Revolutionaries without a Cause
... political opposition today is not entirely normal... "These aren't deranged liberals. They are normalized revolutionaries."
... Marxists determined that the existing cultural hegemony had to be broken, and the means for doing so involved taking over the institutions of cultural transmission: education, the arts, entertainment, the news media, and even religion. Thus, they began what the German student activist Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.”...
The long march/war... was... undertaken in service of the war of maneuver, which would, of course, be the workers’ revolution...
The catch, as late-Frankfurt-Schooler Herbert Marcuse pointed out, is that capitalism is pretty good at placating the workers of the world, satisfying their needs and desires. Marcuse, therefore, replaced the workers with a new and more readily radicalized revolutionary class, the marginalized of society. Here too, though, democratic capitalism threw a wrench into the gears of revolutionary change. As a rule, political and cultural recognition leads to power, which, in turn, enables the fulfillment of needs and wants that might otherwise have been expected to prompt revolution. It all becomes a repeating cycle...
The one outcome the post-war Marxist revisionists never anticipated was that their war of position would be overwhelmingly successful, but that their war of maneuver would never find its motivation, that their means would never produce any ends. They never anticipated... that they would tear down the institutional and moral frameworks of their era, only for them to be replaced with nothing of consequence, leaving a lost generation (or more)...
In the late 19th century, the sociologist Emile Durkheim diagnosed this condition... Anomie... is the condition of individuals who have been released from traditional normative frameworks without being given new ones to replace them...
The difference now is that the anomie we are witnessing is, at least in part, the result of the dissolution of the implied relationship between revolutionary formation and revolutionary purpose...
Related
Leftism - a Hegelian spiral toward Marxism
Marxism - The Threat Within America
Our Turning Point: Either a Liberal or Progressive America
An overview of the ten ideologies of America
