Professionally secular systems of belief—Humanism, Mega-Religion and the grab bag of New Age, for example—forged their own not-so-strange alliances with Gramsci’s heirs, rushing into the religious vacuum of formerly Christian societies. For they, too, were united in insisting on the major proposition that religion and religious faith had no function except to help all mankind to unite and be at peace within this world, in order to reach its ultimate peak of human development.
In the same decade of the eighties, a new bent of mind surfaced within virtually all of the merging secularist streams of activity in the West. Globalism.
The generality of thinking people throughout the West nations—entrepreneurs, academicians, politicians, artists, media people, industrialists, scientists—all inclined themselves toward the concept that the whole society of nations should and could be forged into a unity, into one great society, secular to the marrow of its bones, rejecting all the old religious divisiveness, spurning all of religion’s old and outworn claims of otherworldly ambitions and purposes.
By the beginning of the 1990s, the Gramscian process in the West had been fused seamlessly, like molten glass, into the most important energies and impulses of the new culture prevailing in democratic capitalist societies.
Within what was still called Catholicism, the word “Roman” was frequently dropped; Roman Catholicism was not a concept that was compatible with secular globalism, after all. Within “Modern Catholicism,” as it called itself, a large majority of bishops, priests, religious and laity had adopted all the traits of the new culture that surrounded them. They had ceased to be Catholic in any sense that would have been recognized by Pope John XXIII as he summoned his Second Vatican Council to “open the windows” of his Church to the world in the search for its renewal—its aggiornamento.
The mental deception of so many millions of Catholics by a thoroughly this-worldly, materialistic and un-Catholic persuasion was matched only by the intellectual darkening into which the cultural elites of the West had worked themselves. Gramsci’s ghost had captivated them all into his “Marxist hegemony of the mind.”
The transcendental had bowed to the immanent. Total materialism was freely, peacefully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name of man’s dignity and rights, in the name of man’s autonomy and freedom from outside constraints. Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from the laws and constraints of Christianity.
To tell anyone in the West—any of the participants in the entrepreneurial activities of America and Europe, anyone in the Western media, anyone in the scientific community or in the academic faculties of colleges and universities—that all of them, along with the leading theologians and Church dignitaries the world over, had been thoroughly grounded in the basic principles of Marxism would be to elicit hoots of derision and self-righteous cries of protest. Pope John Paul’s answer to such hoots and cries, however, is to point to Gramsci’s ghost, which has thoroughly penetrated all of these groups with the Communist revolutionary sense of immanence.
Many who would reject this claim by John Paul point in their turn to the social democracies that flourish in the Scandinavian countries. Surely, Marxism cannot be said to flourish in such areas—not even so unbloody a brand of Marxism as Gramsci’s. After all, in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, there has been a revulsion from the Marxist oppression of liberty. And in all of them there flourishes a large bourgeois class with no liking for Marxist economic weaknesses and no inclination to renounce either capitalism or the material comforts it brings.
John Paul’s answer to any such finger-pointing is that it misses the whole subtle attack of Gramsci’s ingeniously congenial process. In fact, argues the Pontiff, to make this argument is in itself to cooperate with the most central operating principle of Leninist Marxism: deception.
The Pope readily concedes that the Nordic model of social democracy in Norway, Sweden and Denmark has produced a comfortable way of life, a way of life ingrained with values of moderation, egalitarianism and social solidarity, a way of life bolstered by hefty social benefits, a way of life in which there is a virtual absence of ostentatious wealth, but in which living standards hover near the top of the international scale.
Nevertheless, as John Paul understands to his pain, the model social democracies in these countries rest upon a way of life that is in no way concerned with any value transcending the here and now. All public values are immanent. In a private conversation with one of his American counterparts, a Swedish book publisher remarked that “Sweden is a small and godless country.” Pope John Paul would extend that observation with equal accuracy to Sweden’s Nordic partners in social democracy.
In their efforts to join in some degree of economic unity with the Europe of 1992, meanwhile, the Nordic administrations have a tough time of it. It is hard for them to place a cap on public-sector expenses; or to step up national productivity; or to allow private enterprises a freer rein. For to do any of that would jigger the national consensus in their own countries. And this is a consensus that rests exclusively on the “value” of material comfort.
In Pope John Paul’s reading, the crux of the matter in the Nordic countries is not all that different from that in the rest of the West nations, including the United States. In every case, national culture was developed on the basis of Christian beliefs and Christian moral laws. Indeed, the Pontiff argues from history, those beliefs and laws gave each nation its resiliency, its courage and its inspiration. In sum, as Gramsci realized, Christianity was both the philosophy and the lifeblood of the Western culture shared by all of the nations in question.
By the end of the 1980s, however, there was no longer even any serious talk of Christian beliefs or Christian moral laws. If they entered into the great dialogues of the day, they were reduced to “values,” like any other coinage that existed for the sole purpose of being bargained away for something else.
George Orwell once wrote that “at any given moment, there is a sort of all-pervading orthodoxy—a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact.”
