The New Class

Introduction - Draft Chapter One

THE NEW CLASS

Introducing the New Class

                   This book might have been called The Mystery of the Missing Class, or The Curious Case of the Invisible Class, or perhaps The Class With No Name.  Strangely, an entire social class has managed to go almost completely unnoticed.  It is not to be found in history books or in newspaper articles.  It is missing from academic and public discourse. Even the Marxists, who see the world entirely through the lens of class, have failed to spot it.

       It is odder still that this particular social class should be anonymous and invisible, because it is large, loud, unashamed, and bossy. It is the most powerful class in society. It is the class that constitutes the Establishment. It is nothing less than the ruling class. And it is the most formidable and zealous enemy of free-market capitalism and individual freedom.

       The problem of this missing class first occurred to me in the late 1990s, when I visited an anti-capitalist ‘climate’ rally in London.  In the pretty, leafy area of Blackheath, I wandered in a throng of militant Greens setting up their tents and vegan-food stalls, preparing to march on the wicked financial area, the City of London, to smash up a few banks and decry the horrors of free-trade and industrial capitalism.  The protesters demanded higher taxes, more government-spending, and more regulation.  That evening they appeared on TV.  As the reporter observed, these angry anti-capitalist radicals were articulate, cultured and well-spoken. They all seemed university-educated. Their accents were, for want of a better word, posh.

Here’s the puzzle. According to the Socialists, it is ‘the working-class’ who have most to gain by the overthrow of capitalism.  It is the workers who are under the heel of the capitalist bosses, and are most cruelly exploited and downtrodden. It is the workers who are expected to be the agents of social change, rising up and throwing off their chains.

But where, I wondered, at this anti-capitalist ‘climate’ jamboree, were the heroic, muscle-bound, lantern-jawed proletarians?  I went about the heath in search of them. Where were the massed ranks of bricklayers and stevedores? Where were the dockers, miners, truckers, crane-drivers, where were the workers from the factories and the building sites and steel mills and railways and ports? Where were the hairdressers and cleaners and the folk who fill shelves at supermarkets?  I could find no-one even vaguely resembling any of the above. Not a single one. These oppressed toilers, I guessed, must be sanguine about the imminent threat of ‘catastrophic climate change.’ For some reason they were not animated by any burning desire to overturn modern industrial consumer society.  In the grand battle between fat capitalist bosses and oppressed proletarians, the workers appeared to have forgotten their allotted role. They were slacking. Overthrow capitalism? Leave it to someone else. Let George do it.

But if these protesters were not working-class insurgents, who were they?  Or as a Marxist would ask, to what social class did they belong?

Looking at the most prominent champions of the Green cause in Britain, it is striking how many upper-class Green anti-capitalists there are: the Old Etonians, aristocrats and royals who think industrial capitalism is messing up the countryside and upturning traditional ways. We will hear more about these reactionary, aristocratic anti-capitalists later. But though the aristo greens make a loud noise, their number is not large - not enough to account for the hundreds assembled on Blackheath. Who are the others?

       The protesters cannot simply be labelled “middle class” because one particular section of the middle class was also nowhere to be seen. The commercial middle class had failed to send a single delegate. There was no-one who looked like a fishmonger or butcher or mortgage-broker or used-car dealer. There was no-one who could pass for a builders-merchant, or bank manager, or someone who worked in marketing and sales or sold insurance or double-glazing.  These practical grafters I guessed were too busy doing capitalism.  No, it is clear that the commercial middle class is quite out of sympathy with these high-minded, anti-capitalist radicals. So what social class are we left with? 

       There is, in fact, a name for the group assembled at the Climate rally, though it is rarely used. The protesters were members, or on their way to becoming members, of the New Class.

       It is not a very good name. It does nothing, on the surface, to describe the nature of the group to which it refers. And, looking back into history, this class is not at all new. But until we dream up a better name, we’re stuck with it.

       Ever heard of the New Class?  Almost certainly not. Most professional political scientists and sociologists, if you mention it to them, will look puzzled and shrug their shoulders. But there are a few commentators who have made reference to this ‘new class’ albeit in passing. The conservative writer Irving Kristol in 1978 attempted to make a list of the kind of people who belong to it. ‘This “new class” is not easily defined but may be vaguely described.  It consists of a goodly proportion of those college-educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a “post-industrial society” (to use Daniel Bell’s convenient term).  We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of larger foundations, the upper levels of government bureaucracy and so on. It is by now, a quite numerous class … it is a disproportionately powerful class, it is also an ambitious and frustrated class.’^[1] 

       We can all see what Kristol is getting at. We know that people in certain kinds of job tend to hold similar views. We know that if we are at an intellectual dinner party with academics and people who run art galleries, we are likely to hear different views on, say, gun-control or ‘climate chaos’, than from guys in a sports bar working in sales, construction and haulage.

       But does that put Kristol’s gang into a different social class? Americans, in particular, are reluctant to recognise or talk about class.  It offends against the spirit of individualism and of easy social fluidity, which has been such an admirable feature of American capitalism. Americans instead prefer to categorise people by how they think. To Americans, ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’ are just people who happen to hold those views.

        This is a grave mistake. It is not an accident that certain sections of society think in certain ways. A particular ideology tends to reflect the material self-interest of the group or class that espouses it. This is an important distinction. It means that it is quite futile to try to overturn the worldview of a particular class - the New Class - simply by force of reasoned argument. No matter how absurd or damaging its views are, a class will cling onto them, feverishly, doggedly, because its very livelihood and existence depends on it.

       It will be argued here that the group described above by Kristol is indeed a social class, in the fullest sense. Members of this class are remarkably conscious of their affinity with other members, they strongly identify with one another politically, culturally and intellectually, and they act, as a class, in a co-ordinated and determined way to pursue their goals. They consider themselves separate from and opposed to other classes. The ideology and worldview of this group, taken as a whole, is consistent, predictable and intractable. And those of us who value individual freedom and property rights, whether we know it or not, are at war with this class.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The term ‘New Class’ was originally used to describe the bureaucratic ruling elite in Communist Russia. In 1945, in his Open Society & its Enemies, Karl Popper describes the new ruling class which establishes itself after a Communist coup: ‘those of the revolutionary leaders who have survived the struggle and the various purges, together with their staff, will form a New Class: the new ruling class of the new society, a kind of new aristocracy or bureaucracy; and it is most likely that they will attempt to hide this fact.’^[2]

       The term was picked up by Milan Djilas, a Yugolsav Communist dissident. Djilas had been born into a poor peasant family, rose through the ranks of the communist party and ended up vice-president in Tito's communist government. But Djilas was appalled by the socialist system that he himself had helped bring into being.  Socialism was not, he realised, the victory of ‘the working class.’ Like Popper, he saw that it was the victory of a new oppressive, parasitic, bureaucratic elite.  Djilas managed to smuggle out of Yugoslavia the manuscript of a book, and in 1957 it was published in America, ‘The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System.’

It was a cruel irony, he observed, that the Communist revolution, the proclaimed aim of which was to abolish all classes, had led to the complete authoritarian rule by this one New Class. For the New Class, he said, it was vital that it should deny its own existence. ‘This,’ says Djilas, ‘is the biggest deception the class must accomplish.’ It cannot admit to having a set of interests other than, and opposed to others, rather: ‘the new class must show that its interests are exclusively and ideally the aim of society.’^[3]  Though this New Class claims to act for the workers, in reality it does the exact opposite. ‘The monopoly which the new class establishes in the name of the working class over the whole of society is, primarily, a monopoly over the working class itself.’^[4]  The source of power for this new class is public administration - its power to regulate and control everybody else, ‘the new class finds itself unavoidably at war with everything which it does not administer or handle, and must deliberately aspire to destroy or conquer it.’^[5]  As a result, ‘the new class opposes any type of freedom.’ 

The New Class, he says, has a ‘voracious and insatiable’ hunger for power.  He says ‘No other class in history has been as cohesive and single-minded in defending itself and controlling that which it holds.’  And this includes control of speech and thought.  Djilas speaks of ‘the dark, intolerant and all-inclusive might of the new class’  He clearly has a low opinion of them.  He calls them ‘robot-bureaucrats’ and ‘characterless wretches and stupid defenders of arid formulas’, ‘self-centred cowards’ with ‘the intolerant and Pharisaical morals of a privileged caste’, ‘willing to renounce everything decent and truthful and moral, to defend their power, the power of the ruling hierarchy.’

The Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe were appalled that Djilas had outed the ruling elite in this way, and what’s more had the nerve to use Marxist class analysis to do it.  For daring to publish his book, Djilas, who had once been tipped as Tito’s successor, was sentenced to seven years in prison.

So much for the New Class in the Communist East.  What about the capitalist West? We do not live under a one-party Communist regime, and yet, in the industrial West, in the 20th the Century, there has been an enormous expansion in the size of the state, which has led to the growth of a new powerful group which bears striking and worrying similarities to the one described by Djilas.

A year after Djilas’ book came out, J. K. Galbraith published his famous The Affluent Society, in which he observed, with extreme satisfaction, that just such a ‘New Class’ had emerged in the West: ‘There can be little question that in the last hundred years, and even in the last few decades, the New Class has increased enormously in size … While virtually no one leaves it, thousands join it every year.’^[6] 

As Galbraith observed, in America, Britain and elsewhere, governments were assuming ever more responsibility for, and control over their various economies and the lives of their citizens. It was this that was bringing into being a ‘new class’, which ‘owes its modern expansion and eminence to the requirements of the planning system.’ And what’s more he says this new class is conscious of itself, and deeply aware of its own interests: ‘the New Class seeks energetically to perpetuate itself.’^[7]

BIG GOVERNMENT, NEW CLASS

The sheer scale of the expansion of government in the last hundred years is too often ignored, its significance overlooked.  In America, in the first half of the 19^th Century, before the Civil War, total government spending in America (federal, state and local combined) did not ever reach as much as 5 percent of GDP.  Even after the Civil War, total government spending did not reach 8 percent, until the outbreak of the First World War. In 1871, other than postal workers, the federal government employed just 14,000 people - so few they could have fitted into Arsenal football stadium four times over, with a few thousand seats left empty. Even at the beginning of the 20^th Century several companies in the U.S employed more people, each, than the American government.^[8] There was no income tax.

As Alan Greenspan describes, “Washington D.C. was one of the world’s sleepiest capital cities: there was no Federal Reserve to look after the country’s money, no Department of Education, Commerce and the rest of it. The inhabitant of the White House had precious little to do and, if for some strange reason he got it in his mind to do something, nobody to help him do it: President Cleveland had to answer the telephone himself, just as he had to open his own front door.”^[9]

In Britain, likewise, until the First World War, the British state was so small it was barely noticeable.  As AJP Taylor says, “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any part of the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home.”^[10] State spending, as in America, was no more than 8 percent of national income (and even this was a shocking increase on the levels seen in the previous century). Even by 1911, by which time the state had started to grow, a mere 1.7 percent of the workforce was engaged in public administration (compared to 38 percent employed in manufacturing).^[11]

For both America and Britain both, it was the First World War which shattered this world of low-tax, small-state, individual freedom.  The First and Second World Wars were ‘total’ wars, in which Western governments, to varying degrees, assumed control of almost every aspect of social and economic life. Individual privately-owned companies began to be viewed collectively as ‘industries’, to be measured and regulated in the public interest. Governments dictated production goals and quotas and pricing, they assumed control of imports and exports, they took charge of agriculture and transport and distribution. Governments greatly expanded public welfare and public health, and, to plan and administer this great endeavour, a large number of new ministries, departments, committees and organisations sprang up.

In Britain, in the space of just four years, 1916-1920, the government set up the Ministry of Reconstruction, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Pensions, Ministries of Munitions and Shipping, the Forestry Commission, the Joint Industrial Councils, the Department for Science and Industrial Research, the Medical Research Council. In the years following there came the National Industrial Board, the Central Electricity Board, Agricultural Wages Board, the Railway and Canal Commission, the Spindles Board (to oversee the cotton industry), the Coal Mines Board, the Potato Marketing Board, the Milk Marketing Board, the Bacon and Pig Marketing Boards, the British Broadcasting Corporation the British Oversees Airways Corporation, and so on, and so on. And this was all before the Second World War, which further greatly expanded Britain’s state bureaucracy.

This extraordinary extension in the size and scope of the state created vast numbers of new tax-consuming jobs. To inform this enlarged planning administration, data had to be collected and studied, reports written, strategy reviewed, performance measured. In 1948, the political economist John Jewkes described the growing number of government personnel: ‘Each Government department working within a integrated plan finds it needs advice on each part of the plan. It must, therefore, accumulate specialists on every conceivable subject under the sun.’ Legions of statisticians and economists had to be trained, general managers, accountants, personnel officers - clerks of every kind - had to be hired.  ‘The economic plan must not merely be drawn up, it must be enforced: the staff required for enforcement may be larger than that for preparing the plan.’^[12] When problems occurred, new committees had to be formed to make further reports and recommendations. Jewkes observed in awe, ‘The British Government in pursuing its policy, has been forced to tolerate over 2,000,000 workers in National and Local Government in a period of the most acute shortage of labour.’ This vast number of public-sector workers, he pointed out, constituted a new self-interested social group, ‘Each official represents a vested interest in planning.’^[13]

In America, likewise, the First World War saw the creation of the War Industries Board, with its Price Fixing Committee which determined industrial production and prices, the War Labor Board, the Shipping Board, the Railway Administration, the Food Administration, the Fuel administration, and so on. As with the UK, the end of war saw some retreat of government power, but not all the way, and not for long. The New Deal saw an explosion in the number of new government agencies: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), Farm Credit Administration (FCA), Farm Security Administration (FSA), Civil Works Administration (CWA), Federal Works Agency (FWA), Public Works Administration (PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA), National Recovery Administration (NRA), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and many more. So many they collectively became known as the Alphabet Agencies. And with the Second World War came a further wave of government administration.

