Mark Latham: ALP is full of useful idiots assisting cultural Marxism

Mark Latham, The Daily Telegraph

October 17, 2017 12:00am

 

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When Vladimir Lenin coined the phrase “useful idiots” in politics, he gave us a handy way of understanding Bill Shorten’s Labor Party.

 

As identity politics has taken hold of our major public institutions and private companies, Labor politicians have played along.

In wanting to help so-called “oppressed minorities”, they have fallen into the trap of naively assisting the far more dangerous agenda of cultural Marxism.

 

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Mark Latham. Picture: Harold David

 

In the eyes of this far-Left movement, they are very useful idiots.

 

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most people thought Marxism had been defeated.

 

But this was only true of economic Marxism — government control of the means of production.

 

Like a scene from a Terminator movie, neo-Marxists reassembled themselves, morphing into an even more menacing force.

 

They adopted the tactics of the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Instead of seeking economic control, they pursued cultural control by manipulating the beliefs, values and language of society.

 

Gramsci proposed a “long march through the institutions”, steadily taking over universities, schools, media outlets and government agencies by appointing like-minded people to senior positions.

 

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Karl Marx argued for state control of production.

 

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Sound familiar?

This is what has happened to Australia over the past 20 years. Political correctness is being used to control our language.

 

Gender fluidity courses in schools are being used to teach young people there is no such thing as fixed, biological science.

 

Post-structuralist Marxism is now the dominant ideology in Australia’s universities, such that students are being made to “unlearn” all prior knowledge and to regard history, science and even education itself as “capitalist constructs”.

 

Employment quotas and theories of “unconscious bias” are dismantling merit-based recruitment, with people hired by the medieval habit of how they look (skin colour and gender).

 

The overall impact has been to create a society devoid of certainty, drained of institutional ballast.

 

Cultural Marxism aims to convince people their true beliefs and identities in life are being repressed, that in feeling anxious and uneasy, they need to rise up against the existing social order.

 

MARK LATHAM: Stop! Diversity police, this is just too much

It’s a powerful movement that started in the underbelly of our institutions and now dominates around 80 per cent of Australian public life.

 

The rest of us, the 20 per cent, are the resistance.

 

I say these things from a background in the right-wing of the Labor Party, where I fought the Left internally on most issues.

 

But I’m not the only one saying it.

 

Peter Baldwin, the intellectual leader of the Socialist Left faction in the period of the Hawke and Keating governments, has been making similar points.

 

He has called for a new political alliance: for conservatives, libertarians and traditional social democrats to unite in preserving the values of the 17th-century Enlightenment.

To defend freedom, science and reason.

MARK LATHAM: Finally, someone goes against the herd

To fight for fraternity: bringing people together in common cause.

This is where Shorten and Labor have lost the plot. Identity politics is an incredibly divisive doctrine.

It pits Australians against each other: black versus white, female versus male, gay versus straight.

The neo-Marxists like it this way, as it creates the preconditions of political unrest: large parts of society agitating on spurious grounds.

Why would Labor ever endorse it?