 |
| A crazy. A cool Italian crazy. But a crazy nonetheless |
That was a time that the Italians were in yet another version of a love affair with communism. Just up the road from me in Torino, was the communist-run town of Bologna. Think of it: not “democratic socialist” or Left Wing. But Communist ! And then there was the Red Brigades, still around at the time, sowing murder and mayhem.
So, Gramsci was sometimes on the lips of lefties of the time. He was, after all, as some claim, “Italy’s greatest twentieth-century intellectual”. Crikey!
But then I started hearing more about him after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism. I’d assumed that communism had been so roundly trounced by the West, so patently a failure, that it was done for. Dead and buried. I wasn’t the only one to think that. There’s “Francis-the-end-of-history-Fukuyama" for just one.
But then there was the resurgence. This time in the cultural sphere. The rise of Cultural Marxism. Via the so-called Frankfurt School, Derida, Foucault, the Frenchies, always and of course, and then, right up there, the louring presence of Antonin Gramsci. Which gave us the “Long March through the institutions” we have today. (The “Long March” is a Maoist term).
The Jacobin, a very leftie magazine, has a whole encomium, by Marzia MacCaferri: "How Antonio Gramsci’s Ideas Went Global”. They love it all, this Long March. If only it could be longer, and harder, and deeper and tougher and more thorough. And more... well, violent, is where we’re at today.
There’s an Oxford Union debate with the New York Times’ know-it-all-in-chief, Paul Krugman, in which he talks of “Zombie ideas”, referring to the idea of “trickle down” economics of the Right. Now, forgive me here, but is there not the Zombie idea of Zombie ideas in the case of Socialism? Of Marxism? Of Communism? All malign versions of each other. There is no bigger, crazier, more malign idea out there that will simply not die. No matter how often it’s been tried and failed.
When you think about that, it’s pretty bizarre. And I’d have to give it the label: “Things I don’t get”. (Though I kind of do: which is the end goal is a utopian wonderland. Just one more try! Pleeeease!)
That’s what we’re living with today. The malign influence of “Italy’s greatest intellectual”, infecting young minds at college, who go on to be middle-aged minds in academia and old-minds in the media and leftist governments.
Oh, how I wish that Gramsci’s ideas had not “gone global”!
Be done with the Zombies!