In 1941 James Burnham wrote about ‘the widening control by government of more and more parts and features of the economy’ and ‘the growth in the number of “bright young men”, of trained and educated and ambitious youth, who set out for careers in the government, not as politicians in the old sense, but as managers in the various agencies and bureaus in all the myriad fields where they now operate.’^[14] In 1944, the economist Ludwig von Mises marvelled how ‘new offices and government agencies thrive like mushrooms.’^[15]

In these decades vast rivers of government money began to flow, not only directly into public administration, but also into funding what became known as ‘the Third Sector’ - of research institutes and universities and charities and a range of other ‘non-governmental organisations’, into (in Britain) the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (later the Arts Council), the Social Science Research Council (later the Economic and Social Research Council), and countless others, to create what would soon be talked about as the (publicly-funded) arts and science establishments. These various organisations all have their own bureaucracies. They rely on public-funding. They do not function as private companies operating under the discipline of market forces. They owe their existence to the notion that government should oversee, guide, promote and regulate.

It has now reached a point that, both in the U.S. and U.K., more than twice as many people are employed by the government as are employed in manufacturing. And this does not include the many others whose jobs depend indirectly on government-funding. This staggering fact alone would have left any ordinary 19^th Century American or Briton gasping in utter disbelief.

What to call this emerging caste or group?  Eisenhower, in his famous farewell presidential address, warned not only about the ‘military-industrial complex’ but also a tax-hungry ‘scientific-technological elite’. Galbraith talked about the rise of a publicly-funded ‘educational and scientific estate’. Daniel Bell, in his Post-Industrial Society, describes the rise of a publicly-funded ‘technical intelligentsia.’  Still today, we talk of the ‘technocratic elite’, an amorphous group, that we suspect is operating above our heads and beyond our control.

Other terms are thrown about - Americans refer to the Swamp, that fetid world of self-seeking lobbyists, subsidy-junkies and tax-munchers, centred in Washington DC.  We also speak of the Blob, that ill-defined obstructive, malignant presence, which includes (but is not limited to) the senior civil service. 

None of these will do.  They are too vague (the very term blob, reflects the difficulty of understanding and defining the beast), and they fail to convey the size, power and ambition of the group to which they allude.

The New Class is more than just another chiselling special-interest group, on a par with ‘Big Finance’, ‘Big Oil’ or the Trades Union movement.  It is an entire, awesome social class in the proper Marxist sense. When Marxists speak of a social class they refer to a section of society with the power and aspiration to define society as a whole, with the potential to determine the course of history. The capitalist class (say the Marxists) created capitalist society. The feudal warrior class defined feudalism.  The success or failure of such a class decides the fate of human relationships on a profound level.  What is vital to understand is that the New Class aspires to create, and indeed has succeeded in creating, a new kind of society. As Burnham correctly foresaw in 1941, ‘We live in a period of rapid transition from one type of society to another.’^[16]  The rising class of bureaucrats, whose job it was to guide and administer and manage the rest of us - ‘the managers’ as he called them - was nothing less than ‘the class which is in the process of becoming the ruling class of society.’^[17]  In short, we now live in a world, not of free-market capitalism properly speaking, but one defined by the New Class, and governed by the New Class.

THE NEW CLASS WORLDVIEW

As government spending has grown so has the number and size of groups relying directly and indirectly on State funding. These groups, which comprise the core of the New Class, naturally tend to look favourably on their own activities, would like to see their powers increased and their responsibilities extended over greater areas. This is entirely understandable and human. They believe the jobs they do are good jobs.  The functions they perform they consider necessary and beneficial.

The New Class maintains that society needs expert analysis, expert advice, direction, guidance and regulation, and they are the people who will do it.  If there is unemployment their answer will always be more government-funded training schemes (run by them) to bridge the ‘skills gap’.  If the price of rented accommodation rises, their answer will be more regulation (by them) of the housing market.  They demand more public spending, regulation and planning as naturally as a stream flows down a mountain, because public spending pays their wages and they are the regulators and planners.

Members of this class encounter one another, in the workplace and socially, and their views become honed and hammered out. Their arguments are repeated and buttressed and refined, and over time they become a coherent, distinct, moral view of the world.  Their favourite newspapers are dedicated to reflecting this worldview, and are charged with interpreting the latest events accordingly. 

Members of this New Class will always call for something to be done, to solve a perceived problem, in the form of another enquiry or review or committee or institute or ministry, for more research into this or that area, for more laws and statutes and official guidance or the funding of more support groups. If there is no problem to justify an extension of their activities, a problem, or threat, or risk must be found. The problem can never be Big Government (this would be to blame themselves), it must always stem from unregulated activity, and the solution must be more State spending and control.

To this planning class, freedom itself is an affront. The idea that we should be left to our own devices is entirely antithetical to them. Freedom will be used irresponsibly and irrationally. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, every unregulated activity taunts them. A typical member of this New Class might earn the same amount, in money terms, as, say, a car-dealer or commercial realtor. But that does not give them the same class perspective. Far from it. The commercial middle-class hankers after lower taxes and lighter regulation. But this is anathema to the New Class. The idea of genuine free-markets, unsupervised, unconstrained, unregulated, makes the New Class shudder.

The New Class, by definition, is against laissez-faire, free-market capitalism. For the New Class, lower taxes and less regulation are a direct challenge to its livelihood.  It would mean for the New Class less power, fewer jobs and less pay.  The New Class, though it does not say it outright, is implacably against the notion of private property.  It ought to be up to the state, it says (the state run by them), to determine how much of your money - your earnings and savings - you will be allowed to keep.

The New Class of course must find a reason for confiscating our money. The current distribution of wealth must be declared unjust - to be adjusted by them. There must be ‘essential’ services which the state, rather than the market, must provide, to be paid for out of taxation. Likewise the New Class needs a reason to regulate and oversee our lives. It needs injustice, inequality, poverty, it needs ‘obesity epidemics’ and ‘climate chaos’. The New Class is a bureaucratic solution in search of a problem.

Capitalism, in short, must be found wanting, inefficient, corrupt. The New Class sees ‘market failure’ everywhere. For the New Class it is axiomatic that capitalism is cruel and oppressive. To correct its innate abuses capitalism must be tamed and curbed.  The ‘anarchy’ of the market must be suppressed. For the sake of the poorest, for the sake of all of us, our lives must be defined, limited and policed, by them.

THE SECRET CLASS

The New Class is assertive and noisy and ubiquitous, and yet it remains, as a class, anonymous.  This is because the New Class knows, deep-down, instinctively, that to acknowledge its own existence would be perilous … an act of extreme self-harm. To recognise or advertise that it exists as a class would be to admit that it has its own material self-interest. Whatever happens, it must present its anti-capitalism as altruistic. It cannot admit that its members want more and better jobs, more money and more power, for their own personal advantage. Our taxes do not go to support and enrich this New Class, but rather they go to make the world better, more fair, less unequal.  When the New Class wants more taxpayers’ money spent on higher education, or opera companies, or environmental research groups, or whatever else, it must dress this up as having a higher, universal purpose. Taxes will either be spent in all our interests, or else in the interests of the poorest and most needy.  It just so happens that the people who will manage this great redistributive, civilizing effort, is the New Class.  Though their salaries are handsome, they are not in it for themselves. They are there for us all. The New Class disguises itself, in Hegel’s words, as a ‘Universal Class’.  

Anonymity is required in order to distract us from the parasitic nature of the New Class. But how has a class so large and powerful contrived to conceal its very existence? The New Class has managed to stay so well hidden because these are the very people who usually talk about class. In the ranks of the New Class are the very intellectuals - sociologists and others - who take it upon themselves to analyse and understand society. Marxist thinkers have done much to define how we see class: what classes exist, how they are supposed to relate to each other and what their true interests are.  But you will never hear a Marxist academic mentioning the New Class. They look away and pretend that this, their own class, is not there. They have written themselves out of the picture. In this way Marxist academics perform an extraordinarily valuable service for the New Class. Through constant, drum-beat repetition, they depict our current society as a capitalist society, dominated by a ruling capitalist class, which stands opposed to the interests of the workers. Modern capitalistic society represents a great essential injustice, which can only be mitigated by us handing over more money and power to the State. 

The New Class must disguise its hunger of power.  Instead of demanding ‘state control’, which sounds sinister and objectionable, it calls for ‘democratic control.’ After all, who could object to sweet-sounding ‘democratic control’?  But by ‘democratic’ they do not mean control by the demos - by ordinary people.  ‘Democratic control of the economy’ does not mean that the control of buying, selling, producing, distributing, etc, is to be left in the hands of ordinary individuals spending their own money (that is what free markets are).  ‘Democratic control’ means nothing other than State control … by the New Class.

NEW CLASS, WELFARE & PLANNING

At best, the New Class regards the demos as inadequate; at worst, with suspicion and contempt. The demos is bigoted, uncouth, unintellectual.  The demos votes for Trump.  The demos votes for Brexit. The New Class claims to act in the interests of the people, but freedom is most decidedly not in the people’s best interests. Ordinary folk cannot possibly be left to follow their own unregulated whims and fancies. The demos would make bad decisions and hurt itself. The demos, were it not for the New Class, would be a victim of cruel capitalistic indifference, of blind market forces, of its own ignorance and failings.  And so it must be cared for, out of taxes, and through regulation. With a grand gesture, the New Class takes it upon itself to look after, not just the unemployed, but increasing numbers of others, via the welfare state. Most families in Britain now receive a small state-welfare hand-out of one kind or another - a peculiarly empty gesture since they must also pay taxes at every turn, on their income, savings and purchases.

The model for the modern welfare state was created in Germany in the 1880s.  It was driven by the fears of Germany’s ruling elite. Capitalism had empowered the masses. How were they to be contained? In 1883 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wondered, how was ‘the herd’, ‘the rabble’, ‘the mob’, to be controlled? ‘Who will subdue it? … who will fasten fetters upon the thousand necks of this beast?’^[18]  That same year, Otto von Bismarck, the aristocratic Prussian bureaucrat, came up with his cynical, ingenious answer. In the words of his biographer, Edgar Feuchtwanger, Bismarck introduced the first modern welfare system because, ‘He saw it as a means of tying the working classes to the state, in contradistinction to liberal laissez-faire, which would leave them to their own devices.’^[19] As AJP Taylor says, ‘Of course, Bismarck did not promote social reform out of love for the German workers. His object was to make the workers less discontented or, to use a harsher phrase, more subservient.’ ^[20]

The welfare-state allows the New Class to adopt a pose of paternalist altruism. It seduces larger and larger sections of the population (as the number of welfare recipients expands) into perceiving themselves to be reliant on the state, and it justifies a level of state intrusion into people’s lives which, in 19^th Century Britain and America, would have been quite unthinkable.

In Europe in particular this has been a great success for the New Class. In Europe big state power has been entrenched for many centuries, and as a result, the expectation of freedom is low, and the instincts of individualism weak. Populist politicians there, in muddled confusion, call angrily for more state welfare, more state subsidies, more state protection and intervention. At every turn, the New Class merely smirks and rubs its hands. As Bismarck predicted, welfare created a culture in which a bigger state was perceived not as the problem, but the solution. 

Of course, in all this the New Class must convince us, and themselves, that they are driven by genuine moral purpose. Never mind that the welfare state has also added literally many millions of New Class jobs to the public payroll.  Never mind that it has led to a vast transfer of the resources and power to the New Class. What is good for the New Class (they tell themselves) is good for all. As James Burnham describes, ‘They naturally tend to identify the welfare of mankind as a whole with their own interests and the salvation of mankind with their assuming control of society.’^[21]

But for all its moral big talk, the New Class views with cold indifference the terrible unintended consequences of its welfare policies. It matters not to the New Class that the massive expansion of the welfare system, far from eradicating poverty, has trapped a large number of people in a condition of extreme poverty and misery, leaving them spiritually crushed, enfeebled and hopeless. It matters not to the New Class that the Welfare dependency trap, far from making us more ‘equal’, has exacerbated the division between broken, impoverished welfare-ghettos and the rest of society, and between needy welfare regions and the rest of the country. It is of little concern if empirical studies the world over show that in areas that have grown most dependent on welfare, there has been a spectacular collapse of the family, the descent of neighbourhoods into dispirited hellholes, marred by a shocking rise in criminality and anti-social behaviour. The New Class does not see, or prefers to ignore, that it has become not uncommon in welfare-dependent areas for young, single women to get pregnant repeatedly by different men; for young promiscuous men to find themselves unable to provide for, and therefore incapable of and unwilling to accept responsibility for the children they create; for young children to grow up in desperate circumstances, without the stability and love of two cohabiting parents, and as a result, for such children to achieve little in education or the workplace, and in turn to produce dysfunctional, atomised families.^[22]

Individual misery and social mayhem are a feature of large state-welfare systems wherever they have been introduced. The poisonous effects of state-welfare have been described many times.  The heart-breaking chain of consequences is well known.  But the New Class adamantly refuses to see it. Every disastrous social consequence of welfarism must be blamed, somehow, on the operation of free markets, and becomes an excuse for still more New Class intervention: another round of welfare programs, studies, strategic reviews, and a further expansion of state services. All the while the size and power of the New Class grows. From its inception, the point of the welfare state was not to lift the workers to new heights of prosperity, but rather, in the name of charity, to extend and secure the power of the state. This is why, for the New Class, today’s bloated welfare state is beyond criticism.  In the 19^th Century, the popular author Samuel Smiles forewarned of the terrifying consequences of state handouts: ‘everything for the people, nothing by them - a doctrine which, if taken as a guide, must, by destroying the free conscience of the community, speedily prepares the way for any form of despotism.’^[23]

It is the New Class, not the working class, which is the beneficiary of the state’s great redistributive effort. As anti-capitalist theorist Thomas Piketty says, ‘Modern redistribution does not consist in transferring income from the rich to the poor, at least not in an explicit way. It consists rather in financing public services.’^[24]  This is the true nature of ‘redistribution’ - the redistribution from private hands to the New Class of money, power and control over large parts of our lives, including education, housing, health, ‘welfare’ and ‘social services.’

