(LifeSiteNews) — In the 1932 book Toward a Soviet America, William Z. Foster – political activist and American Communist Party leader –gushed over his vision of a communist America, which he described as a future certainty. Part utopian fantasy, part revolutionary how-to, the book lays out strategies for a communist takeover of the country.
One battlefield Foster identified was American culture. Indeed, many Marxist thinkers, led by Antonio Gramsci, had theorized that a communist revolution in developed Western nations could not occur until the people’s minds had been unshackled from a traditionally-minded “bourgeois” social and cultural milieu. Gramsci argued that the ruling class uses “cultural hegemony” to maintain its power and exploit the lower classes. The manipulation of culture tricks the proletariat into believing the status quo is good and normal, since they drink in the ideology in art, education, film, etc., thus remaining ignorant of their enslavement and victimhood.
Foster, applying Gramsci’s ideas, wrote, “Present-day culture in this country is an instrument by which the capitalist class consolidates its dominant position… The schools, churches, newspapers, motion pictures, radio, theatres and various other avenues of publicity and mass instruction are the organized propaganda machinery of the ruling class.”
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Gramsci’s ideas thus inaugurated a new battlefront for Marxist ideology: culture. No longer was the Marxist revolution to be waged only in the streets with guns; rather, it would rumble forward in cultural institutions through ideas and propaganda.
One key institution targeted by communists seeking to revolutionize America was education, as Foster stated explicitly in his book:
Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism… God will be banished from the laboratories, as well as from the schools.
Foster’s prediction has largely come true. God is no longer welcome in the laboratories or the classrooms of our nation. It seems that over the course of the 20th century, Marxist agents pursued Foster’s vision and made it a reality.
Luis Budenz, former Soviet espionage agent and member of Communist Party USA who became a dedicated enemy of communism, witnesses to this fact. He wrote in his 1954 book The Techniques of Communism, “In undermining a nation such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime importance. The Communists have accordingly made the invasion of schools and colleges one of the major considerations in their psychological warfare designed to control the American mind.” Budenz asserts that Stalin had long ago identified educational organizations as means for promoting communist ideology.
Similarly, former FBI agent and communist expert W. Cleon Skousen created a list of 45 communist goals, which was read into the Congressional Record on January 10, 1963. These included the directives “[g]et control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in textbooks” and “Gain control of all student newspapers.”
We can turn to another witness for evidence that these goals were not relegated to the realm of theory only; they were put into practice. Bella Dodd was a high-ranking communist who converted to Catholicism through the good offices of Bishop Fulton Sheen. According to Paul Kengor’s The Devil and Karl Marx, it was in college that Dodd fell under the sway of Marxist ideas and the philosophy of the pro-communist John Dewey. Dewey was the progenitor of the modern, progressive educational principles that have shaped contemporary schooling, and he was president for life of the National Education Association (NEA), a Marxist-leaning group I’ll have more to say about presently.
After college, Dodd joined the Communist Party and was personally engaged in operations to funnel thousands of communist agents into the teaching profession, thus infiltrating the American educational system from the inside. She was deeply involved with the teachers’ unions, used by the Communist Party to drive toward a “Soviet America.” After rejecting Communism, Dodd testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952 on the strategic presence of communist agents in American schools:
The [communist] seeks a strategic position. If you had Communists in these schools of education, that is a very strategic position because not only are they affecting the philosophy of education but they are also teaching other teachers, who, in turn, are teaching the pupils. If you have one Communist teacher in the school of education, and he teaches, let’s say, 300 teachers, who then go out all over the United States, that is a strategic position.
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It’s not hard to see how a well-placed communist agent, such as one in a teacher’s college, could quickly influence and infect large numbers of American schools through his or her students.
In 1953, Dodd told the same committee, “There is no doubt in my mind that the Communists will use the schools and every other educational medium, whether it be comic books or the radio and television.”
Dodd and her allies had simply been carrying out the battle-plan elaborated by Foster in Toward a Soviet America. Recall that Foster had called for the establishment of a centralized Department of Education in the U.S. to gain control of the school system and begin injecting Marxist poison into its veins. That was in 1932. Forty years later, as Father John Hardon, S.J., observes in “The Influence of Marxism in the United States Today,” the National Education Association pushed for a national Department of Education during the 1976 presidential campaign. They achieved their goal after the election of President Jimmy Carter, who established the United States Department of Education as a Cabinet-level department on October 17, 1979.
