The Ruling Class

It seems to me it is pretty important to understand just who the ruling class is. It also ought to be pretty straightforward; but it seems it isn't.

I recently mentioned to a left-leaning friend of mine that he and I were members of the ruling class. He reacted badly. In fact, he wrote that I “had a lot of gall” to suggest such a thing of him.

If I was right in saying so, it is odd that he would not know it. But it is even odder, surely, that he would consider the thing an insult. That's surpassingly strange, surely, and suggests immediately that somebody here has things upside down.

Why did I say we were both members of the ruling class? Because we were both well-educated professionals. But perhaps my friend, being a leftist, might have misunderstood. He might have thought I was saying he was a member of the class _Marx_ claimed to be the ruling class: the hated, grubby, money-soiled, lower-class bourgeoisie. After all, besides being a well-educated professional, he was awkwardly also independently wealthy thanks to inheriting part-ownership of a family firm, and also previously owned his own separate profitable national company.

When it comes to an opiate for the intellectuals, Marx is the great enabler—by conjuring up an imaginary ruling class of rich bourgeoisie, a “them,” the real ruling class can exploit and oppress at will without objection, and, even better, without guilt. Just getting a little of their own back from “them.” Even better when the bogus ruling class is a group traditionally looked down on by the real ruling class as far beneath them.

It all looks like a clever and deceitful plan; except that people aren't really that clever, in groups. Everyone is just buying in, as most people mostly do, to the nearest comfortable lie when it is offered, rather than seeking truth. Maybe even Marx himself. When these things look organized, it is not because of some Bavarian Illuminati, it is because the Devil is indeed an independent intelligence. Marxism just happened to be available for the purpose—but, you will note, it is so useful that it is being clung to by the real ruling class long after it has been objectively disproven, for that reason.

The ruling class never changes. It used to never be any secret at all who the ruling class was. The ruling class is, was, and no doubt forever shall be, the educated class. The desk workers, aka “bureacrats,” aka “professionals.”

A Medieval scribe.

When, on the cusp of the French Revolution, the Estates General were summoned by the king for new powers of taxation, we all know that the Third Estate comprised both the bourgeoisie and the common people; but who was the First Estate?

The aristocracy? The Wealthy landowners? Wrong. They were still only number two. The First Estate was the clergy.

Now, don't imagine that, in pre-modern terms, “clergy” meant only those who presided at religious services. “Clergy” in those times meant more or less anyone who could read, write, and keep sums. The big landowners generally couldn't; they could rarely even sign their name. It is worth noting that Prince Charles, not yet king, is the first ever in line for to the British throne with a university education. In these days, moreover, a university degree automatically came with a clerical gown and ordination. All desk-bound or “clerical” work was, as the word implies, done by “clergy,” “clerks,” “clerics.”

That is, the First Estate was the estate, broadly, of knowledge workers; of what we would today call “professionals.”

And they, of course, were the people who actually ran the government, and all the big estates, and all the businesses, all along, regardless of who held ownership. This was necessarily so, since only they knew how.

As in Europe, so too anywhere else in the world. Indeed, the Indian system is the best one to look at for clarity, because it is in India that the system of class or caste is most socially prominent, public, and articulated. Who were and are the highest caste in India? Not the rajahs, who are from the warrior class, the ksatriyas or big leandowners. Certainly not the bourgeoisie, the merchant class, the Vaidyas. It is the Brahmins—the knowledge workers—who emerged out of the head of Brahma. All other castes emerged from his body; only the Brahmins can claim his consciousness.

Who, in turn, are the acknowledged powers in China? In China, historically, there was little room for any landed aristocracy; all land legally belonged to the Emperor. All government power was in the hands of the Mandarinate, the learned class.

Chinese mandarins.

