The Long Insurgency: A Neo-Marxist Revolution

They chose the word first.

In June 1963 the Students for a Democratic Society convention approved a document, America and New Era, restating the principles of the Port Huron Statement of the year before. One of its sections is headed "The New Insurgency," and it opens:

"In a growing number of localities a new discontent, a new anger is groping towards a politics of insurgent protest."

The section names who is carrying it and what they do. Discontent in the population, it says, "is leading to a search for new forms of insurgent politics," and:

"The new insurgents are active generators of a wide variety of political activities in the neighborhoods and communities where they are located."

The document treats these people as a standing formation with practical problems to solve: "the new insurgents need to learn ways of gathering the physical and financial resources to support their activities."¹

Three years later Tom Hayden, who had drafted the Port Huron Statement, named the strategy that this archive exists to document:

"Insurgency within American institutions is spreading: professors fighting their administration, lawyers against the bar association, welfare workers against the political machine, muckrakers against the press establishments. This insurgency is bound to increase as the new generation of student activists graduates into the professions."²

He then summarized what the movement was: "the Movement is a community of insurgents sharing the same radical values and identity."³

Eight years after that, an American revolutionary underground published its strategy and gave institutions a military function in plain words:

"Community-controlled and counter-institutions should be made into insurgent bases."⁴

They used that word for themselves, in programs their own conventions adopted, decades before anyone outside was arguing about it.

The other word in the name does work too. Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, worked out why revolution had not repeated itself in the industrial West: behind the state stood a dense civil society of schools, churches, newspapers, unions and professions, and he compared it to the trench-systems of modern warfare.⁵ Trenches are taken slowly or not at all. When Rudi Dutschke gave the strategy its popular name in 1967, the long march through the institutions, he put the timescale in the first word. It has been long because it was built to be long.⁶

What follows traces what they said they were doing, in the documents where they said it.

ENDS

The objective

The goal was never a fairer administration of the existing order. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society issued the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the American New Left. Its economic program is unambiguous: "resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation."⁷

Fifteen years later the demand had hardened. The phrase "identity politics" was coined in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, whose statement puts the objective ahead of everything else:

"We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy."⁸

The same document states, "We are socialists."⁸

Notice what that sentence yokes together: the liberation of the oppressed and the destruction of an economic system. A single claim holds those halves together, and Cedric Robinson made it in Black Marxism, arguing that capitalism "has always been, wherever it originated, a racial system."⁹ If that is so, then fighting racial injustice and fighting capitalism are one fight. Angela Davis draws the present-day conclusion: it is "simply not possible to tear down prisons but leave everything else intact."¹⁰

This is why fixing a particular problem never settles anything, and why the goalposts appear to move. A reform that leaves the economic order standing counts, on this reasoning, as that order defending itself. It is also why so much of the movement's energy is spent on liberals rather than on conservatives. Someone who wants to repair the system is in the way.

One objection to the word "neo-Marxist" comes from inside, and answering it sharpens the term. Some Marxists hold that the identity turn abandoned Marxism rather than extending it, and prefer "post-Marxist." Peter McLaren, following the Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, puts it sharply: capitalism "is not necessarily endangered by the ethnic, racial, gender, or sexual identities of the social groups that it seeks to exploit," because it "is a social system based on economic exploitation and the ownership of private property."¹¹ That is a quarrel about which branch inherited the method, conducted between people who agree they are heirs. "Neo-Marxist" names the lineage, not every present-day claimant.

ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION

The trench system

Lenin supplied the first rule. Revolutionaries were not to preserve their purity by staying outside institutions run by their opponents. In "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, he ordered communists into hostile trade unions and told them what it would cost:

"We must be able to stand up to all this, agree to make any sacrifice, and even, if need be, to resort to various stratagems, artifices and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, as long as we get into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry on communist work within them at all costs."¹²

Withdrawing instead, he wrote, would be "so unpardonable a blunder that it is tantamount to the greatest service Communists could render the bourgeoisie."¹²

The shift from conventional revolutionary tactics to a longer approach runs through Antonio Gramsci's concept of the "war of position." The Russian revolution had not repeated itself in the industrial West, and Gramsci explained why. Behind the coercive state stood a dense civil society of schools, churches, newspapers, unions, and professions:

"The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare."⁵

A frontal assault could therefore fail even in a crisis. The alternative was a protracted contest across those institutions, and Gramsci was direct about the prize: "in politics the 'war of position', once won, is decisive definitively."¹³

He had already put the method into party doctrine. Communists should form "permanently organized groups within the trade unions and factories" to "import into these bodies the ideas, theses and tactics of the Third International," and organize themselves into "fractions in the unions, and in all the mass formations." Any tendency "to separate oneself off from the life of those organizations" was "to be combated as a dangerous deviation."¹⁴ A fraction is an organized group inside an institution it does not control, and the standing order is to stay in rather than build outside.

