{"id":62990,"date":"2021-02-02T05:00:03","date_gmt":"2021-02-02T10:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62990"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:41:24","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T13:41:24","slug":"when-the-self-defined-elites-achieved-class-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/02\/02\/when-the-self-defined-elites-achieved-class-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"When the self-defined elites achieved class consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts<\/em> Severian<\/a> adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck<\/em> magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

… I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors \u2014 he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than the actual disease. Worse, what makes Marx’s cure especially lethal is what ends up making his diagnosis essentially right: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n

The proletariat is achieving class consciousness, all right \u2014 look no further than the GameStop “short squeeze” for proof. But the only reason the proles are achieving class consciousness is because the “capitalists” forced them to, just like Marx said they would. The Elite and the Bureaucracy (usually, but not always, a distinction without a difference) finally achieved class consciousness through the combination of NAFTA and the Louvre Accords<\/a>. Starting around 1990, then, the Elite self-consciously embraced their role as rootless, stateless, jet-setting parasites (with the wannabe-Elites in the Media, academia, and the bureaucracies signing up for tours of duty as fart-catchers, both to bask in reflected glory and in hopes of being promoted).
\nIn short, our “Capitalists” \u2014 really, “financial-ists” or “spreadsheet gangsters,” since they don’t actually make<\/em> anything, they just bust out existing firms via debt manipulation \u2014 behave exactly as Marx described factory owners behaving all the way back in the First Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n

In my naivete, I used to think Marx’s ranting was hyperbole. I cited the example of Andrew Carnegie \u2014 a real bastard in his youth, who went on to be one of the world’s great philanthropists. That’s human<\/em> behavior, I said, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caricature of Marx’s fantasies … but I was wrong, comrades. Carnegie happily would’ve sold his fellow Americans down the river, just as Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the pirates-in-neckties are happily selling us down the river now. Only two things prevented it back then: one structural, one cultural.<\/p>\n

The structural one is simply technology, and therefore uninteresting. Britain’s “free traders” \u2014 you know, the Jardine-Matheson<\/a> types who started the Opium Wars for fun and profit \u2014 would’ve happily outsourced Britain’s entire industrial base to China if they hadn’t been hampered by wind speed. By the time this was technically feasible \u2014 which is about 1860, if you’re keeping score \u2014 simple inertia had taken over. They didn’t retool until they had to, at which point instant communications and modern ships … well, you know the rest. Like I said, it’s vital, but boring.<\/p>\n

The cultural one is much more interesting. You might be tempted to say, as I did, that Jardine and Matheson were always on the lookout for #1, of course, but were sincere British patriots for all that, just as Carnegie for all his faults was an authentic American. I doubt it, comrades. I sincerely doubt it. What kept these guys in check wasn’t patriotism, or even culture. Rather, it was fear<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Rotten Chestnuts Severian adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right: … I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors \u2014 he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84,7,28],"tags":[509,727,262,1076,1462,764,315],"class_list":["post-62990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","category-history","category-media","tag-civilservice","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-culture","tag-karlmarx","tag-severian","tag-university","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gnY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62991,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62990\/revisions\/62991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}