Popular beliefs can carry the energy of a material force

Evidence

It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the “solidity of popular beliefs” as a necessary element of a specific situation. What he says more or less is “when this way of conceiving things has the force of popular beliefs”, etc. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1344

Categorization

• XREF: This is the foundation of the historical bloc concept that organizes Gramsci’s theory of how ideology and material forces interlock — directly feeds the reader’s Islamophobia readings on how beliefs stabilize structural power. — connects to: thought becomes a commodity when public opinion reaches a certain state
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘historical bloc’ as the unity of material forces (content) and ideology (form).