Gramsci developed Marx and Engels’s theory of the economic superstructure, introducing the concept of hegemony into the general lexicon, and got locked up by the Duce for his troubles.
VS.
In brief - too, too brief - the theory goes: all aspects of life are determined materially (Marx & Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie)
which is the economic superstructure (Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy), the controlling class of which employs the dissemination of information and judgments about values which justify and retrench that superstructure in terms of its desires (Gramsci, Prison Writings).
The family – that is a bourgeois lie which produces new workers. The
state – that is a bourgeois weapon to organise against the proles. Art –
reflects the bourgeois lifestyle and the economic realities
underpinning the apparently universal, objective ideals of
Enlightenment.
According to Spengler’s
history, the question of free will is the fundamental, sacrosanct
dilemma of the Western ideology. Perhaps that is why Marxist determinism
failed – fundamental inability to stomach the notion that all aspects
of living are determined by the capitalist net. That, and the incessant
obsession with revolution for its own sake (valorised in ’68;
transformed in ’89 by the anti-Communist/ pro-capitalist revolutions across the Eastern Bloc). And the stupidity of the world envisaged by Marx post-revolution.
Seven billion people ‘fishing, hunting and criticising art’ in a
harmonious world beyond laws? Get real.
Is it a case of mistaking
incidental consequences for deliberate entrapment by ideology? The
proliferation of media can be seen as a direct and intentional
consequence of 1. The capitalist’s desire for profit; or 2. The
capitalist’s desire to fragment the desires of the working/ all classes –
and I think the heterodox approach, including all classes in the
critique of capitalism works better and sounds less like something from
before the Modern Second Peloponnesian War – in order to water down
resistance to the capitalist model of political economy. Doesn’t 1
logically precede 2? Hasn’t it been shown abundantly that
ideologically-inspired adjustments to the economy will fail, and that
the market determines itself?
Don’t get us wrong, Burning
Pyre deplores the reductionism of our managerial capitalism, which sees
life narrowly as the pursuit of economic interests, but we cannot imply
that the ideology precedes the reality. Spirit/ Mind adjusts to
material circumstances, Hegel taught. The making of money precedes the
desire to make people think that they can only be happy by pursuing the
ideology that making more money makes happy.
Hegel über Marxismus!* Duce oltre Gramsci!
On the other hand, we are
perfectly willing to accept that something akin to Stockholm Syndrome
prevents people from criticising the economic form of capitalism. How
much harder is your job if you disagree with the principles on which it
is founded, the incentive mechanisms used to ‘gee’ it along, and the
organisational structures which are set up by the coal face, so to
speak? Cognitive dissonance indeed.
So the Murdochs advance
number 1 – making money – whilst influencing minds to their own agenda,
which is not necessarily the capitalist one, other than by incidence. Propasphere is a much more accurate term to describe the illusion of objectivity under limited-consensus mass media.
*This tete-a-tete
draws us into a debate about to what degree Hegel is the herald of
liberal democratic capitalism of the Kojéve-Fukuyama variety.
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