The Gramsci Connection
The Gramsci puzzle piece or Gramsci connection may be one of several parts in the efforts of the "powers that be" to change the rhetoric of humanity.
Lest we forget who is in the background; the Man of Lawlessness or the spirit thereof best described in 2 Thess 2:1-4. There has for a long time been a quiet revolution here in the US and around the world through the American Experiment.
Re-packaging, re-branding, re-stating, re-writing, the rhetoric and language of the masses. One might wax communist in terminology and say the Bourgeoise or the wealthy that are below the 1 percenters, are the problem with the world... they are not sharing the wealth. Basically the thinking on a very basic level of communism is the socialistic break down of capitalistic wealth and trickling it down to the "needy starving poor masses" is one way of looking at the rhetoric of today. There is a hue and cry over the unequal distribution of wealth. Then there is the race card that says if you are the wrong bloodline or skin color you just cant have any of the "American Pie". So these "proletarians" want a dismantling of the bourgeoise or very rich monitary holdings, for want of better words.
We all know about Lenin and Marx and Mussolini but have we heard of a guy named Antonio Gramsci? Probably not. He didnt go very far and wrote his volumes of notes and observation while rotting in a prison cell. Someone scooped the papers up and in the Italian some of the ideology spread. BUt in America we had Judeo-Christian values. Until the seventies. We had just come out of a Counter Culture that was fading fast. All the yippie, hippie, flower people began settling down marrying having kids and thinking, "oh my goodness I need a job and to get one... a hair cut" They donned the suits and became little business mogules. Theirs was the out of box thought that instituted so many changes in society that we are still racing to catch up with it all. But in the seventies this italian set of notes got transcribed and possibly annotated and circulated.
What Gramsci seems to propose is a different approach to getting rid of that annoying bourgeoisie. Might didnt equal right enough to stand the test of time, after all the wall did come down and with it the collapse of Communism in Russia. How have we fallen oh ideology of the people who got tired of one trick pony meals, and now they have a selection of... capitalistic stuff to choose from. So if an open rebellion wasnt the way to make a quick lockstep change for the poor man in his bid to make a grab at some of the assets of the rich man, then what will work?
Going after the ideologies of the poor man like that grand optiate of the people, the cross of christ would come first. Then lets do a little fiddling around with the culture as it stands. The problem as he saw it was the wealthy people had the monopoly on the culture of the land. In order for that all important revolution to work those revolting had to develope their own culture. While we are at it lets rewrite history to reflect our point of view, never mind the actual factual events as they happened. Lets just change the narrative.
from wikipedia on Gramsci under State and civil society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
"Gramsci's theory of hegemony is tied to his conception of the capitalist state. Gramsci does not understand the state in the narrow sense of the government. Instead, he divides it between political society (the police, the army, legal system, etc.) – the arena of political institutions and legal constitutional control – and civil society (the family, the education system, trade unions, etc.) – commonly seen as the private or non-state sphere, which mediates between the state and the economy. However, he stresses that the division is purely conceptual and that the two often overlap in reality.
Gramsci claims the capitalist state rules through force plus consent: political society is the realm of force and civil society is the realm of consent.
Gramsci proffers that under modern capitalism the bourgeoisie can maintain its economic control by allowing certain demands made by trade unions and mass political parties within civil society to be met by the political sphere. Thus, the bourgeoisie engages in passive revolution by going beyond its immediate economic interests and allowing the forms of its hegemony to change. Gramsci posits that movements such as reformism and fascism, as well as the scientific management and assembly line methods of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford respectively, are examples of this.
Drawing from Machiavelli, he argues that The Modern Prince – the revolutionary party – is the force that will allow the working-class to develop organic intellectuals and an alternative hegemony within civil society. For Gramsci, the complex nature of modern civil society means that a war of position, carried out by revolutionaries through political agitation, the trade unions, advancement of proletarian culture, and other ways to create an opposing civil society was necessary alongside a war of manoeuvre – a direct revolution – in order to have a successful revolution without danger of a counter-revolution or degeneration. Despite his claim that the lines between the two may be blurred, Gramsci rejects the state-worship that results from equating political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat's historical task is to create a "regulated society", where political society is diminished and civil society is expanded. He defines the "withering away of the state" as the full development of civil society's ability to regulate itself."
Now think about the way civil liberties were won before the seventies and how they are being won now. Dr King was not an absolute advocate of violence and neither fore ht most part is the Black Lives Matter movement but in both you had your hot heads. Usually they stood out of the crowd and the media just loved it.
