The ideological erosion of the bourgeois order at every level — economic, political, cultural, social — would proceed the initiation of direct frontal assaults on the state.

Carl Boggs
Gramsci’s Marxism, p. 52

🕷

Professor Carl Boggs admires Antonio Gramsci. As a socialist, Boggs understands that Gramsci’s idea of the communist revolutionary “process” depends on “the continuous and organic development of the … oppressed classes….” This development is driven by “novel forms of social participation” which gradually extend “the domain of egalitarianism, [and] non-bureaucratic [forms of] social authority….”

Social and political revolt erupted in the European and world periphery in the decade prior to World War I, beginning with the First Russian Revolution in 1905, followed by the Iranian revolution of 1906, the great Rumanian peasant revolt of 1907, the Young Turk rebellion of 1908, the Greek military revolt of 1909, the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy and the beginning of the Mexican revolution in 1910, and the Chinese revolution in 1911.

Stanley G. Payne
The Spanish Civil War

What triggered the revolutions and civil wars of the last century? What triggered the first and second world wars? One thing triggered them: ENMITY.

What is enmity?

Enmity is ill will, hostility, antipathy, animosity, rancor — and, above all, it is hatred — not passive, but active. It is a hatred that fuels the cruelty of war. It is the meaning of war. It is the reason for war. It is the all-in-all of war.

“What are the symptoms of … the derailment of man?” asked Eric Voegelin in his book, Hitler and the Germans. Man has a particular nature. He is a spiritual being and a rational being. The West drew its reason from the ancient Greeks, its spiritual grounding from the ancient Israelites. This was our twofold heritage. Only now we have abandoned it for positivism and materialism. Consequently, Western Civilization is rapidly unraveling.