My father admitted he was wrong.
After spending his early years devoted to a cause that he did not fully understand, Rafael Cruz looked around him, saw the terror that Marxism had wrought in his home country, and changed his mind.
Most Marxists can’t bring themselves to do that.
In the late 1960s various left-wing groups sprung up in the United States, many of which attempted to bring Karl Marx’s dream of a socialist utopia to life. These groups, including terrorist organizations such as The Weather Underground, were strikingly similar to the bands of left-wing radicals my father had known in Cuba. Like Castro and Che Guevara, the members of these groups were mostly young. They did their recruiting on college campuses, and they believed deeply in the principles of Marxism.
Sometimes they were peaceful. Many groups held demonstrations and spoke out against the war in Vietnam, among other things. Most photographs people see today of the New Left are of skinny, stoned-looking hippies in flowery outfits and tie-dye shirts. Anyone looking at your average high school history textbook might believe that your average 1960s leftist just wanted to listen to Jimi Hendrix, lie on a blanket, and talk about the government, man.
But that is far from the whole story. Throughout the 1960s, members of the New Left terrorized innocent people in pursuit of their political goals. They threw bricks through windows, planted bombs in restaurants, and lit whole city blocks on fire to get their message across. Anyone who asked what that message actually was would get slogans and impassioned speeches, nearly all of them derived from Karl Marx and his many disciples.
The movement came to a climax at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in August of that year. As various speakers took the stage and outlined their vision for the nation, radical left-wing protestors clashed with police in the streets outside. Watching from home, millions of Americans saw how unruly and insane the left wing of American politics had become. By the time the convention was over, left-wing rioters had done millions of dollars’ worth of damage, injured hundreds of people—and turned the public against their cause.
Standing amid this carnage, the key figures of the New Left had the chance to rethink their devotion to the twisted, half-baked ideology of Marxism—which, as many of them surely knew, had already been responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world by the late 1960s. If nothing else, they might have taken to heart the fact that public opinion had turned sharply against them.
It turns out, beating up police officers and burning down buildings tend to make people less likely to support your cause, not more.
I’m sure at least some of these activists realized that the writings of Karl Marx were nonsensical and that his ideas were not worth implementing. I’m sure that some of them looked up from the smoldering wreckage of their movement and were horrified, as my father had been, at what they’d supported, even if they had done so unwittingly. They may have looked back through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and discovered that the propositions they contained were stupid, backward, and evil.
All they had to do was read.
Anyone who reads even the most charitable biography of Karl Marx will find that the man was hardly a good example for anyone, let alone someone whose ideas should serve as the basis for a global political movement. From the moment Marx was old enough to be responsible for himself, he refused to—instead taking advantage of everyone in his life, refusing to work or become a productive member of society. He lived in a series of squalid apartments in different parts of Europe, writing poetry about the allure of Satan (yes, seriously) as well as the long, turgid pieces of political philosophy for which he would soon become a household name.
He was often drunk (which explains quite a bit), and he rarely bathed. His children went hungry because of their father’s refusal to get a job to support his family. The little money they did have came, at first, from Marx’s parents. Then, when his parents died, Marx began mooching off a series of wealthy benefactors, most notably Friedrich Engels, who would serve as a co-author of Marx’s most famous work, The Communist Manifesto. The few friends Marx had remembered that even on the most solemn of occasions he would find a way to ask for money, which he’d later spend on alcohol and other vices.
