QUOTE:
According to Harmony Goldberg, a Gramscian cultural anthropologist, Gramsci merely made “several important innovations” on the ideas of Marx and Lenin. As Goldberg put it in her 2015 “brief introduction” to Gramsci’s ideas:
Goldberg is not just any Gramscian anthropologist. In 1996 she founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training.
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To Goldberg, the efforts to undermine the American worker’s endorsement of the American way of life today “must go beyond participation in trade union struggles reform; revolutionaries must root their struggles in all arenas of social life and—centrally—must engage in the battle for ideas.” The ruling bourgeois will always be trying to convince workers that they have a stake in preserving capitalism. This is why “Revolutionaries would themselves have to engage in the long-term battle of ideas in order to clarify the need for revolutionary transformation.” All-out ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first.
A multi-class alliance, which Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” would be needed, in Goldberg’s words, “to move history forward” by indoctrinating society into the new “national-popular collective will”—the cultural counter-hegemony. But it is important to bear in mind that “in every historic bloc there is a single class that plays a leading role and serves as a cohering force,” according to Goldberg’s interpretation of Gramsci. The job of the cohering force was to organize other classes and instruct them on the need to replace the existing order with a socialist one.
Garza learned these lessons a full decade before a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013—the event that supposedly launched Black Lives Matter. It was at SOUL, Garza has said, that she first learned that “social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”
