Control of the means of production has always been the key to power. Throughout most of human history, wealth was related to land. The land was by far the source of political power, and that power derived from the ownership of land. That chain of ownership was justified and based on a genetic nobility; people who owned land, aristocrats, were the elect of God, they were chosen by providence to run the world. It was theirs by right of blood, the great families divided the world among themselves, and sometimes fought over disputed pieces of it. But power, particularly economic and political power, ultimately resided on who your parents were.

Sometime around the end of the middle ages, things began to change. Trade and commerce, and to a certain extent, primitive manufacture, became a force in the creation and flow of wealth. Banking, finance and insurance became essential to the flow of economic power. A new class arose to challenge the old landed aristocracy, the gentlemen of property. Although this new form of aristocracy was not necessarily genetic, in practice, it remained so. The owners of capital, the propertied and moneyed classes, may have earned their wealth through ambition, thrift, hard work, and superior intelligence, but if you look closely, these attributes seemed to be limited to their offspring. That is not a coincidence, they saw to it. Those who toiled on their land or their shops seemed incapable of self-improvement, were still serfs, and they remained that way. Like the aristocracy, this class believed they were entitled to their power because of their moral virtue and psychological superiority. They were not blessed by God, they earned their success through hard work. They had ambition, work ethic, civic and family values, morality. They had piety and restraint, patriotism and morality. Those who lacked these things deserved to be second class. It explained why there were second class citizens.

A tiny, but important class of artisans, mostly in the towns, seemed to be the only exception. What little political power was possessed by this class was due to the influence of their guilds, forerunners of both today’s trade unions and corporations.

The arc of history between the end of the middle ages and the Enlightenment can be best understood as a great struggle for supremacy between the declining landed aristocracy and the rising new bourgeois commercial class. Don’t be intimidated by the word “bourgeois”. Literally, it is French for “town folk”, historically, it is applied to the more prosperous of the propertied peasantry, usually, but not exclusively, urban.. The struggle was slow, progressed in fits and starts, and evolved at different rates in different places, but it still happened. The struggle was finally decided once and for all by the great Revolutions in England, America and France in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The dust settled with the breaking of the back of the great aristocratic land owners, the rise of an energetic and productive middle class, the establishment of parliamentary governments, and the Industrial Revolution. Whether the latter caused the political/economic change, or was the result of it is still being debated. I see no reason why it couldn’t have been both. The peasantry remained peasantry, although now they were increasingly unemployed as their social contract with the vanishing aristocracy crumbled and they were forced to migrate to the cities looking for work in the new factories. They knew perfectly well they were trading one form of peonage for another, and they resisted in the great anarchic and socialistic European revolutions of the mid-19th century. They were soon put down and pacified by bayonets, and by limited, but nonetheless essential social reforms. After 1849, the bourgeosie realized they had to do something, the revolutionary movements of the 19th century did not arise from the poor, they were engineered by educated but dispossessed sons of the commercial class. You couldn’t farm out your excess sons to the church or the army any more, they became revolutionaries.

In North America, this was not necessary. The land was rich, essentially uninhabited, and easily traversed. Communications and travel with the Europe was realtively easy. A safety valve was available, and the lowest ranks of peasantry were replaced by slaves. The transition to modernity was much eased. In North America, the last stand of feudalism was the Civil War, the final victory of the bourgeosie over the landed aristocrats. In South America, perhaps because of their vast Native populations, that battle was never fought. The Spanish were ejected all right, but nothing else really changed. The economic structure of most of South America was latifundism, a term which had been used to denote the agricultural estate/plantation economy of the Roman Empire.

The success of each socio-economic class breeds the conditions for the rise of its eventual rival. The new class, the cohort that may (or may not, it hasn’t been settled yet) is the meritocracy. The managerial/technocratic class. The modern world is complex, administering it requires numerous levels of interlocking hierarchies of trained professionals, problem solvers. It is becoming increasingly more difficult for owners to manage their enterprises, indeed, even ownership is now being collectivized through stocks and bonds. In business there are numerous highly trained functionaries, managers, executives, specialists all needed to make it all work. These are not businessmen, they are not entrepreneurs, they are employees; highly educated perhaps, but employees nonetheless. For social and status reasons they may consider themselves as businessmen, or capitalists, but they work for a salary and they work at the pleasure of their masters, who may not be capitalists themselves, but hired employees too. At the very top of the corporate pyramid, there probably isn’t a real entrepreneur, just a board of directors, a committee, a parliament of special interests.

Behind the hierarchy of administrative corporate employees and assorted technocrats in business, all the other institutions of the society have fallen into a similar organizational model. There are bureaucrats, technicians, academicians, administrators, managers, executives in government, academia, the military, finance, industry, the press, arts, trade, law, business–all the organizational entities of the society. The Suits don’t own farms or factories any more, but they still work at a desk. And careers are determined by the individual’s mastery of of organizational psychology and dynamics. This is why someone who knows how to run a professional sports team is considered qualified to run an energy company, or a government agency. The day when a corporate tycoon could go on the shop floor and tell a machinist what he was doing wrong were over a long time ago.

This is the New Class, the Meritocracy, the careers built on higher education, work experience, and corporate maneuver. These people are not the bourgeosie, although they often consider themselves as such. Many come from working class roots, and received there educations when briefly, that commodity was allowed to become very cheap, People these days doesn’t really want to create and run a productive enterprise, what they want is to work in one. They want a cushy job in an air-conditioned office, where they can play with their spreadsheets and Power Points and and pretend they are actually making or selling something. I speak with some experience. I’m one of these people, and almost everyone I know is one too. This is a sociological essay, not a political or ideological harangue.

Perhaps I’m too harsh. The New Class aren’t necessarily worthless drones, society could not function without them. But the point I’m making is that they are not capitalists, they are not businessmen, and they are definitely not entrepreneurs. Many DO carry out indispensable functions, regulatory and administrative and executive tasks. They are the coordinators, the expediters, the lubricants of the organizational structure. But they are secondary and tertiary personalities, courtiers, not princes. They are not the creative drivers of change, they are the manipulators of process. The new computerized workplace has given them an environment where they can operate with impunity. Where the aristocrat controlled Land, and the capitalist controlled Capital, the New Class deals entirely in Information.

You can see in our current ideological warfare that neither side has fullycaught on to what is actually going on. The Right, seeing ownership of capital as the road to power, is instinctively fearful of the “elites”, “the intellectuals”, the academics and and the educated. What they really mean is that they fear the Meritocracy, people with diplomas, degrees, educations. They dare not articulate it as such, because they have long justified their own hegemony by having a near monopoly on those assets. But today, you don’t need to really own anything to have a knowledge of how it works, how to control it, and how to get access to the levers of power. It is difficult, but still possible to maneuver yourself into a position of power where you can merely twist a valve and make things happen, influence events. You don’t have to own something to run it any more. All you need is a license, a charter, a certificate, or an appointment to a government post.

For their part, the New Class sees their bourgeois rivals as boorish, unpolished, uneducated, and incapable of the subtlety required to properly manage the modern world. And who’s in the right?
Does it really matter? This isn’t about morality, its about history. No one knows how it will eventually turn out, or even how it should. Those questions are more about ideology and philosophy than they are about truth.