Editor’s note: This material has been excerpted, edited and updated from one chapter of Robert Chandler’s important new book, Shadow World, published by Regnery. Call 1-888-219-4747 to order. It represents the kind of investigative reporting we desperately need but fail to get from the major media.)

S. Steven Powell wrote in his 1987 book, Covert Cadre, that the revolutionary activity advocated by Marxist Antonio Gramsci involved the need to “infiltrate autonomous institutions—schools, media, churches, public-interest groups—so as radically to transform the culture, which determines the environment in which political and economic policies are played out.” Or, as Carl Boggs, author of Gramsci’s Marxism wrote, “the role of revolutionary theory is to create the foundation of a new socialist order precisely through the negation and transcendence of bourgeois society.” This “transcendence of bourgeois society,” Boggs explains, was the basis for Gramsci’s first priority—“the multi-dimensional transformation of civil society.”

­The key to Gramsci’s formula for revolution centered on the idea of breaking what he called the “hegemony” or mind-control exercised by the ruling capitalists over the masses. Bourgeois societies were ruled, Gramsci believed, by educating the citizenry that their accommodation of the moral, political, and cultural values defined by the governing system was in their best interests. Hence, Gramsci designed a “reversal strategy” that would silently challenge the existing culture and value-systems that dominated bourgeois governance. That is to say, his formula was based on an ideological struggle that would transform a whole range of activities in civil society, including Judeo-Christian values, the family, schools, unions, and politics and popular trust in the existing government. 

There are ten easy steps toward a progressive-socialist-Marxist civil society: change the popular consensus; destroy Christianity, the traditional family, and existing social mores; transform the culture; install a radical Left mind-control; attain political power; impose strict control of the military and law enforcement; restrict freedom; socialize the economy; erase American sovereignty; and embrace a world without borders. 

Four political arenas have been constructed by the progressive-socialist-Marxist Left to “format” or erase America’s collective brain and install a mind-control program into what is to become a robotic America of theological radicalism, socialist unionism, radical community-state politics, and the “Shadow Party” owned and operated by billionaires such as George Soros.

Subverting The Moral Order

Antonio Gramsci’s formula for socialist revolution in capitalist countries is focused on “corruption of their Christian cultural basis,” Malachi Martin writes. Neither political penetration nor military superiority, Martin says, will bring the capitalist West to its knees. The Christian cultures of these countries are the ties that bind the people in all aspects of society. Hence, Gramsci counsels his followers, Martin says, to join the capitalists in all aspects of life, from “their profession of ethical and religious goals” to their family needs and all social issues affecting their lives. But Gramsci had a catch, Malachi Martin explains: Gramsci admonished his followers to “let the entire effort be solely by man for man’s sake… Make sure man never repeats the famous cry of German philosopher Martin Heidegger: I know that only God can save us.”

­Gramsci realized that Christian culture had to be undone quietly, carefully, and over time. Stealth and passivity would serve as key principles of the war on Christian culture and open the door for progressive-socialist-marxist mind-control.

Antonio Gramsci foresaw an increase in the complexity of civil society that would occur over time in the most advanced capitalist countries. Carl Boggs explains Gramsci’s view that this hegemony or “socialization process” extends throughout society and is the means through which people internalize the dominant free market and its democratic values. It follows that the progressive-socialist-Marxist Left’s struggle against the dominant liberal democracy is a “precondition for socialist transformation.” 

This requires a confrontation at all levels of society to undermine, weaken, and replace traditional American values in the schools, media, family, and unions with Gramsci’s socialist ideals. “To conduct this universalized hegemony,” Boggs writes, “means to transform repressive consciousness into a liberating one that makes socialist politics at a mass level possible—the central focus of any thorough-going cultural revolution.”

­Major elements of American organized labor have imported the alien doctrine of Antonio Gramsci as a guiding light for its socialist ideological struggle against the traditional American way of life. For American progressive-socialist-marxist syndicalists, labor unions are a tool for use in transforming capitalism into a society run by working people who are guided secretly by agents among the leadership. 

It should not be surprising, therefore, that organized labor in the United States has shifted its main focus from the worker and his/her needs to progressive-socialist-marxist politics. For union leadership, their efforts are all about power—power for themselves, social power, and political power. Five U.S. labor unions stand out from their efforts of making socialist politics possible at the mass level by applying the imported ideals of Italy’s Marxist Antonio Gramsci: AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), National Education Association (NEA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Of these five leading unions, only the members of the AFL-CIO operate primarily in the private sector. The other four are centered more on government employees, insulating themselves from the vagaries of the free market.

