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A theory of class interest ANIL MITRA © May 2015 We often think in terms of rights and entitlements. This is a valuable way to think because it is empowering. However if we take it for granted we stand to lose rights for, even if there is some sense in which those rights are natural or necessary rights that alone will not guarantee them. Of course the previous statement is an approximation for perhaps one thing that makes a right natural is that it is something that makes of perpetuation of the good society. Here's one theory. The wealthy and powerful in every country get money from the rest of us; they fight bigger and bigger wars so they can ‘protect’ us while skimming the cream off the top. It's not all about war there are other mechanisms of buying influence and fear politics; but war is big in many ways. In the age of monarchy and naked power brokering, it was the most powerful—the monarch and the nobles—that used power to sustain power; thus the monarch was not the divine or natural leader but the one who used power and other influence to ascend to power and authority. This does not imply that the monarchy was evil in a practical way—many monarchs were good and benevolent (the ‘evil’, at least relative to a perspective in which all are born equal, is that it negates that perspective). Further, the accumulation of power by the power class is not primarily about explicit conspiracy (even though it’s quite obvious that there are varying degrees of intention to undermine principles of democracy stated for convenience and there may be real conspiracies). It’s machine of the power elite of the world against the rest. Today we’re in spiral in which the system above is self-perpetuating. I don't know if we can engineer ourselves out of it but sooner or later it's going to crash and we will have to begin anew. Time will tell how that future will play out. Just a theory. |