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“WAVE OF MATERIALISM” AND “CRISIS OF AUTHORITY”
That aspect of the modern crisis which is bemoaned as a “wave of materialism” is related to what is called the “crisis of authority”. If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer “leading” but only “dominant”, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. 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.
N.B. this paragraph should be completed by some observations which I made on the so-called “problem of the younger generation” - a problem caused by the “crisis of authority” of the old generations in power, and by the mechanical impediment that has been imposed on those who could exercise hegemony, which prevents them from carrying out their mission. The problem is the following: can a rift between popular masses and ruling ideologies as serious as that which emerged after the war be “cured” by the simple exercise of force, preventing the new ideologies from imposing themselves ? Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old ? Given the character of the ideologies, that can be ruled out-yet not in an absolute sense. Meanwhile physical depression will lead in the long run to a widespread scepticism, and a new “arrangement” will be found-in which, for example, catholicism will even more become simply Jesuitism, etc. From this too one may conclude that highly favourable conditions are being created for an unprecedented expansion of historical materialism. The very poverty which at first inevitably characterises historical materialism as a theory diffused widely among the masses will help it to spread. The death of the old ideologies takes the form of scepticism with regard to all theories and general formulae; of application to the pure economic fact (earnings, etc.), and to a form of politics which is not simply realistic in fact (this is always the case) but which is cynical in its immediate manifestation (remember the story of the Prelude to Machiavelli, written perhaps under the influence of Professor Rensi, which at a certain moment in 1921 or 1922-extolled slavery as a modern means of political economy). But this reduction to economics and to politics means precisely a reduction of the highest superstructures to the level of those which adhere more closely to the structure itself-in other words, the possibility and necessity of creating a new culture.
”— Antonio Gramsci, ’“WAVE OF MATERIALISM” AND “CRISIS OF AUTHORITY”’ [1930], The Prison Notebooks (NY: International Publishers, 1971) p.275-6
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