Triumph of The Reactionaries

[applegrove]

Triumph of The Reactionaries

Letter to the Millennials 4

Jonathan Taplin

Jan 12, 2018 

https://medium.com/@jonathantaplin/triumph-of-the-reactionaries-20468de5c6b0

"SNIP......

Although the libertarians will argue that America is a meritocracy, this is not true. In fact social mobility is at an all time low. We have morphed into a country of four classes in which movement between them is relatively circumscribed.At the top is the ruling class made up of the 1% which controls most of the capital and what James Burnham called “The Managerial Elite”. In Burnham’s vision, the middle class gets wiped out and so below the managerial elite are the working class of both industrial and service workers. This is the only class represented by unions, and yet they have seen very few pay raises.

Below the working class is a new class which economists have taken to calling The Precariat — defined as living “in a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare.” These are the free lancers, the Uber drivers, the Amazon warehouse workers. They have no unions and no employee healthcare or retirement accounts. They are divided by whether the live above or below the API (Application Program Interface). Those above tell computers what to do (coders, designers, etc). Those below are told by computers what to do (Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers). Many of you are already living in the Precariat with mountains of student debt hanging over your heads.

And below the Precariat lies the Underclass. The unemployed, on disability, homeless, mentally disturbed, opiod and meth consuming population. Although James Burnham could not have imagined the Precariat or the size of the underclass in 1941, he cerainly understood that democracy was going to be severely challenged by the managerial elite and the 1%. Raised in the 1930’s as a Socialist Trotskyite, Burnham came to believe that neither socialism nor democracy would survive under what he called “The Managerial Revolution.” George Orwell wrote an appreciation of Burnham’s theory.

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.



.....SNIP"

[Newest Reality]

1. K&R