For John Paul’s money, the “all-pervading orthodoxy” in the West in the final decade of the twentieth century is a tacit agreement not to discuss the “large and uncomfortable fact” that Western leaders and populations, in their public consensus, have abandoned the Christian philosophy of human life.
In fact, according to Pope John Paul’s analysis of Western culture at the present moment, there is no philosophy of life worthy of the name. What now passes for philosophy is nothing more than a hybrid complex of fashions and vogues and impulses and theories that mold public opinion, that guide public education and that dominate artistic and literary expression throughout the West. What better scenario than that could Gramsci have written into his blueprint? It is the perfect stage for his process—long since adopted by European Marxists—to promote the growth of social democracy within the society of European nations and to occupy the spaces left vacant by the bourgeois culture itself.
With their own philosophy still in place and as inflexibly based as ever on the materialistic dialectic of Marx, Gramsci’s latter-day heirs have sold the free-market West on a new prize commodity: that type of immanence which is specifically Communist.
The General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Achille Occhetto, gave a little demonstration in early June of 1989 of how well the Gramscian formula works. The occasion was his pious denunciation of the CP in China for ordering the People’s Liberation Army (CPA) to use tanks and automatic weapons to crush the student protest on the streets of Beijing a few weeks before.
“In the East [China],” Occhetto declared without even a wink at the bloody history of Marxism, “Communism is a term that has no relation any longer to its historic origins and constitutes a political framework that is completely wrong.” Then, in the great deception demanded by Gramsci’s policy, Occhetto proclaimed, “There is absolutely nothing left of Communism as a unitary and orga
nic system.” To illustrate the point, in fact, Occhetto and his comrades in the Italian CP went on to organize public demonstrations of their solidarity with the doomed student-led democratic movement in China.
Occhetto’s words notwithstanding, his was the perfect display of Gramsci’s mandate to Marxists everywhere. Take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, Gramsci had said. Be inflexible in the materialist dialectic of Marx. Be rigid in material philosophy and unbending in the Marxist interpretation of history. But be clever as you do it. Ally all of that with any forces that present an opening for Marxist immanentism.
Obediently, Gramscian Marxists in Europe and elsewhere fuel nationalism in Africa. But at the same time, they ally themselves with the globalism of the world’s entrepreneurs and with the Europeanizers of Europe. They side with American sentiment condemning the excesses of Chinese Marxism. But they support the elements in the American Congress and administration that foster compromise with the Chinese Marxist leaders.
They join with the Christian churches in brotherly dialogue and in common humanitarian ventures. But the object is to confirm the new Christianity in its antimetaphysical and essentially atheistic pursuit of liberation from material inconvenience, from the fear of a nuclear holocaust, from sexual restriction of any kind and, finally, from all supernatural constrictions as from all material fears. Total liberation is to construct the long-dreamed Leninist-Marxist Utopia—that is the rule.
By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci more than half a century ago within the dismal confines of Mussolini’s prisons, has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood.
Running through the ancient arteries of once Christian lands, Pope John Paul sees the soul-killing, watery serum of what he has called “superdevelopment,” and an always nervous striving for economic soundness. The ideal is exclusively here and now. Every aim is totally immanent to historical man in his cities and his houses and his pleasures; in his industries and his factories; and, above all, in his banks and his money markets. This is the predeath trickle of serum that has replaced the blood of culture in the West.
Given such a state of Western culture—including the much vaunted Nordic models of social democracy—it might have been laughable, had it not been so painful, for John Paul to hear the recent, almost mystical, judgment of Krister Ahlstrom, CEO of the Finnish Employers Confederation. “Something indefinable binds Nordic countries together,” pondered Ahlstrom, “as though they had an invisible force.” That force, maintains Pope John Paul, is not invisible at all. It is the force of Gramsci’s success. Not only the Nordic countries but the entire West has given birth at last to the child of Gramsci’s ghost: a completely secularized society. And in what is still called “the spirit of Vatican II,” John Paul’s worldwide Roman Catholic institutional organization has been both midwife and wet nurse for that force.
Only once was there a truly serious threat to the Gramscian process. It came, of all places, in Poland. And it followed Pope John Paul’s “pilgrimage” of 1979, with its risky, dramatic and compelling challenge to the status quo of the Communist regime in his homeland.
Bitter and sustained experience—first under post-World War II Stalinism; and then under Khrushchev and Brezhnev—had taught John Paul one basic lesson. Stalin’s brand of Leninist Marxism would brook no tampering with the nuts and bolts of the Soviet Union’s imperial hold on Poland. Any attempt to dilute Soviet control of the Polish Armed Forces, or of the KGB-organized security police, or the rubber-stamp Polish parliament, would be met with the full force of the Soviet mailed fist—which was to say, with total repression, with the use of Soviet divisions stationed in Eastern Poland if necessary, and with the clampdown of even closer surveillance by the KGB itself.