Gramsci also named the ground he considered decisive. A class seeking power has to produce its own thinkers and capture the existing ones, and he named the machinery:

"The education system is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated."¹⁵

His next sentence makes the claim measurable: "The complexity of the intellectual function in different states can be measured objectively by the number and gradation of specialised schools."¹⁵

Gramsci's argument is structural rather than conspiratorial, and that is what makes it durable. Institutions reproduce a social order without anyone coordinating the outcome. The strategy he proposed works by changing what those institutions produce, not by issuing orders to them.

Gramsci had changed the terrain. C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist the New Left treated as its intellectual godfather, changed the cast. Classical Marxism named the industrial working class as the agent that would carry out the revolution, and by the middle of the twentieth century that class had declined the job. Mills put the problem to the European left bluntly, asking

"why they cling so mightily to 'the working class' of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agent, or even as the most important agency in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation."¹⁶

Someone else would have to carry it. Students, intellectuals, the professions and the excluded were promoted into the role the workers had vacated. Massimo Teodori, chronicling the movement from inside its own literature, records the result: in every subsequent demonstration of political and social struggle, "the protagonists have been social groups other than 'industrial workers'."¹⁷

Between them, Gramsci and Mills account for the prefix. A revolution that keeps Marx's objective while changing both the terrain it fights on and the class it expects to win has earned its own name. The end state did not move.

Members of the Frankfurt School such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse contributed a third piece. Where Gramsci explained why the assault failed, they asked why people under capitalist domination reproduced it in their own habits and tastes. Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" holds that detached description is not neutral, since treating existing categories as natural facts reproduces the order that made them. He and Adorno then described mass entertainment as an industry manufacturing conformity. Its political work is done by slow teaching that resistance is unrealistic, rather than by any hidden command in a film.¹⁸

Marcuse named the method himself. Writing in "Repressive Tolerance" in 1965, he acknowledged that his proposal amounted to the "'official' promotion of subversion," and framed what followed as "the calculated choice between two forms of political violence," one belonging to constituted authority and one to "potentially subversive movements."¹⁹

The Frankfurt School was not a single operational bloc, and saying so costs nothing. Horkheimer and Adorno kept their distance from the student activism Marcuse encouraged. Marcuse is the bridge to the New Left, and he is the one who put the program in print.

WAYS

The long march

Americans wrote the program before the German phrase existed. The Radical Education Project, a branch of SDS, published a statement of purpose in 1966 naming the task:

"The greatest moral and political challenge facing leftists is how both to live in America, to work in the institutions which provide income and status, and yet to change America."

Building an American left, it said, "requires striking roots in the professions, among university faculties, in the arts and in many of the 'mass organizations' like churches, unions, etc." It names the occupations, and it states the principle without ornament: "We believe that radicals must make their politics manifest in their daily life and work. There is no politically neutral activity."²⁰

Read that next to Hayden in the same year and the picture is complete: he describes the insurgency spreading through the professions as students graduate into them, and the Radical Education Project tells those graduates what to do when they arrive.

The phrase arrived the following year. Rudi Dutschke used "the long march through the institutions" in a paper for the SDS delegate conference at Frankfurt in September 1967. Marcuse put it in print in 1972 and attributed it to him:

"To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working in them, but not simply by 'boring from within,' rather by 'doing the job,' learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production...), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with the others."

Marcuse's gloss matters more than the slogan. The long march is "not simply" boring from within, because it requires the additional element of real competence. That is what makes the program hard to counter, since a movement whose members are good at teaching, programming, and producing is not answerable by exposure alone. He adds that "the long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions,"²¹ so the strategy runs on two tracks from the start.

THE UNDERGROUND

The armed phase

The American New Left also produced a genuine underground, and that underground described itself in doctrinal terms.

