[redcarpet]

Can I have other poster's response on this?

From a article by Perter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday;

The Utopianism of New Labour was a complete re-engineering of Leninism, by Leninists. It entirely lacks Benn’s nostalgic, romantic Edwardian character. This was the switch from the old model – a vanguard Party suddenly seizing the barracks, the post office, the telephone exchange and the railway station – to the Gramscian model (based on the ideas of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who realised early on the that Russian Bolsheviks were a disaster for the Left, and believed the Left had to triumph by capturing the minds of people in advanced western societies, brought up with liberal and Christian principles, who would be repelled by Soviet Communism).

Instead of the violent putsch, the bodies in the street and the cloud of dark smoke over the city, they sought a sunshiny non-sectarian movement, apparently dissolved in normal civil society, while working slowly but actively to gain control of the TV studio, the school, the newspaper, the museum, and so, eventually, of the minds of the peoples of advanced western societies. As this change came during after the 1960s, it was preoccupied with sexual and cultural politics, the family, marriage, race, immigration, educational egalitarianism, artistic experiment and drugs. Its interest in the older left-wing cause, especially trades unionism was limited and fading. It understood that state regulation was a far more effective way of controlling the economy than crude nationalisation.

This grew out of the organisational and political failure of European Communism, and over the failure of Western European Communist Parties to contain or absorb the posty-1968 New Left (which began with a French student demand for male access to female dormitories). The gap between old and new Communism was neatly encapsulated in 1968 by the May events in Paris, a romantic revolution which was really about sex, drugs and rock and roll, and our old friend, personal autonomy; and by the flattening of a tentative experiment in limited economic and personal liberty in Prague in August that year, final proof (if any were needed, and of course it *was* needed by the Communist faithful ) that Soviet Communism had ossified into an inflexible iron machine even more repressive and intolerant of dissent and variety than any pre-1914 territorial empire.

These currents came together in the late 1980s in the journal ‘Marxism Today’, formerly the stodgy theoretical organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but under its editor Martin Jacques a nursery for a new, post-Soviet left, and in the view of many, for the ideas which lay beneath and behind New Labour - deeply radical on social, moral, cultural, educational, sexual and international matters; identical to Margaret Thatcher on unchained economic liberalism. Political illiterates noted only the similarity to Thatchernomics, which they mistakenly thought were conservative, and so moronically concluded that New Labour was ‘right wing’ and Mr Blair ‘the best Tory prime minister we ever had’.

In this new and sparkling stream Marxism and student radicalism could unite into a movement capable, in the end, of accepting the economic changes of Thatcherism, while continuing to seek extremely radical social goals. Its problem was that, once the Cold War ended, it became completely linked with globalism, which the left loved because of its hostility to borders and the nation state, but also with the new ideology of ‘democratism’, in which the desire to plant ‘democracy’ all over the globe replaced Communism as the radical’s the utopian ideal.

Those who fully understood this (and there weren’t many on the Left or the Right, a grasp of Trotskyist or Leninist theology being essential to the task) grasped that the USA had now become the arsenal of progress, and believed that it could impose democratism with bombs and bayonets on those parts of the world that had until now resisted it. Iraq was a perfect chance for them to show what they could do. And, like all utopians, they concluded that the failure of the Iraqi experiment was caused not by the theory as a whole, but by particular conditions, by implementation, etc. So now they’ve done the same in Afghanistan and Libya and will carry on trying to do it in Syria and Russia.

Old-fashioned leftists were baffled by this. For years and years they had marched in the rain for what they called ‘peace’ .This normally meant the disarmament of NATO in face of the Soviet threat, but quite a lot of leftists, having their roots in various Christian pacifist traditions, genuinely believed that such a policy tended towards actual peace.

Now they found that their movement seemed to have been taken over by open enthusiasts for war. They were confused then, and they are confused still . The confusion has pretty much destroyed the Labour Party, and is the only way of explaining the rift which followed the Iraq war and which persists to this day. Those leftists who actually understand their own utopian, internationalist beliefs grasp why these wars are called for. Those who have embraced socialism as a substitute for a dead Christianity are outraged by leaders who preach a gospel of endless global war.

[The Immortal Goon]

As always in these conspiracy theories, I see absolutely nothing concrete (and in this case even stated) as to who or why or really when these communists infiltrated liberalism in order to apply liberalism.

Instead of this elaborate conspiracy theory, isn't it most likely that liberals are being liberals?

[quetzalcoatl]

Gramsci did not invent 'cultural Marxism' (whatever that is) as a way of enticing liberals. This is just a slightly more clever way of advancing the right's narrative that liberalism, socialism, and communism exist on some kind of continuum. And a movement capable of embracing Thatcherism is profoundly regressive, whatever social positions they take.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

TIG is correct: the article presumes a "Gramscian" conspiracy, but in reality it simply describes liberals being liberal, liberalism being liberal. One of the main points for this is here in the article:

As this change came during after the 1960s, it was preoccupied with sexual and cultural politics, the family, marriage, race, immigration, educational egalitarianism, artistic experiment and drugs. Its interest in the older left-wing cause, especially trades unionism was limited and fading. It understood that state regulation was a far more effective way of controlling the economy than crude nationalisation.

"Older left-wing causes" like introducing socialism, nationalizing much of the economy, and so on aren't things Marxists can simply drop. They're things liberals have no actual interest in, which is where Hitchens's confusion comes into play: he's clearly, obviously (though apparently he's oblivious to how obvious this is) describing liberals.

If anything, it was liberals who ended up eroding Labour into a typical liberal party, rather than Marxists making Marxists stop being Marxists and turn into liberals in order to... advance the cause of Marxism somehow? lol (not that Labour was Marxist even if some in Labour considered themselves Marxist, but "Marxist" in Hitchens's apparent belief Labour was)

[Rich]

I have to confess that I have become as sceptical of Gramsci as of the Knight's Templer. Were they really responsible for all ensuing history. The secret movers of the perpetual revolution. It strikes me that much of the revolution in social- sexual values was already prefigured in Weimar Germany. I can't see it had much to do with Gramsci. Anyway despite the idiotic attempts to portray me an antisemite, I'm more than happy to hold the flag of so called "Jewish" Weimar" culture. Some conservatives seem to be very shy of telling us where they stand on the Weimar culture wars.