Occidental Partridge

In the latter 1920s, a foundational thinker of Western Marxism lay incarcerated in an Italian prison cell. Much as we’re told now by cheery memes not to ‘waste’ lockdown and learn a new language or stage an opera with sockpuppets, Antonio Gramsci used his time inside to reflect on the state of the stalling International Communist movement. The result was the Prison Notebooks , which identified cultural hegemony as the main obstacle to be surmounted; that bourgeois value systems would have to be displaced by revolutionary ones across society’s institutions, to establish strength in a ‘war of position’ before a ‘war of manoeuvre’ was viable. In the 1960s, the German activist Rudi Dutschke took up the baton, calling for a “ long march through the institutions ”, as a tribute to Chairman Mao’s bloody Long March during the Chinese Civil War. Anyone who has been to a British university has probably encountered the practice of this theory, whether unconsciously or by design.   ...