The Frankfurt School refracted Gramsci’s materialist theory of hegemony through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, Weberian cultural pessimism, and idealism, effectively mutating it into a bourgeois theory of subjectivity rather than a tool of working class revolution.
Hegemony is not just cultural dominance or consent, it’s the means by which the ruling class stabilizes its rule through a combination of coercion and consent. It is rooted in material social relations, especially those between the base (economy) and the superstructure (institutions, ideology, culture). Gramsci believed organic intellectuals of the proletariat could construct a counterhegemonic bloc, capable of transforming the state and society. Regardless of your stance on this view (I personally don't even like Gramsci), instead of building on Gramsci’s materialist framework, thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and later Marcuse, recentered hegemony around mass psychology and alienation (drawing heavily from Freud rather than Marx), framed culture as a site of despair rather than a terrain of struggle (see shit like "The Culture Industry"), treated the working class as passive consumers of ideology rather than active agents, moved the critique from economic structures to academic shit like "rationality," "instrumentality," and "false needs". This flattened hegemony into a totalizing force of domination, where resistance is nearly impossible and mass culture is always regressive.
The Frankfurt School’s pessimistic, psychoanalytically-infused marxism domesticated Gramsci, turning a strategic theory of proletarian advance into a fatalistic theory of cultural rot. This led to even further academic detachment from revolutionary politics, moralist critiques of culture (music, film, advertising) with little class analysis and the foundation for much of radlibbery which fixates on subjectivity, identity, language, and desire while neglecting the material mode of production. In effect, it helped divorce marxism from its historical and class-based roots.
this also applies to retards like zizek who believes ideology functions through the unconscious instead of becoming manifest / material in the superstructure
>>2287528shut up college student
this garbo reverses base and superstructure logic, suggesting ideology drives material alliances rather than reflecting them and treats ideology in whatever form it takes as a mystical force that explains political outcomes independently of class position or economic incentive
>>2287522Yeah pseuds don't understand that Gramsci isn't a lens for analyzing the themes of corporate media. He’s a lens for understanding
why capital lets you tell stories about rebellion, etc in the first place, and how that defuses actual revolt. But they gotta feel good about watching or even making video essay slop about the "revolutionary themes of Shrek 5" or whatever.