American ruling classes are now generating the same social passivity Europe had

Evidence

In Europe it is the passive residues that resist Americanism (they “represent quality”, etc.) because they have the instinctive feeling that the new forms of production and work would sweep them away implacably. But if it is true that in Europe the old but still unburied residues are due to be definitively destroyed, what is beginning to happen in America itself? The moral gap mentioned above shows that ever wider margins of social passivity are in the process of being created. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1126

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the reader’s toolkit on how class formation and change happen — a mechanism relevant to how exclusionary ideologies cohere into castes. — connects to: U.S. class mobility is lower than many European countries despite its anti-aristocratic myth — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 925