Could it be different this time?

Criminal activity has a double face. There are crimes committed by the rich and powerful and their subordinate governments, and there are crimes committed by the poor and their organised gangs. However, governments write the laws that make some crimes legal and penalise others. For example, it is legal to poison rivers, aquifers, the atmosphere, land and oceans, whereas selling sex and drugs is severely punished. War can be made, countries invaded and cities obliterated, but armed robbery is heavily condemned. The rich have laws that suit them, and others that justify their oppression of the poor. The rule of law is the rule of wealth over the rest of society.

Upper-class criminality aims at squeezing more out of the system. Working-class criminality is survival in a difficult environment. Organised crime is partly supported by the law and partly against the law. It is the symptom of a society divided by class, where a small minority decides what it can do and what the rest are not allowed to do. Plutocracy rules and makes the rules. But as wealth concentrates to the extreme, those left out grow in numbers and repressive forces grow in consequence. Consent to government is a function of equality. Excessive inequality can only be governed by force. New laws create new crimes, and police powers expand into new domains. Consent is replaced by constraint. A police state and a vast penal system are the logical conclusions.

Inequality breeds repression. The ruling few must defend themselves against their subjects. As wealth concentrates, inequality grows, and so must the defence system, external defence against competing nations and internal defence against rising numbers of rebellious poor. Military and police become the only support of the ruling class, when the middle class is no longer mediating. When their incomes, their wealth and their aspirations are degraded, they no longer function as role models for the lower classes who live pay-cheque to pay-cheque. This degradation is the result of extreme wealth, which can only be obtained by taking from those who actually have something. The work ethic no longer holds, as hard work no longer pays. When the middle class is déclassé, when people have to mortgage their homes to get by, there is no longer a buffer zone between the ruling class and the dangers of working-class rebellion. However, by its numbers – some 40% of the population in industrial nations – the middle class has a determinant role in politics and ideology. It is the best placed to take power from the ruling class. This means battling on two fronts, to maintain its dominion over the working class and to break the plutocratic rule of absolute wealth. The middle class is the backbone of government administration and corporate management. It is strategically placed to take over from the ruling class, whose only legitimacy is ownership.

Since even before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, workers have seen their manual skills replaced by machines, and their labour has been devalued accordingly. From master-craftsmen, they were reduced to mechanical servants. This happened in industry and services, and concerned blue-collar workers. The Digital Revolution is doing the same to white-collar workers, which is the domain of the middle class. Algorithms are replacing their various competencies, and artificial intelligence may soon make them even more superfluous. The middle class did not preoccupy itself with the fate of the working class. It came to seem a fatality, as in most cases machines were faster and more precise than human hands, and they did not slacken or feel fatigue. But now it is the middle class that is being replaced and made the servant of machines. And those made redundant are beginning to react. The whole middle-class status is being undermined and the tremors are getting stronger. So far there are no signs of solidarity with the working class. On the contrary, there is antagonism and defiance, especially towards minorities. The middle class continues to fear the working class as violent and dangerous, but it has lost its respect, or subservience, concerning the ruling class.

The middle class is the most obsessed with rank. The rich and the very rich often know one another, personally or by reputation, at least in their part of the world, and this unites them as a class where they interbreed. Though gang and union bosses may have extravagant lifestyles, the poor are mostly preoccupied by keeping a roof over their heads, clothing their children and having food on the table. The middle class is in contact with both ends, and individual aspirations are to move up. This perpetual competition relies a lot on status symbols and denies any class solidarity. However, that upward movement that characterised the post-WW2 years lost its momentum in the 1970s, slowed down in the following decades and stopped some ten years ago. For a while now, the middle class has been keeping up appearances with debt. But that debt burden has reached a maximum, and growing numbers are finding it unbearable because of shrinking incomes.

The middle class has neither the criminal opportunities of the working class, nor those of of the ruling class. This situation distils a strong, often bigoted morality, tainted by religious beliefs and ethnic privileges. When middle-class status and incomes are rising, the ruling class is perceived as virtuous and the middle class is content with supervising and controlling the working class, and will even encourage its upward social mobility. When wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands, manual workers are the first to suffer from the end of trickle down. And then the middle class progressively joins the victims. This leads to a questioning of ruling-class ethics. Is it benevolent or just greedy? Is it concerned by the nation's well being as a whole, or is it only absorbed by its own wealth and power? As the second alternatives become increasingly apparent, the middle class feels abandoned and its compliance to authority diminishes.

