The social physiognomy of the new financial aristocracy The process outlined here has produced vast changes in the social structure of the United States. The middle classes, which traditionally serve as a buffer between the two main classes, have been decimated, with the vast majority of proprietors, professional employees and small farmers driven into the ranks of the working class. The ruling class has itself undergone a vast change in its social physiognomy. The growth of parasitism has raised up a new financial aristocracy, whose lifestyle and social outlook are conditioned by the forms of wealth accumulation through which they have amassed their immense fortunes. It is impossible to understand the predatory and backward political and cultural environment that has prevailed for so many decades without considering the changes within the ruling class itself.
It is hardly necessary to stress here that the captains of industry associated with America’s rise as an economic giant were no paragons of intellect and culture. However, their fortunes were bound up with the development of industrial empires that embodied a real development of the productive forces. To a large extent, the riches of the wealthiest and most politically influential figures in the ruling elite today are bound up with the decay of the productive base of the United States. The hedge fund billionaires and banking moguls of today amassed in the space of a few years the type of personal fortunes that the Fords, Carnegies, Duponts and Rockefellers took decades to accumulate. They dispose of levels of wealth in their everyday lives that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. And the manner in which the new financial aristocracy makes its money, apart from the vast sums involved, necessarily imparts to its social being a pervasive element of criminality. Hedge fund president John Paulson took in $3.7 billion in 2007 (by betting on a collapse of the subprime mortgage market) and the top 50 hedge fund managers netted a combined sum of $29 billion. The latter sum is about the same as the annual GDP of Kenya, a country of 32.5 million people, and a billion dollars less than the GDP of Sri Lanka, the home of 20 million people. If one takes Paulson’s income for 2007 and divides it by 365, one arrives at a daily intake of $10,137,000. This breaks down to $422,374 an hour, $7,040 a minute, and $117 per second. If one were to assume that Paulson worked a 40-hour week, 52- week schedule, his hourly “wage” would be 24,136 times that of the average worker in the US. Is it any wonder that, in terms of its prevailing social principles, the US has become the most backward and irrational of all major capitalist countries? The malignant state of social relations is expressed in the soaring prison population in the US, whose 2.2 million inmates by far outnumber those of any other country. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008. Another indicator of social decay is the fact that more than 40 percent of high school students in America’s 50 largest cities fail to graduate. The United States today ranks 42nd in life expectancy, behind Singapore, Costa Rica and South Korea. In the figure of George W. Bush, the semi-literate scion of a wealthy and politically well-connected family, one sees the political personification of the criminality that has come to characterize so much of the corporate-financial elite. But it is impossible to find figures of much greater intellectual or moral stature in any section of the American political establishment. The change in the social physiognomy of the American ruling class has played a considerable role in shaping US foreign policy. As we have been noting since the 1980s, the ever more frequent and violent use of military means is a response to the declining economic position of the United States. This tendency became more pronounced and open following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As Trotsky anticipated with immense prescience 80 years ago, the crisis of American capitalism would by no means signify a diminution of its violent tendencies, but rather the opposite. In his 1928 critique of the draft program of the Comintern, Trotsky wrote: “The general line of American policy, particularly in time of its own economic difficulties and crisis, will engender the deepest convulsions in Europe as well as over the entire world.” Militarism is also a response to the growth of internal social tensions. Under conditions of a vast increase in social inequality, the ruling class utilizes war as a means of deflecting domestic discontent outward while intimidating and repressing internal opposition. The internal rot of the ruling class and the rise to its summit of the most predatory and criminal elements has affected foreign policy decisions and the methods employed to carry them out. The recklessness, shortsightedness, ignorance and, one might add, incompetence exhibited by the American bourgeoisie in the management of its economic affairs has found a reflection in its foreign policy. The following is a list of direct US military interventions (invasions, air strikes, occupations, etc.) over the past quarter century: Lebanon (1983), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991, followed by twelve years of continuous air strikes), Somalia (1991-93), Haiti (1994), Afghanistan (1998), Sudan (1998), Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001 to the present), Iraq (2003 to the present), Haiti (2004), Somalia (2006), Pakistan (ongoing). In addition there have been dozens of US proxy wars and covert actions, including in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola and the former Yugoslavia. As in the domestic sphere, the American ruling elite has conducted itself on the world arena with increasing brutality and lawlessness. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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