Márton Békés

CULTURAL WARFARE

The Theory and Practice of Cultural Power

Márton Békés

CULTURAL
WARFARE

THE Theory and practice
of cultural power

Budapest, 2022

Originally published as
Békés Márton: Kulturális hadviselés. A kulturális hatalom elmélete és gyakorlata.
Közép- és Kelet-európai Történelem és Társadalom Kutatásáért Közalapítvány, Budapest, 2020.

Translated by
Ferenc Sullivan

Language editors
Liz Heflin, Patrick Egan

Layout by
Tamás Péter Takács

Digital edition EPUB
EletroPress

© Márton Békés, 2022

ISBN 978-615-6200-52-5

© Foundation for Research on Central and Eastern European History and Society, 2022
Responsible Publisher Director-General of the Foundation

“There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind.
In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

“To destroy one kind of hegemony and create another one.”

Antonio Gramsci

THE STRUGGLE FOR CULTURE

Pervading state and society, as well as the political and economic sphere, culture exercises hegemony over human life. Everything begins with human imagination, proceeds through thought and is realized by a variety of institutions using language and shared rules that have been handed down. Consequently, everything stems from culture, occurs through it and reverts thereto. Recognizing the hegemony of culture and establishing hegemony within it is essential to final political victory.

According to the non-conformist conservative Karl Hess, “Society is: people together making culture.” Ultimately, all issues to which language holds the key are cultural. The occasional election may even be lost if a solid foothold is established in culture, meaning not only theater programs and publishing, but also interpersonal relations, language use and the realm of the intellect. The rule of a political force that is vulnerable in the broadly understood domain of culture will be short-lived or at best lack lasting accomplishments regardless of the number of elections won. Without culture, one may rise to government but never to power.

Clausewitz famously argued that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” If this is true, concrete political struggle is similarly nothing other than the continuation of the struggle for culture by other means. In politics, the substantial part of the strife is waged in the cultural Hinterland, which itself is the battlefield. Culture is not only the substratum but also a “background radiation,” and politics is no more than a shell that hides major cultural processes taking place within it. The various levels of culture are captured through tenacious close combat.

Every day, visible workings of politics, such as petty skirmishes between parties, parliamentary debates, and the race to win voters, as well as celebratory moments like elections, referenda, and the convening of elected bodies, are in fact merely a superficial and formal manifestation of what has already taken place far earlier as a result of hidden change. Generally known levels of the spheres of power, such as state authority – often perceived as an abstract apparatus – along with the political power that operates it and the social order it guarantees, are merely at the forefront of a much more intricate, layered, and complex form of rule. Covering the entire domain of community life, this can be called cultural power. Whoever gains hegemony in the latter may sooner or later play a leading role in most or even all of the former three, more tangible forms of power. It is not just that political power can be exercised without cultural approval and authorization only temporarily (and even so, only for a brief period and especially neither effectively nor validly), but also that rule, or at least the obstruction of the sitting administration, is possible even without palpable political power. This takes place simply through the hegemony of culture – and hegemony established within culture!

The culture war is neither a war within culture nor a war between cultures, but rather a struggle for culture. That is why it should not be understood as petty political elbowing, intellectual skirmish for positions or a depressing fear of losing status, and it cannot be reduced merely to a question of resource allocation. Its main principle, from which everything else follows, is that “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). The Ten Commandments of the struggle for culture can be summarized as:

1. Thought takes the lead.

2. Spirit has supremacy over matter.

3. Everything is rooted in culture as broadly understood.

4. Language is the key to culture.

5. The power of interpretation is the strongest instrument of rule.

6. Nothing happens in politics that has not happened in culture before.

7. Economic difficulties are rooted in political problems that can be traced back to cultural reasons, which raise anthropological/theological issues.

8. A stable, lasting, and enduring political system cannot be operated without cultural hegemony.

9. The creation of an epoch means embedding the political system in its appropriate cultural framework.

10. The creation of cultural hegemony requires a patient, persistent, long-term strategy.

This book is a guide to why, how, by what means, and through what methods it is possible to conquer the sphere of culture, forming a backdrop to political life. Namely, it discusses the theory and practice of the struggle for cultural power, as well as methods through which an existing cultural hegemony can be questioned, a counter-hegemony can be established, and poles of the dominant discourse can be reversed. Our battle cry is Back to the Culture! The war plan is as follows.