Attacking Corporations

­The move toward embracing Gramsci’s formula is a result of the 1960s radicals having come of age. The late Michael Harrington gave intellectual and organizational leadership to labor unions and other societal elements that preserved an alliance with the remnants of the New Left in the Democrat Party and Democratic Socialists of America. SDS’s Paul Booth, for instance, coordinated student support for a United Auto Workers slate and marshaled some two thousand students in the Chicago region in support of the union. Booth, like other Leftists, highlighted General Motors “nastiness.” 

One can track members of the 1960s radicals, Students for a Democratic Society, and the New Left into key leadership positions in several labor and teachers union positions.  These aging radicals have not given up on remaking America. “A new politics must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision,” explains the 1962 Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society.  “Labor’s role is no less unique or important in the needs of the potential political strength, its natural interest in the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass-roots of American society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.” 

Gramsci understood that a revolutionary undertaking in a bourgeois society like the United States could proceed only from a sound “philosophical base” and an “ongoing political involvement.” According to editor Bernie Horn’s commentary in the “Progressive Agenda for the State 2008,” which was prepared by the radical Left’s Center for Policy Alternatives, “most Americans are progressive on most issues.” But, Mr. Horne adds, “most Americans also support traditional conservative principles—limited government, lower taxes, free markets, and personal responsibility.” The way out of this conundrum, he suggests, is to alter the balance of power by espousing “an attractive progressive philosophy.” That is a socialist philosophy. Since “progressive” is but a euphemism for “socialism,” the Left once again promises a full blast of political denial and deception, propaganda and disinformation in “framing the future.” 

Two major influences have helped shape these policies over the years: Antonio Gramsci’s cultural transformation formula and Saul D. Alinsky’s radical community organizing methods.  

Several radical Leftist groups are dedicated to bringing the progressive-socialist-marxist message to prepare Americans for socialist governance.  One of the most important radical organizations dedicated to peddling socialism to Americans at the community and municipal level is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and it has close relations with organized labor. ACORN was founded by Wade Rathke, who organized draft resistance for the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. 

Barack Obama was a community organizer for the progressive-socialist-Marxist ACORN before becoming a practicing lawyer, entering politics, and running for President.

The Shadow Party

Operating from the impact of Antonio Gramsci’s revisionist Marxism of cultural transformation as a precondition to achieving political power, and the radicalism of the New Left’s continuing focus on the politics of neighborhoods and state legislatures and union political power at the national level, an infrastructure, or a “solar system of organizations,” has been created that promises to bring socialist governance to America. These mind-control efforts have been designed to create a false reality for the American people. Pounded incessantly by propaganda tricks, false images, and denial of truth, many Americans understandably see only the contrived negative images of traditional culture, societal norms, and contrived historical “truths” that were spoon fed to them so carefully by progressives-socialists-Marxists.

Carl Boggs sees the “ideological-cultural struggle and political action “as part of a long-range political strategy. It is a thorough-going cultural revolution that sets out to transform all dimensions of everyday life and establish the social-psychological underpinnings of socialism before the question of state power is resolved. And that brings up George Soros.

­Said to be the world’s thirty-eighth richest man, George Soros possesses about $7 billion in net worth, $11 billion in investments, and his foundations disperse more than $400 million a year for a variety of causes ranging from euthanasia and abortion to legalization of recreational drugs and Left-wing political power building. His political philosophy is drawn from some rather balmy ideas about “open societies” expressed by Karl Popper, under whom Soros studied in 1948 at the notorious left-wing London School of Economics. For Professor Popper, an atheist, nothing was “self-evident.”  Drawing on Popper’s teaching, Soros concluded that the U.S. Declaration of Independence, rather than based on so-called “self-evident truths,” is but a statement of “our imperfect understanding” of the world around us.  Hence, America’s founding documents are disposable in what Soros believes is our godless society.

Moreover, for Soros, “the state can be an instrument of oppression.” Soros argues for development of an interdependent world based on the principles of open society.  This requires fostering “open society within individual countries and international laws, rules of conduct, and institutions to implement these norms.” But, since nation-states contradict a development of international open society, the impulse for change must come from “citizens living in open societies” who “recognize a global open society as something worth sacrifice.” 