The Weather Underground's 1974 manifesto Prairie Fire states its purpose without euphemism: "This paper is a strategy for revolutionary anti-imperialism." It calls for "a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society."²² And it is explicit about means:

"We have an urgent responsibility: to destroy imperialism from within in order to help free the world and ourselves from its grasp... We use all the weapons available to us. This necessarily includes mass militant action and guerrilla action to lay the foundation for the decisive armed struggle."²²

Elsewhere the organization sets out its structure: "Our intention is to forge an underground, a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression... a base from which to attack." And flatly: "Armed struggle has come into being in the United States."²³

The passage that matters most sits a few pages from the bombs, where the same organization gives institutional work a place in that strategy:

"We believe that radical teachers should work in schools in working class neighborhoods, in community or junior colleges. Radicalize other teachers, organize the parents, teach and encourage your students. Health workers can choose hospitals and clinics in poor communities. Cultural activists, street players, artists, writers should propagandize and relate to poor and working people. Community-controlled and counter-institutions should be made into insurgent bases."⁴

One American revolutionary organization, in one document, treats clandestine armed action and the placement of teachers, nurses and artists as parts of a single strategy, and calls the institutions they occupy insurgent bases. Nobody has to argue that institutional work belonged to an insurgency. They wrote it down.

The armed formations largely failed. Prosecution, factionalism, and strategic error finished most of them within a decade. The Weather Underground split, abandoned armed action, and lost its clandestine apparatus. What did not fail was the war of position, and it continued through different organizations rather than by any secret succession.

KEY TERRAIN

The schools

Gramsci had named the education system as the instrument. The generation that followed took the assignment and wrote down what it was for.

Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator whose work sits behind much of American critical pedagogy, treats critical awareness as a stage on the way to something else. The oppressed, he writes in The Politics of Education, "need to organize in a revolutionary manner and to transform the real world in a revolutionary manner." The work does not stop at the political victory: "After the revolutionary reality is inaugurated, conscientization continues to be indispensable." Cultural action for freedom "must then transform itself into permanent cultural revolution."²⁴

Henry Giroux puts the work on state-linked ground. Radical teaching, he writes in Theory and Resistance in Education, takes place

"within institutions that serve the interests of the state. These are formal institutions directly or indirectly linked to the state through public funding or through certification requirements."²⁵

He is not complaining about that. He is locating the terrain.

The sharpest evidence is a complaint from inside. Peter McLaren, one of the field's leading figures, laments "the domestication of critical pedagogy," which in his account has accommodated itself to mainstream liberal humanism and is "marked by flirtation with but never full commitment to revolutionary praxis."²⁶ His grievance is that the field is not revolutionary enough. Whatever else that settles, it settles what the field is for.

Nobody has to read intent into these texts. The authors supply it, and the objective they name is the one they have been naming since 1962.

CONSOLIDATION

Into management

The same project reached business schools through Critical Management Studies, whose editors describe the situation themselves. Chris Grey and Hugh Willmott note that the field's key texts and conferences "are broadly 'left wing'," and add that "it might seem odd that an ostensibly oppositional grouping has formed within a distinctly capitalist institution."²⁷

The field describes its own terrain in Gramsci's vocabulary. Writing in The Routledge Companion to Critical Management Studies, Gabriela Coronado holds that "neoliberalism and managerialism as constitutive of the management discursive regime are the hallmarks of the hegemonic management paradigm," and that university teachers "are under pressure to conform to these managerial models."²⁸ Hegemony, a dominant paradigm, and a counter-position inside the institution. The terms are not being applied from outside.

The step from a critical literature in business schools to corporate practice is the one this archive is presently collecting rather than asserting. It is listed in the open requirements with the records that would establish it.

THE STANDING JUSTIFICATION

What counts as violence

Marcuse supplied the justification in advance, asserting "a 'natural right' of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate," and adding that "law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy."²⁹

The doctrine outlived him, and it changed shape. The affinity group that broke windows in Seattle did not disown the act. It redefined the category:

"We contend that property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property, especially corporate private property, is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it... When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights."³⁰

Note what that argument concedes. It does not deny that the acts occur. It argues that they should not be counted as violence.

The redefinition is not universal on the left, and the exception is worth having on the record because it comes from an advocate. Andreas Malm, arguing in 2021 for sabotage against fossil infrastructure, accepts "that property destruction is violence, and that it is less grave than violence against humans," and holds that "even a revolutionary Marxist should regard it as prima facie wrong."³¹ Malm makes the case for sabotage without the euphemism.

REFERENCE

Where the doctrine maps, and where it does not

Military and joint doctrine is used here as a reference, not as a gate. It offers a mature vocabulary for describing how movements are built and run, developed by people who studied the problem professionally. Where the record maps onto that vocabulary, the mapping is worth naming. Where it does not, that is recorded too, and it settles nothing either way. A political movement is not obliged to fit an Army manual.

Field Manual 3-24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, introduces its definition by observing that a population willing to fight for change does so "using both violent and nonviolent means to affect a change in the prevailing authority." The definition it draws from Joint Publication 3-24 is "the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify, or challenge political control of a region." Among the strategic objectives FM 3-24 lists is to "overthrow the existing social order and reallocate power,"³² which is the objective stated in the movement's own documents from Port Huron forward.

