This is what socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke meant by the long march through the institutions – the left’s strategy to create radical change in government by becoming part of it.

Roger Kimball wrote that it was by these means of “insinuation and infiltration” that the countercultural ideals of Herbert Marcuse gained influence. Helmut Schelsky wrote that the long march was part of a strategy towards “the conquest of the system” through efforts to discredit the values and processes of constitutional democracy.

In his 1972 book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse wrote:^[9]

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working 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.
The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement, but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important 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.

More specifically, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician, laid down tactics specific strategems on how to bring down a free, capitalist society outside of direct revolution.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

Gramsci’s long reach

The relation of all these abstractions to the nuts and bolts of American politics is, as the record shows, surprisingly direct. All of Gramsci’s most innovative ideas — for example, that dominant and subordinate groups based on race, ethnicity, and gender are engaged in struggles over power; that the “personal is political”; and that all knowledge and morality are social constructions — are assumptions and presuppositions at the very center of today’s politics. So too is the very core of the Gramscian-Hegelian world view — group-based morality, or the idea that what is moral is what serves the interests of “oppressed” or “marginalized” ethnic, racial, and gender groups.

How DSA educators spread far-left ‘poison’ in America’s schools

By Ryan King, NY Post, Dec. 19, 2023, 12:13 p.m. ET

Members of the Democratic Socialists of America have quietly gained leadership posts in K-12 education to push anti-capitalist and anti-Israel views on youngsters across the US, according to a parental rights watchdog group.

Parents Defending Education, a grassroots organization that backs the “restoration” of non-political schooling, has identified dozens of DSA members who have landed or sought top school board and teachers union positions in at least 15 states — from California to Kentucky and from New York to Texas.

“The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, has long had the goal of using the K-12 system as a way to proselytize to a captive audience of other people’s children,” Parents Defending Education outreach director Erika Sanzi told The Post.

“Their anti-Jewish and anti-Israel messages in the K-12 context are not at all new but many more people have become aware of them since October 7th,” she added. “The DSA is poison in schools.”

Oct. 8 Times Square rally 4

The DSA promoted a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square on Oct. 8 in New York. A demonstrator was seen displaying a swastika on their phone. Twitter/@StuartMeissner

The DSA became infamous after boosting a hate-filled pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square a day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed an estimated 1,200 people — including 33 Americans.

The demonstration featured protesters burning and stomping on an Israeli flag and at least one flashing a swastika image on a phone to taunt counter-protesters who supported the Jewish state.

Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller