to unite, failed to lose their chains, and chose instead to fight for God and country, Europe’s Marxists realized that their long-promised and much-anticipated proletarian revolution was not going to happen—or at least it was not going to happen on its own, without a spark of some sort. The most influential of these Marxists congregated in Germany and Austria—Karl Korsch and Carl Grünberg in Frankfurt, Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács in Vienna, and so on. Although the details here are complicated and the differences between the various factions significant, in general, the conclusion the various theorists reached was that the religious, artistic, intellectual, and cultural hegemony of the Christian/bourgeois order made it impossible for the revolutionary classes to understand their “true” interests and to unite in revolution against their oppressors.

In response, the Marxists determined that the existing cultural hegemony had to be broken, and the means for doing so involved taking over the institutions of cultural transmission: education, the arts, entertainment, the news media, and even religion. Thus, they began what the German student activist Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.”

Again, it’s important to recognize that the differences between the various factions of the postwar Left were numerous and significant. One thing they did agree on, however, was that the march was supposed to be “instrumental,” which is to say that it was the means to an end. Gramsci called the long march the “war of position,” in which Marxist intellectuals would take up roles within the institutions of society, positioning themselves for that which was to come, namely, the “war of maneuver.” The long march/war of position was never an end in itself. It was merely a part of the process, undertaken in service of the war of maneuver, which would, of course, be the workers’ revolution.