That the Department of Education was formed at the behest of the NEA should concern us because the latter has a shady record. Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, the NEA had energetically defended teachers accused of communist sympathies, and today, the NEA is a highly politicized union with overt Marxist tendencies.
As expressed in the Communist Manifesto and explained by Pope Pius XI, Marxists deny parents’ rights to teach their children. Rather, those children and their formation belongs to “the collective.” Pius XI explains, “Finally, the right of education is denied to parents [by Marxists], for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right.”
Before he died, Fr. Hardon believed we had already travelled far down the road to the abolition of parental rights over education. Indeed, Hardon warned that the U.S. was becoming a Marxist nation and that Marxism had seeped into the Church as well. Speaking on the decline in education, he wrote:
What happened to parents’ rights to educate their children? In less than a quarter century, these rights have been lost by most parents in the United States. Most of the once Catholic schools in America have been closed. This manuscript is being written in an empty Catholic school, once taught by dedicated women religious who have been beguiled by Marxian ideology.
It’s worth noting here that the NEA recently opposed legislation that would strengthen parental rights in education. Conservative parents have been pushing for more influence over what and how their children are taught in the public school system, especially since online classes during the COVID saga revealed heavy-handed “health protocols” and just how much indoctrination occurs in a public-school setting. The fact that parents feel the need to fight for this voice in their children’s schooling proves how much parental rights have eroded already.
Of course, one reason educators today may want to close the classroom blinds in the face of parents is because they are teaching things that parents may disapprove of. Marxism wears various disguises and aliases, and it has morphed into new monstrous shapes, but it is possible to see its ugly face in our educational system today. To see it, though, we have to understand the transformation that Marxism underwent in the latter half of the 20th century.
Marxism’s failure as an economic model became impossible to ignore as the 20th century wore on, so Marxist theorists leaned more and more heavily on the social and cultural applications of the philosophy, rather than its economic ones. In a 1989 New York Times article, Felicity Barringer wrote, “As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders.”
To accomplish this feat, they had adapted classical Marxism into neo-Marxism. As the philosophy was shooed out of economics departments, it stealthily embedded itself in English departments across the hall or down the flight of stairs. In hijacked literary criticism, the oppressor vs. oppressed prototype was transferred from economic groups to social groups. John Miltimore and Dan Sanchez of the Foundation for Economic Education explain:
Economics was downplayed, and other key aspects of the Marxist worldview came to the fore. The Marxist class war doctrine was still emphasized. But instead of capital versus labor, it was the patriarchy versus women, the racially privileged versus the marginalized, etc. Students were taught to see every social relation through the lens of oppression and conflict.
The abstruse, hyperbolic, and arcane theories of the university lecture halls and faculty lounges, expressed in impenetrable academese, eventually trickled down into lower levels of education.
As journalist Christopher Rufo and others have amply demonstrated, the Critical Race Theory being taught today in grade schools, high schools, and colleges has roots deeply embedded in Marxism. Critical Race Theory teaches children that America is a fundamentally and systematically racist country, propped up on oppression and continually perpetuating inequalities. This is the direct intellectual patrimony of the neo-Marxists of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
The promotion of the LGBT agenda also bears the marks of cultural or neo-Marxism, as it is conducted under the auspices of “righting injustice” and “fighting the oppression” of these “victim groups.” Neo-Marxism obsesses over perceived injustices perpetrated against minority groups, who must achieve equal or even dominant status if we are to have a “just” society – even if that means lauding sin and disorder. Such beliefs becomes the excuse for total revolution, the upending of the existing social order. All this forms a key ingredient of the “wokeism” with which we are all now familiar.
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In short, through the centralization and bureaucratization of education, the stripping away of references to God and religion, and the suffusion of “woke” ideology, it seems clear that the American educational system has been fatally compromised by Marxist influences – as indeed has the whole country.
Pope Pius XI warned us of the signs, but perhaps we did not listen. In 1937, just a few years after Foster’s revolutionary playbook was published, he wrote, “When religion is banished from the school, from education and from public life, when the representatives of Christianity and its sacred rites are held up to ridicule, are we not really fostering the materialism which is the fertile soil of Communism.?”