And It Appears To Have Worked

“A deviant from a Leninist (and even Marxist) point of view, Gramsci formulated in his Prison Notebooks the doctrine that those who want to change society must change man’s consciousness, and that in order to accomplish this they must first control the institutions by which that consciousness is formed: schools, universities, churches, and, perhaps above all, art and the communications industry. It is these institutions that shape and articulate ‘public opinion,’ the limits of which few politicians can violate with impunity. Culture, Gramsci felt, is not simply the superstructure of an economic base—the role assigned to it by orthodox Marxism—but is central to a society. His famous battle cry is: capture the culture.” [Richard Grenier, Capturing The Culture (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), pp. xxxviii-ix].