Strategy is the application of military power in the interest of meeting a political objective. In Moltke’s words: “Strategy is a system of expedients” to win a war. In our case, the long-term political goal is the replacement of the liberal cultural era, which in Hungary is in fact the (prolonged) cultural paradigm of the progressive epoch of the (post-)communist political system, with a conservative era. Each of the military-style instruments associated with this strategic end serve to embed the right-wing political system into a conservative era that is as broad and secure as possible. Regime change is insufficient; a change of era is also necessary. In other words, the change to a new cultural era seals the change that has already taken place in a political system. Without a change of cultural era, any change of political regime will remain incomplete and easily reversible.

The exact method of achieving the strategic goal is laid out in the operational plan, the main element of which, in our case, is the establishment of cultural hegemony. Having observed that what occurred in Russia in 1917 was not repeated in the West, the Italian Marxist thinker Gramsci outlined a theory that called for painstakingly extending indirect influence over civil society instead of the swift and direct occupation of the state. This entailed the persuasion of public opinion, the creation of counter-legitimacy, and the establishment of widespread cultural consensus. However, his method can be used not only on the Left, which appears to have forgotten his name and work, but also on the Right! Several notes in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks can be regarded as playbooks for a conservative attempt at counter-hegemony. The first step of building cultural hegemony is the realization that our thoughts are rooted in the words we use, political discourse has its foundations in texts, and action is defined by concepts. The language in which the will of the people is expressed, and which describes political action, not to mention political marketing messages, has a fundamental impact on real-life political processes. Our thoughts and behavior towards a phenomenon determine the vocabulary we use in reference to it. A large chunk of political strife is, in fact, discursive struggle, and victory is largely a matter of naming, even in a literal sense.

In war, “small successes bring about great victories” (Carl von Clausewitz) because wars are not a single battle. Time-consuming and energy-intensive thoroughness and consistency are the blueprint for success also in the struggle for culture. Timing must be tailored to the nature of the operation, implementing the strategy through a protracted schedule that invests in long-term cultural work, meaning careful intellectual preparation and attentive implementation instead of swift political success. This is a lengthy, tedious, and persistent struggle: while laws can be passed quickly, reshaping public thinking is a decades-long task. For the latter, it is essential to establish institutions, but even more so to operate them and connect them to networks; in this case, it is not the type of weapon that determines the act of combat but vice versa. Malcolm X is credited with saying, “Only a fool would let their enemy teach their children.” There is much more to this than recognizing the role of education and child-raising in shaping culture; namely, words flowing through channels influence consciousness and thinking. Consequently, the solution is largely within institutions; structure equals content. Institutions not only symbolize power but also represent it and even constitute power themselves. Building cultural hegemony is not a lightning-fast bayonet attack but protracted trench warfare, a quiet, soaking, autumn downpour instead of a passing, summer shower, and a prolonged revolution rather than an impromptu coup. After all, culture is a slow-flowing, calm but firmly running stream, which is joined by both swift-flowing creeks and rapid rivers; ultimately, all are united in its vast body of water.

While strategy is the use of combat for the purpose of military gain, tactics are applied by armed forces during the clash. Finally, let us address tactics, a series of steps that assign specific means to implement a strategic goal set in time and space – in our case, from the armory of the spirit. The most appropriate tool associated with the designated goal forms the basis of tactical expertise; accordingly, a cultural goal requires the tool of the intellect. Ernst Jünger, who spent seventeen of his 102 years in the military, wrote that “to write a successful sentence is much more important than to win a battle.” In the spirit of this radical idealism, the spirit occupies the superior sphere from which accomplishments gradually trickle down to material reality. Recognizing this helps choose adequate weaponry for the great endeavor, the meticulous execution of which will reveal that tactical elements eventually rise to the level of strategy. When they add up, their sheer sum is transformed into something else – victory itself.

Let the struggle begin!

OUR GOAL

Revolt of Ideas

“Nothing else in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

Politics is a struggle of ideas. Political struggles are conflicts of ideas that provide day-to-day battles with ongoing guidance and intensity. Value struggles often disguise themselves as legal disputes, geopolitical conflicts of interest, or economic and redistributional disagreements. Yet everyday politics is just a proxy war of values: current political debates are indirect clashes between values fitting into different worldviews. Individual political parties also operate based on organized systems of ideas, i.e. ideologies; the standards of their activity belong to the world of the intellect, even if they vehemently deny this. The power of ideas is so strong that even “non-ideology” is an ideology itself. Behind business-as-usual political brawls, there are still clashes of different concepts. Based on ideas and ideologies, they traverse the human imagination and seek their path to realization. The projection envisaging the hollowing out and even death of ideas, occupying the horizon of political thinking at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, was a machination of one of the great ideas, liberalism. It coined the “End of History” thesis with the aim of discrediting all other stories; its arrogantly proclaimed neutrality was anything but neutral, and the idea of the “end of ideologies” only served to enforce its own ideology. The return of ideas, the escalation of their conflict, and their increasingly intense clash will first sweep depoliticizing liberalism out of the way, after which the struggle of ideas will recommence on the newly cleared, post-liberal battlefield. Therefore, the world of ideas is far more important than what economic weeklies or foreign policy journals attribute to it. Behind and above visible conflicts in current affairs, opposing worldviews and idea-based ideologies are at odds with each other. After decades of ideological disengagement, ideas are taking revenge. Now, we first need myths to have ideas, ideas that construct our worldview.

