Resistance to social change comes from culturally invested groups facing obsolescence

Evidence

Opposition to Americanism, as he saw it, came mostly from backward economic groups such as the “rural bourgeoisie” of petty landowners and their attendant parasites, but also from a reactionary intelligentsia, stuffed with myths about its cultural heritage and unable to accept its own uselessness and impending super-cession by more vital forces. The working class, by contrast, he saw as not opposed to Americanism as such, nor even to its attendant effects in social life, but rather to the specific form it would take in conditions of intensified economic exploitation and authoritarian cultural repression. The victory of Americanism might also affect the political superstructures of fascism, now more and more embroiled (since the Concordat) with the Catholic Church, and increasingly torn between notions of a new order and a commitment to the most retrograde elements of culture and society. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1028

Categorization

• XREF: The reactionary intelligentsia ‘stuffed with myths about its cultural heritage’ prefigures later analyses of how cultural elites defend status through invented tradition — resonant with how Islamophobia-adjacent intellectuals defend backward positions. — connects to: The people now function as social cohesion rather than social change — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 885; Failed socialization forces revolutionary alternatives into the vacuum — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 30