The New Class insists that ‘essential’ services are better provided by the state (themselves) than by the free market. But New Class control has fundamentally altered the nature of these services. As the provision of education and health (in Britain) shifted from the private to the public sector, those who worked in these areas discovered that the character of their jobs changed. They found themselves sheltered from tiresome market forces, given a generous pension, and, importantly, they experienced the pleasant sensation of becoming less accountable to the people they once served.  There was a fundamental shift of power.  Teachers in government schools could be less attentive to the views and feelings of fussy parents; medics and hospital administrators in state healthcare systems could be less worried about the disapproval of grumpy patients. So-what if patients were forced routinely to hang around for hours in waiting rooms, or to wait months and even years for treatment. These new public-sector professionals had gained power and control. ‘Consumers’ of such services could not choose to take their custom elsewhere. Payment was extracted forcibly as taxation, to be administered by, and given to, the New Class.

For the New Class, it matters less that these services are any good, than that they remain firmly under control of the New Class. The New Class is appalled if, as has happened in America, working class parents demand to take their children out of badly-managed, under-performing, government-run schools, and send them instead to high-achieving private ‘charter’ schools. To the New Class, that the State should retain control of school education is more important than lifting the quality of education received by working class children. In Britain, almost all hospitals are owned and operated by the state. The health outcomes are disastrous. Britain, the world’s fifth largest economy, has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the modern industrial world. But the British New Class recoils in horror when it is pointed out that in Germany, where most hospitals are private, the poorest people are given better healthcare than in the UK, and cancer survival rates are far higher. The over-riding concern of the New Class is not the quality of state education, or state healthcare, or the damage done by its failed ‘income redistribution’ efforts. Its main concern is the maintenance and extension of state power. In other words, its own power.

The New Class is untroubled by the chaos and misery caused by its policies. For the best part of a hundred years, there has been ample evidence of the destructive and dehumanising effects of New Class urban planning, with its giant empty walkways, massive housing blocks, automobile-only by-passes, its vandalised crime-ridden underpasses and scary concrete ‘playgrounds’. And yet this planning barbarism continues regardless. If anything, the deleterious effects of New Class projects and initiatives, merely justifies, for them, the formation of more committees and review groups and studies, and another wave of initiatives. If redesigning an urban road-system creates worse congestion, it does not, in the eyes of the New Class, justify the sacking and humiliation of the urban planning department, but rather expanding the work of the department, in order to spend millions more redesigning the system again, for the 15^th time in 15 years.

The New Class is unashamed and unrepentant that its restrictive planning regulations have resulted, over many decades, in too few houses and flats being built, forcing higher and higher the cost of housing. If there are too few houses, here (to them) is another example of ‘market failure’, requiring the government to step in and build state-housing. If the lack of accommodation pushes rents higher, this is another example (for them) of greedy capitalism, which must be curbed by government regulation of rents. And if forcing rents lower leads (as it inevitably does) to damp, cold, squalid, cramped rental accommodation, it justifies for the New Class the hiring of legions of housing inspectors and further regulation.

The New Class is indifferent to wasting taxpayers’ money. If the cost of some grandiose public project - an act of hubris for politicians and bureaucrats - spirals out of control, there is a mere shrug of the shoulders. The prophet of the New Class, John Maynard Keynes, even sang the praises of wasteful public spending, attempting to formulate some tortured economic justification for it. Waste does not count as waste to the New Class, if the money is going to them. The deleterious results of costly government planning are of no consequence to them. What matters is that there is government planning, and that there are government planners.

The New Class is defined by the fact that, for the most part, it does not perform any genuine productive activity - the provision of goods and services which customers, in an open market, would be willing to pay for.  The discipline of the market has been lifted. As a result, the expansion of the New Class over several decades has involved the most spectacular increase in what one author has memorably called ‘bullshit jobs’. These are jobs which ‘if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference to the world. Likely as not, things would improve.’^[25] Public-sector jobs-pages are teeming with advertisements for well-paid, pointless, ‘bullshit jobs’ - Climate Compliance Managers, Inclusion Support Officers, Local Area Coordination Supervisors, etc, ad infinitum. The core of this ‘bullshit’ economy is the public sector, but this riot of costly vacuity extends to fellow-travellers in the Third Sector. State-funded universities are awash in bullshit courses, emptying the brains of their students, in preparation for bullshit New Class jobs. A smaller, shadow bullshit sector has even been foisted upon the commercial world, as private companies are forced to add an otherwise unnecessary layer of compliance officers and others, to deal with all the bullshit regulation.

In our bloated state sector, there is no market pressure on New Class managers to weed out profit-destroying ‘bullshit jobs’. These ministries and agencies are not subject to market discipline. That they are useless, unwanted, unproductive, obstructive, does not force them to close down.

THE NEW CLASS & THE ANTI-CAPITALIST INTELLIGENTSIA

The New Class was not conjured up from thin air. It sprang from, was the creation of, and is virtually synonymous with that section of society Europeans call the intelligentsia. (Or if you’re German, the bildungsbürgertum, or bildungselite).

The intelligentsia has long had a burning resentment of capitalism. The vulgar market does not reward intellectuals as generously as they think they deserve, either with money or status. Instead, the undervalued intelligentsia is attracted like a magnet to state-funding and state-power. Indeed, throughout most of history, the State (in its various forms) and the intelligentsia have been so mutually dependent, they are hard to disentangle. In general terms, historically, it is the intelligentsia that runs and justifies the State, and, in turn, the State supports and empowers the intelligentsia.

To many people in the crude, capitalistic Anglo-Saxon world, the notion of an ‘intelligentsia’ sticks in the craw. The idea is snobbish and offensive - that there might be a separate, self-regarding group who define themselves as the ‘clever’ ones, who are somehow qualified to do the ‘thinking’ for the rest of us. But the term ‘intelligentsia’ is still commonly used, without embarrassment, in Europe, where the state-regulation of society has a longer history.  And in the broader European sense, the term includes all those with a university education (in a suitably intellectual subject), whose occupation has some perceived greater purpose or meaning, above mere money-making - from teachers to documentary-makers.  The intelligentsia is not an insignificant group, as Friedrich Hayek says, ‘The term ‘intellectuals’ does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer, and the fact that we have no better term by which to describe what we have called the second-hand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not better understood.’^[26]

The intelligentsia’s antagonism towards capitalism has been described many times. The historian W. D. Rubinstein says, ‘it is probably no exaggeration to say that the thrust of intellectuals throughout the western world over the past 150 years has been consistently and pervasively anti-capitalistic.’^[27]  The historian Alan Kahn says ‘anti-capitalism is the most widespread and widely practiced spiritual commitment among intellectuals.’ Thomas Cushman says that ‘Anti-capitalism has become, in some ways, a central pillar of the secular religion of the intellectuals, the habitus of modern critical intellectuals as a status group.’^[28] George Orwell declared in 1941, ‘It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense “Left”.’^[29] The economist Schumpeter talks of ‘the hostility of the intellectual group - amounting to moral disapproval of the capitalist order.’ And adds, ‘this hostility increases, instead of diminishing, with every achievement of capitalist evolution.’^[30]

But why? The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explored this in 1956, in a book called, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.   He concluded that intellectuals do not like the market because the market does not like them. Or, to put it another way, intellectuals hold the market in disdain and refuse to pander to it, and the market takes its revenge on them.

There is nothing mysterious about ‘the market’.  People must sell their services to others for money.  The exchange is voluntary. If you need a plumber you hire a plumber.  If there aren’t enough plumbers about, the cost of hiring one goes up, providing an incentive for more people to become plumbers.  If there are too many plumbers then the price of hiring one goes down, encouraging less popular plumbers to find some other occupation.

But picture the intellectual who graduates from university with, say, a degree in anthropology or French literature, or Classics, or a PhD in the breeding habits of butterflies.  As a member of the intelligentsia he regards himself as socially superior to a plumber. But, to his horror, when he tries to enter the labour market, he discovers there is little or no commercial demand for experts in Baudelaire or Virgil or marriage rituals among African tribes, or for lepidopterists. All of us have experienced that dreadful feeling when we urgently need a plumber. Few of us have ever urgently needed an expert in gender studies, or advice on African tribes.

Does our intellectual retrain as a plumber (since demand for plumbers is high)?   God forbid. Mises says of the intellectual, ‘As a “worker by brain” he looks arrogantly down upon the manual worker whose hands are calloused and soiled.  It makes him furious to notice that so many of these manual workers get higher pay and are more respected than he himself.  What a shame he thinks, that capitalism fondles the simple drudgery of the “uneducated” and does not appraise his “intellectual” work according to its “true” value.’

Does our impoverished intellectual consider a job as a commercial realtor or selling office supplies? Does he try to get a job in junior-management at a nearby factory?  Does he decide to set up a taxi-firm or a road haulage company?   No.  The intellectual is repelled by life in the commercial middle class.  Commerce is insufficiently interesting. It is banal and tawdry.  Again, it would represent a loss of status. ‘The vain arrogance of the literati dismisses the activities of the businessmen as unintellectual moneymaking.’^[31]

J. K. Galbraith said it was the hallmark of the intelligentsia that it should rise above the sordid needs of industrial consumer society.  He said, ‘it would be barbarous to suggest that the only claim to be made on behalf of education is the increased production of goods.  It [the intelligentsia] has its independent and, one must suppose, higher justification.’ Théophile Gautier, the poet son of public official, famously railed against the idea that intellectual life should be commodified, ‘No, imbeciles! No! Fools and cretins that you are, a book will not make a plate of soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is not a railway … no, two hundred thousand times, no.’ 

Galbraith tells us, ‘Some of the attractiveness of membership of the New Class, to be sure, derives from a vicarious feeling of superiority.’  He says, ‘From their earliest years, the children of the New Class are carefully indoctrinated in the importance of finding an occupation from which they will derive satisfaction - one which will involve not toil but enjoyment.’^[32]   In universities, lofty, entertaining academic subjects like literature, philosophy and the Classics, which are furthest from any useful commercial application, are esteemed much more highly, among the intelligentsia, than muddy commercial courses on hotel management and accountancy.

The intellectual’s snooty antipathy to the market is almost a defining feature of the caste. It is not just that intellectuals have little in common, culturally, with the commercial classes. The point is that they deliberately set themselves apart. The existential novelist regards herself as belonging to a different, higher social caste to the manager of a supermarket or factory. The two groups do not mix, socially.  The intelligentsia cannot imagine itself in a factory, mass-producing for the general populace commodities like car-tyres or lawnmowers or bricks. The idea of working in such a job fills the intellectual with revulsion. The New Class intellectual shudders at the thought of working in large tourist hotels or selling washing machines, or life insurance or double-glazing.

Galbraith points out, ‘No aristocrat ever contemplated the loss of feudal privileges with more sorrow than a member of this class would regard his decent into ordinary labor where the reward was only the pay.  From time to time, grade-school teachers leave their posts for substantially higher paid factory work.  The action makes the headlines because it represents such an unprecedented desertion of an occupation which is assumed to confer the dignity of the New Class.  The college professor, who is more securely a member of the New Class than the school teacher, could never contemplate such a change even as an exercise in eccentricity and no matter how inadequate he might consider his income.’^[33] Such a crossing of New Class boundaries, says Galbraith, ‘is regarded by the community with pity not unmixed with horror.’^[34]

In New Class circles, distance from the market is a mark of prestige. A scientist working in a ‘pure’ science (which requires public-funding), has more cachet than a scientist working in commercial product development, on a new quick-drying paint, or insulating foam. The writer of existential novels with limited market appeal, has higher status (but less money) than the writer of ‘trashy’ airport books with mass-market pull.  The impecunious director of worthy documentary films, dripping with social criticism, ranks higher in intellectual circles than a well-paid producer of high-rating glitzy game-shows. Within the professions, you will enjoy more New Class kudos working for a Green NGO, or government agency or the UN, than you would as a tawdry in-house lawyer at IKEA. Rather than study ‘markets’ (marketing is a useful skill), young intellectuals prefer the elevated study of ‘society’ in the one of the new social sciences (sociology, anthropology, gender studies and so on) which have proliferated in today’s state-funded universities.

The intelligentsia favours those things that carry some implied, snobbish rejection of industrial society - a hand-crafted this or that, organic coffee from ‘sustainable’ (pre-industrial) sources, an ‘authentic’ (ill-equipped, unproductive) micro-brewery, and so on.  Their anti-capitalist, anti-industrial, anti-mass-market sensibility is visceral and subtle and all-pervasive.