Do we lack a Zeitgeist?

From the three-tiered ideology of the French Revolution, liberalism spent two centuries privatizing freedom, while the Left collectivized equality and the representation of brotherhood was left to conservatism, which was opposed to the former two – sometimes tactically allied – modern ideologies from the outset. The three great wars of the 20th century (World Wars I and II, and the Cold War) were actually different phases of a single, global war spanning almost a whole century.¹ This process can be interpreted as a struggle of armed ideologies, more closely between American liberalism and competing European forms of collectivism (nationalisms, national socialism, and communism.)

In the 19th century, it was commonplace to understand politics as the conflict of ideas. The beginning of the century was a reactionary period studded with counter-revolution, restoration, Romanticism and religious renewal. Poets, writers and philosophers of German idealism all set out in pursuit of Geist – spirit – to explain the changing world. In his poem The Spirit of the Time, Hölderlin even addressed: “For too long now you’ve prevailed above my head, / In your darkened cloud, the god of the age.” According to Herder, the “power of Zeitgeist is enormous but silent.”² Hegel thought himself wise enough to construct an entire philosophical system of tracing the world spirit (Weltgeist), during which he repeatedly determined the place and time of the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist). Hegel captured the “stage of development reached by the spirit” in the distinct mentality of the era. Hegel’s monumental historical construction – the “algebra of the universe,” as he referred to it – also aspired to be a description of world history; as a sequence of the world spirit’s phases, it was meant to reflect the ideas, thought, and spirit of each age.

Classical German idealism produced a series of philosophers of history (Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Eduard Spranger, Oswald Spengler), who systematically broke down human history into the realization of Great Ideas. Nietzsche argued that “thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.” Tibor Joó, a Hungarian expert of the highly fruitful discourse on the subject, pointed out that “the spirit of the age is the unit of human life,” bringing together the characteristic behavior, sentiment, and worldview of a certain era. In every case, it is expressed by the products of the culture it gave rise to.³

In contrast, the 20th century can be interpreted as “the story of the gradual windup of history” (András Lánczi). This is linked to the fact that with the end of the great 20th-century wars (1918, 1945, 1989), the intention was to discredit not only totalitarian ideologies but also ideas themselves. Since the final decade of the previous century and the demise of ideologies, the age of Leitidees seemed to be over. Hegel would have felt uncomfortable in the early 21st century, when spiritlessness became the spirit of the age. The “low tide of the spirit” was followed by the end of ideas and an age of mental exhaustion. The lack of ideas meant a loss of ideals and resulted in eventlessness; intellectual emptiness was disturbed only by the clinking together of hollow post-ideologies. Sometime between 1989 and 2001, unimaginability and mundane ordinariness shaped the historical end-of-season and the birth of the new millennium into a common, indistinct period.

However, the most spectacular processes within the major aspirations of an age can be identified in political ideas and their struggle with each other. That is why overcoming political disagreements has long been the intention of those seeking to eradicate politics once and for all. They are the ones who either long for an apolitical utopia based on abstract philosophical premises or are motivated by far more prosaic parochialism.

The essence of this process, which Carl Schmitt called Entpolitisierung or depoliticization, is the dissolution of mutually exclusive political poles in a common field where a conflict arising from the clash of interests or values cannot emerge in the first place.⁴ Although Schmitt saw this approach developing in connection with efforts to end the struggle of states against each other (“eternal peace,” League of Nations, global governance), such an intent also appears regularly within states. Appearing in a variety of forms since the 16th century, the project of depoliticization and neutralization reaches its pinnacle with the technologically organized global civilization.⁵

Thus, the struggle of political opposites against each other either bothers those seeking to abolish politics par excellence or is a major element of status quo rhetoric. An example of the former is the multitude of socially liberal and pacifist views, as well as those approaching social issues solely from the technical conditions of wealth redistribution. Their voices are sometimes amplified by texts proclaiming the death of ideas and ideologies. The latter view is well reflected by the status of the Right in Hungary as “challenger” and “rebel”, calling into question the standing order of the post-communist regime from 1990 onward. The Right is accused of inciting conflict by left-wing and liberal intellectuals seeking to downgrade politics to a value-neutral, redistributional issue. From this perspective, values are displaced by mechanisms, engaging in politics is substituted for “expertise,” and conflict is discarded in favor of the post-communist, (neo-)liberal status quo. While the Right understands the nature of politics, the liberal Left seeks to change it; the former is heir to Hobbes, the latter to Kant.

