We do. "Class war" is just the succinct phrasing for "people who earn money through capital returns have vastly different incentives than people who earn money from their labor, and they also have the means to turn those interests into political leverage".
When you sell your labor you want it to cost as much as possible. When you buy the results of others labor you want them to be as cheap as possible.
The system is circles, cycles, loops, two sided trades. It’s not one group of people unilaterally plotting things. When someone does try to do that they usually fail unless their plot happens to align with the current in the river.
If you get rid of the investment and capital class you will get a new investment and capital class, probably made up of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the old one. That’s where our current one came from after all. They are the intellectual and social descendants of the mercantile capitalists who overthrew the feudal order.
It’s pretty common for the new boss to end up becoming the old boss because they are also monkeys with the same limbic system.
Real change would require changing the system not the people in it, but I see no ideas on how to do this from the typical pop Marxist at least. Maybe there are deeper thinkers out there. Usually it’s “proletarian revolution, magic happens here, utopia.” Instead you get a new capital class whose power is rooted in position in the party, like the CCP, and it behaves just like our capital class.
I also suspect really deep change would require genetic modification that alters the structure of the human central nervous system, since a lot of this stuff is just ape behavior writ large.
My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
* The canonical book on the subject - The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882
* https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/what-is-distr...
* https://practicaldistributism.com/distributism-basics/
And not directly related, but full of mineable thoughts, the papal encyclicals of the last 100 years on economy, including Rerum Novarum (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...), Quadragesimo Anno (https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/docume...), Centesimus Annus (https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...), and the very latest Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...)
How true is this? Certainly trust busters like Teddy had a lot of political power. Though I wouldn't call them a new capital class.
> Except that when you comparison shop, you are helping construct those incentives.
You're advocating for political consumerism? I suppose it has some use alongside boycotts and the "buy made-in-the-USA" movements of old. Sadly today the label is so watered down I doubt one can reasonably know whether any given purchase has any significant manufacturing or resources from within the USA. Ultimately we have to pull all the levers to enact change. Because the top 1% certainly isn't holding back.
What I'm doing is arguing against the us-vs-them conspiracist framing and pointing out that you are a participant in the system that contributes to creating the incentives that make the whole thing behave the way it does.
The CEO wants to save money, and therefore wants to lay people off because labor is a top cost, in part because you comparison shop on price. When you do that you send a price signal that says "do everything cheaper!"
> My deeper point is: there’s a lot of discontent out there for legitimate reasons, but I don’t think LARPing communism will help any more than LARPing fascism has. We need new ideas, not 19th century ones that failed. Right now it just feels like the only ideas we have is to LARP the 1930s.
I think that's genuinely why the pop left and the pop right are LARPing the 1930s. The deep thinkers of the world on both sides know that there are very hard problems but nobody has thought of solutions. I think the mid-to-late 1800s felt a lot like this too, which is the crucible through which many of today's political and economic systems came from.
The real blockade is that it would require everyone to admit that they are just as bad as Elon Musk, at least when it comes to the desire to accumulate infinite wealth. Everyone thinks they are in the right and that if they had control over all of society, their moral framework would improve the world, no matter what that moral framework actually is.
I have a rule: if we are still talking about a problem, it's a hard problem.
It's true in engineering but also in other fields like politics and economics. If it's still a problem it means the problem is hard -- meaning harder than what's already solved.
"But what about cases where people resist the solution for selfish or ideological reasons?"
Yes those are real, but I think that pushes the problem back to "why are they doing that?" If you dig, you generally find that there's some deeper perverse incentive or feedback mechanism at work. Or there's fear, or something deep in human psychology that needs to be understood and mitigated. Those are all tough problems.
Very few people -- maybe a few extreme narcissist and psychopaths -- wake up and genuinely try to be nasty and evil. It's very few people even at the top. If most executives and politicians were that bad, the world would be a lot worse than it is... like I'm not even sure we'd have a civilization at all. We'd have something that looked like Mad Max.
But people at the top absolutely do fall for conspiracism and ideological cults that claim there's easy solutions. People at the top are just people after all. When they fall for this bullshit they can end up doing a lot of damage.
The funny thing is that while conspiracism is popular everywhere now, it's also quite popular at the top. Go look at certain billionaires' accounts over on X. It's clear that these people are 100% conspiracy pilled and think they're the underdogs in some struggle against The Conspiracy(tm). That's not good at all.
They gravitate to conspiracism and gimcrack populist bullshit for the same reason ordinary people do: hard problems are discouraging and facing them induces despair. Despair sucks. It's easier to buy into some kind of bullshit that promises an easy answer.
The typical pop Marxist denounces any form of observable incremental improvement as "reformism" which will supposedly pacify the workers and thereby delay the necessary revolution. From a Marxist perspective, things are going wrong when capitalism works better than what their book says and things are getting worse, when capitalism becomes less bad.
Needless to say, once the revolution does happen, they won't go back on their word and think "Okay now that the old system is gone, maybe we should look at the old (reformist) ideas and run a thousand small scientific experiments to see what actually works."
Because they are ideological purists rather than systemic engineers, they reject the very concept of trial and error. They genuinely believe they already know what's correct and what's wrong. They demand the utopia promised in the text immediately and with a 100% guarantee of success while simultaneously denying any way of actually getting there.
Usually that big change makes things worse, unfortunately, because magic does not happen. The underlying faith behind accelerationism is that if everything breaks the good change is what will happen and not something else, but that's not backed up by history or honestly logic. Why would things get better after a crash and not worse? Why wouldn't worse forces (criminals, totalitarians) use the crash as an opportunity to take power?
It's found across the political spectrum and is IMO incredibly toxic. The accelerationist is wishing for other people to suffer so their preferred ideology can triumph after the great calamity, which is incredibly self-centered and callous. If you really think about it, it's pretty evil to hope for suffering in the name of realizing some mental image you have of how the world ought to work.
Of course that would go against the class war idea, then you can't blame others anymore. You'd have to accept how this objective improvement to your life as a labor income dependent person would also crush your own dreams of earning capital returns yourself.