This lofty contempt for the market comes at a price. Those who serve the market are rewarded. Those who reject it are punished. Full to bursting with ‘higher justification’ many intellectuals, such as our French poetry expert or lepidopterist, find it tough to earn a crust.  As a direct result of their snobbery, intellectuals in capitalist society are, in the words of Joseph Schumpeter, ‘unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable.’ The spurned market has its revenge - which in turn adds a layer of bitterness to the cerebral snob. The poorly paid intellectual, says Mises, ‘must swallow down his mortification and divert his wrath toward a vicarious target.  He indicts society’s economic organisation, the nefarious system of capitalism. But for this unfair regime his abilities and talents, his zeal and his achievements would have brought him the rich reward they deserve.’^[35]  As the English author George Stuart grumbled, ‘I don’t like England as she is - industrial, over-capitalised, where the Struggle to Live is so sordid.’  Of the intellectuals, Mises says, ‘They sublimate their hatred into philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them their failure is entirely their own fault.’  Thomas Cushman concludes, ‘The general picture in much of academia is one of an entire class of intellectuals whose very existence is supported by the very capitalist system, which, to varying degrees, they resent.’^[36]

The intelligentsia spits at the ‘freedom’ which capitalism has brought.  The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse complained, ‘If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.’  Marcuse understandably did not want to submit himself to this test.  The masses would not buy nearly enough copies of his dreary One Dimensional Man to keep him in the lifestyle he felt he deserved. Karl Marx, who had to live on hand-outs from his factory-owning friend Engels, complained bitterly in the Communist Manifesto of the market’s callous, philistine disrespect of intellectuals like himself, ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage-labourers.’ For Nietzsche, the market was a cold, unwelcoming place to cerebral ‘Higher Men’ like himself. The marketplace was full of ‘poisonous flies’, ‘small and pitiable men’ and God forbid, ‘shopkeepers’ with ‘bloodless souls’. Nietzsche’s advice to his fellow super-men? ‘You Higher Men, learn this from me: In the market-place no-one believes in Higher Men … Let us not be equal before the mob. You Higher Men, depart from the market-place!’ ^[37]

THE MARKET & THE MASSES

Let us return to the anti-capitalist rally on Blackheath. So much for all the statist young New Class intellectuals. But what about the people who were strangely absent? What about the working class?  Given how articulate the New Class is, given that it has such a firm grip on public education, given that it exerts such a powerful influence across large sections of the media, you would have thought that its anti-capitalist message would have filtered down to the masses. You would have thought that the masses would have finally realised what an oppressive system capitalism is, and how much better for them it would be if the State were better-funded and more powerful. But, for some reason, the masses seem to view the anti-capitalist rally with indifference, or worse.  They are inclined to give left-wing intellectuals short shrift.

Why is the working class not more enthusiastic about radical anti-capitalism?  Karl Marx argued that industrial capitalism would make workers poorer.  He explains why: ‘As the division of labour increases, labour is simplified. The special skill of the worker becomes worthless … the lower do wages sink … The more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract. Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.’ ^[38] In the Communist Manifesto he tells us, ‘Machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.’

Even as Marx was writing this, it was evidently nonsense. The increased use of machinery in the industrial revolution did not cause there to be fewer and fewer jobs, or ever greater wage-wrecking competition between increasingly impoverished workers. On the contrary, new industrial areas were booming, attracting ever more migrant workers from far away, drawn by high wages. Far from making workers poorer, capitalism was making them richer.

In the 17^th century the statistician Gregory King reckoned that living standards in capitalistic England were a fifth higher than France, and the gap continued to grow.^[39] In the 18^th Century Defoe wrote of the ‘dearness of wages which in England outgoes all the nations of the world.’ Thomas Malthus warned that, ‘It is a general complaint among master manufacturers that high wages ruin all their workmen’. 

Marx could not have been more wrong. Not only did jobs grow and wages rise, goods became more affordable.  This was due to astonishing advances in industrial mass-production and in mass freight transport (each depended on the other).  By 1850 America had put down no less than 9,000 miles of railway track. By 1890 this had risen to 164,000 miles. By 1916, 254,000 miles.  Railways meant that producers were no longer confined to serving their immediate locality.  Instead of higgledy-piggledy workshops producing goods, expensively and inefficiently for sale in the immediate locality, giant factories sprang up, producing goods more cheaply in far greater quantities for sale far and wide.

The 19^th Century saw an extraordinary increase in the standard of living of the industrial working-class, and the birth of what became known as a consumer society.  Frank Woolworth, a stock-boy at a general store, set up his own ‘five cents’ store in 1879. Within a couple of decades he had 238 stores. Richard Warren Sears, who was a lowly clerk on the railways, came up with the idea of a catalogue-order business. By 1902 his catalogue ran to 1,162 pages and he was meeting 100,000 orders a day, and to help him do it, his partner Alvah Roebuck, at the Chicago rail hub, built the biggest building in the world.^[40]  

Ever more novel products were invented. Ever more goods were produced and sold. Wages continued to rise. Prices continued to fall.  In 1910 it cost $950 to buy a Model-T Ford car. By 1923 the quality of the cars had improved dramatically, the price had fallen to just $269, and many other cars were now available to choose from. The number of cars on the new American highways rose from 468,000 in 1910, to nine million in 1923.^[41]   Like the Americans, ever more Britons were able to experience the liberation of owning a car. In 1920 there were 200,000. Within two decades there were almost two million.^[42] The expansion of roads and railroads led to the expansion of the suburbs, as ordinary people escaped their cramped city dwellings for comfortable semi-detached houses with front and back gardens, and grid electricity (the price of which, in the U.S., fell 6 percent a year for the first 30 years of the 20^th century).

As prosperity grew, so was there a spectacular drop in infant mortality and a welcome rise in life-expectancy leading to a great increase in population. Malthus had warned of this - increasing prosperity would lead to higher population - but according to the misanthrope Malthus, this would, for some reason, cause us to sink back into poverty. It didn’t. By the 20^th Century the workers of the industrial world, for all its huge population growth, were unimaginably richer than the miserable wretches who at the time lived in the pre-capitalist parts of the world.

The masses were not just enjoying greater prosperity, they were gaining greater independence and self-confidence, they were becoming more ambitious, for themselves and their children. The lower orders were ‘getting on’. Capitalism was not doing the workers down, but rather providing unprecedented opportunities for their material and social advancement. In fact, in this industrial revolution the workers were leading the way. It was from the ranks of the workers that most of the industrial capitalists came, which is why, in Victorian English ‘industrial’ novels, northern factory-owners were invariably depicted as gruff lower-class types.  In 1859, eight years before Marx published Das Kapital, Samuel Smiles published his Self Help - a guide for the ordinary man to self-improvement and advancement. Self-Help (unlike Das Kapital) became the best-selling book of the era - a quarter of a million copies sold and translated into more than a dozen languages. A book bought by the aspiring masses, not by intellectuals.

Smiles’ advice to his readers was to take inspiration from the working-class pioneers who had made the industrial revolution, ‘Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam-engine are those of Newcomen, Watt and Stephenson, the first a blacksmith, the second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the third an engine-fireman.’^[43] He tells of Michael Faraday, pioneer in the understanding and use of electricity, the son of a blacksmith, Thomas Telford the great engineer, the son of a shepherd. The modern factory-system itself was the creation and proud boast of the working man: ‘Richard Arkwright, like most of our great mechanicians, sprang from the ranks. He was born in Preston in 1732. His parents were very poor, and he was the youngest of thirteen children. He was never at school: the only education he received he gave to himself; and to the last he was only able to write with difficulty.’ And yet he had ‘indomitable courage, much worldly shrewdness, with a business faculty almost amounting to genius.’

Smiles underlines emphatically that these heroes were not the product of fancy schools and universities. ‘Brindley and Stephenson did not learn to read and write until they reached manhood, and yet they did great works and led manly lives …. This is the advantage which the working classes, strictly so called, certainly possess over the leisure classes: that they are in early life under the necessity of applying themselves laboriously, to some mechanical pursuit or other.’ He says, ‘The value of knowledge to any man consists not in its quantity, but mainly in the good uses to which he can apply it … the experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom; and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than the former.’

In fact, Smiles concluded, when it came to entrepreneurial zeal and hard work, being from a privileged background was often a positive handicap, ‘Riches are so great a temptation to ease and self-indulgence, to which rich men are by nature prone.’ The Gentry and upper classes lacked ambition and spine and grit.  ‘An easy and luxurious existence does not train men to afford or encounter with difficulty.’ What’s more ‘the youths of the leisure classes, having been taught to associate labour with servility have shunned it.’

With scorn he notes that ‘It is principally in the departments of politics and literature that we find the most energetic labourers among our higher classes.’ These may, in the eyes of their fellows, confer prestige, but not riches, and he describes with extreme satisfaction the decline of the indebted, impecunious and uncommercial upper classes, ‘Many barons of proud names and titles have perished, like sloth upon their family tree … and sunk at last into poverty and obscurity.’

To succeed under capitalism, said Smiles, it was almost a requirement to be born poor, ‘Indeed to start life with comparatively small means seems so necessary as a stimulus to work, that it may almost be set down as one of the conditions essential to success in life.’

The same, famously, was true of American capitalism. The men who would transform the world and in the process make themselves the richest people on earth, were ill-educated wretches from dirt poor backgrounds: Cornelius Vanderbilt, who left school at 11 to work on the ferries, John Jacob Astor, the immigrant son of a butcher, Andrew Carnegie, son of a poor weaver, John D. Rockefeller, son of a lumberman turned travelling salesman, Henry Ford, who also never attended High School, son of a poor farmer.

Capitalism, Smiles and his readers knew, had upended the classes. It had turned the world upside down. And in this, for Smiles, it was nothing less than a reflection of God’s will, for which he turns to St Luke, ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats; and exalted them of low degree.’

By the 20^th Century ordinary people were vastly better fed, better dressed, with access to far greater quantities and different kinds of products and services. They went to the cinema. They listened to the wireless. Very many of them owned their own homes and drove their own cars. Capitalism was a society created by the masses for the masses. Mass production served mass consumption. Free markets put the mass consumer in charge. The masses were the masters every entrepreneur endeavoured to serve. And as the masses grew richer, and their buying power increased, so they could increasingly bend society as a whole, and culture too, in their direction. This, for Smiles and his many readers was a reason for celebration and excitement, ‘Our trade is young; our engineering is young; and the civilisation of what we call ‘the masses’ has hardly begun.’

THE INTELLIGENTSIA & THE ‘CIVILIZATION OF THE MASSES’

In the early decades of the 20^th Century the prosperity of the masses, in advanced capitalist industrial societies, reached a new level - the era of cars, the wireless, cinema, of mass prosperity and mass culture. It is also in these decades that we find the most violent expressions of alarm from the intelligentsia, in reaction to these developments.

One might have thought that our big-hearted intelligentsia would have been delighted that mass-market capitalism had bestowed material prosperity on the workers in such a bountiful way, and empowered them culturally and politically.  But in fact, we find the complete opposite.   

 The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, has been described by Professor Carey as ‘the classic intellectual account of the advent of mass culture.’  The author, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals, was horrified that ‘Europe has become Americanised.’  American capitalism had created a debased ‘paradise of the masses’.  Material abundance itself was a problem. ‘There is a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case,’ said Ortega. The ‘automatic multiplication of wealth, comfort, health, prosperity’ represented ‘the basic tragedy of our civilisation’. It was the ‘superabundance of resources’ produced by capitalism that had created ‘the mass-man of our time’, who he declared was ‘the newest of the barbarians.’ 

The masses (‘that heap after heap of human beings’) hadn’t just grown richer, they were also increasingly confident and assertive.  As mass consumers, they were creating their own mass culture. ‘The average man,’ complained Ortega, ‘everywhere imposes his spiritual barbarism.’ He said, ‘a characteristic of our times is the predominance of the mass and the vulgar.’  He lamented that ‘We live in a levelling period; there is a levelling of fortunes, of culture among the various social classes, of the sexes.’ 

This proletarian take-over took many unpleasant forms. By the 1920s the rising wages of workers meant that hiring a servant became too expensive. The number of servants in Britain halved during WW1 and never recovered. As AJP Taylor wryly observed, ‘The cynical observer will not forget this fact when he reads lamentations from the comfortable classes about the decline of civilisation.’ According to George Orwell, the typical member of the old, genteel, educated middle-class regarded the increasing prosperity of the masses as an affront and a threat. ‘In his eyes, the workers are not a submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf him and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence. Hence the queer watchful eye lest the working class shall grow too prosperous.’^[44]  Having described the dreadful working conditions of coal miners, Orwell noted that the miners he mixed with were taking home a similar income to his own, as a freelance writer.  Fellow members of his class, he said, were horrified at the thought of miners being able to afford motor cars. This was the ‘levelling of fortunes’ between the social classes which was so disconcerting to the old gentry.