Some years prior to the ideological turbulence of the late sixties, Daniel Bell argued in his 1960 book The End of Ideology that amid the Cold War, the globalization of economic relations, and a mass consumer society, “old” ideologies had become redundant.⁶ In other words, Bell claimed that having achieved its goal in Western culture, the system of ideas rooted in 1789 slowly became obsolete. The intensifying leftist wave in the second half of the sixties, reaching its peak in 1968 and culminating in the success of expansionist Soviet foreign policy in the seventies, finally dispelled the opinion that the world’s ideological struggles were coming to an end. Student uprisings, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Second Vatican Council, the struggles around decolonization, the Khmer Rouge, and the debate over the Western welfare state all showed that left-wing and right-wing views were experiencing a renaissance. It became clear that ideas matter.

Forty years after the American sociologist’s book, another testimony to “endism” was published. Francis Fukuyama expanded his article The End of History, delivered as a lecture at a neoconservative conference in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1989, i.e. before the demolition of the Berlin War, into a book three years later. In the volume, he transformed Nietzsche’s fear of the “last man” into an optimistic prophecy with the help of the Kojèvian mutation of Hegel’s philosophy of history.⁷ Fukuyama pointed out the demise of great deeds and subversive ideas, after which there is no longer any obstacle to the birth of a “last man” longing for consumerism, mutual recognition, and the global spread of liberty. Fukuyama’s basic premise was that following the collapse of the communist empire, the only alternative to remain on the global stage was the American-style cohabitation of liberal democracy and capitalism. This, he argued, represents universal values that are acceptable and even desirable for all people on earth, regardless of their differences in ethnicity, language, religion, and culture.

Hegelian philosophy of history prevailed in 1989: just as prescribed by the three consequential stages of the development of world spirit (thesis → antithesis → synthesis), the liberal version of Hegelianism triumphed in the aftermath of its right-wing and left-wing variants, fascism and socialism. Liberal democracy and a technologically advanced consumer society, the expansion of global free trade, the export of American democracy, and the institutions of the Washington Consensus guarding the New World Order (UN, EU, European Central Bank, IMF, World Bank, WTO) promised to resolve political calamities. This historical situation fit well the postmodern condition, in which there are no more so-called “grand narratives” (Jean-François Lyotard).

The end of the end of history

Whether we look at books from the sixties describing the extinction of ideas or literature from the nineties offering similar speculations, not to mention manifestoes based on the nondescript governmental philosophies of the early 21st century, it is apparent that liberalism is both the mastermind and the beneficiary of blurring the line between Left and Right. It was not the Left that integrated the Right or vice versa but liberalism that dissolved them both and incorporated them into itself!

In the last two decades of the 20th and the first two decades of the 21st century, the exposure of both Left and Right to liberalism resulted in conflict-avoiding and fluid political poles. Bringing historic struggles to a standstill resulted in ideas falling into a dormant state. Both Left and Right slipped into a neutral non-history, or rather a practical denial of history, to fill the void created by the neoliberal world order and its post-historical sentiment. This was reflected in Western European moderate parties’ forgetfulness of their founding ideals: Muslim MPs representing Christian democratic parties; Socialist secretaries-general sitting on the supervisory boards of banks; the assimilatory ideology, language, and dress of Western European MEPs; or the European Commission presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker, who readily opened the Marx bicentenary despite belonging to a right-wing political group.

While the great Cold War animosity also generated struggle over ideological conflicts and the philosophical backdrop of various governments, this became redundant in the post-bipolar age. After 1989-91, academic journals were filled with assessments on relations between market and state, global trends, and the spread of democracy. These were the topics that influenced intellectual life and political thinking, and these were the issues that governmental action sought to respond to. Clearly, such topics fundamentally favored liberalism. The emptying of structures followed the abandonment of ideologies with a decade-long delay; after the turn of the millennium, hollowness spread to party politics. The loss of contours separating Left from Right was facilitated by four reasons: 1) the conclusion of a Left-Right compromise on the no-man’s-land of the “liberal minimum”; 2) the absence of statesmanlike political leaders (who tower above political PR and campaign branding and maintain their character after being elected); 3) neutral and universalist issues with no clear connection to any political side (pragmatic management of the economic crisis, anti-corruption standards, environmentalism, federalism/global integration, democratic norms, and human rights) became predominant; 4) heavy exposure to identity politics as a means of strengthening the