User:RD/9k/Gramsci's Marxism (Q618)
Main entry
- Gramscianism (motif) / Gramsci's Marxism / Gramscianism (generic)
- Gramscianism (tradition) / Gramscian tradition / Gramscianism (generic)
The time of monsters
- Now is the time of monsters / The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (Gramsci ??/1971) / Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres (Gustave Massiah) [1] / The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this contrast (twilight; chiaroscuro; contradiction) the monsters surge [2] [3] / Is it gonna break or bend? (Nate Hagens) [4] / With the right help, the new world will be radically better (sense) [5] / Yes we can (generic) [6] / schizophrenic position (position of "new" swatch lost in ocean of "old" swatch) [7] / Monsters appear between light and darkness (sense) -> I swear this quote is represented in Deltarune either intentionally or semi-accidentally.
- Gramsci gap / old world, new world, monsters graph [8] -> I hate how simultaneously true this is and deliberately misused this is. you know what it's doing the second you see that graph. you know exactly what it's doing. you can predict almost the exact statements that will come out of people's mouths if you ask them what the graph means, plus or minus some synonyms: Toryism is on the past side, Menshevism or anarchism or agorism or literally Christian charity is on the future side. you know what's going to come out of their mouths. you know they're not going to say Bolshevism is on the future side. you know what Gramsci meant? you know what Antonio Gramsci thought was on the future side???
it probably won't surprise you to know that the article interpreted the graph to be about any time industrial structures replace each other through "creative destruction". there is.... a lot to be said about this some other time. in short: let it be known that every single philosophy ever starts at really small-scale elements and the exact arrangement of people inside small groups of 50-1000 people, and even very large-scale philosophies have to fight horizontally through these teeny tiny scales to ever exist. - Monsters are a thought-terminating cliché / Monsters are something exceptional, an inverted miracle that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation; it shuts off the possibility of trying to work out what produced it (Peter Thomas) [9] -> well, that isn't wrong. it's comically backhandedly-true, probably for reasons the author had no idea about, but at least it isn't wrong.
Initial class rule / hegemony politics
- Gramsci believed that ruling classes maintain power by shaping society's norms [10] -> please read over that sentence you wrote again and tell me what's wrong with using that to carry out a proletarian revolution. repeat the phrase "ruling classes". is the proletariat the ruling class?? is it the ruling class when it starts out?? this is the problem. everybody's so stupid about what ideologies and estates are you can see the errors in plain sight.
- Gramsci believed that citizens enter a social contract with class society / Gramsci believed that societies operate through the consent of the governed -> this is... this is hard to evaluate. I can see one flaw in it already: if this is really what he said then he said that as long as people love capitalism they will absolutely love and be overjoyed to see fascism. which doesn't sound quite right; you see a lot of cognitive dissonance when Toryism gets popular and you see people attempting to separate it from capitalism. so this statement only works if you have a theory of multicapitalism where there are literally two capitalisms and people are able to give their consent to one capitalism but not the other, but both capitalisms still have consequences on everybody.
- Gramsci was trying to make sense of why Italy could not break through to the beginning of Communist revolution; what he discovered is that the ruling class can rule through the intersection of popular culture, intellectual activity, and civil society (Marzia Maccaferri) [11] -> thanks, this is vastly closer. it's still just a little wrong but to be fair Gramsci may have made the error there.
I want you to look really closely at this statement and zoom way in on it with a magnifying glass. popular culture: capitalism. civil society: capitalism. intellectual activity: the only thing that's sometimes not capitalism (thanks Lenin & Stalin), but yet which quickly degenerates into people writing up an appealing product, submitting it to a journal to receive money, and then checking out before they think very hard about whether it's actually true or useful, making it however accidentally into the same thing as capitalism. to everybody but Stalin and Trotsky that statement reads 'the intersection of capitalism, capitalism, and capitalism'. so why don't people notice, and why do they keep getting trapped in the same 'Gramsci trap' they're supposedly trying to get everyone out of? agorism. that's it. that's why. agorists don't believe that agorism is capitalism, so they start making up conspiracy theories about how something else than the nascent capitalism inside agorism is corrupting agorism. it isn't. capitalism doesn't truly begin at capital most of the time but at the belief that "voluntary agreements" don't shear society apart into competing islands. because most capitalism is generated by Idealism, not by the really cold and calculating "Once-ler" capitalists described in Marx. it's not the Once-ler or Chairman Rose that keeps regenerating capitalism. it's...
let's think of an absolutely killer metaphor so people will actually understand. it's like, a cold war inside capitalism / blue anarchism. it's like... it's not like the Fire Nation in Avatar, which was always a bit malicious. that's incorrect. oh, you know, it's kind of like Discord. like, the principality of friendship doesn't like him, so he becomes more powerful and causes trouble, and refuses to let the Ponies control him, but he ultimately wants to be included, he just wants to have perfect control over how he is linked to society and what he gets to make everyone else do so that he can be integrated into society "perfectly". the more the Ponies try to resist Discord (in his first appearance) Discord is just like, no, I'll get more powerful, you have to bow to me first. because Discord knows they don't like him for how hazardously different he is, so because they'll never accept him he has to defend himself against them, and become more powerful to maintain that defense. yeah, Discord is a weirdly good metaphor for how capitalists actually function. - Gramsci believed in co-op theory; he believed in a slow transition of one kind of industrial structure replacing another kind of industrial structure before the political structure would change [12] -> I'd sooner find this one believable than that Gramsci was a flat-out Idealist that believed culture inherently creates social structures just because culture is special.
