

For example, in 2014 former British Welfare Minister Lord David Freud suggested that the breakdown of the family in the United Kingdom would cost taxpayers an estimated £46 billion. One of the underlying problems with this type of Marxism is that an attack on the family and the Judeo-Christian values that sustain it leads to catastrophic economic and social effects. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.” In Gramsci’s own words, he viewed the task thus: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. It has been described by Neo-Gramscian theorist Nicola Pratt as the creation of a rival hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI QUOTES HOW TO
Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”Ī counter-hegemony, in essence, is an alternative ethical view of society that seeks to challenge, undermine, and replace the existing bourgeoisie power structure. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power.

Saul Alinsky describes the modus operandi for such an enterprise in the introduction to his book Rules for Radicals: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. It seeks to dismantle the existing cultural hegemony by ideological subversion and opposition, challenging the legitimacy of existing super-structural institutions like family, religion, and political power. Gramsci’s counter-hegemony is also deeply rooted in today’s theory of intersectionality. Gramscian Marxists define the superstructure as everything not directly having to do with production such as family, culture, religion, education, media, and law. Cultural hegemony is maintained by the capitalist ruling class through the institutions that make up society’s superstructure. They use ideology, rather than violence or economic force, to propagate their own values by creating the capitalist zeitgeist. Gramsci believed that the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, used cultural institutions to maintain power. Gramsci sought to break with Karl Marx’s economic determinism and base his theory on wielding and maintaining power by the ruling class, which has commonly become known as his theory of cultural hegemony. Many of his writings can be found in his three-volume Prison Notebooks. Gramsci, an Italian philosopher and politician who was imprisoned during Mussolini’s reign, wrote more than 30 notebooks and 3,000 pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment. One key figure in the mainstreaming of Marxism in Europe, who enjoys little popular recognition for his success, is Antonio Francesco Gramsci.

The emergence of identity politics in Western Europe has come swiftly and aggressively.