Anyone who met the man came away feeling confused, unclean, and worried. The following passage from Paul Kengor’s excellent book The Devil and Karl Marx quotes from the account of a Prussian police-spy report that was commissioned on Marx in the mid-1840s. As the officer assigned to Marx found, “ ‘Washing, grooming, and changing his linens are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk…. He has no fixed times for going to sleep or waking up.’ As for the family apartment, ‘everything is broken down,’ busted, spilled, smashed, falling apart—from toys and chairs and dishes and cups to tables and tobacco pipes and on and on. ‘In a word,’ said the report, ‘everything is topsy-turvy…. To sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business.’ Quite literally, the chair you chose to sit upon in the Marx household could collapse.”1
As if that weren’t enough, the man was also ferociously racist—something that the modern left-wing activists who constantly cite his work seem to have brushed aside. They ignore, for instance, the fact that Marx used the n-word constantly in letters to friends. In one exchange he seemed to agree with Engels’s assessment that Black people were “a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us.”2 He also objected fiercely when one of his daughters sought to marry a man from Cuba, denigrating her suitor as a “Negillo” and calling him “the Gorilla” because of his race.3
As a Cuban American myself, that gives me yet one more reason to loathe Karl Marx and everything he stands for (not that I needed another). And I’m not alone. In his other writings, Marx denigrates Mexicans, whom he believed were inferior, and Jews, whom he (like all conspiracy theorists, and too many members of today’s Democratic Party) believed were somehow both an inferior race and simultaneously evil masterminds who control the global banking system in a conspiracy to keep workers down.4
Marx was, in short, not the kind of person you’d want to be stuck on an elevator with for a few minutes, let alone someone you should look up to and trust to solve the world’s problems. But for over a century left-wing activists have looked to his dense, borderline-unreadable works and found the blueprint for a revolutionary worker’s utopia—one that they have tried, with absolutely no success, to bring about in countries all over the world. Despite ending every time in failure, they keep trying again, hoping that this time they get it right, finally bringing about a world where people like Karl Marx are free to lie around, get drunk, and have the government pay for it all.
The writings they look to, much like the furniture in Karl Marx’s house, are built on the flimsiest foundations imaginable. Rather than data and solid reasoning, Marx uses poetic language and rhetoric to make his grand claims. Perhaps that is why his work has appealed to wayward English majors and self-serious left-wing activists for generations. It would certainly help explain why so many people throughout history who have become committed to Marxism refuse to give up on the idea even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that it doesn’t work.
This is exactly what happened to many members of the New Left in the early 1970s. Like so many Marxists who had come before them, they did not admit that they were wrong. The most devoted among them did not simply turn in their bricks and torches, buy suits, and get respectable jobs. Instead, they returned to their sacred texts with more fervor than ever, attempting to figure out why Marxism had failed so badly in the United States. They read the words of The Communist Manifesto and other works by Marx and his disciples, putting their heads together to find new ways of implementing these ideas in the United States.
They knew they could not continue to mount a violent revolution against the government. Not if they wanted to be successful. They could no longer throw bricks through windows, scream at police officers, and hold unruly demonstrations in the public square if they wanted to win hearts and minds to their cause—at least not yet.
For now, they had to take the ideas of Marx, the ones that they had worked so hard to bring to the United States, and quietly slip them into the minds of people in some other way.
The question was: How?
The answer, oddly enough, came in part from an obscure series of political essays called Prison Notebooks, selections from which had just appeared in translation in the United States, in 1971.
These notebooks had been written by a man named Antonio Gramsci, who had been imprisoned in the last years of his life, from 1926 to 1937, by Benito Mussolini shortly after Mussolini became dictator in Gramsci’s home country of Italy. For years, Gramsci had been an active member of the Italian Communist Party, attempting to overthrow the government and bring about a worker’s paradise on earth just as his hero Karl Marx had envisioned.
But he kept hitting walls. The society Gramsci and his comrades were living in seemed especially resistant to the doctrines of communism that they were pushing—not to mention that their Marxist groups kept splitting apart on account of infighting and poor organization.
But Gramsci didn’t blame himself or his fellow communists for their constant failure. He certainly didn’t blame the bad ideas of Karl Marx. Instead, like so many Marxists before and after him, he blamed society. In his view Italy, and other societies in the West, were especially resistant to Marxism because they were made up of institutions that were not connected to the government: universities, schools, churches, and newspapers, as well as publishing houses and other means of distributing popular culture. This made implementing Marxism, which relied on the central power of the government to control everything, extremely difficult.
