(some old stuff from my marxist days for you all to play with)
Overman or Economic Dead Weight?
Antiquity gave us a different version of the aesthete of culture than the version we have now in this century. The ‘highest’ man today merely owns six islands and one of Jupiter’s moons, but beyond that he is as uneventful and ordinary as anyone else. He has never been in a war, he doesn’t collect fine art, he’s a terrible fencer and he speaks only one language…and badly, at that. Is this what Rand promised us? The noble hero of the industrial age? Is this John Galt?
This is what earth has been reduced to- a planet of monkeys ruled by a few better monkeys among them. Nothing is great anymore. I blame much of this on the fulcrum, wheel and the inclined plane. Three inventions that changed everything for the worse. No, I’m kidding.
Practice has shown the world that the theoretical far ends of the right and left political philosophy both lead conclusively to a type of elitist rule of a few over the many. Whether this be the rule of a few corporations and bank owners over society or the rule of a vanguard party over the state, either case ends up again at a concentration of power in the hands of a few major decision makers.
The theoretical Marxist ‘withering away of the state’ has never been realized, although Marxist apologists explain that the conditions were not yet ripe for that final dialectical change…so the state remained necessarily. In any event, a true spontaneous anarcho-capitalism would never be conceivable in a real democratic form- a working class lower range of people will always be necessary (until all labor is provided by machines), and therefore the practical, undemocratic form of the society would reveal itself over time.
In theory the right and the free market suppose that real equality is defined by having the opportunity to start one’s own business and use wage workers to make a profit. If everybody has the right to do this, then this particular civil contract is justified. In practice, however, this basic premise of the free market is often not applicable because intrinsic to the premise is the premise that there must be a lower, exploited class…or else the capitalist class cannot operate. This fact is in the fine print of the idea.
In theory, the left and the worker’s state suppose that real equality is defined by not having the opportunity to start one’s own business and use wage worker’s to make a profit. If nobody was a capitalist, and everyone worked for the state, then everyone would be equal…insofar as everyone was a wage worker. In practice no socialist state has ever achieved this throughout. A bourgeois class still existed among the elites. Markets of private property continued to exist and the small margin of society that ruled dictatorially could exploit the entire state for their own personal gains.
Still, a statist economy would consist of a smaller number of economic tyrants in general, since it would reduce the number of private institutions dramatically, eliminating very many independent capitalist entities. This is another matter, though.
So despite our attempts to argue the successes and failures of both the left and the right, history demonstrates through its own compulsion to organize politically that the human animal is a moral animal, but that there were different kinds of morals for different class oriented perspectives. I would allude to Nietzsche’s belief that the two types of morality- the constrained, reactive morality of the exploited class and the naturally affirmative, dominant tendency of the ruling type, the master- are different types of pathologies. The first seeks to define and justify itself by petitioning the herd, the second, seeks to justify itself by distinguishing itself from a herd (its pathos of distance).
The great political upheavals and shifts are the initiative work of the ruling class morality type. History has shown that a communist revolution is organized by an elite few, so the ideology of communism, conceived of by those who had the power to actualize it, contained within it the edifice for a totalitarian system.
There are two classes here in relation now. The aristocratic class is the emergent class out of the bourgeois and proletariat divide which established itself once the material productions were advanced enough for mass production (and therefore relatively large population), and the requirement that a large majority of the citizens of that society became working class.
Prior to the aristocratic conception of class the bourgeois was considered the highest class involved in the economic machinations of the society. After the origin of the aristocratic class, political motivation would naturally become a motivation toward having the most property and laboring the least. For this, the proletariat and capitalist class was needed to sustain the productivity of the society.
A considerably modest proposal; that one have as much freedom as possible, and as little obligation as possible to labor. Such a thing sounds perfectly reasonable but it wouldn’t work as an imperative. If the rule given to the aristocratic class were ever given to the majority, the economic and social functioning of the society would radically change. The productivity of the entire society would diminish. This makes the exceptional class exceptionally contingent. That is to say, it is not a critical component of the socioeconomic machine because of its lack of imperative form and necessity in real material relations.
The new aristocratic class, possible only after a certain kind of society is established, is an emergent class (it does not function economically and affect the modes and relations of production) from the natural modes and relations of a material existence in a society based around productivity and consumption on a large scale. A few gain the opportunity to amass large amounts of money and assets without participating directly in business management or employment of some kind.
The vast majority of a people must be under subjugation in order for an abundance of luxury to be created for the aristocratic class. The semiotic of this ‘artistic’ type is propagated through the narrative associations made in the class identifications, and the aesthetic values are generated out of that discourse.
The aristocrat is typically identified as refined, intelligent, of higher more sophisticated culture, in contrast to the autonomous and mechanical nature of the mundane capitalist and worker. The class consciousness of the ‘aristocrat’ operates like any other class consciousness, the cultural reification of the idiosyncrasies of the class identify it objectively. The identity of this upper class is sustained in this way.
Contrarily, from an economic point of view, the aristocratic type is a negative feature of the organization and efficiency of the entire system, while the worker is ‘embedded’ in the very ecological and technological relations of the machine. Anatomically, the aristocratic class is like a parasite to the capitalist/proletariat discourse. His alienation to the working class in that way distinguishes him as a traitor in the sociological and cultural atmosphere of ‘consumer’ discourse. This is why we all understand precisely what a stereotype of the bourgeois would be and identify it so easily. There is a very clear linguistic/idiosyncratic ‘stamp’ on the identity of the bourgeois, as there is for any social class. All the possible derogatory allusions we could create with the popular phrase ‘white collar’ demonstrates the dexterity of our understanding of this particular class and its signs.
Here man’s will to power is attributed and marked by the principle which holds true in any possible political orientation- he wishes to make decisions which others must submit to, and he wishes to own as much property as possible without committing to any laboring to get it. At the top ends of any political pyramid of power there will be people who wish to do precisely that, playboy.
It should be clear that no arrangement of political power will ever be truly egalitarian…but only insofar as equality means to be equally subjected to the necessity of laboring. The aristocratic class really has only two significant advantages over the bourgeois and proletariat- he is not inclined by necessity to act in an economic way. He is not committed to financial concerns nor is he obligated to produce anything (with his own hands), but he acts to maintain his place of power. This action is again, from an economic perspective, another form of manipulation and exploitation of the process of production that the two opposing classes are engaged in. Well maybe he’s an investor and then technically a capitalist, too.
But these are some of my basic objections to the soft, democratic conceptions of politics and people who seem shocked that politics is full of conspiracy and half truths, and that we still haven’t achieved peace on earth. This is the natural state of man, and the moral types should be considered respectively according to their function in the entire political body. Think Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Both are necessary for each other.
By virtue of having enough power to gain so much power, the ruling classes of this technocratic, corporatist planet called earth have every right to exercise such power. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
Who was it that said ‘art and culture rests on a terrible basis’. Society must for its majority be mundane, monotonous and laborious so that a few might have the luxury and free time to become refined and artistic.