The Long March through the Institutions – Part 1

Document Summary:

The document details the influence of the New Left on societal institutions, comparing their strategy to Mao's Long March. It highlights how student leaders in the 1970s shifted from violent revolutions to infiltrating and transforming institutions from within.

• Historical Context: The document compares the New Left's strategy to Mao's Long March, emphasising patience and rebuilding to achieve goals.

  
  

• Shift in Strategy: Rudi Dutschke proposed a non-violent approach of infiltrating institutions, which Marcuse saw as a way to refocus the revolution.

  
  

• Marcuse's Vision: Marcuse encouraged the creation of counter-institutions to provide alternative perspectives and promote Marxist values.

  
  

• Internal Conflicts: The Weathermen's national conference in Chicago highlighted internal conflicts and the eventual integration of radicals into mainstream society.

  
  

• Shift in Academic Ideologies: Studies show a significant liberal bias in academia, with a high ratio of liberal to conservative staff in various disciplines.

  
  

• Linguistic Therapy: Marcuse's concept of linguistic therapy aimed to redefine words and ideas to align with New Left values, creating a new moral hierarchy.

A shift from violent revolution to an intellectual fermenting

To understand what has happened in our universities, government departments, businesses,  schools and churches, we need to go back to the image of Mao’s Long march of the Red Army during the  Chinese Civil War in 1934.  Mao’s army had been crushed by the Nationalists and forced to retreat into the mountains. There, with great patience, he rebuilt his army, emerging to crush the Nationalists and establish the People’s Republic of China.  It is a reversal of fortunes that validates its place in war history.

Fast-forward now to the 1970s and a German Student leader, Rudi Dutschke, set the fresh direction for the New Left.  Revolutions had failed to achieve the transformations of society for which Marcuse and the others had taken to the streets, carried out assassinations, and sought to tear down the existing institutions.   These campaigns of terror had not worked and had alienated the movement from the public they were hoping would rise up and join them. Dutschke proposed an alternative way, a process he tagged the long march through the established institutions, a direct referral to Mao’s long march.

Marcuse saw it as an opportunity to refocus the direction of the revolution.  It was for him a return to their beginnings, this time building its power base in the institutions, especially in the universities, the media, social services, schools and business.  The working class were too comfortable and ensnared in the web of consumerism and too lazy to appreciate their predicament. Students would now be the way the Left could makes its influence felt in society and bring about the changes that were needed.  This would now become a war of values rather than using the weapons of violence, with the New Left determining what those values were to be.

In the words of Marcuse himself, the new objective for the Left was

to gain control of the great chains of information and indoctrination and in this way they could once more begin the impossible, the vast task of political education, dispelling the false and mutilated consciousness of the people so that they themselves experience their condition, and its abolition, as vital need, and apprehend the ways and means of their liberation. 

He urged students to set up what he called “counter-institutions” – radio, television, the press, workshops, anything that would provide them with a voice, a way through which they could present an alternative understanding of the world, and the place people and communities had in that world.   There had to be a better way, he and his followers declared, and that better way was the way of Marx and his evangelists. The old values had to go, and a new culture put in its place.  Marcuse knew this would take time and so he encouraged the students to have patience, to work slowly on these changes and to ensure their critical theories permeated all levels of society.

No more dropping out – engaging with the world from within

They were not to drop out like the hippies did in the 1960’s, nor were they to accommodate existing values into their vision.  These new values were to spread like a contagious disease infecting the society undermining traditional culture and shattering the existing hierarchy of values.  People needed to be educated to these new, true principles they understood even if the working classes did not.   

This process would be slow and would encounter many obstacles as the existing hierarchy resisted any changes.  It is for this reason it was to be a the long, slow march through the institutions.  They were the ones establishing the foundations for the brand-new world that was to come, a world they might not even experience. A world that would tolerate no alternative visions.

And this is what they did.  They graduated and made their way into the very institutions they were seeking to pull down and replace.  Their first foray into the public arena was with the publication of their new manifesto – Prairie Fire – a nod to Mao’s maxim a single spark can start a prairie fire.  It verbalised the new perspective which was no longer about killing the police but was a war on “…isms” – capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism.  No more guns.  They would be using Marxist theories to “awaken (hence later the word “woke”) the consciousness of the masses”. 

This is a language with which the world of today would be comfortable:  our nation is built on genocide, sexism, white supremacy and colonial abuses.  All these realities have become institutionalised so that they are no longer challenged. White people are all racists and people of colour can never be racist.  Such was the way the world had developed.  The systems on which the society was built are riddled with decay, but we are blinded by social expectations and controls.  The white elites benefitted from this culture and would resist every attempt to change it.  Theirs was an inherited white privilege that oppressed racial minorities, minorities of every kind.

Gaining control over value setting

The education system needed to be radicalised because societies values were passed on through schools and families.  What they set out to do was radicalise teachers who would in turn set in motion an anti-racist white movement spreading their message through fellow teachers, parents, students and education administrators. 

