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Can We Escape the Ruling Class? |
Nature of a Ruling Class
We tend to think of the "ruling class" as a Marxist concept; but the notion has a long history before Marx, particularly in the ancient Greek and Roman historians, and class analysis played a central role in 18th and 19th century classical liberalism as well. Whenever the decisions and actions of the political machinery are largely controlled by a particular group, and serve to advance the interests and reinforce the power of that group, such a group is properly called a ruling class. A ruling class is, obviously, a bad thing to have. This raises two questions:
• How does a ruling class operate and maintain its power?
• Is it possible to construct a political system that will not fall prey to a ruling class?
With regard to the first question: I do not believe that a ruling class needs to exercise its will or advance its interests consciously. That does often happen, of course. But what more usually happens, I think, is that as various policies are proposed or adopted in the governmental arena, those that adversely affect powerful, influential, and concentrated interests will get noticed and vigorously attacked, while those that affect the average person — too busy to keep track of what the government is doing, to poor to hire lawyers and lobbyists, too dispersed to have an effective voice — will be largely unopposed. This creates a kind of filter mechanism, that strains out legislation that harms the powerful, while allowing legislation that harms the weak to pass unhindered. The result, whether intended or unintended, is that government power tends to be turned more and more, by a kind of malign invisible hand, in the direction of advancing the interests of the powerful at the expense of the interests of the weak.
Bureaucrats and Plutocrats
A ruling class need not be monolithic, however. In fact, most ruling classes are divided into two broad factions, which we may call the political class and the corporate class. The political class comprises those who are in direct control of running the state — politicians, civil servants, and the like; the corporate class, on the other hand, comprises the wealthy quasi-private beneficiaries of state power — the collectors of subsidies, government contracts, and grants of monopoly privilege. These two groups might be called the Bureaucrats and the Plutocrats.
These two wings of the ruling class have similar interests, and they work together. But their interests are not identical, and each side strives to become the dominant partner in the relationship. When the political class gains the upper hand, the polity tends toward socialism; when the corporate class gets the upper hand, it tends toward fascism. In the United States today, each of the two major political parties works (mostly unintentionally, through the invisible hand process discussed above) to advance the interests of both wings of the ruling class — but the Democrats tend to lean more toward the Bureaucrats, while the Republicans lean more to the Plutocrats.
This model serves as a remarkably good predictor of Republican and Democratic policies. High taxes on the poor are in the interest of both ruling parties, and so both parties in practice enact these, whatever their rhetoric. But high taxes on the rich benefit the political class at the expense of the corporate class, so Republicans support and Democrats oppose a capital gains tax cut. On the health care issue, Democrats favor socialized medicine — giving the political class control over health care — while Republicans favor the status quo — keeping health care largely in the hands of quasi-private beneficiaries of state privilege, like insurance companies and the AMA. (A genuine free market in health care is the last thing either faction wants to see.) Both sides have an interest in gun control, in order to keep the subject population disarmed and docile, but for the corporate class this interest is partly offset by the interest that weapons manufacturers have in keeping guns available; thus Democrats are strongly for, and Republicans are weakly against, gun control. And so on. Thus most of the major political debates in this country are merely squabbles within the ruling class.
If we abolish the state, will the ruling class vanish along with it? Or will the ruling class survive (or a new ruling class emerge) and succeed in reestablishing the power of the state?
The political class would certainly perish together with the state; but what of the corporate class?
It is generally agreed that a ruling class and a powerful state are mutually reinforcing influences; a powerful state bolsters the power of the ruling class, while the ruling class uses its power and influence to maintain the state. But are these causal connections ironclad laws of natural sociology, ones that we can do nothing about, or are they mere tendencies that can be kept in check by sufficient vigilance?
Class analysis has traditionally taken two forms. The socialist version, pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Karl Marx, holds that the ruling class is the dominant factor; the ruling class does not need a powerful state in order to arise, but will arise spontaneously from free competition; once it has arisen, it creates or captures the state apparatus in order to pursue its goals. Once socialist radicals get their hands on the state apparatus and use it to abolish free competition, the ruling class will vanish, and the state will have no tendency to breed a new ruling class, but can instead be used for enlightened ends.
The classical liberal version of class analysis, pioneered by Adam Smith, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Augustin Thierry, Benjamin Tucker, and Lysander Spooner, holds a diametrically opposed position. A ruling class does not arise through free competition; it is created by state power. So long as a powerful state remains in place, abolishing the ruling class will do no good, since it will simply be replaced by another. Thus the socialists attempt to resolve the problem by focusing their attack on private economic power, while the classical liberals tend to focus their attack instead on centralized political power. For the socialists, we do not need to worry too much about the state, so long as we eliminate socioeconomic stratification; for the classical liberals, we do not need to worry too much about socioeconomic stratification, so long as we severely curtail the power of the state.
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