An anti-establishment artistic movement can be absorbed into authoritarian nationalism

Evidence

Gramsci, in a 1922 letter to Trotsky who had requested information on futurism for his “Literature and Revolution ”, described how the workers before the World War “had seen in futurism the elements of a struggle against the old academic culture of Italy, mummified and alien to the popular masses …”. But during the war the futurists were violent interventionists, and subsequently their positions converged on the one hand with fascism and on the other with d’Annunzio’s nationalism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1986

Categorization

• CANDY: Gramsci writing to Trotsky requesting info on futurism is a fun cross-revolutionary anecdote — two future enemies corresponding about avant-garde art.
• XREF: connects to: Liberation movements inherit the deformity of what they oppose — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 196; Neoliberalism weaponizes its own rebellious aesthetic to absorb anti-system dissent. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 257; Radical movements get assimilated to bourgeois culture via nationalism, essentialism, and fragmentation — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 265 (+1 more)