The wikipedia continues
under historicism
"Like the early Marx, Gramsci was an emphatic proponent of historicism. In Gramsci's view, all meaning derives from the relation between human practical activity (or praxis) and the objective historical and social processes of which it is a part. Ideas cannot be understood outside their social and historical context, apart from their function and origin. The concepts by which we organise our knowledge of the world do not derive primarily from our relation to objects, but rather from the social relations between the users of those concepts. As a result, there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature, but only historically variable social relationships. Furthermore, philosophy and science do not reflect a reality independent of man. Rather, a theory can be said to be true when, in any given historical situation, it expresses the real developmental trend of that situation.
For the majority of Marxists, truth was truth no matter when and where it was known, and scientific knowledge (which included Marxism) accumulated historically as the advance of truth in this everyday sense. In this view, Marxism (or the Marxist theory of history and economics) did not belong to the illusory realm of the superstructure because it is a science. In contrast, Gramsci believed Marxism was true in a socially pragmatic sense: by articulating the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxism expressed the truth of its times better than any other theory. This anti-scientistic and anti-positivist stance was indebted to the influence of Benedetto Croce. However, it should be underlined that Gramsci's absolute historicism broke with Croce's tendency to secure a metaphysical synthesis in historical destiny. Although Gramsci repudiates the charge, his historical account of truth has been criticised as a form of relativism."
In the actual entry you will find the wikipedia is quoting a lot of scources whose tags I have removed.
the article goes on and I want you to look at the various area his influence touches.
under critique on economism
"In a pre-prison article titled "The Revolution against Das Kapital", Gramsci wrote that the October Revolution in Russia had invalidated the idea that socialist revolution had to await the full development of capitalist forces of production. This reflected his view that Marxism was not a determinist philosophy. The principle of the causal primacy of the forces of production was a misconception of Marxism. Both economic changes and cultural changes are expressions of a basic historical process, and it is difficult to say which sphere has primacy over the other.
The belief from the earliest years of the workers' movement that it would inevitably triumph due to "historical laws" was a product of the historical circumstances of an oppressed class restricted mainly to defensive action. This fatalistic doctrine must be abandoned as a hindrance once the working-class becomes able to take the initiative. Because Marxism is a philosophy of praxis, it cannot rely on unseen historical laws as the agents of social change. History is defined by human praxis{insert anchor here to below} and therefore includes a human will. Nonetheless, will-power cannot achieve anything it likes in any given situation: when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, it will encounter historical circumstances that cannot be arbitrarily altered. However, it is not predetermined by historical inevitability as to which of several possible developments will take place as a result.
His critique of economism also extended to that practised by the syndicalists of the Italian trade unions. He believed that many trade unionists had settled for a reformist, gradualist approach in that they had refused to struggle on the political front in addition to the economic front. For Gramsci, much as the ruling class can look beyond its own immediate economic interests to reorganise the forms of its own hegemony, so must the working class present its own interests as congruous with the universal advancement of society. While Gramsci envisioned the trade unions as one organ of a counter-hegemonic force in a capitalist society, the trade union leaders simply saw these organizations as a means to improve conditions within the existing structure. Gramsci referred to the views of these trade unionists as vulgar economism, which he equated to covert reformism and even liberalism."
Indeed the revolution didnt need to wait, it had a nasty war that Russia lost and that ruined the economy of the land, to bring everything to the boiling point. In fact the bipolar economy of the peasantry and the Royal house and all that was in between that failed to bring stability but seemed to have lost touch with the backs that were propping it up was the thing that set off the Revolution. It just took a lot of rhetoric from the right charismatic indivual or individuals to spread a new idea.
{point anchor here}
Over and over again we see the word praxis.
wikipedia's entry on the word has this among other things to say.
" Praxis- is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas."
In other words re-packaging, re-branding, re-stating, re-writing of... whatever is necessary to get the ideology firmly entrenched in the minds of a generation that could be primed to "take action" at some distant point in time.
Re-writing... "when the consciousness of the working-class reaches the stage of development necessary for action, it will encounter historical circumstances that cannot be arbitrarily altered." this is from Gramsci. It will encounter historical circumstances that cannot be arbitrarily altered." Unless you start to re-write history and alter the present in a way that opens the way for the necessary action to occur.
