Must-read: Charles Moore: “The Middle-Class Squeeze”
Must-Read: Miles Kimball sends us to a convinced British Tory:
: The Middle-Class Squeeze: “If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx…
…we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure…. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the ‘haves’ and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: ‘I explained,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘that what I was trying to do was create a society of ‘haves,’ not a class of them.’ In the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, those words carried conviction. There was plenty of argument, of course, about whether the means they chose were the best and about the fate of those who got left behind…. In 2015, it is difficult to imagine a version of that Thatcher/Gorbachev conversation being replicated between any Western leader and the hostile and suspicious Vladimir Putin. Neither side seems to have an intelligible ideology. Besides, the confidence is not there anymore. We have become a society of ’have lesses,’ if not yet of ‘have nots.’… In Britain and the U.S., we are learning all over again that it is not the natural condition of the human race for children to be better off than their parents. Such a regression, in societies that assume constant progress, is striking….
When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?… Extremes of both left and right are doing well….
Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: ‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.’ Or this: ‘Modern bourgeois society… is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.’ Or this: ‘The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.’… In the 21st century… it is not surprising that many members of the middle class now see themselves as prisoners of the system that they helped to create. Phrases like ‘negative equity’ and ‘credit crunch’ capture that. A lot of words that have a specific economic or financial meaning also draw on a moral meaning—value, bonds, goods, security, even ‘collateralized debt obligations.’ The word ‘credit’ itself means ‘trust’ or ‘belief.’… There is clearly an unmet need for a politics that goes beyond mere grievance-peddling to develop a new way of thinking about what makes a society free and secure at the same time. If this were easy, we would have heard more of it by now….
I am no alarmist, and no one should worry that I have become a late convert to Marxism. Marx’s prescriptions were mostly wrong, and his spirit was intolerant and coercive. He did not understand markets or respect political institutions, and he thought liberty was a sham. But Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.