As in all things, seemingly, the New Testament gets this right. In ancient Palestine, whom do Jesus and John the Baptist consistently target and rail against as the as oppressors of the common people? Not the Roman procurator—his position seems almost ceremonial. Not the Roman centurions, nor the tax collectors, who are portrayed as only doing a job. The real power over the average man is obviously wielded by the scribes and Pharisees—the educated class: the professional teachers and those who made a living from their ability to read and write. The Sadducees, a professional priestly class, also figure in prominently, as a sort of upper bureacracy: in modern terms, doctors and scientists as opposed to mere teachers or accountants.

You can find the same ruling class even among hunter-gatherers—as soon as there is any possibility of class at all, the learned class immediately assumes its place of privilege. Most tribes have two distinct leaders: a war leader, and a “medicine man,” who, as the name implies, is the all-purpose professional. He keeps the tribal records and laws, presides at all rituals, tallies up ownerships, and functions if needed as a doctor as well.

In other words, Marx was completely wrong on his two main points: first, in who the ruling class was, and second, in claiming that the ruling class changes over time.

Is the same class ruling over us today? You bet. Suppose, today, some family makes it good in the family business: what is most often their fondest hope? Is it that their son or daughter, too, may become a successful businessperson, although perhaps on a larger scale? Not usually; their hope is that he may move up into the professions. Even Lord Thompson of Fleet, having made it bigger in business than most could imagine, insisted that his son Ken had to attend Cambridge. That was real success. The working class? Every group of workers if they can strives to form themselves, and be recognized, as a “profession.” Who is striving to be recognized as a shopkeeper or a bourgeois? Professionals, brahmins, of course look down on businessmen, on the “greedy” bourgeoisie, as they always have; just as, but even more than, they always looked down on those blustering, ignorant aristocrats. Hence the oddity of being offended by the suggestion that they are part of the “ruling class.”

As to whether the professions really hold all the power, once you get beyond the small family businesses and sole proprietorships that have always defined the bourgeoisie, who is actually running all the big corporations? Professionals: professional managers, professional accountants, professional lawyers, professional engineers. Ownership is usually dispersed, and rarely heard from. Who in turn, is running the government, and all the public services? Professionals: professional managers, professional teachers, professional social workers, professional academics. And whom do we elect, in theory to oversee them and keep them in line? Professionals—lawyers, mostly, with the odd manager, teacher, academic, or social worker.

It would be very funny, if it were not so serious.

Perhaps there is nothing intrinsically evil about a ruling class; or perhaps there is. The attitude of Jesus in the New Testament seems to make no allowances for the possibility that the ruling class of bureaucrats might be either good or necessary. It is, after all, a general principle that all individuals should be left as much as possible to rule themselves; this is the doctrine of human rights. There are great and honourable ethical traditions of this learned class: those of Confucius, Rabbinical Judaism, Hippocrates, the Jesuits, and so forth. But then, other classes can also claim their own great ethical traditions: those of chivalry, Calvin's “Protestant work ethic,” and so forth. The problem with any ruling class is that it seeks power over others, and those who join that ruling class will be those who seek power over others, and seeking power over others is probably intrinsically immoral, a violation of “do unto others....”

And there is definite reason to fear mischief from a structure in which the true ruling class is a matter for concealment.

A professional officer, near a small town in Belgium.

Unfortunately, over the past several centuries, more or less the opposite of what Marx, and indeed most others, have thought to have been happening, has been happening. The ruling class has been gathering more and more power to itself. In the pre-modern era, any tendency by the clerical Brahmin class to overreach could be countered by the landed class, the Ksatriyas. With their power over the military, they could intervene if they felt it necessary. The French Revolution, American Revolution, and English Revolution by and large took out this landed military class. The result was that the professional, clerical class had a much freer hand. Indeed, more or less the immediate result of both the French and the English revolutions was the seizure of the military power by the clerics, and its recasting on “professional” lines, with a professional officer corps: Cromwell's “New Model Army,” Napoleon's “Grand Armee.”

Lord Protector Cromwell, every inch the professional soldier, arrives at Parliament.

