The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

For a long time people had a crude but basically correct understanding of culture’s relationship to politics: Marx’s idea that the “superstructure” of society—law, morality, and culture—arises out of the economic meat grinder hidden underneath, the “base.” This rough version of the theory gets criticized as simplistic, and to be fair, it is: there are all kinds of inputs and outputs that determine culture, and there’s plenty of good criticism of this bastardized version of Marx. Still, as far as we’re concerned, it’s always better to err on the side of this crude theory than to go in the opposite direction, the For Dummies version of Antonio Gramsci: the idea that a nation’s culture is self-reinforcing and affects all other walks of life, so if you change the culture, you can change the political reality. To quote the Italian Communist himself, “Ingredienti migliori, cultura migliore, Papa John’s.” The taste of Gramsci-lite won a lot of people over during last the few decades, trading away material and economic analyses for an overwhelming focus on culture. But this approach comes from the generally bad side of 1960s radicalism (incidentally, the only part that survived). It was embraced by middle-class hippies whose demands were not material and collective but aesthetic and individualist—which, once you smooth off the edges, is just libertarianism. We know this because almost all those baby boomers grew up to become square, greedy marketing consultants for UBS who also ha...