- long march through the institutions (Rudi Dutschke) [13] -> god the appropriation of both Gramsci and Mao converging on each other to both shore up Liberal-republicanism is unbelievably obnoxious
it's like, how did Gramsci and Deng both get together after their death to form a Second International more effectively than they formed anything when they were alive - Gramsci's model was co-opted by the French New Right ... / reinterpreting Gramsci's cultural theory for conservative aims [14] -> I need to pause on this language. how do you know Gramsci's model was "reinterpreted" at all? why can't it just be a descriptive model of how "The Right" gets power in the first place which was used prescriptively? this is the difference between Idealism and Materialism right here. Idealists believe that when a descriptive model is put into use the intentions are cosmically important and depending on the intentions it becomes a completely different model. Materialists believe models have only a limited ability to have agendas and the model didn't change.
- Gramsci's model was co-opted by the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite) to create Identitarian fascism, a new Tory-to-fascist axis based on cultural identities [15] -> you've lost the plot. center-Liberalism was co-opted to create Identitarian fascism. they didn't need Gramsci to create it, all they needed was something like queer theory or schizoanalysis to corrupt; the moment you have people clustering into "the LGBT-autistic community" and going on and on and on about community community community the moment you can have a bunch of Tory "communities" cluster together into Identitarian fascism. I genuinely don't think the average center-Liberal actually knows the difference between Gramscianism proper and blue anarchism. which explains why they all mysteriously decided Gramsci was okay when logically they shouldn't have. they very seriously can't tell the difference between Gramsci and agorism and believe Gramsci is an agorist, which leads to all the problems complained about by Gramsci being regenerated over and over again because they don't understand that agorism is capitalism.
- All politics is downstream of culture / strategic understanding of culture as the true battleground -> I'm sorry, an understanding of what.
- All politics is downstream of culture (Steve Bannon) [16] / The United States is captured by The Left because of underlying cultural narratives [17] -> okay, but what are the underlying cultural narratives and what group of social structures were they spat out of? even Western-Marxism has the concept of culture actually having come from somewhere, so you have to actually say what group of structures is demanding consent for itself.
one part of this that is evident but very unclear is 'The Left in institutions'. so how is that an economic structure in even the broadest sense, and what is it generating narratives for? rarely you see "Black conservatives" and "gay conservatives" so it's not identities. so then what is it?
point two: the unwanted structure will 'destroy the republic'. how? can he even explain to me how? like, when they try to argue against Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, they can point to something material that's supposedly bad, and it's wrong but at least it's halfway logical. this isn't.
point three: 'immigration' is one possible unwanted structure. okay, that's at least a real thing. immigrant populations. but it's not the only thing! it's not the one and only thing they don't like that's "ruining" all institutions.
point four: 'Christian churches' are one possible wanted structure. you have to explain how that's economic. avoiding taxes and replacing them with churches? replacing taxes with charities while "The Left" tries to collect taxes and create government institutions?
point 4b: 'vaccine mandates'. the CDC is a government institution; blue anarchists telling airlines to give bonuses isn't.
point 5: 'homesteading'. that is a social structure. that is advocated by like, Proudhonists?
point 6: 'regulation'. that's just a capitalist point with nothing to hide it.
point 7: 'food and water contamination'; 'Big Pharma'. ok, that's in total contradiction with 'regulation', but it at least paints a clearer picture of small businesses trying to eradicate big businesses without using regulations. this is the feel I got from Animal Farm 2026.
Related
hegemony politics
/ war of position (Gramsci) / musical chairs attack (meta-Marxism, MDem scraps) / entryism (generic) / (9k)hegemony politics
/ stealth activism (center-Liberalism, blue anarchism)- Our Democracy / a shared civic narrative [18] / national solidarity (generic) / the broader health of the American political psyche / American political identity (generic) / pluralistic society (generic) / pluralism (generic) / inclusive pluralism (generic) / national reconciliation (generic) / to heal fractures in the national body / the political goal of persuasion or compromise (generic) [19] -> everyone gets used to this stuff but, when you stop and look at it, it's really strange. why does anybody believe this stuff is even possible? what evidence do they have? to me the entire period from the beginning of the Civil War until now would seem like terrible evidence.
- "Make America Healthy Again" seeks to delegitimize liberal governance [20] -> no. if you have no distinction in your mind between "Liberal-republican" and "liberal", then the whole point of it is to give the United States more liberty and make it more liberal. I may not like the movement but I can't dispute that particular definition. right-Liberals heavily believe liberal means liberty and you won't tell them otherwise, or they'll absolutely laugh at your article and none of them will even consider what you have to say.
Ideologies or fields
- W / Western Marxism
- W / Gramscianism