Moral and cultural reform cannot proceed detached from economic reform

Evidence

Can there be cultural reform, and can the position of the depressed strata of society be improved culturally, without a previous economic reform and a change in their position in the social and economic fields? Intellectual and moral reform has to be linked with a programme of economic reform—indeed the programme of economic reform is precisely the concrete form in which every intellectual and moral reform presents itself. The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, in that its development means precisely that any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or as wicked, only in so far as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose it. In men’s consciences, the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 616

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Deepens the mechanics of ideological program-building that ties into why sacrifice and moral-suasion arguments only bind where an economic program carries them.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia readings on how cultural/humanitarian arguments operate without economic reform. — connects to: Abstract liberal theory cannot substitute for confronting economic realities — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 342