Great piece. There’s so little Marxist analysis on this website and you literally love to see it. Bonus points for bringing up Gramsci, who I find myself coming back to more and more often these days.

I do agree that Protestant culture plays a big role in the question of why it’s so hard for class consciousness to take root. It’s also that the US is a settler society and all that comes with that.

Of course the two go hand in hand. The original American citizen ideal was the yeoman smallholder, so there’s a deep-rooted culture of self-sufficient rugged individualism.

That was briefly disrupted by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid immiseration that it brought, so you did have class consciousness develop in the US during the early 1900s and it continued to be highly militant, almost revolutionary until the New Deal created a release valve.

So it’s not like our culture makes us inherently less prone to develop class consciousness. Under the right conditions, we can and have.

It’s just today after decades of neoliberalism and capitalist realism, we’re demoralized, atomized and alienated to the point where we’re just individual consumers and corporate serfs. A “sack of potatoes” as Marx said. ;)