19th century Marxists had one thing in their favour. The battle lines in an economy were clearly marked, so they could speak about a simple clash of c

The Inner Civil War - by Brett Scott

submited by
Style Pass
2024-12-04 18:00:08

19th century Marxists had one thing in their favour. The battle lines in an economy were clearly marked, so they could speak about a simple clash of classes. After European feudalism disintegrated, dispossessed peasants had drifted to the cities to become the urban ‘working class’, a group of people who owned nothing, and who often had few other options but to sell their labour to an ownership class - rich people who controlled factories.

In my Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires, I expanded upon these basic battle lines, showing a more modern version. If we had take every single activity in the global economy, squash it together, and imagine the entire thing as one giant process of people collectively making a huge ‘soup’, we could split the whole enterprise into five basic classes:

This is of course an abstraction. It’s not like we literally have a single giant pot and it’s not like we’re literally making a single soup in a single state. Rather we have hundreds of thousands of smaller ‘pots’ - productive units we call companies, spread across the world - and we are producing many different types of things against the backdrop of a mish-mash of different state regimes. To gain clarity on the overall structure, though, it’s helpful for us to imagine those combined into a single pot with a single soup and single classes of people revolving around it.

Leave a Comment