When the Ruling Class Goes Missing

In the Absence of Ruling Ideas

One index of a general social crisis is the absence of what Marx called ruling ideas—the kind that, when compressed into regulative principles and expressed as slogans, can be characterized as the components of an ideology. The centrifugal intellectual motion that attends this absence makes the world feel more insane than incoherent because the world is now divided into irreconcilable domains of fact—mutually exclusive ways of designating reality—and there is no voice of authority to decide which of these is legitimate, thus actionable. Power, or mere strength of will, fills that vacuum. Welcome to the year 2025.

If we work backward from the absence of ruling ideas according to Marx’s own logic in the relevant passage, we find that its probable cause resides in the absence of a ruling class. Is that possible? Does this explain the total collapse of institutional resistance to Trump’s fascist rampage—see: Columbia University, Paul, Weiss, et al.—and the corresponding inability of anyone to offer a plausible defense of his economic policies (tariffs, tax cuts), his imperial bluster (Greenland, Canada, etc.), his frontal assault on the rule of law (those innumerable executive orders)?

I was moved to ask these questions by Roger Gathman’s post at Facebook this morning. Here it is:

“So Trump is so powerful that Columbia could not even engage in a lawsuit over previously approved grants with him, but so weak that he can't afford to continue with his first pick for the UN ambassador cause her Red district might kick out her GOP successor. In other words, Trump scares, awes and impresses the elite, while every body else goes puweee. The rot at the top isn't Trump. It is the whole top. We are ruled by the most rotten people in the country.”

I commented as follows:

One way to explain this phenomenon is to chart the dispersal or disintegration of a ruling class, the inevitable long-term consequences of the corporate stage of capitalism, which separates ownership and control of the means of production and thus recapitulates the social death of the landed aristocracy in the 16th-17th centuries. Marx saw a "new aristocracy of finance," a totally irresponsible elite of stock-jobbers, as the short-term result of this separation; it has come of age in our own time, in the form of morons like Marc Andreesen who mistake their ownership of assets for the possession of intelligence.

Hello? What does the decline of the landed aristocracy in late-feudal England—social death?—have to do with the rise of corporate capitalism in the early 20th century? Look at it this way.

Between the late-14th century, when the plague killed off at least a third of the agricultural labor force (as, meanwhile, a pesky peasants’ revolt shook the labor system as such) and the early 17th century, by which time a functioning market in land was in place, the landed nobles of England turned more and more decisions regarding the allocation of resources over to rent-paying peasants, mere commoners who carried out an agricultural revolution. The nobles did so to reinstate the incomes and preserve the prerogatives owed them as feudal lords with exclusive rights to landed property, but in doing so, they made themselves superfluous, mere rentiers, parasites on the body politic—in other words, they consigned themselves to the ignominious social death that was certified by the English Revolution (a.k.a. the Puritan Revolution, the English Civil War, etc.) of the late-17th century.

Between 1890 and 1920, capitalists in the US resolved a social stalemate, reinstated their endangered incomes, and preserved their prerogatives as propertied citizens by resorting to the corporate legal form, which separated ownership and control of industrial assets by turning day-to-day decisions regarding the allocation of resources over to salaried managers. The capitalists did so because as late the mid-1890s, they knew they were still losing a class war conducted on two fronts, on the one hand against the Populists, agrarian radicals who were determined to abolish “the trusts,” and on the other, against working class organizations like the AFL and the Knight of Labor, which endorsed either “collective ownership of the means of production”—that was Plank 10 of the AFL’s program in 1894—or cooperatives and industrial unions that would establish economic democracy—that was the Knights’ program of 1886 and after.

The corporate legal form allowed for the consolidation of firms that, when in competition with each other, had driven down prices and profits; meanwhile it permitted the centralization of management, the integration of production and distribution, and the whole-scale mechanization of the labor process, which meant, among other things, the end of workers’ control of machine production in the industrial sector. Corporate capitalism was, in these terms, a project, an attempted economic solution to a social crisis. And it worked, largely because its intellectual justification was inclusive and coherent enough to become an ideology, the set of ruling ideas that came to be known as corporate liberalism.

But it worked in the long run as did the nobles’ solution to the general crisis of late feudalism. It made capitalists superfluous, mere rentiers, parasites on the body politic—in other words, by relinquishing control of and responsibility for the assets they had once owned and managed, in person, they consigned themselves to social death. Or at least to intellectual oblivion and irrelevance.

My first book was a social and intellectual history of the Fed’s origins. The narrative through line was the making of a modern ruling class in and through the movement for reform of the US banking system, which educated the would-be educators by forcing capitalists (not just bankers) to address the idiocies of a competitive market system that kept collapsing into unmanageable crises, and to come up with a replacement. The question that governed every proposal for banking reform they offered was not whether but how to regulate the market. Their question was, in this sense, how to treat the market as a means to equitable, that is, socially acceptable ends; their unstated assumption was that they needed the consent of the people that would live under the new conditions they were proposing if they were to be perceived, and treated as, responsible, legitimate reformers of the system.

There is no trace of these questions in Trump’s fascist rampage, which is now stripping the federal government for parts as if his “administration” is a private equity firm newly in possession of a health care network. There are no ruling ideas—nothing that comes out of the White House makes any sense, or would, on its own, merit general social acceptance —because there is no ruling class. And there is no ruling class because there can’t be, not anymore.

For the “new aristocracy of finance” born in the transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism bears no responsibility for “other people’s money,” as Louis Brandeis observed in the early 20th century. They have no vested interest in anything beyond their own aggrandizement. So if capitalists have rendered themselves superfluous, thus irresponsible for the future, by turning basic decisions on resource allocation over to people who don’t own the resources in play—and who therefore don’t need to “own” their financial failures—the new aristocrats have made themselves poisonous, thus positively dangerous to the future.

I leave you with Marx’s evocation of the “socialised mode of production” created by the intersection of modern joint-stock companies and modern credit—that is, by corporate capitalism, from Volume 3 of Capital (Kerr ed.), pp. 518-19:

“Formation of stock companies. By mean of these: . . . Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, an administrator of other people’s capital . . . . This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within capitalist production itself, a self-destructive contradiction, which represents on its face a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. . . . It reproduces a new aristocracy of finance, a new sort of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation juggling, stock jobbing, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.”