Capitalist propaganda
[5][6] Philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that "it is necessary to establish ideological hegemony in order to maintain the continuity of capitalism" and that this is the role of capitalist propaganda.
"[12] As scholar Jason Lee describes, "the propaganda of capitalism has worked so well that most people, of the left and the right, find it inconceivable that any other system should exist, and this is the aim of the ideology.
[1] Capitalist propaganda has been identified as promoting individualism through idealizing the conditions of social mobility under the liberal free market or laissez-faire capitalism.
Phrases such as "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" and having the "frontier mentality" promote the idea that going from "rags to riches" through rugged individualism is available to all who work hard enough, or what has otherwise been referred to as the myth of meritocracy.
Buck wrote that "the capitalist press distorted the meaning of the nationalization of banks and industries and referred to those great democratic reforms as 'the work of criminals.'"
[4] Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. argued "for free enterprise education in television, radio, and other media" in order to "sell" the idea of laissez-faire capitalism to the masses.
Material was sent to the Economic League, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the surveillance of anti-capitalist activity, stating that "what is required is some years of propaganda for capitalism as the finest system that human ingenuity can devise."
The League responded by placing numerous articles in newspapers, paying journalists to write them, and funding speakers, who they referred to as "big men in every sense of the word," to talk to the British public about economics in simplistic terms.
White and Colin C. Williams state, "at a time of global neoliberal economic, environmental and political crisis, capitalism is presented as society's least worst option" through propaganda.
Pro-capitalist individuals will often comment that capitalism equates to "human nature" and is hence unavoidable, despite the existences of Revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovshchina, and the Paris Commune proving otherwise.
"[19] Writers such as Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart in How to Read Donald Duck and Michael Real in Mass-Mediated Culture demonstrate the pervasiveness of capitalist propaganda in mass media such as Disney comics and entertainment venues like Disneyland.
The manifesto demanded that MOMA "decentralize its power structure" and stated that if art is "to have any relevance at all today, [it] must be taken out of the hands of an elite and returned to the people."
The Economic League was a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the United Kingdom dedicated to surveying and opposing all anti-capitalist activity as well as funding capitalist propaganda.
