The Long March Through the Institutions

In the AI Story

Rudi Dutschke coined the phrase in 1967-1968 at the height of the West German student movement, consciously adapting Gramscian strategy to contemporary conditions. The phrase captured the movement's recognition that the revolutionary confrontations of 1917 Russia could not be replicated in societies where hegemonic common sense was reproduced through thousands of institutional points. Transformation required the patient work of entering those institutions and changing them from within.

The phrase has had complex reception history. On the right, it has been deployed as a conspiracy theory — the claim that cultural Marxists have deliberately infiltrated institutions to destroy Western civilization. On the left, it has been deployed as a strategic orientation — the recognition that movements must build institutional capacity rather than relying on moments of rupture. The Gramsci volume uses the phrase in the second sense, while acknowledging that the first sense represents a morbid symptom of the hegemonic order under strain.

Applied to AI, the long march involves specific institutional targets. The universities must be transformed from credentialing mechanisms that reproduce the technology class's worldview into institutions that cultivate structural literacy. The research laboratories must be rebuilt with public funding and democratic governance. The regulatory agencies must develop independent technical capacity rather than depending on industry secondments. The media must be reconstructed on models that support complex analysis rather than engagement optimization. Each target is a specific institutional project with specific requirements.

The march has no final destination. The war of position is not won at a particular moment. It produces, instead, conditions under which counter-hegemonic institutions are strong enough to contest the hegemonic ones, and the contest itself produces a more common common sense. This is not a utopian vision. It is the ordinary work of democratic politics conducted with strategic seriousness about the timescales and institutional forms that transformation actually requires.

Origin

Rudi Dutschke used the phrase in lectures and writings from 1967 onward, explicitly adapting Gramscian strategy for the West German New Left. The phrase became popular across European and North American student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The phrase has been reinterpreted multiple times — by Antonio Negri as immanent institutional transformation, by conservative critics as conspiratorial infiltration, by contemporary left movements as strategic patience. The Gramsci volume uses it in its original Dutschkean sense as pragmatic institutional strategy.

Key Ideas

Institutional strategy. The phrase names a strategic orientation — transformation through institutional work rather than through dramatic confrontation alone.

Multiple targets. The march proceeds through all the institutions of civil society, each with its own hegemonic function requiring specific counter-hegemonic response.

Long timescales. The work operates on generational rather than news-cycle timescales — patience is a strategic requirement.

No final destination. The war of position produces ongoing contest rather than decisive victory.

AI-age application. The contemporary terrain includes universities, research labs, technology corporations, regulatory agencies, media organizations, and the platforms that have absorbed many of their functions.