Subversion maps cleanly. The Army's study of undergrounds explains the target selection: "Whereas other methods of recruiting can seek to win over the general population, subversion takes aim at those within the government, i.e., officials, administrators, government workers, police, or military personnel."³³ Public universities, public school systems, and state licensing boards are government. Private newsrooms and corporations are not, and extending the doctrine to them is an analogy rather than an application.

The two vocabularies describe the same architecture. Doctrine speaks of subversion, undergrounds, auxiliaries, a public component, and a contest for legitimacy. The tradition speaks of fractions, cadre, political education, the war of position, mass work, insurgent bases, and armed struggle. They disagree about justice. They agree about the form.

Organization maps loosely, and the looseness is doctrinal. Joint Publication 3-24 records that "nonhierarchical networks are decentralized decision-making structures. Although they do not always have a fixed organizational structure, nonhierarchical networks have a coherence of objectives or goals and tend to have relatively consistent lines or modes of communication."³⁴ TC 7-100.3 notes at paragraph 2-72 that "the leadership may purposely issue only general guidance to allow initiative at the cellular level for specific actions."³⁵ The TRADOC handbook adds that cells "need not contact or coordinate with other cells," and that avoiding coordination "provides deniability to the leadership."³⁶ Coherence of objectives is the test doctrine applies, not a chain of command.

Violence maps to the historical record and not to the present one. The armed phase is documented in the movement's own manifestos. No current organized armed component appears in this archive's evidence, and none is claimed. Robert Bunker, writing for the Army's Strategic Studies Institute, sets the bar: "Of importance is the stipulation that both elements of subversion and violence are required to characterize an insurgency. Subversion on its own, derived from co-option and corruption, can be viewed as an element of big city political machines."³⁷ On a strict reading of that bar, the doctrinal fit is strongest for 1969 to 1977 and looser afterward. The archive's own term does not rise or fall on it.

Some doctrinal slots have no occupant. No external state sponsor, no durable shadow administration, no standing armed wing. Recording an empty slot is more useful than filling it with a guess.

Two professional notes belong here. Andreas Krieg, quoting the war studies scholar Thomas Rid, records that "subversion, in contrast to what some security scholars seem to think, is not principally illegal and it is not even principally illegitimate, only the most extreme forms of subversion are," and adds that in open democracies it "appears to be entirely within the boundaries of law."³⁸ Nothing described in the institutional sections above is illegal. That is what makes it difficult, not what makes it innocent. And David Ucko of the National Defense University names the resulting problem for a state: telling "legitimate yet sharp-elbowed political opponents" apart from "Trojan horses, exploiting political openness to tear the whole system down."³⁹

ASSESSMENT

What the record shows

A revolutionary tradition set out to replace the existing order. It said so in 1962 and has not stopped saying so. It called itself an insurgency in 1963 and described insurgency within American institutions in 1966. It produced a written program for placing its people in the professions in the same year, and a German phrase for the same strategy the year after that. It built an armed underground that named counter-institutions as insurgent bases, and that underground failed while the institutional line did not. It wrote its purposes into the literature of teaching and of management, in its own words, under its own names.

What this archive does not claim is a command structure. No evidence here shows central direction among the people quoted, and a shared strategy is not a chain of command. Most people using this vocabulary today could not say where it came from, which is what Gramsci meant by hegemony operating without coordination. The people who chose the framework and the people who absorbed it in a training module are not the same.

The claim is narrower than a conspiracy and harder to answer than one: they told us what they were doing, in writing, for sixty years, and the documents are still in print.

ANNEX A

Sources

Every quotation above was read in the document it comes from. None was taken from a search result, a secondary summary, or from memory. Where editions differ in wording, the edition consulted is named, because a translator's choice is not the author's.

The numbered citations below carry each quotation back to the page it came from. A marker in the text jumps here, and the arrow at the end of each entry returns you to where you were reading.

Standpoint matters more than alphabetical order, so each entry says where its author stands. A movement source conceding a point is the strongest evidence available. An opponent asserting the same point is the weakest. Most of the weight here is carried by the movement's own publications, on purpose.

Where a locator is absent, the quotation was verified in the document but that edition's pagination has not yet been recorded. Those are being filled in.

Two attributions are hedged. Rudi Dutschke's authorship of "the long march through the institutions" and its first use at Frankfurt in September 1967 is reported rather than documented, since no primary German text has been consulted, though Marcuse's 1972 attribution has been read directly. And the passage from C. Wright Mills is quoted from Teodori's text rather than from the original publication.