Behind the publication of Prairie Fire were the Weathermen.  They organised a national conference in Chicago that spoke the language of cultural-identity, anti-racism, white privilege and the evils of a society stacked against minorities.  However, it turned out to be a disaster and splits soon appeared in the Weathermen.  As one commentator noted wryly, the black radicals fought with the white radicals, the women denounced the men, vegetarians revolted against the chicken served in the cafeteria and accusations of racism reverberated around the conference centre.  In the end, the radical purveyors of violence “came out” and ended up becoming part of the bourgeois society they had sought to tear down.  The irony is irresistible and delicious.

What is worth noting here is the language that grew out of the manifesto the Weathermen left behind…Institutional racism, white supremacy, white privilege, male supremacy, institutional sexism, cultural identity, anti-racism, anti-sexist men, monopoly capitalism, corporate greed, neocolonialism, and Black liberationists all of which became the means of manipulating the emotions of the people.  They wanted guilt feelings to grow and out of this morass of self-flagellation out of which would come a moment of enlightenment flowing over into a willingness to submit to the new moral hierarchy. 

Marcuse stressed the key role played by the education system as the primary counterinstitution.  The students with Marcuse as their guru moved from being students to becoming professors, even finding their way into the premiere educational institutions – Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Duke, Berkeley, the Universities of California, Sana Barbara, Rutgers, Loyola, and many more.  Even more ironic, Bernadine Dohrn, a former leader of the far-left militant organisation Weather Underground, an activist who made the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for several years, became a tenured professor of Law at Midwestern University.   Her husband Bill Ayers, notorious for having tried to bomb the Pentagon and the US Capitol ended up a professor at the University of Illinois.  Another notorious killer – Kathy Boudin – who was part of a gang that killed a guard on a Brinks security van and two police officers ended up as an illustrious professor at Colombia.  This is a process that was widely reproduced across the academy.   The terrorists became professors and passed their philosophies onto the willing students passing through their institutions.

The point is that these former street revolutionaries found themselves in positions that enabled them to influence new generations of leftist graduates.   Such was their power that they had an impact on the language that became the grammar of the new world. They published widely in journals, a step that gave legitimacy to their vision.  They formed allies that would enable them to influence appointments to faculties by like-minded academics and encouraged cohorts of students to take the revolution out into the world.

Radical professors create new cohorts of radicalised students

Gradually the conservative professors were pushed aside and the professors of the New Left controlled the faculty meetings and set the agendas for conferences.  The “old knowledge” was replaced one they claimed was more authentic and the existing concept of knowledge was turned upside down.  They were grounded in Marxism even though they were witnesses to the failure of Communism and blind to the trail of death, misery and destruction that marred countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, China and of course, Russia – all carried out proudly under the banner of the Marxist Leninist world vision. 

By the time of the New Millennium the universities had become tip of the revolutionary spear that was driving the ideology of the New Left and its critical theories.

 According to a study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons published in 2007, 24 percent of college professors in the social sciences self-identify as radicals. 21 percent as activists and 1 percent as Marxists.  In the humanities those percentages are 19 percent, 26 percent and 5 percent respectively. 

In another survey published in Academic Questions 31(Summer 2018) out of the forty institutions that took part, the ratio of liberal to conservative staff members was 8:1 in political science, 17:1 in history, 44:1 in sociology, 48:1 in English and, unsurprisingly, 108:0 in race and gender studies. 

The reshaping of academia has resulted in key university positions being held by proponents of new ideologies with no place for the old conservatives. Inspired by Marcuse’s critical theory of society, these professors of the New Left have enabled the introduction of numerous new fields of study that they insisted were authentic, including Critical Studies of all kinds… critical studies on identity, race, ethnicity, Whiteness, gender, and class.  Marcuse had insisted on what he called a “liberating tolerance”  which was nothing more than an intolerance against movements from the Right (his words). Those intellectuals of a conservative bent had to be suppressed and their voice unheard.  These new leaders in education had picked up and popularised the language of the Weathermen – white supremacy, white privilege, and male privilege – subjecting large sections of the population to feelings of guilt.  Any conservative on the campus, lecturer or student, was likely to be subject to bullying, intimidation, hostility and fear.   There was now no place for alternative voices and to ensure those conservatives understood their true place, they were subjected to compulsory programmes of deconstruction of all sorts – deconstructing whiteness, deconstructing gender, and even a whole new twelve step programme on recovering from white conditioning (a take-off from AA’s twelve steps.  The steps are included at the end of this post). 

Marcuse even had a name for this.  He called it linguistic therapy – the necessary process of freeing words and ideas from the distortions they have suffered at the hands of the Establishment.  Along with this is the need for transferring the moral standards that were previously associated with these words to their new context.  Once this language is established and in common usage, even if it has never been validated by any rigorous analysis, the subconscious of the public becomes accustomed to it and language takes on an unquestionable truth of its own.  Use the phrase “white privilege” or “institutional racism” often enough, across a broad cross-section of media sources, then it becomes indubitably true.  When major newspapers such as the New York Times adopt this language as their house style, the public is bombarded with an unending flow of social justice propaganda.  Our traditional knowledge-forming institutions are transformed in that they undermine all that was once certain, suppressing that which once stood for truth, suppressed alternative world views and ending up by creating an atmosphere of fear and rootlessness. 

