US and Western Europe: The New Class War by Michael Lind

Arguable, but very interesting.

An interview with the author.

Here are the main arguments in case you cannot access the article.

“Constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class.

The nation-state is the only unit of government that has been able to mobilise extra-political popular sentiments and national identity to improve the condition of the majority of people, not just an oligarchy or aristocracy.

The actual ruling class in the US and similar Western democracies is not a tiny number of freakishly rich individuals, or heirs and heiresses, but the top 10 or 15 per cent of the population – almost all of them with college diplomas and often graduate or professional degrees.

I was criticised for arguing in The New Class War that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West.

There are two working classes, divided by geography and to some degree by origin, in the US and many western European countries.

One need not be a Marxist to recognise that much of what is coded as “cultural conflict” actually involves clashes of economic interests between the overclass and the working class.

In the book I criticise both “technocratic neoliberalism”, the dominant elite orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic, and “demagogic populists” who exploit popular resentment against arrogant managerial elites but who tend to be charlatans and corruptionists who betray their followers.

Most elites in most countries … are guided by a mix of parochial interests, including class interests, inertia and half-baked ideas and fads.”

“If the countervailing power of the working class in Western nations is to be rebuilt, organised labour will have to play the major role – perhaps in unfamiliar forms, such as wage boards, or sectoral bargaining, which is familiar in Europe but not in the US.”

Back to social-democracy’s social contract?

In an era of obscene inequality and more power of global capital and corporations, Michael Lind does not say a single word about ownership.

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The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

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"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

Putting a Racist in Their Place

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