"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[ahinton]

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we're winning"

- Warren Buffett, 'The Sage of Omaha'

That's as discreditable statement on the subject as any, I would say; it smacks of a kind of war-mongering that one might expect from the President of his country, which speaks volumes for it.

Aside from any other considerations, he makes the same mistake as do certain others in assuming that there is such a thing as a "rich class". There is no such thing; there are only rich people, some whose wealth is self-made (legitimately or otherwise), some who have inherited it and some who fall into both categories and, as their backgrounds and avowed agendas are almost as varied as are they themselves, there seems to be no obvious commonality between them besides their riches.

For what it might or might not be worth, President Putin is reckoned by some to be by some distance the world's wealthiest person (even though his wealth is supposedly not all officially in his own name, perhaps for obvious reasons), but I remain to be persuaded that he is a member of a particular "class" as a direct consequence...

As I've suggested before more than once, however, it would (at least to me, but I'm sure to a goodly number of others) seem like a good idea to pursue the notions of modernism and élitism here, as presumably anticipated by the OP, rather than focusing disproportionately on that of "class"...

[DracoM]

The class of appropriated entitlement?
Or
As some would call it 'kleptocrats'?
IMO, they are the same the world over.

[french frank]

a good idea to pursue the notions of modernism and élitism here, as presumably anticipated by the OP, rather than focusing disproportionately on that of "class"...

Just as little clarity. I always understood "elitism" as having a political connotation - power in the hands of what I thought (in non-Marxist terms ) as being a ruling class having benefited from the advantages and privileges of social class - either inherited or bought.

If I'm remembering back to the beginning and the OP, "elitism" seemed to have some cultural meaning which overlapped with the above, as if only the wealthy and the upper classes liked classical music.

Or maybe it's a different elite which likes really modern works like Stravinsky's Œdipus rex 'n things like that………

[Joseph K]

Chomsky hits the nail on the head as ever...

"The unmentionable five-letter word

It's a given that ideology and propaganda are phenomena of other cultures. They don't exist in the United States. Class is in the same category. You've called it the "unmentionable five-letter word."

It's kind of interesting the way it works. Statistics about things like quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. are usually broken down by race. It always turns out that blacks have horrible statistics as compared with whites.

But an interesting study was done by Vicente Navarro, a professor at Johns Hopkins who works on public health issues. He decided to reanalyze the statistics, separating out the factors of race and class. For example, he looked at white workers and black workers versus white executives and black executives. He discovered that much of the difference between blacks and whites was actually a class difference. If you look at poor white workers and white executives, the gap between them is enormous.

The study was obviously relevant to epidemiology and public health, so he submitted it to the major American medical journals. They all rejected it. He then sent it to the world's leading medical journal, Lancet, in Britain. They accepted it right away.

The reason is very clear. In the United States you're not allowed to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious. When you read their literature, it's all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It's kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism.

The other group is the high planning sectors of the government. They talk the same way -- how we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate.

So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it's extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We're all just equal, we're all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work together, everything is great.

Take, for example, the book Mandate for Change, put out by the Progressive Policy Institute, the Clinton think tank. It was a book you could buy at airport newsstands, part of the campaign literature describing the Clinton administration's program. It has a section on "entrepreneurial economics," which is economics that's going to avoid the pitfalls of the right and the left.

It gives up these old-fashioned liberal ideas about entitlement and welfare mothers having a right to feed their children -- that's all passé. We're not going to have any more of that stuff. We now have "enterprise economics," in which we improve investment and growth. The only people we want to help are workers and the firms in which they work.

According to this picture, we're all workers. There are firms in which we work. We would like to improve the firms in which we work, like we'd like to improve our kitchens, get a new refrigerator.

There's somebody missing from this story -- there are no managers, no bosses, no investors. They don't exist. It's just workers and the firms in which we work. All the administration's interested in is helping us folks out there.

The word entrepreneurs shows up once, I think. They're the people who assist the workers and the firms in which they work. The word profits also appears once, if I recall. I don't know how that sneaked in -- that's another dirty word, like class.

Or take the word jobs. It's now used to mean profits. So when, say, George Bush took off to Japan with Lee Iacocca and the rest of the auto executives, his slogan was "Jobs, jobs, jobs." That's what he was going for.

We know exactly how much George Bush cares about jobs. All you have to do is look at what happened during his presidency, when the number of unemployed and underemployed officially reached about seventeen million or so -- a rise of eight million during his term of office.

He was trying to create conditions for exporting jobs overseas. He continued to help out with the undermining of unions and the lowering of real wages. So what does he mean when he and the media shout, "Jobs, jobs, jobs"? It's obvious: "Profits, profits, profits." Figure out a way to increase profits.

