Apologia Academy | Andrew Sandlin

Cultural Hegemony and Gramsci’s Strategy

The West is basically committed to peaceful political transfers and democratic elections. Gramsci popularized the word hegemony, which is cultural dominance. Particularly when we hear today about cultural hegemony, we're hearing the echoes of Gramsci.

To create a counter hegemony was the revolution's first task, according to Gramsci. It's not a counter-politics, it's truly a counter-culture. Better yet, a new culture replaces the old culture. You don't change the culture by capturing politics.

You capture politics by changing the culture. Culture goes where politics cannot. Its change is therefore deeper, more permanent, more radical. And then, second, for Gramsci, the fundamental cultural change that was needed was the destruction of hierarchies.

The destruction of hierarchies. Gramsci hated hierarchies. As a hunchback, he suffered ridicule and exclusion, even as a child. He then turned his private grievances into a cultural philosophy. He's not the only one to have done that, by the way.

In old Marxism, the oppressed were the impoverished proletariat, the workers. In cultural Marxism, the oppressed are the socially marginalized, foreigners, women, children, homosexuals, racial minorities, convicts, the mentally insane, the physically disabled.

No person is permitted to be better than another, and no person should be permitted esteem higher than another. Classes in society, for example, the wealthy above the poor, the master above the slave, the freeman above the prisoner, the healthy above the unhealthy, the aristocrats above the commoners, men above women, intellectuals above the less mentally gifted, the Italians above the Sardinians, in his situation, any class or group that has been excluded from honor and esteem and leadership must be included.

Gramsci was the self-appointed champion of the marginalized and the outcast. Gramsci believed that the marginalized, led by intellectuals who tap into their plight, should gradually reshape the culture so that they become the insiders, and they rip down the hierarchies that oppress them.

His objective, then, is to abolish all privilege, not just economic privilege. The marginalized, he said, must rouse themselves to bring down the entire hierarchical system that has prevailed in various forms from the beginning of civilization.

Gramsci’s Redefinition of Morality

He completely redefined morality to mean exalting the excluded. That's how he defined morality. The moral ones, the truly moral ones, were the champions of his hyper-inclusive cultural hegemony. Gramsci himself was very sexually immoral in Christian terms.

But of course, for him, Christianity doesn't matter. So his morality was exhibited in his cultural project. This is one of the first examples, by the way, of the new morality. Quite old by now, actually.

Morality isn't defined as living according to God's revealed standards, his law and his.

Word.

Morality means living constantly as an atheistic, social revolutionary. Those are the truly moral people, according to Gramsci. The notion that the world is what it is because God created it that way, that men are men and women are women, for example, because of creational law, is an illusion that serves the interests of the privileged classes.

There's no God to whom to appeal. Present differences that privilege some and deprivilege others are simply matters of the human will. Just as these present differences were created by the human will, so they can and must and should be abolished by the human will.

It's the triumph of the enlightened will over traditional and particularly Christian society. The deprivileged are to be liberated from their marginalized existence. Now you know where the great liberation movements of the 20th and now the 21st century come.

From.

Women's liberation, minority liberation, workers' liberation, gay liberation, children's liberation. They owe their ideological roots to Antonio Gramsci. Now of course some liberation, for example, blacks from the evils of slavery, was biblical and necessary.

But cultural Marxism isn't interested in merely redressing specific historical evils as we.

Should.

Rather, it's interested in re-engineering all of society. But it's more than liberation that Gramsci envisions. He advocated turning the tables culturally. Gramsci, you see, wasn't just about inclusion.

He advocated the periphery-centered society. Those who were formerly privileged must be deprivileged. The upper crust must feel the pain of the marginalization and misery of the formerly oppressed. The oppressed must turn the tables and rule over their oppressors.

When today we observe vocal homosexuals becoming prominent CEOs while simultaneously Christians are fined for standing for biblical sexual ethics, when we see the normalization of families in which wives provide all the income and husbands stay home to care for the children and children dictate the family choices, when we encounter college professors forced to attend sensitivity training classes for offending the sensibilities of millennial students, we see on graphic display the spirit of Gramsci.

Tragically, we see Gramsci's imprint on a conference recently at Covenant Seminary sponsored by the Presbyterian Church of America. White attendees were to be indoctrinated on so-called white privilege and called to repentance for being white.

Gramsci would have been very, very happy with this conference. The chief hierarchy that must be leveled, however, is Christianity. Christian culture has pervaded the West. It privileged God's truth and deprivileged all competing religions and views.

The Gramscian program necessitates the replacement of Christendom with a new, radically secular.

Order.

In Gramsci's words, and these are his words in translation, we need a complete secularization of all of life and of customary relationships.". So liberation doesn't just mean leveling hierarchies. It means that the previously underprivileged rule.

It really means establishing a new hierarchy under the guise of compassionate equality. This project means it'll be necessary to redefine common sense and even normality. What is considered normal today must be considered abnormal tomorrow.

If it's common sense to believe that men and women are different from one another, that sense must become uncommon. If it's normal to be heterosexual and abnormal to be homosexual, well, the morality, normality must change.

Homosexuality has to be normalized and heterosexuality denormalized. The gays are cool and the straights are weird. This is Gramsci with a vengeance and it is our culture. Third, to accomplish this momentous fact, nothing less than a new kind of individual, a new kind of person is needed.

Regenerating the Individual and Remaking Society

Gramsci makes it clear that real change can come about only through an intellectual and moral transformation of consciousness. He knows that his project is so massive that ordinary means cannot accomplish it.

He needs something extraordinary to get it done. The Bible itself teaches that sin is so deeply embedded in man that God must supernaturally remove it, incrementally, but supernaturally by what we call in Christian and biblical terms regeneration.

The Holy Spirit must resurrect our dead spirit. God transforms the individual. But Gramsci redefines sin as cultural hierarchies and that sin is so deep in our hearts that ordinary means can't abolish it.

Only a massive education campaign by a dogged act of the will, spearheaded by intellectuals like himself, can do this. In Gramsci's cultural program, man transforms the individual to remake the concept of man.

The final goal for society is a shared mental universe. All of us must be embracing the same egalitarian ideals, above all developing an alternative vision of the good society.