The ruling class is threatened when the middle class is dissatisfied and makes a pact with the working class. This happens when the aura of government is seen to be just the glitter of gold, and when the mastery of words and numbers is devalued like the mastery of tools. A class alliance is possible when the middle class loses faith in the system. But falling income and status are not enough. Rebellions need leaders with a vision of unity, and able to convince both parties that they should be together. In the past, that class alliance put an end to feudalism and absolutism, opening the way for capitalism. More recently it has made war, opposed war and even given failing finance a new lease of life. But it never lasts, and the hierarchy of wealth and power reinstates itself relentlessly. When the middle class and the working class join together with a determined leadership, they have the power to transform the world. But the ingrained ideology of individual success and the intoxicating effect of commanding the masses end up with more of the same. "For things to remain the same, everything must change" (1). Marx was very critical of this class alliance and imagined that the working class could and should go it alone, though it is unclear what role the “lumpenproletariat” is supposed to play (2). And the idea persists that education and class consciousness can insure that workers are able to depose the ruling class and impose their own dictatorship (3). But experience shows that education alienates people from their working class origins. They no longer have a shared vocabulary, and their mental experience has been expanded beyond the daily grind by literature and science. Most will join the ranks of the middle class and adopt its ways. The rest will be in a kind of limbo of neither/nor, a lumpen-bourgeoisie, a sort of Oort cloud propelling artistic comets blazing round the sun.

The middle class has the power of knowledge, but is subjugated to the power of wealth and its mercenary forces. The pen is the sword's servant, and both bow down to money. Except when money is not forthcoming (4), when their share of the loot extracted from labour shrinks and that of their rulers grows exorbitantly. In the workplace the middle class is being replaced by algorithms, and in the domains of ideology and politics, of literature and science, artificial intelligence is a growing threat. Can machines crush the middle class the way they crushed the working class? In fact it is already happening surreptitiously. The ranks of the middle class are thinning and their prospects are increasingly uncertain. For some time, the middle class has been riding on debt, as has the world in general, dreaming of a new rush of wealth production that would wipe those debts away. The pandemic has put a damper on that dream, and the growing devastation of climate disruption is destroying it for many. The return of middle-class prosperity and expansion will not happen, and one of two paths will have to be followed before they are completely gutted. The choice is between a hard, uncertain climb to revolution and a gentle slope down to mechanised totalitarianism.

The middle class has risen to power in the past, lifted by working class energy. But the coercive means it deploys against the ruling class are then turned against the working class to keep it in subordination. Taking power from those who hold it involves violence, because power is founded on violence. The middle class has a mostly cerebral function, and does not experience the physical violence of manual labour and of working-class circumstances. The violence it mobilises to impose it class rule is that of the working class, and it does this by promising freedom, equality and fraternity/happiness. Abstract notions that sound good and obfuscate the fundamental question of national and international property rights. Who owns the national wealth, the land and all its produce, the money and all its benefits, the knowledge and all its advantages, the machines and all their productivity, be it at home or, for imperialist nations, abroad? Does that wealth belong to individuals, corporations, governments, or to the vast majority who actually create and circulate it? Just like government, the nation's ownership can be by the few for the few, or by all for all. And the pendulum swings one way or the other.

Over the past few decades, the distribution of wealth and power has become increasingly top heavy. Without consulting the people, political decisions are made and laws are passed by a tiny minority of “representatives”, when things are not simply decreed by the head of the executive. As for wealth disparity, it has outstripped historic records, with a situation where some see their fortunes increase by millions every day, while countless others are lucky to earn more than a hundred, and half the world's population tries to survive with less than five. Not to mention those who eat mud-cookies to calm the pangs of hunger (5). For all this to be possible, something must be seriously wrong. It is neither moral nor inherent, it is structural and ideological. The structure is profit capitalism that is obliged to take more than it gives, and the ideology is that there is no alternative. Capital is held by the ruling class, but its propaganda grips the middle class. The first group, one presumes, knows the system advantages it. The second is led to believe the system can work for anyone who tries hard enough. The middle class is brought up on the idea of constant striving, whereas fun and games are distractions and almost guilty occupations. This goes back to the very beginning of profit capitalism and its Puritan morality, according to Max Weber. Four centuries of always wanting more and the frustration of never having enough. The more started by taking from the natives. In the Americas this was simplified by superior weapons and transmissible diseases. Those proud nations were destroyed, decimated and finally parked like animals in reservations. And once all had been taken, the newcomers could only take from each other. Always more, not as a society but as individuals created by the protestant religion's personal relation to god. Which in turn resulted from the diffusion of printed matter and the spread of literacy (6).