Snooty intellectuals expressed disdain at the consuming habits of the lower classes, ‘who seem content to be dazzled by the never-ending variety of the stream of products which the modern machine is able to pour out in such prodigal profusion.’^[45]  Sinclair Lewis was repulsed by this new craving for mass-produced commodities: ‘These standard advertised wares - toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters - are symbols and proofs of excellence: at first the signs and then the substitute for joy and passion and wisdom.’^[46] Dwight MacDonald, the snobby American critic of mass culture, could not deny the material achievements of America’s postwar boom, ‘The work week has shrunk, real wages have risen, and never in history have so many people attained such a high standard of living, as in the country since 1945.’ But to his distress these riches were being showered on ‘hordes of men and women without taste, without standards but those of the mob.’  The paternalist Oxford don Arnold Toynbee, so fond of the poor, was somewhat concerned about the workers getting richer, ‘High wages are not an end in themselves. No-one wants high wages in order that working men may indulge in sensual gratification.’^[47]  As the American literary critic Malcom Cowley admitted, ‘It wasn’t the depression that got me, it was the boom.’^[48]

The lower-class ‘self-made man’, lionised by Samuel Smiles, became for the intelligentsia an object of scorn. Bloomsbury aesthete Clive Bell attacked ‘the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle classes, the religion of money-making sometimes called ‘the gospel of work,’ and the passion for ‘getting on’.’^[49] The uppity lower-class grafters were positively ‘engrossed by the idea of getting on.’^[50] And with material aspiration came a loss of deference to their superiors, ‘success means motor cars and insolence.’^[51]

The lower orders were spilling beyond their social bounds, and their geographical bounds too. With the advent of the railway, then the motor car, suburbs grew around towns and cities. Ordinary people were escaping their cramped urban hovels and were moving into semi-detached houses with gardens front and back. But to the refined intelligentsia, who enjoyed rural-living close to towns, it was horrifying that the suburban railway was ‘dragging living creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it.’^[52]  This was ‘the democratisation of the countryside: the lower-middle-class and working-class invasion of an area that had hitherto been the preserve of an aristocratic and upper-middle-class elite.’^[53] The suburbs made their stomachs churn. They looked down on the ‘emptiness and meaninglessness of suburban life^[54]’^[55]  The suburban masses were ‘a low inferior species’, whose foul lives were ‘stingy’ and ‘soulless.’ ^[56] John Betjeman’s poem Slough (the London suburb) encapsulates this disgust, as he calls on Nazi bombs to destroy it:

                   Come, bombs and blow to smithereens

       Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

       Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

       Tinned minds, tinned breath.

The lower-class suburbanites were beneath contempt:

                   It's not their fault they do not know

       The birdsong from the radio,

       It's not their fault they often go

       To Maidenhead

                   And talk of sport and makes of cars

       In various bogus-Tudor bars

       And daren't look up and see the stars

       But belch instead.

The intellectual views with horror these uncultured plebs and their new-found affluence, with their vacuum cleaners and washing machines and hair-dryers:

                   In labour-saving homes, with care

       Their wives frizz out peroxide hair

       And dry it in synthetic air

       And paint their nails.

Clive Bell mocks the devotion of the suburban masses ‘to inferior pleasures (e.g. picture-palaces, golf, motor-cars, greyhound-racing, football), and to child-rearing.’ These jumped-up proles, he said, were ‘incapable of enjoying anything better than a little tipsy lust or sentimental friendship, cheap novels, cheaper pictures, vulgar music, the movies, golf, smoking-room stories, and laying down the law.’^[57] Bell’s friend and fellow Bloomsbury intellectual E. M. Forster derided ‘the snigger of the suburban householder who can understand nothing that does not resemble himself.’^[58]

This echoes the loathing of lower-class suburbanites expressed by Matthew Arnold, the poet and cultural critic, ‘[Consider] their way of life, their habits their manners, the very tones of their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like the people by having it?’^[59]

The British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, admitted grudgingly that capitalism had made the masses richer, ‘The profit-makers themselves found their greatest gains in increasing output and consumption by a continuous lowering of the price of commodities that everyone consumed and of services that everyone used.’^[60]  But the workers on their way up were held in contempt, with their ‘vulgar ambitions, vulgar capacities and vulgar tastes in excitement.’^[61]

It was the very success of capitalism in enriching the masses that irked these posh anti-capitalists.  Marxist intellectuals found all this mass prosperity especially awkward and disagreeable. Orwell wryly observed of the increasingly affluent working class, ‘British workers have a great deal to lose besides their chains.’^[62]

Marxists have long been annoyed and embarrassed by the fact that the workers clearly enjoy the material wealth that capitalism brings.  Workers in capitalist West Germany weren’t jumping over the Berlin Wall to reach the socialist East.  They don’t build rickety rafts on Florida beaches, hoping to make it to Communist Cuba. The socialist regimes in North Korea and China are trying to stop workers from escaping.  Capitalist America struggles in vain to keep them out!  Never do we find workers trying to escape capitalist countries, in the hope of reaching a socialist state.  It is always the other way round. The workers delight in the prosperity and freedom capitalism brings (what a surprise!) and they vote with their feet.

In Britain, Marxist parties were never more than comical, tiny groups with handfuls of (intellectual) members.  In America after WW2, the working and commercial middle-class (ordinary Americans) were not just apathetic towards communism, they hated it with a passion. According to your average Yank, these effete, slippery Marxist intellectuals were not on a mission to enrich the lower orders, but to impose over them a tyrannical state.  ‘The masses themselves are forces of conservatism’^[63] observed the Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Indeed, ‘the working class,’ he said in disgust, ‘has become a conservative, even counter-revolutionary force.’ Instead of bothering with the unfriendly workers, anti-capitalists would have to rely on ‘the youth and the intelligentsia.’ He might have been more specific and said ‘university-educated youth’. Marcuse was spot on.  It is the New Class - not ‘the workers’ at all - which is the real anti-capitalist class, the historic agent of anti-capitalism.

The ‘false consciousness’ of the workers - who clearly didn’t know what was good for them - was blamed on ‘commodity fetishism’. They had been blinded by all that material stuff capitalism produces. Marxist intellectuals, without blushing, or any sense of irony, joined with the rest of the snob intelligentsia’s bitter condemnation of mass prosperity, as gaudy and tasteless. The Marxist theoretician Marcuse, who left Europe, became an American citizen and enjoyed a comfortable university position in California, poured scorn on ‘the affluent society’ he had joined. He ranted ‘This society is obscene in producing a stifling abundance of wares … obscene in stuffing itself and its garbage cans.’ He decried ‘this dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise’ and ‘the need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines offered to and imposed upon the people.’  The high-minded Marxist Theodor Adorno, who also fled Europe to become an American citizen, enjoying various well-paid academic sinecures, expressed his disgust at the emptiness of the ‘mere consumption’ he found there, which produces only ‘the caricature of a true life.’ He was disgusted by the ‘mindlessness’ of the resulting mass-culture, which sadly, obviously, reflected the taste of the masses (‘Every visit to the cinema, against all my vigilance, leaves me stupider and worse.’)^[64] 

It was the advancement of the workers, not their impoverishment, that was so upsetting to these disgruntled snobs. Reading their various accounts, it is hard to escape the conclusion that behind the intellectuals’ disdain for the results of mass market capitalism, was a hatred of the masses themselves.

W. B. Yeats called them ‘the mere multitude.’ Baudelaire, ‘the vile multitude.’ Ezra Pound, ‘waste and manure.’  Thomas Hardy called the London population, ‘a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes,’ D. H. Lawrence called them ‘the monster with a million wormlike heads’ To the Bloomsbury intellectual Clive Bell they were ‘a herd of mere human beasts of burden’ and ‘overpaid helots.’ To his friend Virginia Woolf, ‘that anonymous monster the Man in the Street’ … ‘a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff … occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it.’ To the Socialist J. B. Priestley they were ‘mostly small, rather mis-shaped, toothless men and women, harmless enough, but very unattractive in the mass.’  To his fellow socialist and eugenicist George Bernard Shaw they were ‘the promiscuously bred masses.’  To the socialist H. G. Wells they were a ‘multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying by sheer incontinence and stupidity.’^[65]  The ‘leaderless, aimless multitude’ was a ‘bulky immovable excretion’ made up of ‘stagnant ponds of population.’ To Nietzsche they were ‘maggots in the bread of life’^[66]. 

Here, we find the vile, unpleasant truth behind what Galbraith called the New Class intellectual’s ‘feeling of superiority.’

THE INTELLIGENTSIA & THE STATE

The most famous intellectual circle in Britain, and possibly worldwide, in the 1920s and 30s, was the Bloomsbury group.  And the nearest the Bloomsbury group came to a manifesto was Clive Bell’s Civilization, published in 1928, in which he highlighted the plight of the unmarketable, impecunious, work-shy intellectual. ‘Unluckily, material security, leisure, and liberty all cost money; and ultimately [in a market-economy] money is to be obtained only by productive labour.’ For Bell getting a proper job was too hideous to contemplate since ‘almost all kinds of money-making are detrimental to the subtler and more intense states of mind.’  Intellectuals like himself should have their minds on higher things: ‘there are personal relations to be enjoyed, beauty to be contemplated or created, truth to be sought.’

Society, for its own good, said Bell, had to be reorganised to support folk like himself - the intellectual elite, ‘As a means to good and a means to civility a leisured class is essential; that is to say, the men and women who are to compose that nucleus from which radiates civilisation must have security, leisure, economic freedom, and liberty to think, feel and experiment. If the community wants civilisation it must pay for it. It must support a leisured class as it supports schools and universities, museums and picture-galleries^[67].’ The obvious answer was to tax the productive section of society, ‘How are the civilizing few to be supplied with the necessary security and leisure, save at the expense of the many?’

His friend Aldous Huxley agreed that society had a duty to support an idle class of intellectuals, ‘you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within obvious limits, do what they please.’^[68]

This is why the under-appreciated, under-employed and underpaid intelligentsia welcomed with loud cheers the growth of government and government-funding. Thanks to the expansion of the State, they could console themselves with a government grant, they could find shelter with a position in a grandly-titled government agency or in one of the myriad organisations that relied indirectly on government largess - in the universities and research institutes, in the publicly-funded arts and science establishments. At last, with the expansion of the state, came the proper respect and financial support for what H. G. Wells called, ‘an elite of intelligent creative-minded people.’  These positions were not dependent on the fickle whims of consumers, spending their money as they saw fit. Instead they were paid for out of taxes, extracted reliably and forcibly from the rest of the population.

But there was something else.  It is clear from the writings of intellectuals, from the mid-19^th century to the first decades of the 20^th, that there was another reason to embrace state power.

To the great distress of the old intellectual gentry, capitalism wasn’t just making the lower orders richer. The masses were also losing their sense of social inferiority. As we have seen, through their sheer weight in the marketplace the masses were bending culture to reflect their tastes. Newspapers were pandering to them, they were expressing opinions, they were expecting to have a say in how they were governed and who should govern them.

For Nietzsche the advent of capitalism involved ‘the great, evil, protracted, slow rebellion of the mob and the slaves.’ Capitalist social mobility led to ‘the dominion of inferior men.’ Capitalism had dethroned the natural rulers and even the idea of ruling, or rather ‘what they now call ruling: bartering and haggling for power - with the rabble!’  He complained that ‘Everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master!’ Democracy was the ‘tyranny of the least and dumbest.’

In his Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset was alarmed that ‘the ordinary man, hitherto guided by others, has resolved to govern the world himself.’  He was distressed that ‘mass-man ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence.’  This was an historic transformation: ‘I doubt whether there have been other periods of history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than our own.’

This was a deplorable development. ‘The masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general.’  The masses were bestially ignorant, said Ortega, ‘The average man finds himself with “ideas” in his head but his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words.’  Capitalism represented ‘the brutal empire of the masses.’

Intellectuals like Ortega saw capitalism as a form of barbarism, the collapse of civilised society - a drift towards disturbing anarchy ordered by nothing other than crass economic forces and the wants and desires of the many-headed. Instead, a truly civilised society would be planned and ordered from above, rationally, by intelligent folk like himself.

The First World War was a gift.  In the various belligerent countries the state extended its power to a degree unprecedented in all history. As we have seen, during the Great War even the most hitherto free-market countries adopted a command economy, with governments assuming control of what was to be grown and manufactured, by whom, in what quantities for what prices, and what might be sold and consumed, by whom.  As AJP Taylor observed, ‘The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase.’

This enormous, unprecedented, expansion of the state sent a frisson of excitement through the intelligentsia. With Total War came Total Planning, and suddenly a new model for society presented itself. The bloated administrative State would not only provide the intellectual class with an income, it would establish the intellectual in the gratifying role of expert, thinker, supervisor, overseer, regulator and planner, directing the rest of us from on high - a vast all-powerful state, controlled by a class of wise, educated administrators. It was utterly thrilling, and the intellectuals set to work articulating how this would work, and how great it was going to be. 

H. G. Wells, one of the most famous and influential intellectuals of his day, dedicated his Shape of Things To Come to Ortega (whose Revolt of the Masses had been published in English the previous year). Wells was a cheer leader for a new form of society, which was to be governed by the New Class. The antidote to the domination of the vulgar masses described by Ortega, said Wells, was a ruling aristocracy of experts: ‘a new numerous, intelligent, educated and capable social element … organised, educated, conscious of itself and its distinctive aims.’^[69] It would be ‘a scientifically trained middle class of an unprecedented sort …  administrative men inspired by the belief in a common theory of social order.’  Society needed to be overhauled, to ‘clear the way for the recognition of an elite of intelligent, creative-minded people.’

