Industrial civilization’s habits arise through coercive subjugation of instinct, not consent

Evidence

The history of industrialism has always been a continuing struggle (which today takes an even more marked and vigorous form) against the element of “animality” in man. It has been an uninterrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order, exactitude and precision which can make possible the increasingly complex forms of collective life which are the necessary consequence of industrial development. This struggle is imposed from outside, and the results to date, though they have great immediate practical value, are to a large extent purely mechanical: the new habits have not yet become “second nature”. But has not every new way of life, in the period in which it was forced to struggle against the old, always been for a certain time a result of mechanical repression? Even the instincts which have to be overcome today because they are too “animal” are really a considerable advance on earlier, even more primitive instincts. Who could describe the “cost” in human lives and in the grievous subjugation of instinct involved in the passage from nomadism to a settled agricultural existence? The process includes the first forms of rural serfdom and trade bondage, etc. Up to now all changes in modes of existence and modes of life have taken place through brute coercion, that is to say through the dominion of one social group over all the productive forces of society. The selection or “education” of men adapted to the new forms of civilisation and to the new forms of production and work has taken place by means of incredible acts of brutality which have cast the weak and the non-conforming into the limbo of the lumpen-classes or have eliminated them entirely. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1108

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s core concept that new modes of life take hold through mechanical repression imposed from outside before becoming ‘second nature’ — foundational for hegemony and common sense.
• XREF: Connects directly to Foucauldian discipline and the construction of the docile body, and to later Islamophobia readings on the colonial civilizing mission as coercive habit-formation. — connects to: Industrial society reduces individuals to interchangeable species beings through conformist working conditions; Advanced industrial society channels erotic and aggressive instincts into socially controlled outlets. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 61; Romanticism and medievalism are defense mechanisms against industrial capitalism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 195
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all prior civilizational change happened through brute coercion — the selection/education of humans by brutality and elimination of the non-conforming — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how social norms are historically installed.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘selection or education by brutality’ that casts the weak into lumpen-classes parallels the sacrifice readings on how societies structurally dispose of those who don’t fit.