“In the East,” Gramsci would write in his Prison Notebooks, describing his moment of epiphany, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”5
According to Gramsci, the only way to truly change society was not by violent revolution, but by infiltrating the institutions that make Western society unique. If Marxists could get inside the universities, for instance, where knowledge is effectively “made,” or get jobs at publishing houses, which were the main avenues through which ideas were distributed at the time, they might be able to change the ways people thought in subtle ways, rather than having to resort to the kind of outward revolution that Karl Marx had planned on.
As the writer Nate Hochman recently described in National Review, Gramsci set out a plan that would require any would-be Marxist revolutionaries to “engage in a longer, more covert counterhegemonic struggle, waged via a ‘war of position’ against the ruling cultural consensus. That war of position would not, as in the East, culminate in a single violent, cathartic victory. It would require a protracted, multifront battle for control of the civic structures that form the social consciousness.”6
Antonio Gramsci died before he could begin that struggle in his home country. Unlike many reformed revolutionaries, my father among them, he died without ever seeing the error of his ways. And the writing he had done in prison eventually made it out to the world, where it was picked up by young Marxists eager to conduct exactly the kind of covert war he’d described.
One of these people was Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in Germany who had already achieved considerable success by the 1960s, when he encountered Gramsci’s ideas. Using these ideas as well as the work of other Marxist scholars, Dutschke proposed what he called “the long march through the institutions.” According to this vision, Marxist revolutionaries would no longer simply protest in the streets and try to tear down existing structures. They would, rather, infiltrate those existing structures in an attempt to change them from within. Given his talent as a public speaker and a campus organizer, Dutschke was able to spread his ideas quite widely across the globe.
At some point in the 1960s, they reached the United States, and by the end of the decade the New Left in America was already beginning to burn out. The primary means of transmission was a professor named Herbert Marcuse, who had done some organizing with Dutschke before coming to the United States and who’d grown to admire Dutschke’s plan for the “long march through the institutions.” In a letter to Dutschke written in 1971, Marcuse said that the long march would be “the only effective way” to bring about a true left-wing revolution in the United States.
Marcuse described the strategy in detail in a book published the next year. He described how leftists would now work “against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within,’ rather by ‘doing the job,’ learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.”7
In other words, the activists who had once planted bombs in buildings and torched cars to bring about revolution would now have to calm down, get jobs, and pretend to be productive members of society (“doing the job”). All the while, though, they would maintain their revolutionary ideas (“preserving one’s own consciousness”) and work to insert those ideas into the work they did, indoctrinating as many people as possible in the process. Those who became university professors would treat figures like Karl Marx kindly while attacking capitalists and other revered figures from American history. Those who went into information technology would design systems with a subtle liberal bias. Those in journalism would work to transform the newspapers—and, eventually, the cable news networks and internet startups—into propaganda organs for the Left.
Marcuse also wrote about the need to develop “counterinstitutions,” especially when it came to the media. He noted that these “must be made competitive.”
“This is especially important,” he wrote, “for the development of radical, ‘free’ media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.”8 (Ironically, Marcuse’s call for effective “counterinstitutions” is today mirrored by many on the Right’s call to create the same, now that the Left has captured the original institutions wholesale.)
In the years immediately following the tumultuous events of 1968, which turned public opinion sharply against the radical Left, the new revolutionaries began implementing the long march through the institutions, carefully following the instructions of Gramsci, Dutschke, and Marcuse. For the most part, they worked slowly. Sometimes they stumbled. In the process, many of the revolutionaries actually became what they were pretending to be, throwing off the ridiculous revolutionary ideas of Marx and becoming genuinely productive members of society.
But enough of these leftists remained committed to the project that it began to succeed. Over the course of several decades, this group of revolutionary professors, journalists, film writers, and others began slowly to change the way Americans thought about culture. They exploited their new avenues of transmission to great effect. Along the way, the original tenets of Marxism—which, in the beginning, applied mostly to economics—began to mutate. The new revolutionaries found that the core idea of Marxism—namely, that the world was a battleground between oppressed people and their oppressors—could be mapped not only onto warring economic classes (what Marx called the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie”) but onto races as well.9
Today, many Americans are so used to this idea that they don’t wonder where it came from. But its origin is worth investigating. You might wonder why, in the year 2023, with the long shadow of overt racism receding further into the past every day, we constantly hear stories about “racial tension” in the media. Why is it that there is seemingly no news story that the radical Left cannot twist to fit the narrative of racial oppression?