In 1928 Wells drew up a highly influential manifesto for the emerging New Class intelligentsia, called Open Conspiracy.  The open conspiracy he called for, was among his fellow intellectuals.  The new society imagined by Wells would abolish individual ownership and ‘private profit-seeking’, but this would not be done in order to liberate the workers.  On the contrary, the purpose was to contain them.  He and his fellow conspirators he said, had lost ‘the delusive comfort of belief in that magic giant, the Proletariat.’ The direction of society, he said, could not possibly be left in the hands of thugs, race-course bookmakers, wilful idlers, burglars and the like.   Wells called for a ruling class of experts to control the ‘dull’, ‘base’ masses below, to save them from their ‘present confusion of aimless and ill-directed lives.’ Such views were standard among the intellectuals of the age. In 1932 Freud insisted that the ‘mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class.’^[70]

 Wells’ Open Conspiracy formed the manifesto for The Progressive League of intellectuals. Vice-Presidents included Wells, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, the Bloomsbury intellectuals Leonard Woolf, Rebecca West, Harold Nicolson and others. A close friend and admirer of Wells was John Maynard Keynes, a key member of the Bloomsbury group, who called on his fellows to join Wells’ ‘open conspiracy’. Wells was also huge admirer of Keynes, who in 1936 published The General Theory, which perfectly reflects the attitudes and aims of the conspiracy. 

Keynes’ General Theory - which is the economics bible of the New Class - called for an extraordinary extension of state control over economic life, for ‘communal saving through the agency of the state’ and ‘the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist’, declaring, ‘the vital importance of establishing central controls in matters which are now left in the main to individual initiative.’^[71]  These controls would be in the hands, not of what he called ‘the boorish proletariat’^[72]. The masses were dangerous, said Keynes, because they had no knowledge. Instead, a class of ‘intellectual and scientific’ experts would organise society ‘above the heads of the mass of more or less illiterate voters.’^[73]  As his biographer Lord Skidelsky says, ‘Keynes welcomed the coming to power of a new class of Platonic guardians.’^[74]

 It is quite explicit in these writings that a caste of expert planners would constitute a new ruling class.  H. G. Wells looked hopefully to the future, ‘one may conjure up a practical end to democracy in the vision of a state run entirely by a group of highly forcible and intelligent persons.’^[75] Instead of mass democracy (rule by the ‘New Stupid’), Aldous Huxley said an ideal State would be ‘controlled by an aristocracy of the intellect.’^[76]  America’s failing was its ‘lack of an intellectual aristocracy.’ He said ‘dictatorship and scientific propaganda may be the only way of saving humanity.’ Huxley even proposed ‘the special breeding and training of a small caste of experts, without whom a scientific civilisation cannot exist.’  These experts would be responsible for ‘the deliberate planning of our social life in all its aspects.’  This meant embracing totalitarianism, ‘We must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands.’^[77]  For Clive Bell such a tyranny of the intelligentsia was called for because, ‘There has never been a civilised democracy.’ The great intellectuals of the time, Mencken, Shaw, Kipling, Belloc, T. S. Eliot, all spoke out against democracy.

George Orwell, as we shall see, was one of the few intellectuals who bucked the trend, ‘The truth is that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.’^[78]

 Over time, said Wells, the New Class of guardians would extend its power beyond national boundaries, ‘this grey confusion that is Democracy must pass away inevitably by its own inherent contradictions, as the twilight passes, as the embryonic confusion of the cocoon creature passes into the higher stage, into the higher organism, the world state of the coming years.’  For James Burnham, ‘If political problems were settled by scientific reasoning, we should, most probably, expect the political system of managerial society would take the form of a single world-state.’^[79] The ‘anarchy’ of national sovereignty would be superseded, and the New Class, through a series of world bureaus would be free to organise society along rational lines.

These world bureaus, said Wells, would ‘take into account of all the resources of the planet, estimate current needs, apportion productive activities, and control distribution.’ The expert administrators who ran the ‘great central organization’ would tell people ‘what had best be done here, there and everywhere, solve general tangles, examine, approve, and initiate fresh methods.’ To this end, ‘the organised world community, conducting and ensuring its own progress, requires a deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition.’^[80]

Annoyingly, sweeping aside democracy, though desirable, is hard to pull off.  And so, a compromise was imagined wherein the form of democracy was kept (elections and such) but drained of any real content. Under the subtle guidance of the New Class, said Huxley, democracy would become an empty ritual, ‘the sovereign people will go to the polling booths firmly believing itself to be exercising free and rational choice, but in fact absolutely predestined by a lifelong course of propaganda.’  This life-long indoctrination of the population would begin in state ‘baby-farms’, and be achieved by the domination, by the state-controlling elite, of all education and media.  As Huxley says of the ordinary citizen, ‘By the time he reaches what is somewhat ironically called the age of reason, he will be wholly unable to think for himself. None but the approved State ideas will ever even occur to him.’ Keynes called it ‘the nationalising of knowledge.’

Wells too aimed for ‘a steady campaign to revolutionise education and establish a modern ideology in men’s minds.’ For Wells, this would ultimately lead to single state-approved world religion, ‘the modernisation of the religious impulse’ which would imbue in people ‘the desire for service, for subordination’ to the coming ‘single world state.’  This spiritual indoctrination would give the ruling intellectual class ‘an effective world control, not merely of armed force.’

THE NEW CLASS, FASCISM & COMMUNISM

These ideas were not mere flights of fancy.  They reflected and helped to inform and excuse the most appalling political developments. As Wells and the Bloomsbury group were promoting their Progressive League, Keynes was writing General Theory, Roosevelt’s Brains Trust of intellectuals were overseeing the huge expansion of state control sold as the New Deal, Communism was enjoying growing support among Western intellectuals and the Nazis were consolidating power. 

These events were not just contemporaneous. They were different eddies in the same great wave of statism that washed over the industrial world after the First World War.

Rexford Tugwell, one of the main architects of the New Deal was an admirer of Italian fascism and the Soviet Union. Roosevelt called Mussolini ‘admirable’ and said he was ‘deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.’  Oswald Mosely, the leader of British fascism knew and received advice from Keynes, who was himself an admirer of Nazi Germany.  Mosely also knew Wells, Nicholson and the others. 

Much of Wells’ work could have been lifted straight out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Hitler called for ‘A Weltanschaung which repudiates the democratic principle of the rule of the masses and aims at giving this world to the best people.’  Hitler’s aim was ‘to place men of brains above the multitude and to make the latter obey the former.’  Like Wells, Huxley & the rest, Hitler argued that ‘the common interest is surely not served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of thinking nor are they efficient and in no case whatsoever can they be said to be gifted … The best constitution and the best form of government is that which makes it quite natural for the best brains to reach a position of dominant importance and influence in the community.^[81]’

The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in the 1930s openly supported the Nazis, was not out of step with many of his intellectual contemporaries. In 1931, the writer Wyndham Lewis (whom T. S. Elliot lauded as ‘the greatest prose master of style in my generation’) wrote his book Hitler, a book of praise.  As an active eugenicist, H. G. Wells, declared that ‘masses of the human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future.’  He did not merely envisage preventing ‘base’ types from procreating, he also imagined the state systematically exterminating them. Death would mean ‘the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.’  The ruling elite would have a stomach for such eugenic slaughter because ‘They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.’^[82]  In a foretaste of the Holocaust, D. H. Lawrence imagined using poisoned gas, ‘I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace … then I’d go out in the back streets and the main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed; I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks.’^[83] It is worth remembering that not just Wells but George Bernard Shaw,  John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, William Beveridge, and others, were all advocates of eugenics.

As Professor Carey rightly observes, ‘The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.’       

INTELLECTUALS & THE STATE - CONCLUSION

                   ‘The work of teaching and organising the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals. … The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume leadership.’

                                                                        Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945

All this is to say that the intelligentsia, as a class, is not just innately anti-capitalist, it is also innately pro-state. And let us not naively suppose that this statism is motivated by soft-hearted altruism, to protect the feeble masses from the cruelty of the free market. For the New Class intelligentsia, the state is the ultimate expression of its own class interests, a vehicle for its domination.

The statism of the intelligentsia today is ingrained and ubiquitous. To demur from a statist worldview, to dare to express admiration for such champions of the small state as a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, leaves you badly out of step with your fellows. You might at best be viewed as eccentric. You will most likely be shunned.  New Class self-interest has naturally morphed into New Class morality. Those who want more government spending and oversight are civilised good people. Those who want lower taxes and less regulation are uncivilised bad people.  The working-class people who support them are deplorable.

NEW CLASS GREENS

The intellectuals of the 1920s and 30s, writing largely for their own consumption, were quite open about their dreams of a world state and their disgust for the masses. The challenge for the New Class intelligentsia in the second half of the 20^th Century was how to disguise its craving for power and its visceral, unpleasant snobbery as something apparently rational and noble. Better still if it could be dressed up as scientific.  In the 19^th Century their prejudices lay behind the ‘science’ of Social Darwinism, in the first half of the 20^th century, its evil offspring, the ‘science’ of eugenics. In the second half of the 20^th Century, and today, it is environmentalism.

The bitter misanthropy of the intellectuals, their hatred of the suburbs, their comfort-blanket yearning for a mythical unchanging rural past, their disgust at mass consumerism and mass tourism, their rage against an industrial society in which they have no useful role, their desire to control the whole of society … came together in modern environmentalism.

       Environmentalism is posh-anti-capitalism.  It is snob-anti-capitalism. As Irving Kristol wrote, ‘the “environmentalist” movement is a revulsion against the kind of civilisation that common men create where they are given the power, which a market economy does uniquely give them, to shape the world in which they wish to live.’^[84] Environmentalism is nothing more than a re-branding of the intelligentsia’s disgust at the social upset and mass prosperity that the free market brings.

In 1968, ten years after Galbraith’s Affluent Society, the green guru Paul Ehrlich, filled with violent disgust for mass consumerism, condemned ‘the effluent society’.  In 1973 E.F Schumacher in his classic Green text Small is Beautiful, said the modern consumer ‘is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy’.  He complained, ‘The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom.’  His conclusion was devastating.  We must abandon any hope of attaining ‘universal prosperity’, because, he said, ‘universal prosperity … if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy.’ Green hero James Lovelock says the over-consuming public is like a ‘revolting teenager’ and that we are ‘far too greedy and selfish for our own good.’

In How Much is Enough?, echoing Keynes, Robert and Edward Skidelsky argue, ‘Capitalism is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it has made possible vast improvements in living conditions. On the other, it has exalted some of the most reviled human characteristics, such as greed, envy and avarice. Our call is to chain up the monster again.’^[85]  They advocate a new puritanism, ‘This book is an argument against insatiability, against the psychological disposition which prevents us, as individuals and as societies from saying enough is enough.’ They complain that ‘Modern capitalism has inflamed through every pore the hunger for consumption.’   Chaining the monster will mean curtailing ‘our insatiable desire for consumption goods, inflamed by advertising’ The desire to make more and get on is quite revolting, ‘To say that my purpose in life is to make more and more money is like saying my aim in eating is to get fatter and fatter … there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot just go on spending … growth is no longer a sensible goal of long-term policy … material wants know no natural bounds, and will expand without end unless we restrain them.’

In Green literature, this anti-consumerist rant is relentless. We are told we must ‘move away from endless consumerism and materialism,’ from ‘the mindless accumulation of wealth for ill-defined purposes,’ and to end ‘the consumerism and incessant travel of the profligate West.’^[86]  John Naish, in his book Enough, says we should be satisfied with what we have, ‘In the Western world we now have everything we could possibly need.  There is no ‘more’.’

The leading Green Edward Goldsmith decried ‘the mass production of shoddy utilitarian goods in ever greater quantities.’   The debased creatures who buy this stuff constituted a different kind of subhuman - Homo Sapien Industrialis.  Every form of economic activity that benefits the many-headed, is held to be crass and an offence against the natural order.

It is not the tasteful consumption of the New Class intelligentsia that seems to distress posh-anti-capitalists. The well-to-do Greens do not rage against expensive organic free-range food, or hand-made cashmere sweaters, or imported Italian floor tiles.  They do not disparage posh cheese shops or boutique vintners, or contemporary art fairs, or shops that stock Persian-rugs. The problem is not their consumption. The problem is gaudy, soulless mass consumption. Greens John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander deplore the vulgar bargain hunter for whom, ‘everyday low prices are the ultimate human conquest.’  The Green group Earth First went so far as to organise a ‘puke in’ in a shopping mall.

It is not exclusive, expensive delicatessens, but rather the wicked low-cost supermarkets frequented by everyday folk which they find repellent.  It is a commonly heard complaint from Greens that things ‘aren’t expensive enough’.  ‘Rebels’ down from Eton for an anti-globalisation rally in Piccadilly threw bricks through the windows a working class MacDonalds – but not the windows of the high-class restaurants nearby. It is not the luxurious boutique furniture shop that makes them angry, but the proletarian IKEA, with its affordable sofas and lamps.

If a manufacturer of shampoo or coffee or whatever else, wishes to appeal to the exclusive, snobbish New Class intelligentsia, they must package and brand their product carefully. Forget the garish colours and the brash logo and the boast of how cheap it is. Packaging must be discreet, minimalist, as if it’s holding its nose against the stink of the mass market.  The product must appear as if it had been hand-crafted in some workshop, rather than churned out in a factory. It will cost many times more than the shamelessly mass-produced version. But to the New Class snob it’s worth the extra, to announce their distance from, and superiority to the mass market, and the masses themselves.

And the same goes for the Green outrage at mass tourism. When the New Class intelligentsia goes abroad, it is mind-expanding cultural travel. When the working and commercial middle classes do it, it is ecologically destructive, culturally insensitive mass tourism. For these sensitive snobs, it is the masses themselves who are the problem.

