Can the people run the state?
As we have traced the course of history from tribalism to socialism after World War Two, we have only made fleeting reference to elites. Every culture has had elites. Elites are the people Marx referred to when he commented that the history of the world was the history of class struggle. Elites are the people who take more of what the workers produce than the workers themselves. In our modern world this includes our politicians and many public servants.
A state with much more public involvement if we ever get that far, will have people doing important work but they will be there by public approval, there will be no “status” or economic advantage to be had by being in parliament and indeed leaving the important state jobs or institutions will be no more a wrench or humiliation than changing work place. It certainly will not be like it is now with the spectacle of the powerful clinging on to rank, position and wealth after events like Brexit threaten their status. The state will therefore not have a separate identity from the people and power will be evenly balanced between the working people, who hold it and those who exercise it on their behalf.
Modern elites are not there because of historical accident as in feudal times or because they are talented scientists or businesspeople (whatever they might like us to believe) or because they are especially moral. They are there because they have party based political networks and influence. This is the legacy of the capitalist system retaining feudal power structures that were easily taken over by an ambitious bureaucratic state. With a modern economy reliant on government investment, the political state, rather than an economic elite, becomes the elite. Workers continue to be shut out of the political system by a new class of bourgeois socialist.
The people who take advantage of opportunities to enter the governing class do so out of concern about unfairness and inequality. However, a guilty conscience (11) is what their concern usually amounts to. They are unlikely to see their own privileged political and salary status, or their elitism more generally as a problem. They maintain a consciousness (12) based on their own privilege which prevents them seeing that their privilege occurs at the expense of the ordinary worker. Look at the pay of British Broadcasting Corporation ‘talent’ and the pay of the average licence fee payer, or the salary of an MP relative to the minimum wage.
So, the political and economic elite fret about the disadvantages faced by workers whilst ignoring how they have used the supposedly liberating principles of the once capitalist free society to feather their own economic and political nest. Karl Marx was the first to describe these people as bourgeois socialists. People who will fret about social unfairness but are happy to overlook economic unfairness if it benefits them to do so. It is a double standard, exactly what characterised the Victorian bourgeoisie with their use of contract, choice and consent to mask what was clearly the exploitation of the working people.
Modern bourgeois socialism therefore is an obstacle to economic and political progress as it ignores widespread political and economic unfairness but divides the working class using the trickery of identity politics to break the bonds that tie the world’s working people together. Working people of the world should unite against planet destroying economic unfairness but we cannot because we are differentiated by religion, sexuality, nationality and race. The bourgeois socialist elite might have the right values as they believe in Contract, Choice and Consent but they believe for ordinary workers the accent should be on exercising our rights not through acquiring greater economic equality or political power, but through nailing our identity. Other nations (and some people within our own nation) continue to be exposed to compulsion, coercion and control and this is not questioned by our elite seemingly happy to accommodate this outrage in the interests of diversity.
The elite need to be dealt with, not this time by a bloody revolution but by simply allowing “the people” the Blue-Collar workers of the world to determine how access to state power is gained, managed and maintained and this can be done through existing political arrangements. The arrangements just need tweaking! Basically, the current state works on behalf of a bourgeois elite and not for the people who pay for the state via their direct and indirect taxation. Because of this shortfall in influence modern government lacks legitimacy.
The problem of the state’s lack of legitimacy can be easily resolved but it must start with the workers of the western world uniting in the common cause of bringing an end to an economic and political system based on elitism, unfairness and identity. We must ignore the entreaties of the Bourgeois elites to engage us in petty sectarian squabbles over ‘identity’ and through democratic means bring down once and for all the elitist thinking that keeps us paying to support political systems over which we have no control.
SUMMARY
The capitalist system created rights to contract, make choices and consent. These were originally legal and economic principles, but they have now become social in character, we use them in daily life. In the past the political elite extended these principles to more people to protect their economic system capitalism from revolution but now they only allow us to use them in the sphere of identity politics not the politics that governs us from Westminster or the White House. They are as unfair to us as the original capitalists, the so-called bourgeoisie, who hundreds of years ago exploited workers in factories. The new political elite do not want us to enjoy greater economic and political equality as their status would diminish.
