Cultural War by Juan Carlos Girauta

 In its modern sense, the culture war does not come from the United States but from Italy, specifically from a man who elaborated his theories in prison almost a century ago: Antonio Gramsci.  If one conquers literalist laziness, he will find out that the culture war, or the cultural battle, does not mean being a warrior all day but in gaining hegemony in institutions, the media, the University, the school, the publishing world, etc.  .  That is why Gramsci's is a "passive revolution" and gradual.

 Of course a communist, Gramsci is the most alive thing that Marxism has.  What is Marxian (the work of Karl Marx) is no longer bought by anyone serious and endowed with good intellectual faith once its central theories, such as that of labor value, have been demolished and crushed;  once milked by the Frankfurt School (in the United States and in Germany) and by Sartre, Althusser, or Deleuze in France, a series of superstitions with scientific overtones: "reification," "commodity fetishism," and other quibbles.  Bad vinegar gave the milking.  The exception, Gramsci

 Because he is the highest and most attractive point of the Marxist paradox: it turns out that the active agent of historical change is political and intellectual.  Areas that, for Marxism, belong to the superstructure, smoke that does not change history.  Well, no!  If Marx turned Hegel around like a sock, Gramsci did the same with Marx.  Of course, there is no paradox but contradiction.  Or not even that.  As Scruton, the great British conservative theorist, wants, Gramsci simply disproved Marx's theory of history, although neither he ever said it nor did his countless followers mention it.  The reasons have to do with the prestige of the intellectual within the "bourgeois society" that he wants to destroy.

 And now let's look back at the Spain of today.  If someone other than Jon Juaristi announced the funeral of our liberal democracy, it would be considered literary license.  But he just did it on these pages.  You have to take it very seriously.  If it is not dead, the Spanish liberal democracy is dying.  It is the result of a process started long ago in the University and the school, in the arts and in publishing houses.  And, with more resistance, in the institutions.  We can affirm that this process has followed the guidelines of Gramsci's Theory of Hegemony.  It has followed them within a larger trend, western in scope.  Locally, the path has been walked without awareness of the purpose.  Except in the case of Podemos, which has successfully precipitated events by consciously following the teachings of the Italian communist.

 Look if we will be kaffir, bellicose and sectarian those in favor of undoing the operation following those same guidelines, after public signaling of the precise mechanisms used, that in reality we are recognizing the undeniable effectiveness of Antonio Gramsci's ideas.