Carrol Cox wrote, "A hypothesis which I won't defend or develop but which I think would be worthwhile exploring: A century from now historians (unless we have been bombed or warmed back to the stone age) looking back on the history of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries will see that the core of the ruling class consists of the rentier strata of the capitalist class."
This takes us back to the critique of the land reformers from the 18th and 19th century. I don't think that their critique, as expanded into industrial society, varied as much from that of Marx and the "scientific" socialists as many of the latter have claimed. In fact, I think that most of the rudiments of the socialist critique of class society originate there. Solidarity! Mark L.
