Tag: dystopia

The ruling class – the oligarchy, aka the plutocracy, aka the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC); aka the leaders of ‘they’.

Preamble

Is the Great Reset, underpinned by its much vaunted Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), a class war? If so, what class are you in and will you survive? How should we define class in modern Western economies dominated by the ‘service’ sector? Does class matter anymore?

I want to reassert David Hughes’ view that this is indeed a class war. ‘Twas ever thus, but it has entered a new and decisive phase – a final top-down revolution, if they succeed. Hughes describes it as “an undeclared global class war… aimed at the controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy, a novel, bio-digital form of totalitarianism.” Correct, notwithstanding that liberal democracy was always an illusion. The illusion is now being dispensed with, although the language of ‘democracy’ persists in the way that uplifting music was sometimes played to accompany a concentration camp inmate to his execution.

Normies love to indignantly ask us “what do you mean by ‘they’?”, when we use the pronoun to loosely refer to the psychopaths who govern us and their eager minions. It seems to me that the main objective of class analysis ought to be to systematically arrive at an understanding of who is being screwed by whom in modern industrialised societies. This tool was developed and perfected by the Left, so it beggars belief when a mainstream leftie, and idiot, asks, “Who is this ‘they’? I believe that looking at the Great Reset through the lens of class is an effective way to identify this ‘they’. It also helps to highlight how ‘they’ make fools of us by using class to divide and rule.

What does it mean to be working or middle class today? If the Great Reset is a class war, and you are neither working class nor owning class, whose side are you on? One’s economic status, the type of work one does, conflicts between and within the individual, and whose interests you serve in acting and thinking in certain ways are paramount in answering these questions.

I won’t use terms like ‘petite bourgeoisie’, except in this one sentence. I’d love to, but I don’t want this Idiot’s Guide to look like it was written by an idiot, as defined at the start. What I’ll try to do instead is use recent articles by John Spritzler and Brett Scott as a springboard for my thoughts on other people’s interesting thoughts about class and its relevance to the 4IR.

It should go without saying that you should not interpret this piece as a full endorsement of Spritzler’s or Scott’s ideas, as interesting and stimulating as they are. Nor should you interpret this piece as me putting words into their mouths. If you want to know what Scott and Spritzler think, read their pieces, which I will link in due course. If you’re vaguely interested in what I think, continue reading this piece!

You might want to think of this piece as the first in a series about who the ultimate global hegemon is. Approaching the question through the lens of class is a way of analysing the mess we’re in from a systems or structural perspective, as opposed to listing organisations, people, victims and dastardly acts. I have stated in previous pieces who I think wields the most power in world affairs, but I haven’t fully made the case for it, so I will continue to do so with more evidence. I’m now reasonably certain that until we are fully cognisant of who or what wields the most power, we risk misinterpreting the actions of the subsidiary hegemonic powers beneath it.

Like football, this guide will be a game of two halves:

· Some big-picture thoughts about class, and in particular the middle class, whom I plan to give a bit of a kicking. I think it’s deserved and long overdue, but don’t take it personally. It’s directed as much at myself as anyone else.

· In part II, I’ll ponder divide-and-rule, again through a class lens, and why it matters.

First, some overarching thoughts about class and my own somewhat conflicted position. In examining the boundary between the working and middle class, traditional class analysis up to the late 1970s did not ignore economic status, but placed greater emphasis on politicised ideas of class based on identity, exploitation, and domination. From the 1970s onwards, a shift coinciding with the rise of neo-liberal economics transformed class analysis into a technical issue of measurement. That said, class analysis has not successfully adapted to spiralling levels of income inequality accompanied by neo-liberal market forces.

This has led to what Mike Savage terms the “paradox of class” – people’s subjective class membership or identity declining as social inequality increased. We have essentially become more confused about class, and I discuss this more in Part II where it is most relevant to the issue of divide and rule. There is another paradox forced by the exigencies of neo-liberalism. The intellectual Left was fooled into thinking class didn’t matter anymore; that the class war was over. It was in fact merely entering a new phase. At precisely the moment the intellectual Left should have doubled down, it sold out. But then again, the reason for this, as John Spritzler argues very convincingly, is that intellectuals on both the left and right have always despised ordinary people. They have always despised the working poor.

The problem of class identity has not gone away, and nor has class utility for the ruling class. This somewhat facetious guide does not attempt to disentangle that mess, but to rather propose a way of moving past it with the objective of uniting all of us against the ruling class, who have strengthened their position by blurring the boundaries between middle and working class. ‘They’ are still the problem from the perspective of resistance to the Great Reset and 4IR.

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