The Riots Are Part of the Plan
In his 28 July 2024 review of the book NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It, David Lewis Schaefer explains the history of Marxism in America and how it has conducted a long march through our institutions. Schaefer writes:
... The authors’ title alludes to a movement that arose in Germany and Italy a century ago when leftist intellectuals, disheartened by their failure to achieve a Communist revolution like the one that had just occurred in Russia, turned to a different strategy. Instead of relying on factory workers (Karl Marx’s "proletariat") to generate the Communist paradise, they would gradually shape the surrounding "culture" to achieve that end.
The movement originated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, best-known for its invention of "critical theory," based on the theory and strategy of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci1. Gramsci (who spent his later years composing his 30-volume Prison Notebooks in one of Mussolini’s jails) maintained that the revolution would require a painstaking, decades-long "education" (indoctrination) of the workers, so as to disabuse them of their attachment to the system of private property and imbue them with "revolutionary consciousness." That education would be the work of a handful of "enlightened" Marxist intellectuals.
In one of the ironies of history, Hitler’s rise compelled the leaders of the Frankfurt school, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, to flee to the great bastion of "capitalist" democracy, the United States. Among them, the most influential was Marcuse, who remained in postwar America and from his perch as a tenured professor at Brandeis University (and later at the University of California, San Diego) concocted a youth-tempting witches’ brew combining Marxist utopianism (the abolition of government and property) with sexual "liberation." He thereby became the guru of the American "New Left" of the 1960s...
Another of Marcuse’s protégés, the West German radical Rudi Dutschke, termed the Gramscian project a "Long March through the Institutions" of society...
Remarkably, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the Weather Underground, wound up being teachers of education - with Ayers, additionally, mentoring Barack Obama in the art of "community organizing," though Obama tried to downplay that connection...
One of the most important revelations of NextGen Marxism is that the riots that swept American cities following the police killings of criminal suspects Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and then of George Floyd2, were not spontaneous incidents...
The concluding chapter, "What to Do," sets out an ambitious agenda for Americans and their elected leaders to combat the NextGen assault on our institutions and way of life. These include banning indoctrinating schoolkids in gender "theory"; eliminating ideological training in "diversity, equity, and inclusion" from our public and private workplaces; cutting off the hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies that the federal government provides annually for projects concocted by the "progressive" left; and combating the inclusion of propagandistic "ethnic studies" courses... NextGen Marxism should serve as a much-needed wakeup call.
1. Gramsci's Prison Notebooks were translated by Joseph Buttigieg. His son, Democrat Pete Buttigeig is currently married to his husband Chasten Buttigieg, and is U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
2. Career Criminal George Floyd was not murdered. He died from a Fentanyl overdose. See The George Floyd, Jr. Narrative Unraveled - The Whole Story Was a Lie.
