Crafting the Counter-Culture | Deep Dive

In the last Dispatch we identified the conflict between the ruling class and working class. For today’s Dispatch we wanted to get into the specific ways that the ruling class maintain their power. Broadly speaking, the main strategies of the ruling class fall into 6 categories and you can see examples of these all over the world and throughout history:

1. Cultural Hegemony & Propaganda
   The Ruling Class shapes the public’s values, beliefs, opinions, expectations, norms, behaviors & worldview by controlling cultural institutions such as media, education, religion & the arts.
2. Bureaucratic Structures
   The Ruling Class controls the federal & state governments and are able to create legislation that align with their interests and reinforce status quo.
3. Judiciary Control
   By controlling both what laws are written and how they are interpreted, the Ruling Class is able to ensure that all decisions within the legal system ultimately reflect their interests.
4. Overturning Elections
   When elections challenge the economic and social status quo, the Ruling Class will overturn the will of the majority of the voters in effort to maintain power.
5. Violence & Intimidation
   The Ruling Class use state-sponsored police brutality and vigilante violence to instill fear and break working-class power.
6. Sowing Division
   The Ruling Class employs “divide and conquer” tactics to sow division among workers, the poor, the Left, and more to break movements so that they can never unite fully to topple to existing system.

Each of these deserve their own discussion, which we’ll get to in the coming dispatches, but with the anniversary of the genocide in Gaza upcoming, we want to dig into Cultural Hegemony first. As we mentioned above, cultural hegemony is when the views of the ruling class are adopted as the mainstream views of society. This is a powerful tool for the ruling class. It allows them to define who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. It’s also a way to deflect attention away from themselves as the ones responsible for problems in society.