The answer is that the long march through the institutions has finally paid off. Today, ideas that were once peripheral to American life are at the forefront. Notions like White supremacy, class warfare, and internalized racism are now discussed on major news networks as if they have always been with us. Few people stop to wonder how these concepts, which seem to have come straight from a college literature seminar, have ended up ubiquitous throughout American culture.
The term “Cultural Marxism” refers to this transition. Over the past several decades, Marxists took Marx’s communist teachings, which were originally applied to economics and to property, and applied them to culture instead. Using the same Marxist framework—a never-ending struggle between victims and oppressors that can only be corrected through force by the government’s punishing the oppressors and rewarding the victims—they extended the oppression matrix to race, gender, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and disability. And they expanded their weapons to enforce Marxism: no longer is it imposed just through government policy, but now also through education, journalism, Big Tech, Big Business, sports, music, and Hollywood.
Whenever he’s asked to explain this shift, my friend Christopher Rufo—whose work on Cultural Marxism, particularly Critical Race Theory, has proven extremely influential—references a book from the 1970s called Prairie Fire. Reading this book today, he notes, you can see all the terms that would eventually become familiar to American audiences: systemic racism, White privilege, and post-colonialism. The book describes the plight of oppressed classes in the United States, saying that the only way to end the oppression of these people is to mount a revolution against the ruling capitalist class.
What’s notable about it, according to Rufo, is that in 1974, when it was written, the book needed to be printed in small batches by left-wing presses all over the nation. Mainstream publishers would never have touched such garbled nonsense. The fact that it was written and endorsed by The Weather Underground, one of the most famous left-wing terror groups in American history, would alone have been enough to keep this book off the shelves at any major bookstore.10
Today, books like it appear regularly, published by major mainstream publishers. The reading lists of many Fortune 500 companies include them, as do the syllabi of many colleges and high schools. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if you’re currently reading this introduction while standing in front of the “Current Events” shelf at your local Barnes & Noble, you’ll notice that many of the other books in front of your face contain the same radical Marxist ideas as the ones in Prairie Fire. Within your grasp, I’m sure there is a book about how to be an “anti-racist,” or one that defends looting. You might even see books written by people who are members of Black Lives Matter, an outwardly Marxist organization that explicitly stated its desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family.”11
The fact that these books are widely available today, and that they no longer need to be printed by crazy people in basements, speaks to how successful the long march through the institutions has been. Today, ideas that were once (rightly) considered insane are mainstream. This has happened because the radical Left has systematically seized control of the organs of the transmission of ideas.
They began with the universities. Then they expanded to K–12 education. Then came science and journalism and Big Business and Big Tech.
Even entertainment was not exempt. Today, in fact, the radical Left exerts more control over entertainment than virtually anything else.
Within these institutions—and, consequently, in the United States in general—if you think wrong, you will be reprogrammed. If you speak wrong, you will be silenced. If you act wrong, you will be cancelled, eliminated, fired, destroyed.
Many today are still wondering how the hell this happened. The brief outline of events in this introduction, while a good place to start, does not quite capture just how insidious the infiltration has been.
Reading it, I’m sure many people still wonder how the storied institutions of America, many of which used to be bastions of conservatism, went so stark raving nuts in such a short amount of time. How, you might wonder, did they become uniform and brutal enforcers of such an evil, misguided orthodoxy?
This book will endeavor to answer that question. It will walk you through precisely how anti-American Marxists have systematically worked to destroy our nation, to capture our institutions, and to turn them against us. To turn them against America, so that they have literally become organs of hate undermining our history, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our founding, and our fundamental liberties.
And, critically, it will lay out specific steps for how we stop it: how we defeat Cultural Marxism.
How we retake our institutions, and how we retake America.