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To: DeweyCA

IIRC, the left has been at this since the 20’s.

Italian workers back then realized that socialism went against human nature (their own enlightened self interest, so to speak), and started bucking it. The leftist powers decided they needed to change human nature to get people to accept socialism. Basically turning common sense on its head.

Wish I could remember the so-called philosopher’s name who championed this idea in literature of the time.


32 posted on 09/02/2019 5:27:34 AM PDT by P.O.E. (Pray for America)
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To: P.O.E.

Gramsci (from Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci#Hegemony

Orthodox Marxism had predicted that socialist revolution was inevitable in capitalist societies. By the early 20th century, no such revolution had occurred in the most advanced nations. Capitalism, it seemed, was more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also through ideology. The bourgeoisie developed a hegemonic culture, which propagated its own values and norms so that they became the “common sense” values of all. People in the working-class (and other classes) identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.

To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented natural or normal values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was ancillary to political objectives, but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci’s view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a “historic bloc”, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations, and ideas. In this way, Gramsci’s theory emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.


34 posted on 09/02/2019 5:49:46 AM PDT by P.O.E. (Pray for America)
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