Antonio Gramsci, Godfather of Cultural Marxism
Gramsci, whose writings birthed modern Critical Theory (CRT, DEI, Queer Theory, Radical Feminism, etc.), saw churches, charities, media, and schools as targets to be invaded by socialist thinkers.
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NOTE: How did the world get into its Postmodernist, Critical Theory-dominated morass? As Weaver wrote, “ideas have consequences”.
The progenitor of our modern Cultural Marxism — CRT, DEI, ESG, LGBTQIA+, you name it — is Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist whose writings heavily influenced the Frankfurt School. Gramsci grappled with the problem vexing all Marxists of his day: why had the proletariat not overthrown their bourgeois overlords in Germany, Britain, France, and America as Marx and Engles had predicted, but only in heavily agricultural (and non-industrialized) Russia?
Gramsci and his disciples didn’t bother to answer the question directly, which would have required tossing Marxism out the window and starting over. Instead they created a marketing scam designed to repackage class warfare in terms more palatable to 20-year-old college girls and their effete work-averse professors (but I repeat myself).
To understand what we’re up against, you have to understand the evil of the man who gave birth to the modern world. Take a minute to read this important essay. — RDM
Antonio Gramsci, Godfather of Cultural Marxism
by Bradley Thomas
June 4, 2025
There’s little debate that modern-day American universities, public education, mainstream media, Hollywood, and political advocacy groups are dominated by leftists. This is no accident, but part of a deliberate strategy to pave the way for communist revolution developed more than eight decades ago by an Italian political theorist named Antonio Gramsci.
Described as one of the world’s most important and influential Marxist theorists since Marx himself, if you are not familiar with Gramsci, you should be.
The Italian communist (1891 – 1937) is credited with the blueprint that has served as the foundation for the Cultural Marxist movement in modern America.
Later dubbed by 1960s German student activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions,” Gramsci wrote in the 1930s of a “war of position” for socialists and communists to subvert Western culture from the inside in an attempt to compel it to redefine itself.
Gramsci used war metaphors to distinguish between a political “war of position” — which he compared to trench warfare — and the “war of movement (or maneuver),” which would be a sudden full-frontal assault resulting in complete social upheaval.
A Shift in Strategy
In the 1998 book The Antonio Gramsci Reader, edited by David Forgacs, Gramsci’s development of a new form of strategy for ushering in the socialist revolution is made clear.
Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”
As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.
In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.
Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.