Conclusion:

As Christopher Rufo observes, when taken together this new language and the process of implementing critical theories succeeded in disembowelling the old institutions and captured the “linguistic universe of the Establishment”.  Their language was the only language tolerated, and they now became the new enlightened “establishment”.  Having set the foundation in place, they were now ready for the next step – taking on the leadership of the predominant institutions of society.  This next step brings with it the power to realise their hopes and ambitions for a whole new world.

12 Steps of Recovery from White Conditioning

 1.) We admitted that we had been socially conditioned by the ideology of white supremacy…that our minds were subject to racial biases, often unconsciously so. The first step to any kind of recovery is admitting that we have a problem. Individuals not ready to acknowledge a problem may be unable to pursue and receive the help they need. Becoming aware of a problem—and admitting it to others—can be challenging, but it is a fundamental step on the recovery journey.

 2.) We came to believe that we could embrace our ignorance as an invitation to learn. We acknowledge that we, as white people, will never know what it feels like to walk in the world as a person of colour. We embrace our “not knowing” as a powerful reminder of our ongoing need for new learning, and we abandon white supremacist traditions of “knowing” how others should feel, think, and act.

3.) We developed support systems to keep us engaged in this work. We are aware that facing and recovering from the effects of white supremacist conditioning will involve difficult, sometimes painful, moments. We commit to developing practices that facilitate self-care…to ensure that we are gentle with ourselves while also bravely able to confront the dehumanising ideology of white supremacy.

 4.) We journeyed boldly inward, exploring and acknowledging ways in which white supremacist teachings have been integrated into our minds and spirits. After acknowledging the problem, we must also acknowledge that it has impacted many areas of our lives, consciously and unconsciously. Each of us must explore ways, past and present, in which the ideology of white supremacy has negatively impacted us: our understanding of history, our social networks, and our patterns of interacting with people of colour, with an emphasised focus on microaggressions.

 5.) We confess our mistakes and failings to ourselves and others. Beyond identifying ways in which our thinking, feeling, and relating have been impacted by white supremacist conditioning, honestly addressing the actions that have emerged from that conditioning is a separate, necessary step. Confessing past (and ongoing) microaggressions to a group and receiving support is an essential part of recovery.

6.) We were entirely ready to deconstruct previous ways of knowing, as they had been developed through the lens of white supremacy. After admitting these problems (white supremacist conditioning and related actions), it is time to let go of “knowledge” developed in isolation from people of colour.

7.) We humbly explored new ways of understanding…proactively seeking out new learning and reconstructing a more inclusive sense of reality. This step involves mindfully and intentionally engaging in learning to more deeply understand the experience of people of colour in a white supremacist society. This type of learning can take place in a variety of ways, including reading texts written by people of colour, actively listening to the experiences of people of colour, patronising businesses owned by people of colour, etc.

8.) We committed ourselves to ongoing study of our racial biases, conscious or unconscious, and our maladaptive patterns of white supremacist thinking. This step is about identifying our triggers to negative thoughts (or other stereotypes, positive or negative) about people of colour. We remain curious about the source of our thoughts, fears, and assumptions…and perpetually aware of their existence.

9.) We developed strategies to counteract our racial biases. Developing positive associations to counter negative thoughts is an important, proactive strategy in recovery from white supremacy. We believe that the most powerful way to develop positive associations is to develop authentic relationships with people of colour. In lieu of such relationships, we can still engage in daily, proactive practices to retrain our brains from the ill effects of white supremacist conditioning.

10.) We embraced the responsibility of focusing on our impact, more than our intentions, in interactions with people of colour. Taking responsibility for the impact of our actions is an ongoing part of recovery. If we fall back into perpetuating white supremacist ideology—or defending actions that have caused hurt to people of colour—it's important to stop and admit it. Prioritising impact, instead of explaining the intent of our behaviour (i.e. “I didn’t mean to offend you”), is essential for attending to the human being in front of us.

11.) We engaged in daily practices of self-reflection. Reflecting on the day—on moments in which we confronted our own white supremacist conditioning and on moments in which we were still bound by its limiting beliefs—is an investment in our recovery. Relevant spiritual practices may play a helpful role in this step, as a way to encourage us toward continued growth and connection, beyond our mistakes.

12.) We committed ourselves to sharing this message with our white brothers and sisters…to build a supportive recovery community and to encourage personal accountability within our culture. Assisting others to seek help in recovering from white supremacist conditioning and in becoming an ally with people of colour is a core component of recovery. Working with future recovery-from-white supremacist-conditioning groups is a common choice for this step.