For how many years have I been banging on about Antonio Gramsci and The Frankfurt School? Still there’s progress at least when Gramci’s names starts getting a mention in the MSM and particularly a tabloid like the Daily Telegraph.
Mark Latham saddles up in this blistering editorial column
“…Labor and Liberal education ministers have introduced this course into classrooms without understanding its ideological basis.
It’s a radical “hegemony theory”, centred on personal identity. In the 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci tried to answer the puzzle as to why, following the 1917 Russian Revolution, there had not been any more communist uprisings.
He argued that the working class had been seduced by hegemony: the communications and values systems of capitalism had tricked people into supporting the politics of free enterprise. In the 1970s and ’80s, European Marxists updated this theory to address questions of identity. They argued that modern capitalism has fried our brains — that no one can truly know themselves and their race, gender and sexuality due to the impact of systemic propaganda.
While most people regard the Enlightenment as a wonderful period of progress, the identity-Left see it as a “capitalist construct” designed to mislead us. Post-structuralist Marxism also seeks to undermine the credibility of recorded history, telling students that what we know about the past has been manipulated by capitalism. This is winding back the gains of the Enlightenment, junking evidence as the basis of knowledge.
Perhaps the biggest worry is in employment policy. Across the public and private sectors, people are no longer being hired on merit but by their appearance. Racial, gender and sexuality quotas mean if the best person for the job is a straight white man, he has no guarantee of getting it.
In the Australian Public Service and corporate-left outfits like Westpac and Telstra, he will most likely miss out. Through identity politics, anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual discrimination has been institutionalised. The Left has tried to justify this practice by inventing the concept of “unconscious bias” — that subliminally we all hate women, blacks and gays. For wackiness, the theory is up there with left-feminist notions of “repressed misogyny” and “repressed racism”: the argument that any woman or black American who voted for Donald Trump did so because they had internalised capitalism’s hatred of themselves….” The new ideological war is already on the home front