NEW CLASS & HAPPY PEASANTS

The Greens call for ‘de-growth’, and in this campaign against mass prosperity, the poorest people of the world are not spared. According to the Greens, mass tourism and free trade threaten to spread the poison of industrial mass-consumer society, corrupting the innocent, balanced cultures of the developing world. So the Greens have taken it upon themselves to protect the unspoiled peoples of these far-away places from the horrors of capitalism.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, free-market capitalism was allowed far greater scope in Communist China and socialist India. As a result of this, and of the greater adoption of free-markets elsewhere in the developing world, within just 20 years, world poverty halved. This was the most spectacular decline in poverty in the whole of human history. One might have thought this should be a cause for celebration. But the New Class anti-capitalists were dismayed.

Poorer parts of the world ‘must not make the same mistakes’ as the mass-consuming industrial world. In E. F. Schumacher’s seminal Small is Beautiful, he says, ‘The methods of production, the pattern of consumption, the systems of ideas and of values that suit relatively affluent and educated city people are unlikely to suit poor, semi-literate peasants.  Poor peasants cannot suddenly acquire the outlook and habits of sophisticated city people  … There are, moreover, many features of the rich man’s economy which are so questionable in themselves and, in any case, so inappropriate for poor countries that successful adaptation of the people to these features would spell ruin.’ 

But we shouldn’t worry too much because, Schumacher reassures us, ‘the needs of poor people are relatively simple’.  The tribespeople and peasants couldn’t handle all those goose-down duvets and angle-lamps and hatch-back cars.  Such fussy material wealth is ‘inappropriate’ to their blissfully simple culture.

James Lovelock, in Revenge of Gaia, scolds us for being ‘obsessed with the idea of progress and with the betterment of humanity’.  ‘Gaia’ won’t stand for it.  He says, ‘Now that we are over a billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.’  Lord Rees tells us, in his apocalyptic book Our Final Hour, ‘the world plainly could not support its entire population in the present style of middle-class Europeans and North Americans.’ Joseph E. Stiglitz says ‘embracing America’s profligate lifestyle would be a disaster for China, and the planet.’

 Schumacher’s book was sub-titled Economics as if People Mattered.  This is echoed by Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, subtitled Economics as if the World Mattered (people have been subtly demoted).  McKibben, like Schumacher, argues that, ‘The point is not that we should have it and they shouldn’t; it’s that extending Western-style consumption to the developing world is not going to work.’  How so?  He says, ‘Growth in the developing world is often ineffective; when it does work it can lead to cul-de-sacs we in the rich world have already entered; and in any event, there’s not enough stuff for our model to spread around the globe.’  Environmentalist Lester Brown tells us: ‘The western economic model, the fossil fuel based, auto-centered throwaway economy is not going to work for China.  And if it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which has an economy growing at 7 percent a year and a population projected to surpass China’s in 2030.  Nor will it work for the other three billion people in the developing world who are also dreaming the American dream.’ 

Capitalism is to blame says Edward Goldsmith, ‘we [in the West] are altering people’s aspirations’.  John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander attack ‘the intense promotion of consumerism’ which is ‘replacing diverse cultures with cultures of greed and materialism’.  They ask, in despair, ‘How many cars and refrigerators can be built and bought?  How many roads can cover up the land?’

This ‘globalisation’, says Goldsmith, must be stopped, ‘Free trade sounds highly desirable; its proponents make it appear that it frees the oppressed individual of yet another set of shackles previously imposed on him and on his ancestors by tyrannical customs and governments.’  But he says, ‘What is required is just the opposite – a transition to a world of largely self-sufficient communities, carrying out their economic activities at the level of the family, of the small artisanal enterprise and the community itself, largely to satisfy local needs via local markets.’ 

Telling the poor they should stay poor is a tough case to make. And so anti-capitalists have had to reframe their arguments. The aim of preventing poor people from getting richer, is now presented as protecting indigenous people from the harm that comes from material affluence. In his Earth in the Balance, Al Gore says our Western consumer society represents a ‘disharmony in our relationship to the earth.’  He says, ‘the noisy chatter of our discourse with the artificial world of our creation may distract us from the deeper rhythms of life’.  He regrets that, in the decadent West, ‘the pursuit of happiness and comfort is paramount, and the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products is encouraged as the best way to succeed in that pursuit.’  This is a ‘new kind of addiction’.  Industrial society makes a ‘false promise’.   He says, ‘The accumulation of material goods is at an all-time high, but so is the number of people who feel an emptiness in their lives.’ 

It’s hell being rich.  All those shiny new products making us miserable.  And if anyone is qualified to speak on the subject then it is surely Al Gore, who is, after all, rolling in the stuff.  Al Gore’s solution, to prevent the developing world becoming too Earth-destroyingly rich is, ‘The imposition of export controls in developed countries that assess a technology’s ecological effect, just as the Cold War technology control regime (known as COCOM) made careful and usually accurate analyses of the potential military impact of technologies proposed for export.’  COCOM, for those who don’t remember, blocked the export of advanced technology to poor countries, just in case they made weapons.  Gore suggests Western governments do the same again, to prevent ‘ecologically damaging’ industrial technology from reaching poor countries. 

POWER TO THE NEW CLASS

The mass consumers of the industrial world are consuming too much.  The poor of the Third World are in danger of consuming too much.  But there is one group in society, says the New Class, that is not over-consuming. There is one group that is not too rich. In fact, oddly enough, this group, though very wealthy by global standards, deserves more than they are currently getting. And that group is, of course, the New Class itself.  The Skidelskys, after lambasting the rest of us for our ‘greed, envy and avarice’ and ‘our insatiable desire for consumption goods,’ after telling the rest of us that we ‘cannot just go on spending,’ and that ‘material wants know no natural bounds, and will expand without end unless we restrain them,’ then declare, without a blush that,  ‘A sustained effort should be made to raise the share of income received by teachers, doctors, nurses and other public service professionals. This will require a higher rate of taxation.’

Higher levels of tax will go towards better pay for academics like themselves, and also what the authors call ‘merit goods’.  Merit goods, they tell us, are ‘goods judged to be good for society whether or not people want to buy them.’  These ‘merit goods’ include ‘art galleries, museums, concert halls and opera houses.’

Nor are we talking about a little more public funding.  The New Class demands the lion’s share of what society produces. Thomas Piketty in his celebrated New Class tract ‘Capital’ demands tax levels high enough to support ‘a much larger public sector than exists today’, requiring ‘public financing equivalent to two-thirds to three quarters of national income.’

 The New Class craves money, and power. Bureaucratic New Class authoritarianism, so beloved of Wells, Huxley and others, is a central feature of environmentalism. It is present everywhere in environmentalist manifestos. Michael Perlman argues that ‘Wartime planning represents an alternative organisational principle that can address the question of sustainability.’^[87]  For Paul Ehrlich ‘the policeman against environmental deterioration must be the powerful Department of Population and Environment.’^[88]  For Stephen Schneider saving the planet will require a series of ‘World Security Institutes’ with global planning powers.  A world ‘Institute of Imminent Disasters,’ which would liaise with and a world ‘Institute of Resource Availability,’ to come up with ‘drastic measures to reduce rates of economic growth’, and a world ‘Institute of Alternative Technologies’ would prevent the development and spread of ‘unsustainable’ technology.  The U.S. constitution might have to be rewritten, to hand power to a new ‘Planning Branch’ which would be independent from democratic political control.  And, to educate the public a ‘Truth and Consequences Branch,’ would produce and broadcast prime-time television programs aimed at creating ‘a new political consciousness.’ The Truth and Consequences Branch would also have its own compulsory 15-minute slot in all news programs, to ensure the public gets ‘repeated exposure’ to its message.

 All this of course explains why the New Class Greens adore the European Union, which perfectly reflects their yearning for a large-scale, well-funded, tax-consuming, powerful bureaucracy with law-making powers, beyond democratic control.

The New Class is shameless in its pursuit of more money and more power. Environmentalism has nothing to do with ‘protecting nature’ and ‘saving the planet.’  It is the ugly expression of a disgruntled, misanthropic, self-serving, anti-capitalist intelligentsia, who wish to see their own New Class power enhanced, and the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us curtailed.

NEW CLASS & THE WORKERS, AGAIN

                    It should be clear by now why ‘the workers’ were totally absent from the anti-capitalist ‘climate’ rally on Blackheath. This anti-capitalist demonstration was not for the workers. It was against them.  Nietzsche wrote that ‘a declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!’ The answer to Nietzsche’s call to arms was environmentalism.

 The workers are no longer even the nominal heroes of anti-capitalism. Today’s anti-capitalist radicals are fighting for the planet.  Far from championing the cause of the toiling masses, they are scornful of them.  The workers are the problem. It is they who are the ‘mass consumers’ in the reviled ‘mass-consumer society’.  It is the working masses who fill the aeroplanes and are guilty of unsustainable, culturally-insensitive ‘mass tourism’.  It is to provide the masses with affordable chicken-sandwiches that chickens are battery-farmed.  It is to provide the masses with cheap food that industrial intensive-agriculture is practiced, with its evil GM seeds and inorganic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.  It is for the sake of providing the masses with cheap products, that the capitalists have erected their frightful industrial factories.  It is for the greedy masses that beaches in foreign resorts are lined with vast hotels, and the world is plagued by well-lit shopping malls and hypermarkets and large cruise ships and multi-storey carparks.  It is for the aspiring masses that multi-lane highways and gas-guzzling cars and the suburbs were built. It is not the failure of capitalism to shower the masses with products and services that so upsets today’s posh anti-capitalists, but its success in doing so.

The working and commercial middle-classes, it should come as no surprise, are rather happy to be mass consumers.  They are delighted with the extraordinary range of pleasing commodities and services they can now afford.  They quite like the cars, and the central heating, and the back gardens, and foreign holidays and TV-sets and computers.  They do not see their own lifestyles as excessive. They do not consider themselves greedy. They can see the hypocrisy when well-to-do, upper-middle-class greens tell them to tighten their belts. They do not think of themselves as vulgar.  They can tell when relatively affluent snobby intellectuals are looking down on them.  They are not amused when the New Class intelligentsia sneer at the ignorant, backward, uncultured folk in ‘Middle America’, ‘Middle England’, the ‘flyover States’, and the ‘soulless sprawling suburbs.’

And, understandably, for their part, the masses look with resentment and disdain on the snooty culture and pretentious of the New Class. They can smell the class bigotry behind this posh anti-capitalism.  This is why working-class support for these flamboyant anti-capitalist radicals is close to zero. This is why so many working-class people are attracted to politicians who proclaim themselves to be decidedly pro-capitalist and anti-establishment (anti-New Class). This class animus is what’s behind what Orwell called, ‘the ordinary man’s recoil from Socialism.’

NEW CLASS HEGEMONY & POWER

The huge growth in government spending and control in the last hundred years has made the New Class immensely powerful. Its power is direct and indirect, or one might say ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.  Its hard power comes from the increasing reach of the State. This power is such that even the mightiest capitalist enterprises have been reduced to twitching, fawning supplicants. Big Capital is driven into the arms of the New Class, propelled both by fear and greed. Large corporations reason that, if they are to be regulated, it would be best to try to shape that regulation, to minimise as far as possible its adverse effects, and, wherever possible, to use it to its advantage. And so it must seduce and flatter, and make friends with the New Class, and laugh at its jokes.  After all, the right kind of regulation might make it harder for unwelcome foreign competitors to enter the market. Heavy regulation will also make it harder for smaller, upstart firms to threaten their established market dominance, since the burden of tiresome regulation falls heaviest, relatively, on smaller companies, who can ill-afford the compliance, auditing, HR and legal departments which the observance of complex rules requires - a bulky, largely unproductive shadow bureaucracy. On top of this is the appeal, to Big Capital, of getting its share of tax-breaks, subsides, public contracts and the like. The New Class has at its disposal vast quantities of taxpayer cash, which it can hand-out to well-behaved companies, and there are plenty of ways - regulatory and fiscal - of punishing large companies and industries that step out of line. And so Big Capital is bought off, and becomes a craven, cynical, uneasy friend of the Big State. This is why we find the senior managers of large, lazy corporations failing to challenge New Class anti-capitalism, paying lip-service to statist New Class initiatives, openly kowtowing to New Class prejudices, mindlessly regurgitating New Class environmentalist claptrap.

Even more insidious and extensive is the ‘soft power’ of the New Class. This stems from the New Class’ professed superiority of ‘knowledge’ and ‘expertise’ and its influence on public discourse and on the intellectual framework of public debate. 

 It is the New Class that staffs our universities, and its viewpoint pervades every subject taught. Modern economics (Keynesianism) is entirely the creation of the New Class and to its very core reflects its worldview.  It sees the world, not from the perspective of a hungry, street-fighting entrepreneur or an ordinary taxpayer, but from the perspective of a Treasury official (as Keynes was) and government planner.  In truth, real-life commercial entrepreneurs never need the services of a university-trained economist.  Businesspeople think about products and markets and marketing and sales and wage-bills and profits - never ‘aggregate demand’. Keynesianism is the quasi-scientific justification for the New Class’s state-control of the economy. And as such it enjoys a privileged position within universities and schools, effectively beyond criticism. No matter how absurd its propositions, no matter how obviously self-contradictory its ideas, no matter how many times it is shown by actual reality to be disastrously wrong, it persists as received wisdom, for the simple reason that it chimes completely with the interests of the New Class.  The New Class worldview is woven into the very fabric of mainstream economics and its coverage in the media.  ‘Cuts’ refers to cuts in public spending - not cuts in taxes.  ‘Austerity’ is always the austerity experienced by the tax-consuming New Class (angry about lower government spending). ‘Austerity’ never refers to the austerity imposed on the unfortunate taxpayers who must pay for high government spending.