So, contrary to popular opinion, these revolutions may have reduced, rather than expanded, the freedom of the ordinary man. Regulations grew, and grew more strict: Cromwell's Puritans banned nearly everything, and Napoleon sought to regulate all phases of national life.

But these revolutions still left the Vaidyas, the merchant class, intact. The Marxist and Fascist revolutions of the Twentieth Century have been attempts to also strip all remaining power from the Vaidyas, the merchant class, aka the bourgeoisie, as well, and give them too to the professionals, leaving the professionals in that much more complete control.

It seems no coincidence, by the way, that the Communists and Fascists have done best in nations where a good education is traditionally most admired: in those most inclined in the first place to give power and prestige to the learned. China, Eastern Europe, then Catholic countries more than Protestant countries.

In the meantime, with or without a formal Marxist or Fascist revolution, the power of governments and their proportion of the GDP has been growing steadily, seemingly inexorably, worldwide throughout the Twentieth Century. Rules and regulations have continued to multiply.

Is there no escape?

Perhaps there is.

Up to this point, technological innovation has by and large only served to increase the power and prestige of the learned. Though new technologies did not necessarily come from the learned class, as technology improved, there tended to be more things to know, and so more need for learned sorts who knew how to operate them. So the professional class has grown richer, more powerful, and more numerous.

But in the end, the educated class exists due to a shortage of knowledge. What happens if knowledge instead is freely available to everyone, more or less at the click of a mouse?

That is what is happening with the Internet. The Internet will no doubt vastly increase the overall store of knowledge available, as did the invention of printing, but it also, vitally, and unlike the invention of printing, makes it instantly searchable. Increasingly, one can find the precise bit of knowledge one needs, right when one needs it.

There is perhaps, therefore, no longer a need for a professional class, really; everyone is capable of doing these things for themselves. Rather than needing to hire an expert on copyright law, who has studied the laws and casebooks and has them at least partly committed to memory, you can in principle get the relevant information, law and cases, for your situation quickly online. Rather than going to a doctor to have your symptoms diagnosed, you can use an expert system online. Knowing what your ailment is, you can fairly quickly become a more current expert on possible treatments than your doctor.

You may have noticed that Marx's third class, the proletatiat, the manual labourers, has largely disappeared in the most developed countries, instead of multiplying as he predicted, since he wrote. No doubt, in the early stages of the process, it looked as though they were growing. Technology instead made them largely obsolete, replacing much manual labour with machinery.

Just so, computers can replace much mental labour with machinery, probably over time making the professional class start to vanish.

We seem to be seeing this effect already. We are witnessing, it seems, the rapid decline and fall of the “legacy media,” which is to say, the “profession” of journalism. This makes sense: journalists are the first line of the keepers of the knowledge hoard, the daily disseminators of knowledge. They are no longer needed.

The rise of the Tea Party looks as though it is the beginning of a similar collapse in the power of professional politicians.

Teachers, too, are starting to feel the heat; Chris Christie in New Jersey is getting a lot of political milage out of challenging their unions.

Other, higher-level professions will probably follow. Real estate agents are about as useful now as elevator operators. General medical practitioners are only a shade better off, absent their legal monopoly on prescriptions—and the rising cost of health care should go far to bust that trust.

It might seem ironic that the world of the “knowledge professional” would collapse just at the moment when they seem to have reached the apex of their power, and everyone and their agent is striving to become a professional. But that is the way these things often are. Overreaching is part of the usual process. The French monarchy, too, fell just as it had seemingly consolidated everything under a Sun King, who could claim, “L'etat, c'est moi.”

If the ruling professional class actually falls, for the first time in human history, what will be left? And what will we all do for a living? That's a good question. Leonard Cohen may have been a true prophet in singing, back in the early nineties, “Democracy is coming—to the USA.” Who knows? We may see, for the first time, a direct, participatory democracy. The truth is, this is now for the first time ever truly feasible, thanks to the connectivity of the Internet. But that is secondary; the greater breakthrough would be a reversal of the trend towards greater government regulation.