"The second stage [of capitalism] is that in which the bourgeois spirit finally manifests itself in the pure state; in which it realizes fully what it had already achieved about nature, abolishing mystery and quality and replacing them with measurable, quantitative data.
The spontaneous ideology of the bourgeoisie is pure materialism, positivism focused exclusively on raw facts, the denial of that any meaning exists that transcends the immediate phenomenon. At the neo-capitalist stage the bourgeoisie is so dominant that it no longer needs
to modify to some extent its own spontaneous ideology, in order to let other social classes integrate into it, albeit in subordinate form; it no longer needs, in short, to compromise with Christianity ... In Gramsci's version the revolutionary party provides the bourgeois spirit
with the opportunity to realize itself in the pure state. The Gramscian transition is thus completely absorbed into the shift from the old to the new form of capitalism. Thereby it merges with the current form of 'conservatism' marked by the attempt to eliminate the possibility
of calling into question the instrumentalist mindset. Such conservatism coincides with the appearance of great change because the unceasing evolution of the technical-scientific instrument leads to an equally unceasing transformation of ways of feeling and thinking" (DN 1975).
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