It is from the New Class intelligentsia that newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV channels recruit their journalists, reporters, producers, presenters and editors, who in turn feed us deferential interviews with ‘experts’ from the New Class; it is from the ranks of the New Class that we get our school teachers, university lecturers and professors, policy researchers and analysts, novelists, theatre and museum directors, book publishers, sociologists, and so on. They are the educators and the literati. As Hayek says, ‘Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to this class, it is difficult to realise how numerous it is, how the scope of its activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we have all become. There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented.’^[89]

Politicians are never challenged by New Class journalists for allowing the fantastic proliferation of the State and Third Sector. On the contrary, when New Class journalists confront politicians, demanding to know what they’re doing about problems X, Y and Z (from juvenile delinquency and teen pregnancies to ‘Climate’) the politician must respond, defensively, that they are on the case, with more spending and the creation of another bullshit agency or service or review.

It is the New Class that provides us, through various channels, with their commentary on the world. It is through the lens of the New Class that we are, at every turn, invited to understand and interpret the world.  Taken together, there is an almost complete New Class monopoly of cultural and intellectual life, largely inescapable and overwhelming. This even applies when members of the New Class work for a privately-owned concern, as Hayek observed: ‘Newspapers in ‘capitalist’ ownership, universities presided over by ‘reactionary’ governing bodies, broadcasting systems owned by conservative governments, have all been known to influence public opinion in the direction of socialism, because this was the conviction of the personnel.’^[90]

The New Class enjoys its monopoly of cultural and intellectual life, and guards it with jealous fury. It is determined not to share its territory. The New Class is breathtakingly intolerant, within universities, in the media, the arts, and the other heartland professions of the New Class.  The rare news outlets that defy New Class orthodoxy are vilified by them, marginalised, and considered demonic. Activist groups threaten advertisers to boycott such channels. The editors of academic journals who publish papers that contradict New Class orthodoxy on ‘climate’ risk losing their jobs. University academics who dare to challenge the climate consensus are denied funding, have they papers rejected, are socially ostracised and even hounded out of their profession (New Class intolerance is the real basis of the ‘consensus’ on global warming). Hollywood directors and actors can damage their careers if they step out of line. A tech entrepreneur is reviled if he dares to oppose New Class dogma. The heads of companies can lose their jobs for a single ill-considered comment. It is a brave and exceptional politician who will dare to take on the New Class. Politicians, after all, need the support of journalists, they need the votes of teachers and others in the New Class public sector, and every day they are surrounded by, and rely on, New Class public administrators.

This is the ‘soft’ power of the New Class in operation. The New Class does not need formal methods of censorship. The voices of dissent are so few and so muffled, excluded from the New Class’ intellectual cartel. And yet, for all that, the New Class calls, at every turn, for direct censorship. The New Class feels threatened by social media, which is worryingly out of its control, and so it goes to great lengths to force social media platforms to subtly, and not so subtly, guide and censor views expressed there.  News which offends against New Class dogma is ‘fake news.’ Views of which the New Class disapproves are considered ‘harmful’. Those who promote such views face being ‘cancelled’. Broadcasting watchdogs are urged to revoke the broadcasting licenses of offending news channels.

The young members of the New Class, in their anti-capitalist rallies, pose as anti-establishment. They are rebels, they would have us believe. But the truth is, the New Class is the establishment. They are the very people who run and staff the legions of omnifarious agencies, offices, commissions, programs, advisory bodies, boards, committees, directorates and councils. They run the arts and science-funding bodies. They run the government schools. They run the research institutes. They run the universities. They run the NGOs and ‘Quangos’ (Quasi-NGOs) and the rest of the non-profit ‘Third-Sector’. The New Class runs the OECD, the WHO, the UN, the EU, the WEF. It dominates the mainstream media. The New Class is the establishment. It is an irony of the utmost significance, rarely if ever observed, that in modern capitalism, the Establishment is anti-capitalist. An anti-capitalist Establishment?!  It’s true.  Why else do we imagine taxes are so high?  Why is the State so enormous? Why is there so much regulation?

What’s more, it is an establishment that defies democratic limits or popular censure. Describing the grip on power of the managerial New Class, Burnham, as early as 1941, argued, ‘The democracy of capitalist society is on its way out, is, in fact, just about gone, and will not come back.’^[91] The New Class enjoys power beyond democratic control because you can’t vote the New Class out of power.  The intelligentsia, said Daniel Bell in 1973, exercises its influence, not through the ballet box, but rather ‘the bureaucratic and administrative labyrinth.’^[92] In Britain the Greens can manage to get only a single MP elected. As a political movement they are staggeringly unpopular, and, understandably, their unpopularity is most extreme among working class voters. And yet, despite the failure of Greens at the ballot box, green policies, in Britain and across Europe, reign supreme across the entire political spectrum. No politician dares to cross them.

The New Class does not need democracy, and does not fear democracy.  State policy can, in effect, only be changed by the New Class functionaries who run the state. New policies will be discussed and considered and edited and re-worked and altered by those New Class apparatchiks whose job it is to judge and frame and write regulations. The New Class are the gatekeepers of public policy. They are the ‘public realm’. And their power comes from size. The ‘public realm’ is now gigantic. It is a daunting political task to radically shrink it. Where is the politician who would dare to sack several million people? Even the likes of Thatcher and Reagan hardly made a dent. Their feeble blows against the New Class counted for little.  With sublime indifference the New Class carries on.

NEW CLASS VERSUS PROSPERITY

Today the New Class is enormous. To repeat, in the U.S. and U.K more than twice as many people work in government as work in manufacturing. In France, as I write, government spending stands at a mind-boggling 60 percent of GDP.  The sheer number of bullshit New Class jobs that result from this is staggering.  Never before in the whole of human history has such a vast proportion of mankind been occupied in such a futile, unproductive, parasitic manner.

The holder of every bullshit public-sector New Class job - every sustainability assessment co-ordinator and regional inclusion officer - has a car and house and a TV and food and clothes and holidays. Every member of the productive economy is struggling to support, not only themselves, but one or two of these ‘bullshit’ others. The dead weight of New Class parasitism has had a devastating effect on growth and prosperity. And the effect is compounded.  Year after year.  How much richer would we have been, how much more thrilling would life have been, had it not been for this miserable mountain of New Class bullshit, weighing us down and obstructing our path?

The very existence of the New Class has stifled and retarded economic growth. The high level of tax needed to maintain it has reduced profits, wages and levels of productive employment, suffocating economic activity. The New Class’ incontinent government spending has wasted taxpayers’ hard-earned money and landed us with ruinously large public debts. Its monopoly and debasement of currency has held down wages, undermined the culture of saving, increased indebtedness, encouraged reckless speculation and destabilised markets. Its environmentalist policies are in the process of decimating the industrial manufacturing economy. Its expansion of welfare has undermined the independence, resilience, spirit and social coherence of vast swathes of the population, destroying families and poisoning communities. The New Class regulatory state, which demands obedience and compliance, has eaten away at the instincts and ideals of individual responsibility and individual freedom.  It has sapped the dynamism of people, reducing too many of us to docile servility and conformity. The New Class is modelling for us a world that is ever more stultifying and limited, less free, less exciting and less human.

FIGHTING THE NEW CLASS

                   There is no doubt that Western society is out of sorts. Many ordinary citizens feel alienated from, and animosity towards the political and cultural establishment.  On a whole range of issues, a gulf exists between the progressive views of the university-educated elite, and those of the grumbling, conservative, unenlightened masses. To academics and progressive commentators, this is a sad reflection of the poor intelligence and morals of the lower orders, the narrow self-interest of the vulgar, commercial middle class, and the extraordinary ability of political Svengalis like Donald Trump to dupe and deceive the workers.

       The ideological fissure between the enlightened elite and the backward masses has been called, nebulously, a ‘culture war’.  But the term is too trivial.  It is a full-blown class war. We don’t realise it yet, we haven’t understood it properly, we haven’t grasped its enormous historic significance …  because one of the belligerents in that war has managed, by magic, to stay hidden.

In this war there is no point reasoning with the New Class, to try to win them over.  The historic task of defeating the New Class falls to the very classes who did not turn up to the climate rally in Blackheath - the working and commercial middle-classes. They - many of them - are already instinctively aware of this class conflict.  They are at the butt-end of so many New Class policies.

But grumbling resentment and vague animosity towards the New Class is not enough. The nature of the battle must be spelled out. The need to fight must be underlined, the reasons for waging war explained, and distilled into memorable slogans. 

Most of all, the enemy needs to be clearly identified. Our failure to do so has allowed the New Class to grow and grow, and to escape responsibility for the chaos and misery it has caused.  The first step must be to pronounce and advertise, loudly and repeatedly, that the New Class exists. The immense power of the New Class, as we have seen, lies in its anonymity - in the fiction that its members are neutral and disinterested experts, well-meaning ‘concerned’ scientists, high-minded intellectuals, impartial planners and regulators, rationally ordering us and our world, in our best interests. This sham neutrality must be exposed, the selfish motives called out. This invisible class must made visible.  This anonymous class must be given a name.

Copyright, Martin Durkin 2024

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[1]. Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), p. 25.

[2]. Karl Popper, The Open Society & its Enemies, Vol. II (1945), p. 138.

[3]. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (1957), p. 149.

[4]. Ibid p. 42.

[5]. Ibid p. 56

[6]. J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958), p. 253

[7]. Ibid p. 263

[8]. Greenspan, Capitalism in America (2018), p. 136

[9]. Ibid p. 156

[10]. AJP Taylor, English History 1914-45, (1965), p. 1

[11]. EHBS1700-92-3

[12]. John Jewkes, Ordeal By Planning (1948), p. 157

[13]. Ibid p. 158

[14]. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941), p. 109

[15]. Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (1944), p. 4

[16]. Op. cit. Burnham, p. 9

[17]. Ibid 77

[18]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Penguin, p. 86

[19]. Edgar Feuchtwanger, Bismarck (2002), p. 219

[20]. Ibid p. 203

[21]. Op. cit. Burnham, p. 193

[22]. James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We’re In (2014), among others

[23]. Samuel Smiles, Self Help (1859), p. 19

[24]. Thomas Piketty, Capital (2013), p. 249

[25]. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (2018), p. 2

[26]. F. A. Hayek, The Intellectuals & Socialism (1949), p. 10

[27]. W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain 1750-1990 (2015), p. 52

[28]. Thomas Cushman, Intellectuals & Resentment Towards Capitalism (2012)

[29]. George Orwell, Essays (2013), p. 310

[30]. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy (1942), p. 153

[31]. Ludwig von Moses, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (1956), p. 64

[32]. J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958), p. 163

[33]. Ibid. 262

[34]. Ibid. 262-3

[35]. Mises, Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 10

[36]. Op. cit. Cushman

[37]. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 297

[38]. MESW Vol 1, pp79ff

[39]. E. H. Hunt, British Labour History (1981), p. 57

[40]. Op. cit. Greenspan, p. 141

[41]. Ibid. p. 107

[42]. Op. cit. AJP Taylor, p. 302

[43]. Op. cit. Smiles, p. 24

[44]. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), p. 128

[45]. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981), p. 93

[46]. Cited Fred Siegal, The Revolt Against the Masses (2013), p. 47

[47]. EC82

[48]. Op, Cit Siegal, p. 71

[49]. Clive Bell, Civilisation (1928), p. 93

[50]. EC33

[51]. EC61

[52]. EC34

[53]. COT83

[54]. IM51

[55]. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992), p. 51

[56]. Ibid. p. 57

[57]. Op. cit. Bell

[58]. Lawrence James, The Middle Class: A History (2008), p. 391

[59]. EC37

[60]. DCC 82

[61]. OBP 32

[62]. Orwell, Essays, p. 331

[63]. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (1969), p. 82

[64]. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

[65]. Op. cit. Carey

[66]. TSZ 121

[67]. C178

[68]. Ed. David Bradshaw, The Hidden Huxley (1994), p. 12

[69]. H. G. Wells, Anticipations (1901), p. xlv

[70]. Op. cit. Carey p. 29

[71]. J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), p. 376

[72]. Robert Skidelskey, John Maynard Keynes, Vol 2 (1994), p. 235

[73]. Ibid. p. 224

[74]. JMK 2, 224

[75]. Op. cit. Wells, p. lxxvii

[76]. Op. cit. Hidden Huxley, p.36

[77]. Op. cit. Siegal, p. 108

[78]. Op. cit. Wigan Pier, p. 173

[79]. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941), p. 174

[80]. H. G. Wells, Open Conspiracy (1928), p. 47ff

[81]. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925), p. 401ff

[82]. Op. cit. Carey, p. 124

[83]. Ibid. p. 12

[84]. Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), p. 57

[85]. Robert Skidelskey & Edward Skidelskey, How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (2013), p. 3

[86]. OFH 102

[87]. Michael Perlman, The Perverse Economy (2003), p. 183

[88]. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968), p. 152

[89]. Op. cit. Hayek, p. 10

[90]. Ibid. p. 14

[91]. Op. cit. Burnham, p. 171

[92]. Daniel Bell, The Coming Of Post-industrial Society, p. 36

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