The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America, we have a national interest, we're working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them -- they're our servants.

And that's all there is in the world -- no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it.

So then equally exotic issues like class oppression and class warfare occur only in obscure books and on Mars?

Or in the business press and the business literature, where it's written about all the time. It exists there because they have to worry about it.

You use the term "elite." The political economist and economic historian Samir Amin says it confers too much dignity upon them. He prefers "ruling class." Incidentally, a more recent invention is "the ruling crass."

The only reason I don't use the word class is that the terminology of political discourse is so debased it's hard to find any words at all. That's part of the point -- to make it impossible to talk. For one thing, class has various associations. As soon as you say the word class, everybody falls down dead. They think, "There's some Marxist raving again."

But the other thing is that to do a really serious class analysis, you can't just talk about the ruling class. Are the professors at Harvard part of the ruling class? Are the editors of the New York Times part of the ruling class? Are the bureaucrats in the State Department? There are lots of different categories of people. So you can talk vaguely about the establishment or the elites or the people in the dominant sectors.

But I agree, you can't get away from the fact that there are sharp differences in power which in fact are ultimately rooted in the economic system. You can talk about the masters, if you like. It's Adam Smith's word, and he's now in fashion. The elite are the masters, and they follow what he called their "vile maxim" -- namely, "all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else."

You say that class transcends race, essentially.

It certainly does. For example, the United States could become a color-free society. It's possible. I don't think it's going to happen, but it's perfectly possible that it would happen, and it would hardly change the political economy at all. Just as women could pass through the "glass ceiling" and that wouldn't change the political economy at all.

That's one of the reasons why you commonly find the business sector reasonably willing to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism. It doesn't matter that much for them. You lose a little white-male privilege in the executive suite, but that's not all that important as long as the basic institutions of power and domination survive intact.

And you can pay the women less.

Or you can pay them the same amount. Take England. They just went through ten pleasant years with the Iron Lady running things. Even worse than Reaganism.

Lingering in the shadows of the liberal democracies -- where there's this pyramid of control and domination, where there's class and race and gender bias -- is coercion, force.

That comes from the fact that objective power is concentrated. It lies in various places, like in patriarchy, in race. Crucially it also lies in ownership.

If you think about the way the society generally works, it's pretty much the way the founding fathers said. As John Jay put it, the country should be governed by those who own it, and the owners intend to follow Adam Smith's vile maxim. That's at the core of things. That can remain even if lots of other things change.

On the other hand, it's certainly worth overcoming the other forms of oppression. For people's lives, racism and sexism may be much worse than class oppression. When a kid was lynched in the South, that was worse than being paid low wages. So when we talk about the roots of the system of oppression, that can't be spelled out simply in terms of suffering. Suffering is an independent dimension, and you want to overcome suffering."

https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/www/chomsky/pfrm/pfrm-10.html

[ahinton]

Take England. They just went through ten pleasant years with the Iron Lady running things. Even worse than Reaganism.

Well, that was some time ago now; that era ended almost three decades ago (and she was ousted by her own). What "England" (or, more properly, UK) has now seems to me to be infinitely worse even than that, as indeed I suggested earlier; cronyist self-servatism isn't enough for the present incumbent who seems determined also to preside over a far from systematic demolition of UK, its economy and such international reputation as it still retains.

[Richard Barrett]

For example, the United States could become a color-free society. It's possible. I don't think it's going to happen, but it's perfectly possible that it would happen, and it would hardly change the political economy at all. Just as women could pass through the "glass ceiling" and that wouldn't change the political economy at all.

That's one of the reasons why you commonly find the business sector reasonably willing to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism. It doesn't matter that much for them. You lose a little white-male privilege in the executive suite, but that's not all that important as long as the basic institutions of power and domination survive intact.

This point is really important. Although of course it doesn't mean that racism and sexism shouldn't be actively opposed!

On the power of elites and the media: Irish people are to be congratulated for the decisive result of their referendum a couple of days ago, and I was particularly impressed and moved by the way that so many people made a point of travelling back there, sometimes from the other side of the world, to take part (don't they have postal votes, I wondered?). But one of the differences between this referendum and the Brexit one is that in Ireland two of the major political parties were unambiguously for Yes and the other two didn't take one position or the other, while also none of the major media supported a No vote; whereas in the UK the major political parties as well as the media were split on the question. Is this a matter of politicians and the media reflecting the relative proportions of public views on the subject in question, or the other way around? (or both) Certainly the media behave as if their propaganda had such a decisive effect on voters.

[ahinton]

it doesn't mean that racism and sexism shouldn't be actively opposed!