To create the “Age of Open Society,” Soros’ vision would require terminating U.S. sovereignty, disposing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights, or at least significant amendments to make them square with open society norms, and reforming the United Nations to facilitate a world socialist governance with the new social-political institutions to enforce its principles, such as the International Criminal Court.

It should not be surprising that Soros’s Open Society Institute lavishes huge sums of cash on U.S. progressive-socialist-Marxist civil society entities. By fastening himself like a leech to the progressive-socialist-movement, Soros’s open society dream sucks the life-giving blood from the Gramsci advances toward America’s cultural transformation. By his infusion of large sums of money, and persuading other plutocrats to contribute as well, Soros is moving toward a “take down” of the United States through control of the Democratic Party and its progressive-socialist-marxist candidate whose hidden payback agenda is foreordained: move forward on the open society initiative.

Soros made his political move to ally himself with these organizations in forming “Shadow Party” as the control-center inside the Democrat Party. A secret meeting was held on July 17, 2003, at Soros’ Southampton beach house on Long Island, and Morton H. Halperin was present. He had been hired by Soros a year earlier to head the Washington office of the Open Society Institute, a part of the global network of institutes and foundations located in fifty countries around the world. Halperin made a name for himself by waging open war against the U.S. national intelligence agencies, while director of the Center for National Security Studies in 1974 and the American Civil Liberties Union from 1984 to 1992.  

The Soros Plan

After licking his wounds and completing a damage assessment of what went wrong in 2004, when his candidate John Kerry lost the presidency, Soros turned to winning the 2008 presidential election through his clandestine Shadow Party tucked away inside the Democrat Party. A secret meeting was held in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the spring of 2005. Seventy well-heeled potential donors listened intently while George Soros laid out a five-year plan to create a network of think tanks, media outlets, and training centers to promote his own special blend of progressive-socialist-marxist politics. Those at the secret meeting, calling themselves the “Phoenix Group,” focused initially on three main goals: creating progressive-socialist-Marxist think tanks, training centers for the young progressives, and media centers.

Political Power

Perceptions are being shaped through a combination of propaganda, disinformation, denial and deceit by the radical left, which has seized control of the Democrat Party. The model is based on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas to first prepare the “masses” for a change in political power by transforming American culture.

The “real” Obama is the “chosen one” for the far-Left progressives-socialists-marxists. Disciples of the Gramsci Left supported Obama’s campaign with millions of dollars to fund a massive propaganda and disinformation campaign. In the end, however, Obama was exposed as a puppet of the far Left, an agent of influence for the Gramsci formula of transforming American culture and leading hard-working Americans toward a comfortable embrace with socialism-Marxism. 

Obama speaks eloquently of post-racialism but he belonged to a church that embraces Black liberation theology. For twenty years, Obama sat in a pew on Sundays to listen to the vile anti-White, anti-America oratory pouring from the mouth of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

Obama associates William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were both high profile Weathermen as a result of their bombing activities. For a time, Bernardine, who called herself a “Communist revolutionary,” was one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitives from justice. Neither Ayers nor Dohrn apologized for their destructive tactics. The Weather Underground’s terrorist tactics may have occurred some thirty or forty years ago, as Obama plaintively explained, but a photograph of William Ayers stomping on a U.S. flag in August 2001 depicted in Susan Braudy’s book Family Circle offers clear evidence that Ayers remains very much a vicious and untrustworthy America-hater. 

Ayers and Dohrn are members of the string of far-Left, hate-America cultists stretching from Antonio Gramsci and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day. They are an aging clan in search of disciples to pass on the “tear down this government” torch.  The aging radical Left has anointed Obama to become a leader of the successor generation of progres-sives-socialists-Marxists.

“Social justice,” as defined by the progressive-socialist-Marxist Left, can be achieved only through confrontation with bourgeois society. A monumental piece of who Barack Obama really is was shown in a private meeting with potential donors in San Francisco.  Addressing the challenges he faced in securing the support of working-class voters, Obama told the well-heeled liberals gathered that “it’s not surprising…that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

William Kristol quickly recognized the historical and dogmatic roots of Obama’s “cling to…religion” as a reflection of Marx’s famous statement on religion: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.” Kristol says that Obama let “the mask slip.”

Barack Obama in reality is the progressive-socialist-Marxist soldier hiding inside a Trojan Horse. He is the one who slips out of the wooden horse to open America’s gates to a horde of socialists-Marxists intent on swarming the federal government and carrying out a family-destroying, religion-busting, freedom-infringing cultural revolution and an extended political dominance over the entire country.