The Marxist Transformation of Higher Education

Gramsci, the “father of cultural marxism”, and the marxist capture of American universities after a “long march through academia”

Tokyo, 31st October 2025 – Published as an article in the Japanese newspaper Sekai Nippo. Republished with permission. Translated from Japanese. Original article.

[Series] Trump vs. America’s Elite Universities – part 4  

Gramsci’s Strategy Achieves Great Success

The Battle Against “Cultural Marxism”

by Toshiyuki Hayakawa (早川 俊行)

See also part 1: Ideological War: Trump Targets Cultural Marxism

See also part 2: Defector: US Campus Culture Reminds Me of NKorea

See also part 3: How Marxism Shifted from Revolution to Culture

See also part 5: Cancel Culture, Cultural Hegemony, Universities

See also part 6: Far-Left Activism in American Higher Education

See also part 7: Exclusive Left-Wing DEI Ideology on Campus

See also part 8: Growing Antisemitism Based on Leftist Ideology

See also Politics Fueled Japan’s Attack on Federation

See also Communist Strategy Against Religion and Family

See also Unlikely Alliances in Defense of Mother Han (82)

Among the connections former U.S. President Barack Obama built during his years in Chicago is a man named Bill Ayers – one of the founding members of the far-left militant group Weather Underground, which carried out multiple bombings of federal buildings such as the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and police stations during the Vietnam War.

After evading federal prosecution, Ayers transformed himself from a terrorist into a professor of education at the University of Illinois (now retired).

In 1995, it was Ayers who hosted a reception at his home to introduce Obama to key local figures when Obama decided to run for the Illinois State Senate. In other words, Obama’s political career began in the home of a former far-left terrorist.

Ayers can be described as a figure who embodied the theories of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian thinker who called for a shift from violent revolution to cultural revolution. Ayers even quotes Gramsci on his personal website and makes no effort to hide his admiration.

Gramsci, often regarded as the “father of Cultural Marxism”, witnessed firsthand the limits of Leninism – which could maintain its regime only through terror – during his exile in Russia. Based on that experience, he concluded that in Western societies, where civil society had developed between the state and the people, a violent “war of maneuver” (mobile warfare) to seize state power would not succeed.

Instead, he proposed a “war of position” (trench warfare) [See editor’s note below]: infiltrating civil society and gradually undermining existing culture and values over time in order to gain power.

This revolutionary strategy of Cultural Marxism was later popularized in the 1960s by German student activist Rudi Dutschke, who coined the slogan “The Long March Through the Institutions”. Borrowing the term from the Chinese Communist Party’s “Long March” of the 1930s, Dutschke called not for the destruction of the existing system, but for patient infiltration from within – steadily expanding influence. This idea became a guiding principle for revolutionaries in the United States.

Radical organizations like Ayers’s Weather Underground began to lose momentum by the early 1980s. In line with the “long march” slogan, Ayers shifted to academia and established himself as an authority in the field of education.

According to Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation,

“Teaching was one of the most sought-after professions among members of the New Left.”

Many radical leftist students from the 1960s became professors in the 1980s, and universities rapidly grew more left-leaning.

John M. Ellis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, presents data in his book The Breakdown of Higher Education showing how faculty positions became dominated by the left after the 1960s.

A 1969 survey found that 45% of professors identified as left-wing, while 27% identified as conservative. By 2006, however, left-wing professors made up 80%, and conservatives only 9% – a dramatic widening of the gap. Moreover, over half of those on the left identified as far-left.

Once the left gained control of hiring decisions, they appointed leftist successors to replace retiring conservatives. This accelerated the growth of left-wing faculty – a trend that appears to have widened even further today.

The 2006 survey also found that one in five social science professors identified as “Marxist”. According to Ellis, many avoid the term “Marxist” due to its negative connotations, preferring labels such as “socialist” or “progressive”. For that reason, he estimates the actual number of Marxists to be significantly higher.

Ellis laments the current state of universities, saying,

“While only a tiny fraction of ordinary Americans call themselves Marxists, among social science professors they represent an enormous faction – showing a deep divide between academia and the real world.”

In short, Gramsci’s “war of position” strategy has been realized with stunning success in America’s universities.

See also part 1: Ideological War: Trump Targets Cultural Marxism

See also part 2: Defector: US Campus Culture Reminds Me of NKorea

See also part 3: How Marxism Shifted from Revolution to Culture

See also part 5: Cancel Culture, Cultural Hegemony, Universities

See also part 6: Far-Left Activism in American Higher Education

See also part 7: Exclusive Left-Wing DEI Ideology on Campus

See also part 8: Growing Antisemitism Based on Leftist Ideology

See also Politics Fueled Japan’s Attack on Federation

See also Communist Strategy Against Religion and Family

See also Unlikely Alliances in Defense of Mother Han (82)

Featured image above: Antonio Gramsci (left) and Rudi Dutschke. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain images.

[Editor’s note: “War of maneuver” and “war of position” are Gramsci’s own metaphors, but they come from Italian military terminology, not from Japanese or later reinterpretations. “Mobile warfare” and “maneuver warfare” are just English renderings of guerra di movimento – the phrase Gramsci himself used.

In his Prison Notebooks (written between 1929–1935), Gramsci uses two military concepts: “guerra di movimento” – literally “war of movement” or “war of maneuver” – and “guerra di posizione” – “war of position”.

These were drawn from early 20th-century military theory (particularly World War I strategy), but Gramsci repurposed them as political metaphors for revolutionary strategy.

In Gramsci’s thought, war of maneuver (guerra di movimento) referred to a direct, frontal attack on state power – like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where the old regime was overthrown through a relatively rapid and violent insurrection.

War of position (guerra di posizione) means a prolonged struggle for ideological and cultural dominance within civil society – slowly eroding the existing order’s moral and intellectual foundations from within (schools, media, religion, etc.).

Gramsci argued that in Western Europe, with its strong civil societies, the “war of maneuver” (violent revolution) could not succeed as it had in Russia. Instead, revolutionaries needed to wage a “war of position” – a cultural and ideological struggle.

In English translations of Gramsci, “war of maneuver” and “war of position” are the standard academic translations. But some translators also use “mobile warfare”and “trench warfare”for guerra di posizione, emphasizing its slow, entrenched nature.]

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