Karl Marx, in his 1867 preface to the first German edition of Capital, vol. 1.

This passage, I feel, accurately (dialectically, “on its head”) may describe the etiology of the “culture wars”: knowing full well that poor and middle class people care less existentially for their pittance of property than the wealthy do (viz. they have less to lose and more to gain, and know it), but still care much for spiritual and cultural matters (these being, in the absence of the corruption of mass wealth, the true bricks and mortar of human mental and social life), the capitalists’ mass media created the smokescreen of cultural assault to draw them into the big tent of defense against the inevitable assault on private property which is the product of, well, centuries of the lions’ share of population increasingly having less of it.

Marx describes a world in which the rich care more for their property than for anything else. This is a supreme insight, but not beyond the discovery of any provoked mind, however simple. The radical dialectic of today’s corporate propaganda, however, is that the rich pretend to care more for culture than their property.

But we may know how very much this is a pretense.

(via colinbrineman)

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