Indeed!

On the power of elites and the media: Irish people are to be congratulated for the decisive result of their referendum a couple of days ago, and I was particularly impressed and moved by the way that so many people made a point of travelling back there, sometimes from the other side of the world, to take part (don't they have postal votes, I wondered?). But one of the differences between this referendum and the Brexit one is that in Ireland two of the major political parties were unambiguously for Yes and the other two didn't take one position or the other, while also none of the major media supported a No vote; whereas in the UK the major political parties as well as the media were split on the question. Is this a matter of politicians and the media reflecting the relative proportions of public views on the subject in question, or the other way around? (or both) Certainly the media behave as if their propaganda had such a decisive effect on voters.

The Irish people are certainly to be congratulated on the outcome of their referendum and, although what's being proposed remains more restrictive than in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, I have little doubt this this new legislation, once ratified, will soon be subjected to various amendments to bring it into line with Britain, &c. NI is really now isolated and in the firing line; similar change there is surely inevitable.

[Once Was 4]

This point is really important. Although of course it doesn't mean that racism and sexism shouldn't be actively opposed!

On the power of elites and the media: Irish people are to be congratulated for the decisive result of their referendum a couple of days ago, and I was particularly impressed and moved by the way that so many people made a point of travelling back there, sometimes from the other side of the world, to take part (don't they have postal votes, I wondered?). But one of the differences between this referendum and the Brexit one is that in Ireland two of the major political parties were unambiguously for Yes and the other two didn't take one position or the other, while also none of the major media supported a No vote; whereas in the UK the major political parties as well as the media were split on the question. Is this a matter of politicians and the media reflecting the relative proportions of public views on the subject in question, or the other way around? (or both) Certainly the media behave as if their propaganda had such a decisive effect on voters.

Also, I heard a spokesman for the losing side being very magnanimous and saying that he did not want to spoil the joy of the winners; he accepted the democratic decision of the population and would have to think carefully and discuss with his colleagues what, if anything, they did next. Bear in mind that he still considered the outcome to be a disaster.

Contrast this with the remoaners (and I am a remoaner - I think that Brexit will spell disaster) whose personal abuse towards Brexiteers makes one ashamed to be anti-Brexit oneself.

[ahinton]

Also, I heard a spokesman for the losing side being very magnanimous and saying that he did not want to spoil the joy of the winners; he accepted the democratic decision of the population and would have to think carefully and discuss with his colleagues what, if anything, they did next. Bear in mind that he still considered the outcome to be a disaster.

Contrast this with the remoaners (and I am a remoaner - I think that Brexit will spell disaster) whose personal abuse towards Brexiteers makes one ashamed to be anti-Brexit oneself.

By no means all Remain supporters (of whom I was also one at the time of the referendum and still am) have been personally abusive towards Brexiteers. There's probably been more of that kind of thing in the opposite direction, often couched in "we won - live with it - get over it" terms and the other unscrupulous conduct during the campaign and afterwards seems also to be rather more on the part of Brexiteers than that of Remainers. I suspect also that at least some of the acrimony and aggressiveness characteristic of certain Brexiteers has been fuelled in part by the sheer clumsiness of the present government in failing to see it through and the consequent worry that it might fall apart and never happen.

That said, neither Brexiteers nor Remainers were given anything like enough data on which to base a considered and informed decision, so I imagine that there remains increasing discontent on both sides although most of it not directed at one by the other.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I suspect that either side of the Brexit debate would have been a helluva lot "happier" with a 65/35 democratic decision than the 52/48 outcome.

[ahinton]

I suspect that either side of the Brexit debate would have been a helluva lot "happier" with a 65/35 democratic decision than the 52/48 outcome.

Too right they would! There's more to it all than that, of course, but there's no denying it nonetheless.

[Bryn]

Oh, I just love the way the Brexiteers consider the possibility of a further referendum on the outcome of negotiations to somehow be a denial of democracy.

[ahinton]

Oh, I just love the way the Brexiteers consider the possibility of a further referendum on the outcome of negotiations to somehow be a denial of democracy.

Quite - as though their views are more important than the future of the country for all of its citizens - but then what do any of them know about democracy anyway?

[Richard Barrett]

Oh, I just love the way the Brexiteers consider the possibility of a further referendum on the outcome of negotiations to somehow be a denial of democracy.

I think you mean "some of" the Brexiteers, who are by no means a homogeneous mob of idiots as they're often portrayed.

[Bryn]

I think you mean "some of" the Brexiteers, who are by no means a homogeneous mob of idiots as they're often portrayed.

Not all who voted to leave the EU are best characterised as "Brexiteers". I was referring to those who are.