The middle class will not throw away its ingrained beliefs in the accumulation of wealth, but it is slowly being obliged to admit that there are limits that should not be exceeded. The dangers of extreme wealth and poverty, and of climate disruption can no longer be denied in good faith. And both have reached a stage where reforms and “nudges” are no longer of any use. Radical action is needed, but it will have to be preceded by a profound modification of mental attitudes. The challenge is not ethnic, or religious, or national, it is global. Humanity survives or it disappears. Thinking in planetary terms is not simple, especially if one is running all the time to keep up with the bills. And centuries of taking from others, their land, their labour, their souls, will not easily turn to sharing, especially for those who have taken the most. The alternative to this almost spiritual transformation is belligerence and having the working class fight itself, inside or across borders. Making war, civil or foreign, has often resolved social unrest in the past. A nation at war can be made to obey. The temptation is strong to go there again, but finance and climate concern the world as a whole, not some parts as opposed to others. There are no dividing lines. East-west, north-south no longer make sense. However, reason very rarely prevails, and economic tensions are reviving the Cold War oppositions. The perpetual struggle over who owns what, in a game of global Monopoly.

The collusion between middle and ruling classes to exploit manual labour goes back a long way, insuring that the hands that hold tools to transform matter and create use value do not get all they produce. For most of history the lords of the land did the exploiting, while merchants and artisans only took the profits of trade and the labour of their apprentices. Mechanisation changed that. When workers were assigned to precise, repetitive and timed operations, the middle class became their natural overseers. And it was the middle class that took up experimental sciences and imagined technological applications. Mass production and wage labour came into conflict with the old order of landed aristocracies, feudal serfdom and slavery. Industry prevailed and generated a new even greedier aristocracy, the capitalist Moguls of the late 19^th century. Hereditary power structures were replaced by the absolute rule of profit capitalism. After hard times, the Second World War brought the middle class to the fore and multiplied its numbers. In the military, the essential links in the chain of command - leadership in combat - were middle-class, or became so by moving up the ranks. And government control of production multiplied the administrative domains and their personnel. After the war commerce and commercials took off fast, and they recruited competence not class origins. At the same time small businesses and corporate management were growing in numbers. By the 1960s, some imagined that the middle class in developed countries was humanity's future. It was not to be. Capital accumulation was back and its concentration was on the rise, while wartime government control and administration were deconstructed, and wealth taxation was reduced. The middle class saw its wealth stop growing and go into reverse, and the working class was criminalised and jailed in lucrative penal archipelagos.

Profit capitalism is backed into a corner with no exit. It is assailed by the growing intensity of rain and drought, by a phenomenal mountain of debts, an abysmal wealth divide and a devastating pandemic, all of its own making. It still holds the reins of power, but its ideological control is weakening as reality uncovers its impostures. The lies and duplicity, the fraudulent claims, the corruption of wealth and the power it gives, the indescribable mismanagement of global affairs from war to warming, and countless other deceits are coming out in the light of day. Profit capitalism has lost its credibility, and people are desperately searching for something to replace it. This should lead to a middle-class dictatorship, of a more or less “enlightened” nature. Will it be nationalist, exclusive and belligerent, or will it be humanist, inclusive and peaceful? Will the new rulers open up to the top or the bottom? Will they mimic and incorporate their predecessors, or will they welcome the poor and the hungry to a share of the feast, what is left of it? Precedents do not encourage optimism.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AThe_Leopard

2. “The February (1848) Revolution had cast the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole power. Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat. Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after setting up a hundred different obstacles. There consequently remained but one way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other.

For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty–four battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from fifteen to twenty years old. They belonged for the most part to the lumpen proletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character – at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption. The Provisional Government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day; that is, it bought them. It gave them their own uniform; that is, it made them outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers. In part it assigned officers from the standing army as their leaders; in part they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.

And so the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army, drawn from its own midst, of 24,000 young, strong, foolhardy men. it gave cheers for the Mobile Guard on its marches through Paris. It acknowledged it to be its foremost fighters on the barricades. It regarded it as the proletarian guard in contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was pardonable.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm

3. “The petty bourgeoisie becomes not only as reactionary as the upper bourgeoisie, but even more so. Any steps taken to establish links with it are tantamount to opportunism, destruction of the revolutionary forces, and solidarity with capitalist preservation. This is valid today for the entire western world”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1957/fundamentals.htm

4. "Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn all others".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septimius_Severus#Death_(211)

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_cookie

6. See Marshall McLuhan's “The Gutenberg Galaxy”.