Antonio Gramsci was an early 20th century Italian Marxist who died after imprisonment by Mussolini. His prison diaries are worth reading for a variety of reasons, one of which is his radical optimism, the exhilaration at the prospects of a struggle to make the world better.

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But he’s probably best known for his concept of cultural hegemony, the process by which the ruling class uses the institutions of society—media and press, schools, etc—to project its ideology, goals, and common sense onto the rest of society.

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In a very crude summary, this was Gramsci’s explanation for why the proletarian revolution had not yet emerged from the dialectical contradictions of capitalism.

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The ruling class, he believed, relied not just on coercion but also cultural hegemony to stay in power, building consent by making the status quo seem just, natural, permanent, and inevitable.

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Gramsci has taken on something of a bogeyman role for the right, who imagine that leftists have infiltrated all the cultural institutions in America (and the West generally), engaging in a subversive “Gramscian March” to take over society from within.

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The irony is, of course, that this idea is too a part of capital’s cultural hegemony, an effort to cast even the milquestoast criticisms of the status quo you might get from college students as radical and dangerous and beyond the pale.

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Cultural hegemony is often subtle, or at least so pervasive that it seems subtle. The never ending parade of cop shows. A press that treats politics as horse race theater. The patriotic kitsch of professional sports. It’s endless and everywhere.

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But rarely is it so explicit as this: a direct government restriction on even *mentioning* criticism of the status quo to British school children.

8/ https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/27/uk-schools-told-not-to-use-anti-capitalist-material-in-teaching

I often accuse the US of being every bit as ideological as the Soviet Union was, but this is a helpful reminder that the UK, birthplace of capitalism and neoliberalism, is a close second.

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I can only guess that our ruling elites are getting sufficiently nervous about the obvious decay of capitalism that they’re throwing subtlety to the wind. All the better time to read Gramsci to understand what is being done to you.

http://courses.justice.eku.edu/pls330_louis/docs/gramsci-prison-notebooks-vol1.pdf

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