The effective answer to that insistent hands-off-our-turf requirement of the Polish regime came from Cardinal Wyszynski, Primate of Poland, and mentor of Pope John Paul during his days as priest and bishop in Krakow. Wyszynski always insisted that in other Eastern satellite countries—notably in Hungary—the Church’s tough and intransigent fight with the atheist puppet regimes of the USSR had met with disaster. On the other hand, neither could the Church in such countries run away from the hostile and oppressive situation that engulfed them. The Cardinal devised a third way. The Church had to cohabit Poland with the Marxist political regime, he said; but at the same time, it had to preserve its people intact in their culture.
Under Wyszynski’s canny and guiding hand, the all-pervasive Catholic Church in Poland developed its own anti-Gramsci version of Gramsci’s process, its own network within which Polish culture could be preserved and developed.
The underground or “flying” university, of which Pope John Paul himself was a product; underground publications and libraries; underground cultural activities and artistic pursuits—all of these efforts and countless others blanketed Poland and constituted a popular stratum of Polish culture. All of it was Church-related—devised, fomented, nourished and solidly supported under Wyszynski’s guidance. And all of it was untouched by the deadening hand of Marxism.
In the months following Pope John Paul’s careful but unequivocal call for change during his 1979 papal speeches in Warsaw and Gniezno and Krakow, the Solidarity movement—originally based among shipyard workers in the Baltic ports—found its way throughout Poland. It came into official existence in 1980, when the first accords were signed in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdansk.
The success and vogue of the Polish Solidarity movement added a whole new dimension to the Wyszysnki concept. Almost insensibly, a new proposition was born in many minds. It was true—and as nearly as anyone could see at the time, it was going to remain true—that Poles were forced to concede political, military and security powers to the Soviet regime in Moscow. But that regime could allow exactly the aboveground freedoms John Paul had called for in all areas of culture. In education and art and literature, to be sure, but also, and at long last, in the field of labor relations.
When just that proposition was actually made, the officials of the CP in Poland found it appealing in a number of respects. Warsaw was being badgered continually by Moscow to do something about Poland’s economy, which was in shambles, and about its labor unrest, which was always ready to boil over, and about its $30 billion debt to Western creditors.
Given recognition and status, it was just possible that Solidarity could do away with the crippling strikes that bedeviled Polish industry. It might even prevent the subtle and costly “go slow” tactics used by Poland’s workers, who saw reduced productivity as their only means of protest against starvation wages, food shortages, police brutality and all the other forms of governmental oppression.
It might even be that, if such a prescription could work in Poland, the Soviet Union might see in it a formula to be tried in other ailing economies of its Eastern satellite empire.
It is unlikely that the record of private conversations between the participants in the negotiations, or the cable traffic between Cardinal Wyszynski’s Warsaw, Pope John Paul’s Vatican and General Secretary Brezhnev’s Moscow, or the few additional documents involved, will ever be laid bare to the eyes of today’s historians. It does seem certain, however, that with Moscow’s approval, at least a verbal agreement was finally reached between the background organizers of Solidarity and the Polish Communist regime.
It was a brilliant idea. A mixed bag of carrots and sticks for both sides. It would make any penetration of Polish culture by the Gramscian process difficult. But there would be common agreement at last to leave security and political control of Poland in the hands of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party. And it promised economic relief in at least one of the satellite countries that were draining Moscow’s already strained resources.
The plan might have worked, had the agreement concerning exclusive political control by the Communist regime not been violated. But among Solidarity’s organizers were members of another organization—the Committee for the Defense of the Workers,
known internationally by its Polish initials: KOR. Whether by design or by tactical error, KOR managed to push Solidarity’s policies and demands beyond the bounds of culture. KOR wanted a share of the regime’s political power, as well; and it was not content to wait for time to ripen the possibilities.
KOR’s demand was too much too soon for the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and for its surrogate regime in Poland. The agreement collapsed. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul took place. And by December of 1981, Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski had imposed martial law in Moscow’s name. The alternative, as the General insisted in his own defense to Cardinal Wyszynski and Pope John Paul, was a direct military takeover by the Soviet Union.
In retrospect, both Moscow and Warsaw seem to have suffered a loss of nerve. In Poland, Gramsci’s process had been met head-on and squarely for the first time by the dedicated use of its own tactics. And when those tactics seemed to threaten the control of Soviet Marxism within its own domain of Polish politics, all thought of Gramsci’s call for the CPSU to foster different faces of Communism in different countries was lost in the panic.
What Brezhnev saw in the situation was a threat to total Soviet control in its own territory. In those unprecedented circumstances, he reverted to his Stalinist roots. He abandoned the Gramscian experiment in Poland—the first, but not the last that would surface in the satellite countries.
Even here, however, the aftermath of Brezhnev’s action demonstrated still one more time the unwisdom of classical Leninism. For once again, such heavy-handed policies failed to change the way the people thought about their lives and their problems. Poles remained fundamentally Christian in tradition. Their culture, with its moral laws and civic customs, was only driven underground. True, the people were again forced to behave outwardly according to hated rules within a hated sociopolitical regime. But just as Gramsci had said, the religious transcendent—God, with his laws and his worship—continued to flourish, and to nourish enmity for what Poles everywhere saw was the alien superstructure of a Soviet Marxist dictatorship.
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