Ruling Classes

The history of shifting political alliances

“Thus, rights originate: recognized and guaranteed degrees of power. If the proportions of power are changed drastically, rights pass away, and new rights come to be…”

-Nietzsche, The Dawn

The Political Question is: Who Shall Rule?

The only sane answer is twofold:

1. Whoever can, and

2. Whoever wants to bad enough

We often think of society in Manichean terms: Haves vs. Have-Nots, Rulers vs. Ruled. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it leaves far too much truth on the cutting room floor to be useful. In reality, a society is dominated not by one ruling class, but by several, who form alliances of mutual interest to maintain power. Power is defined as control over a societal lynchpin: truth and tradition, resources and wealth, war and violence. No one class can control all of these.

Indeed, the best definition of a class is functional: what is it that you do? What need do you fulfill within society? Consider the following breakdown:

• Landowners/Aristocracy - control land, study war and dominate it

• Burgesses/Merchants - control trade, finance, and mechanical production

• Clerisy/Academia - control truth and law/tradition

• Artisans - produce goods

• Freeholders/Yeomanry - produce food

• The Circus (media and entertainment) - produce distraction and public information

• Proletariat - sell their labor

The top three are ruling classes, the rest are ruled.

These classes have always existed, because all of them fulfill necessary functions. The Marxist mistake is to believe that any class can be eradicated. They are atomic, essential. Their functions can be absorbed by others, but the need will always remain, and the speed with which the Soviet industrial nomenklatura became the Russian industrial “oligarchs” undermines everything about Marxist theory. To critique a thing is not to overthrow it.

Revolution is not, as commonly believed, the replacement of a ruling class, or of political institutions. Revolutions are the rearrangement of alliances between ruling classes.

In bronze age societies, warrior kings often shared power with institutional priesthoods. The kings and their armies provided security, and the priests provided legitimacy and record-keeping. The mercantile class had access, but with war providing a steady supply of slave labor (slaves and urban proletariat in ancient societies were often joined at the hip, if not synonymous), they could not overthrow the warrior caste.

In ancient Rome, power was shared between the Senators (aristocracy) and the Equites (who functioned as burgesses). These two groups organized public institutions (including religion. Rome had no separate priestly caste) as an alliance of clans, allowing minimal buy-in from other classes, usually expressed in term of the franchise. Roman political history is a series of compromises between the Senatorial-Equite axis and the people.

The European Middle Ages was a functioning alliance between the Church and the aristocracy of the Germanic people who settled in the Roman Empire. Every part of Medieval culture reflects the relationship between an institutional Christian clergy and a landowning warrior aristocracy. They got along as well as they had to in order to control what they needed to, each using the other to get what they needed.

Modern (1800-present) society is an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the manifold Clerisy: academia/education, the scientific research establishment, the legal and medical professions, all funneling their energies towards organizing Truth, Law, and Policy. The federal government of the United States is itself a gigantic Clerical establishment, controlling huge funds and exercising regulatory control over all aspects of life, with minimal oversight from elected officials, who in any case are dependent for their roles on remaining within boundaries of acceptable discourse and the good graces of captains of industry. By these people, we are ruled.

The collapse of aristocracy is the central political event of the last two centuries. Landed warriors, having independent power of action, having a sense of pride and of responsibility, a sense of greatness, made life very difficult for the men of Commerce. They are gone now, and we feel their loss in ways we cannot calculate. What are Superheroes, but a longing for those great enough to be beyond the categories of normal men? Not for nothing do they wear capes and insignia, not for nothing do they inhabit lairs cut off from the rest of us. They represent the thing we destroyed, the thing we want to forget.

But the past is past. The world before 1800 is not returning. This is a Machine Age, it will have Machine politics. Marx was a terrible economist and a preposterous prophet, but he had useful insights. We are ruled by a set of ideas called Science, and the resources of the bourgeoisie. Until a separate class is able to claim a share of power, or a separate narrative to institutional Science challenges the academic clerisy, little is likely to change.

The downside, of course, is that the academic-bourgeois axis is not a ruling alliance that creates stability within a society. Science is not ordered but chaotic, an ongoing intellectual overturning. What Science holds today, Science abandons tomorrow. Only the doomsday cultists of the so-called Environmental Movement could ever believe science was settled. By the same token, capitalism, the system of the bourgeois unleashed, calls for ever more growth, ever more profit. Stasis and order is death to Wall Street.

Totalitarian political parties, of either the left or right varieties, are best understood as an attempt to create a new clerisy, one centralized and based on positive ideology, rather than the current decentralized clerisy, based on the via negativa. The only distinction between left-totalitarianism and right-totalitarianism is what they posit as the atomic core of society. Marxists, as stated above, believe they can abolish all classes but the workers, and founder on the failure of workers to be ready to rule. The Party, intended as a mere Revolutionary Vanguard, opening the way for the Proletariat to walk through, becomes a permanent Clerisy obliged to organize production, finance, war, and truth. The strain either breaks it, or forces it to concede resource power to a chastened and regulated bourgeoisie, as in China.

Right-totalitarianism, commonly known as Fascism, and focuses on national or racial identity as the central theme. Fascism tends to take one of two forms: what I call strong-party or weak-party. In the Strong Party form, the fascist movement struggles to overthrow the state and succeeds, whereupon it allies itself to the institutional military, suborns the bourgeoisie, and makes some attempt to allay the struggles of the lower classes. Both Italian Fascists and German Nazis ruled in this manner. What destroys them is their inability to grow beyond the party’s institutional narrative of struggle. Having conquered, having cast aside all notions of political propriety in favor of Will to Power, they must remain conquering. Imperialist war and all the dangers thereof ensue.

Weak-party fascism is when the party is a fig leaf for military/aristocratic or bourgeois interests. The party is created by the powerful, rather than overcoming the powerful. These are the regimes of strongmen, brought to power by swift coups d’etat, who linger for decades, appropriating wealth and throwing communists off of helicopters. They do best in places where aristocratic landowning and military traditions retain a ghostly presence, such as Spain and Latin America.

All of these attempts to break the Academic/Bourgeois alliance have failed to find the proper balance. They are too Revolutionary, too determined to Solve Politics forever, to create a stable regime. Politics cannot be solved, because humanity cannot be solved. Politics is the result of the irrationality of man, the attempt by man to rationalize his way out of his irrationality. All systems that man create have shelf lives. The proper study of politics, as the eternal attempt to find balance among class interests, has only begun.