People Like Us v. People Like You

I thought it was p'tit-boos, the cornered rats of capitalism who go ballistic when society's s-curve plateaus. I'm sticking with it.

The concept of "ressentiment" was first described by Friedrich Nietzsche. He introduced and elaborated on the term in his book 𝘖𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘴 (1887). Later, Max Scheler also explored the concept in his 1912 book titled 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵.

The life of Max Scheler was a continuous struggle for truth under constant pressure from the stress of his private life on one side and the chaos of German public life on the other. Located closer to the West's region of origin, Germany was a focal point for the culmination of the latest Toynbeean Time of Troubles that the New Deal has not completely resolved today.

From the beginning, Scheler rejected intellectual relativism as well as the crude materialist positivism of science, preferring a view that insisted there must be an absolute truth somewhere, and that any satisfactory picture of that truth must recognize that it has spiritual elements and human freedom in it.

In the same way, he rejected the outlook of the triumphant bourgeoisie, either the insatiable greed of the successful middle classes or the sour, "free-floating, ill-temper" of the petty-bourgeoisie (to which he also applied the term "ressentiment"). Scheler was the first to provide a clear description of this latter outlook, which subsequently provided the chief basis for Hitler's appeal and plays a major, if largely unrecognized, role in American life today, epitomized by such persons as Newt Gingrich.

Scheler's intellectual odyssey in search of a more satisfactory ideology took him through neo-romanticism, Germanic conservative mythology, Roman Catholicism, and onward to an outlook more typically his own. Before his death, he saw that there was a truth, although no man or group had any adequate grasp of it. The shape of that truth, could be seen in outline by examining the views of diverse social groups to grasp each group's unique glimpse of that truth and to free their dim and partial view from its narrow perspective, and, above all, from its conceptual and verbal formulation in their own limited social and historical context.

Scheler was one of the founders of the modern theory of the sociology of knowledge, an area in which he exercised considerable influence on thinkers like Ernst Cassirer and Karl Mannheim. He rejected both capitalism and socialism as such time-bound and partial points of view, opposite sides of a single sordid effort to exploit both man and nature for material ends.

He ended up with a vision of humanity, history, the universe, and God, which has a great deal to offer future thinkers, from its early recognition of the interrelationships among many strands of contemporary thought, from that of Teilhard de Chardin to recent work on cognitive studies. This makes him a fair representative of the Western tradition dating from Aquinas's adaptation of Aristotle with his emphasis on consensus-building to the revolt against overspecialized education such as inspires organizations like the New School College of the New School for Social Research established by the economic critic Thorstein Veblen, who combined his economics with anthropology and anticipated Paul Tillich's ideas about how people inadvertently sell their souls to institutions.

I admire Yanis for his opposition to austerity, the latest manifestation of institutional entropy with which the current Time of Troubles began in the First Gilded Age here and the fin de siècle in Europe, but leftists have a habit of dusting off Marx's old theories.

Contra Marx, who had expected impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership with a huge increase in the number of workers and a diminution in the number of owners and a gradual elimination of the middle class, there was instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising standards of living, dispersal of ownership via shareholding, a relative drop in the numbers of laborers, and a major expansion of the middle classes. In the long run, under the impact of graduated income taxes and inheritance taxes, the rich became poorer (relatively speaking!) and the major problem of advanced industrial societies became, not the exploitation of laborers by capitalists but the exploitation of unorganized consumers (most especially of the professional and lower middle-class levels) by organized labor and monopolized managers (Burnham's Managerial Revolution) acting together. This collusion of these last two groups gave them the clout to obtain what they wanted from society as a whole.

As a result the revolutionary spirit that Marx expected did not grow but declined. Instead, the revolutionary spirit that persisted prevailed, not in the working class, but among the so-called "petty bourgeoisie. The average bank clerk, architect's draftsman, or schoolteacher was disorganized, found himself oppressed by organized labor, monopolized industry, and the growing power of the state, and found himself caught in the spiral of rising costs resulting from the efforts of his three oppressor to push the costs of social welfare and steady profits onto the disorganized consumer. The petty bourgeois found that he wore a white collar, had a better education, was expected to maintain more expensive standards of personal appearance and living conditions, but received a lower income than unionized labor. As a result of all these factors, the revolutionary spirit that existed in advanced industrial countries manifested among the petty bourgeoisie, not among the proletariat, and was accompanied by psychopathic overtones arising from the suppressed resentments and social insecurities of this class. But these dangerous and even explosive feelings (Doonesbury was correct in giving Gingrich a hissing bomb for a head - Scheler called it "psychic dynamite") took an antirevolutionary and even reactionary form and showed up as nationalistic, anti-Semitic, antidemocratic, and anti-labor movements instead of an antibourgeois or anticapitalist movement as Marx had expected.

The reason for the collusion between labor and management was the expense of heavy capital equipment which management could not afford to allow to be idled by labor strikes. Planning had become important to production, and with millions or billions of marks or dollars in equipment and physical plant (steel works, auto-making, electrical utilities) smooth operations were mandatory. The first Galbraith has described how monopolistic industry had to control both prices and sales by eliminating competition. Once this was done, it became both possible and helpful for labor to be unionized. Labor and management stopped being enemies and a partnership evolved instead. There was still friction from the threat of technological unemployment; this resulted in the survival of obsolete factories. Marxist jargon obscured this development. I will be getting ahead of myself if I bring up the subject of deindustrialization on the United States and asset-stripping along with offshoring of jobs, undercutting labor. Suffice it to say that the victims of deindustrialization fell (or flocked) to the anti-New-Deal bloc of Big Business which had been cultivating petty-bourgeois ressentiment since the John Birch Society at least. To telescope this historical development, Trump came along and seized the reins of this whipped horse and proved to be a more skillful rider.

I want to avoid the complicated history of electoral politics in the three sectors of the country (East, South, and West) to point out that the tech bros are the newest faction in the Neoconfederacy who are staging a coup within the long desired coup by the pro-business cabal represented by the Cheneys (think of the movie 𝘝𝘪𝘤𝘦 as a combination sociological documentary and illumination of the power structure). These developments have been quite fluid. In the larger context of devolving civilizations, this is nothing new. Just think of Carol Burnett's Mama's Family supplemented by workers with the prowess to beat the crap out of us in a back alley in Gary, Indiana. America's p'tit-boos are not averse to blue denim the way they were in Europe before WW2. (Hitler hated wearing overalls; privately his party intimates labeled him as petit-bourgeois.) The outcome of this latest civil strife may either be a Toynbeean Universal State or a leap to the next s-curve. Since I prefer the latter, I'm a big fan of Progressives like AOC.

I'm a dirigiste, not a Marxist, but I admire this fellow Yanis Varoufakis.  Do you know his work? I believe he coined the expression "techno-feudalism" to refer to these super-rentiers. (Even Adam Smith hated rentiers.)