When was the last time any parent looked at their kids history books. I once picked up one from a local elementary school that had fallen in the rain and mud and was very surprised at the blatant obvious changes in historical narrative that were found therein.
Here is the final piece of paydirt and tell me if you have seen this one on your TV set.
"For Gramsci, much as the ruling class can look beyond its own immediate economic interests to reorganise the forms of its own hegemony, so must the working class present its own interests as congruous with the universal advancement of society."
What he is saying, I think, is that just like the wealthy can pivot and reinvent itself and culturally enrich the environment philantrophically to say that their wealth is vital to the "universal advancement of society" so too should those with less means at their disposal likewise do. He was refering to unionization but with the advent of the internet, well the possibilities are... endless.
We now have this pseudo culture of Image and Status that is actually putting our poor into the bondage of the banker. Lately not even the banker is making book on that gambit. Corona Virus anyone?
If I have understood what has been said here, all those agencies who share a sentinment of a Global Government without boundaries spearheaded by a union or coalition of people deemed to have humanity's best interests in mind this is the trend that will take place. To lull the people into a false sense of security and to undermine anything that purports an unbending absolute truth or loyalty; both of which are found in Christendom. It doesnt take much to understand a reprisal from a Living Entity who just might not want to go along with the idea of being... "replaced". Then there is the last Book in the Bible and the story it has to tell of what will happen when this very alive and Living God has finally had enough.
But how to create the Counter Culture of the "proleteriate" or the "average man"? Television brought the orint media to the big screen in the living room. It had been being done at the movie theaters for years. News reels before feature movies and the all important ADVERTISING. Now the evening news took the place of the news reel at the movie theater and allowed the Press to "tell us what happened today". Journalism which started out so very factual became so very sensational and somewhat opinionated over time. Now that there were dedicated stations and time slots for the news, we could do "sitcoms". Situation Comedy was the way to relax in front of the TV after a long day. Into each episode could be woven ideologies. Take a long run sitcom called "All In The Family" which tackled a wide array of topics with Archie Bunker being the Conservative old man and the young husband he called "meathead" being the youth leftist counterpart. The young couple even displayed the hippie vibe in their attire, whereas Archie and wife, Edith displayed the older established but working class vibe in attire and behavior. This was a white family sitcom but, there were others and one was black and was about the same sort of interaction of generations and ideologies albeit with a Black culture and liberation message woven throughout and you might remember this line from the intro "Movin on up to the East side." it was called "Good Times". In a way it actual painted the black family in a more negative stereotype than might be thought.
But it doesnt end there. In both sitcoms we had advertising and product placement. In fact in a sitcom called I Love Lucy there is an episode where "Lucy" is doing an ad for Vitameatavegimin. It contains alcohol and after many takes she is pickled. It is a poke at the rigors of advertising. The thing is that noone cried out over a lot of the programming of the era and so as time went on advertising became more explicite and elicite. Programming followed. Television grew and TV sets modernised and then there was HTTP with WWW and the internet was born. GoDaddy.com does program advertising for making your site. It runs the gamut of acceptable site content.
Through the media hype we got film stars, porn stars, soap and day TV stars along with their lives and intrigues and culture; you cant forget the culture, fashion and mystique. We also have the radio and its music, then we had MTV and music combined to video to become the next "hot thing" to follow. Now the internet has picked up the thread with the ability to listen to and buy music. Then there was Youtube where the average man could get an account and upload almost anything and if they did it right, they could even upload copywritten content. All this makes the common man drool over what the rich man has. So now we have a nation of people indebt for the latest "toy". Of course Corona Virus (CoVid19) has made it more like people selling off toys to pay back rent of hospital bills but you get the idea.
In short, Gramsci's ideas WORK. They are WORKING. Right under our noses.
Christendom? It has its own message. You are just passing through. Keep the eye on Jesus whose Kingdom is not of this world and unto whose Kingdom we are headed as The Redeemed. With a message and belief system like that and a culture that is diametrically opposed to the hedonistic feels good culture of this nation, it is the Royal Thorn in the side of Gramsci's plot to bring on the Communism or whatever the next thing the "powers that be" decide they want to inflict on humanity. The best thing is to do everything to demean, distract from, expose the sins of, (January 8 2021 anyone?) debase, remove, erase from any institution where it could be seen or heard, and silence. The silencing of the preacher hasnt quite begun thanks to the "right of free speech". As long as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in this nation exists, so can the Church. After CoVid 19 that is.
Think about it.