NowA hundred years onStill running

Avowed socialists sit in Congress under their own banner and run major American cities.

They are winning openly. They no longer need euphemism, because a generation raised inside the curriculum does not hear the word as an accusation.

People in newsrooms, human resources departments, medical schools, city councils and church basements now speak the vocabulary built in the seminar rooms of the 1970s. Most of them would be baffled to learn where it came from. That bafflement is the strategy working.

The armed road is still open. Bombings, armed attacks on government facilities and personnel, and political assassination continue, and federal prosecutions follow them. Setting that record out is its own line of work for this archive, built on indictments and convictions.

The people who study insurgency for a living recognise the shape. 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.

This archive does not claim a command structure. No evidence here shows central direction among the people quoted. A shared strategy is not a chain of command. The claim is narrower than a conspiracy and harder to answer than one.

A hundred years ago a handful of disappointed Marxists in Frankfurt asked why the workers would not rise. The enemy, they concluded, was the culture rather than the police. Antonio Gramsci, a prisoner in Italy, reached the same conclusion. He never met them, and nobody would read his notebooks for another twenty years. He added that the way to win a society like that was to take its schools and wait.

A century on, the strategy is still running. This file stays open.