America as a nation is now dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that has become known as “political correctness.” It seeks to impose a uniformity in thought and behaviour among all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. It has its roots in the ideology of Marxism, which requires a radical inversion of the prevailing traditional culture by cultural Marxism in order to achieve a social revolution. Such a social revolution is the kind envisioned by Karl Marx as an inversion of the social order and a commensurate inversion of the structure of power.

Social revolution has a long history involving a number of disparate forces that have conceivably been inspired by Plato’s “Republic.” But it was the French Revolution of 1789 that probably inspired Karl Marx to do what he did in the 19th century. In the 20th century it was the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia that set off a wave of optimistic expectation among the Marxist forces in Europe and America that the new proletarian world of equality popularized by Marx was finally coming into being as the wave of the future. Russia as the first communist nation in the world would lead the revolutionary forces to final victory.

The Marxist revolutionary forces in Europe could not restrain themselves. They leaped at this opportunity to lead the proletarian workers into the promised new world. There was a Communist Spartacist uprising in Berlin, Germany, led by Rosa Luxemburg; the creation of a Bavarian Soviet in Germany led by Kurt Eisner, and a Hungarian Soviet established by Bella Kun in 1919. At the time there was great concern that all of Europe might soon fall under the banner of Bolshevism.

This sense of impending doom was given vivid life by Trotsky’s Red Army invasion of Poland in 1919 that was expected to begin the triumphant conquest of all of Western Europe by Soviet Armed Forces allied with local communists in accordance with Lenin’s plan.

While the Red Army’s invasion was defeated by Polish forces at the battle of the Vistula in 1920, the Spartacist, Bavarian Soviet and Hungarian Soviet all failed to gain widespread support of the workers and after a brief time they were all deposed by opposition forces. These events created a quandary for the Marxist revolutionaries in Europe. Under Marxist economic theory, the oppressed workers were supposed to be the beneficiaries of a social revolution that would place them on top of the structure of power. When the revolutionary opportunity presented itself, the workers did not respond.

The Marxist revolutionaries did not blame their theory for these failures. They blamed the workers. They resolved their quandary by an analysis that focused on the cultural superstructure of society rather than on the economic substructure as Marx did. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs contributed the most to this cultural Marxism.

Antonio Gramsci worked for the Communist International in the years 1923 to 1924 in Moscow and Vienna. He was later imprisoned in one of Mussolini’s jails, where he wrote his famous “Prison Notebooks.” Among Marxists, Gramsci is noted for his theory of cultural and ideological hegemony as the means of class dominance. His view that a new Communist man had to be made before any political revolution led to a focus on the efforts of the intellectuals in the fields of education and the culture to perform this task.

This was to be a long march through the society’s institutions, meaning the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media. He also concluded that so long as the workers had a Christian soul, they would not respond to revolutionary appeals. Multiculturalism can be seen as a means of breaking the grip of the traditional cultural hegemony on American society.

Georg Lukacs was the son of a wealthy Hungarian banker who began his political life as a key Soviet agent of the Communist International. His book, “History and Class Consciousness,” gained him recognition as the leading Marxist theorist since Karl Marx. And like Marx his primary emotion was hatred. “I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” was one of his expressed attitudes. In defending Bolshevism, Lukacs stated: “Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values and the creation of new ones by the revolutionaries.”

In 1919, Lukacs became the Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary, where he instigated what became known as Culture Terrorism. He launched an explosive sex education program. Special lectures were organized in Hungarian schools and literature printed and distributed to instruct children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of the bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which the Marxists said deprives man of all pleasures.

Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of morality, easily and spontaneously turned into delinquents with whom only the police could cope. This call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian women. This was a precursor to what Cultural Marxism would later bring into American schools.

Raymond V. Raehn