I think it's overall a good thing that not all people from elite backgrounds with above average IQ/skills end up being purely upper class aligned.
You say he is talented. I say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has been promoted by some powerful institutions such as mainstream media and elite universities. He did not get up there on his own. He isn't some street kid from Athens who clawed his way up by his own intellect.
By the way, I don't have a big problem with Corbyn as an individual. I think he is personally honest. I do have concerns that a decent man like him (or Bernie Sanders) may be used by individuals who are less honest. That has happened in the British Labour Party many times.
I'm not sure what you're implying though. I don't think he is being platformed by current mainstream institutions if that's what you're saying.
Now I know that in the US, people group everyone with a job in the middle class, but that's just semantics.
However, class is also about your origins not just your wallet and YV is in no way a horny-handed son of toil.
It's birth, not brains or organizational skills that make "leaders" in Europe. Hell, the highest European politician gets criticized for exactly that a great many times. Very lucky to be born where she was born, not much at all in terms of accomplishments, and zero spectacular achievements.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufak...
He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.
Also part of the elite WEF. https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.
Do machines drive your Uber ride? Deliver your food? No. They assign jobs to gig workers. Those are the serfs. Your goods and services are by people managed by AI.
Yes, I know, FSD is just around the corner rendering truck and taxi drivers obsolete. /s
https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...
People also consistently share advice/tips on restaurants to try, and that largely escapes tech control. And even a well-reviewed/noted restaurant isn't immune to people's choices. As someone who has restaurant owner friends, I can assure you that tech companies have very little impact on the restaurant's success/survival.
He has no experience or understanding of poverty from the inside. Like a lot of his ilk, most of his understanding is second hand and theoretical. He wouldn't last five minutes on a factory floor.
If he was compassionate, he would condemn the WEF, instead of enabling it. It is an antidemocratic organisation, is partnered with big business and does not allow free press coverage of its events.
It does seem reasonable that people should have experienced poverty to understand it. The world has been full of people who came from privileged backgrounds who claim to speak for the working class and don't understand them. Maxim Gorky talks about this with Lenin and Lunacharsky.
p.s. Also please don't use that word "change". It is meaningless. Change is something which happens anyway. "Progress" and "improvement" are better.
Having been through the result of implemented hypothetical solutions, they suck. They not only suck, but the suck all of the oxygen up, so that real, better solutions can't replace them.
In my opinion, the modern-day socialists are the equivalent of priests who spend all day convincing people to give some of their money because they are going to make a “better community” and help the poor. In practice, anyone who knows the other side of this trade would rather have a solution that doesn't involve them…
She comes from a really poor background and its informed her views and made her into the great leader she is today. I'd recommend giving it a read!
Or, the 1% and the 0.01%.
The superrich are perhaps more alien than most aliens would be to us. (I'm assuming you are not a billionaire).
YV was born into a monied family and married into one. He also went to private school as a child. As far as I know he has spent most of his life in an ivory tower.
The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.
You just keep pounding on the fact that he is from privilege, but that alone is not enough to be suspicious.
At the very best, you are arguing guilt by association.
They say you can know someone by the company they keep. The company he keeps are the Cambridge University students (who come disproportionately from private schools), mainstream media pundits and the billionaires of the WEF.
He doesn't just come from privilege... He never really left it.
Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.
I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.
What are his words? What are his actions?
Where is the harm?
Where is the evidence?
> they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it
that is not irony.
Do you believe only working class people can improve the situation for working class people? That seems counter-intuitive to me, as people outside the working class usually have more time and education to think about changes and advocate for them.
What was it the Who once sang, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? I don't think he has ever been much out of privileged circles.
The way ordinary people's lives can improve is self-advocacy and self-determination. You're not going to find that from Cambridge University where he teaches (one of the snobbiest and class ridden institutions in the UK which often resembles Hogwarts more than a modern university), the World Economic Forum (which prefers closed meetings to public ones and is furtive about its aims), or anything like that.
In this article he is right to voice concern about Big Tech oligarchy. But his analysis is off and he is not aware of what it really means to millions of people.
The cynic in me thinks it's because they stand to gain even more power/privilege this way. I think those people are disgusted by the fact that filthy capitalists can gain money and thus power while largely escaping their own power/control.
So-called elite education is fucked up in a bizarre way. They all end up with an ideology that could be summarized by anything that isn't government controlled is necessarily bad. Not very surprising because the whole point is them getting this education to be “worthy” to lead. Hard to do when people can manage without your leadership. Allegedly they are smart, but I think their actual intellectual power is below that of most engineers.