How Gramscianism Conquered Uruguayan Culture

The strategy of cultural hegemony shifted political struggle towards education, the media and institutions.

In previous articles, we examined the process by which Marxism co-opted education in Uruguay.
A task accomplished in the best Gramscian fashion, which can be described as successful—regrettably successful.
The Italian Antonio Gramsci argued that a ruling stratum did not remain in power through force or legislation alone.
He believed it also endured because it had succeeded in imposing values on society that most citizens perceived as appropriate.
That ruling class achieved this through education, the media, religions and the family.
Thus, Gramsci reasoned, power can only be attained by influencing both the State, as a political organisation, and society.
From all this he inferred that conquering power required what he called a “war of position”.
This concept can be related to Von Clausewitz’s assertion that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”.
Gramsci adopted the Prussian general’s strategic language to formulate his idea that politics could be interpreted through categories drawn from warfare.
Drawing on the experience of the First World War and its transformation into trench warfare—where the plan was to hold positions, wear down the enemy and advance without haste—Gramsci developed his idea of the “war of position”.
That was the path: to conquer civil society, education, culture, the press and institutions.
A clear example is the media—or at least much of it—which referred to the recent electoral contest in Chile by describing Dr José Antonio Kast as “far-right”, while his opponent Jeannette Jara, a communist, was described as “left-wing”.
Jeannette Jara belongs to the Communist Party of Chile, a political group whose declaration of principles expresses “its firmest purpose of establishing an authentic representative democratic regime”, and so forth.
The text brings to mind the lion who, addressing a flock of sheep, said that if they elected him he would become a vegetarian.
It is true that these crude manoeuvres made no dent in the electorate of the Andean country, which ultimately elected Dr Kast as “the president with the most votes in Chilean history”.
Even so, it cannot be denied that Gramscianism has carried out its destructive work in Uruguay.
Since the communist reconversion agreed at the São Paulo Forum, a meeting convened by Fidel Castro and Lula da Silva in 1990, the strategy changed.
They would now accept—or pretend to accept—the rules of liberal democracy and submit themselves to elections.
The guerrilla movements abandoned—or pretended to abandon—their armed struggle and began transforming themselves into political parties.
They then turned to Gramsci’s manuals and focused on promoting “cultural hegemony”.
They set aside the industrial worker and began operating in other fields, such as feminism in its new Marxist version, indigenous movements, minority rights and gender identities.
All this came under a different guise. They now became “progressives” or coined, as in Venezuela, the “socialism of the twenty-first century”.
They won the elections in Venezuela and set the leftward turn in motion.
That is Venezuela today, whose misfortune has now been compounded by the terrible earthquake that caused a true disaster in loss of human life and material destruction.
Nicaragua offers another example: Daniel Ortega reached the presidency through the ballot box, and the country now suffers a cruel autocracy that has eliminated effective political competition, replicating features of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.
In Uruguay, attempts to establish “popular” fronts go back a long way.
At the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Eugenio Gómez writes in his History of the Communist Party in Uruguay, the “tactic of the united front and the popular front” was established.
That is: “to sweep away all sectarian phraseology and dogmatic formulas [and] combine the most flexible alliance policy with the affirmation of the proletariat’s vanguard role and the independent development of the Party”.
Is that not precisely the Broad Front in the present government?
And that process was built through the patient work of undermining the stone.
Many intellectuals, radical feminism, the devaluation of women, the deconstruction of the family and the treatment of neoliberalism as a common enemy have contributed their tonne of sand.
Some of these tenets have been embraced by the United Nations in the so-called 2030 Agenda, which would appear to indicate that Gramscianism has also managed to permeate the organisation.
In the next article we shall examine an attempt to curb the independence that the University of the Republic regards as a shield allowing it to do—or let others do—whatever it pleases.

The war of position.
The left’s political reconversion.
Cultural hegemony in Uruguay.

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