Revolutionary periods produce materialist popular culture while elites cling to spiritualism

Evidence

In the history of culture, which is much broader than the history of philosophy, every time that there has been a flowering of popular culture because a revolutionary phase was being passed through and because the metal of a new class was being forged from the ore of the people, there has been a flowering of “materialism”: conversely, at the same time the traditional classes clung to philosophies of the spirit. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1407

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates Gramsci’s distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals, and maps onto how dominant classes deploy spiritual/universalist ideology against subaltern materialism.