When the source of all wealth was arable land, those who owned land dominated society. Ownership of land was passed on from father to son, marriages were carefully planned and arranged, and soon great land-owning families arose. Wealth was kept in the family, and others were excluded, even when it was necessary for others, whether slaves, serfs or tenants, to actually work the land. The aristocracy arose as a means of exercising family control of property. It soon became more or less accepted that those who owned land deserved to own it because they were better than anyone else, they were superior to the common folk. They had superior blood, and they could pass this superiority on to their children. God and the King made sure it happened that way.

Eventually this system started to break down, other sources of wealth arose; crafts, skills, commerce, knowledge, manufacture, law, government, even finance. But still, the landed aristocracy jealously guarded their privilege, enforcing a two-tier structure to society based on land ownership: the inherited nobility and the white trash. Although occasional commoners of great talent or luck could sometimes succeed to positions of power and influence, for the most part, the association of a landed aristocracy with great wealth and political power lasted for centuries. Politically, this system began to break down in the Enlightenment. The Dutch Republic, the English Civil War, The American and French Revolutions were epic milestone struggles of the Common Man over the landed, hereditary aristocracy. Or to put it another way, of Capital over the Nobility. Although wealth and the ownership of property (not necessarily land any more) still determined political power, it was no longer tied to blood, although it still remained to a great extent hereditary. Wealth now was no guarantee of future wealth, but it certainly didn’t hurt. The more you had, the more likely it was you’d keep it, and the more likely it was to grow. Basically, it was the old aristocracy, the ancient nobility, all over again. It just wasn’t guaranteed by ancestral land and blue blood.

With the growth of Capitalism, control of great fortunes no longer became tied exclusively to great families, whether aristocratic or otherwise. Ownership was distributed through corporations and companies and the ownership of stock, and in the New World vast tracts of land and resources claimed only by indigenous “savages”, became available to anyone with the ferocity and greed to seize and hold it. A new aristocracy arose, one not tied to a superior bloodline of noble ancestors, but an innate sense of ambition or an alleged inherited work ethic. The result was not much different. The new rich still felt they were better than everybody else. After all, weren’t they richer?

” We own all this because we deserve it. We’re entitled to it because we’re better. Therefore my descendants are entitled to it too.”

The democratization of wealth through capitalist enterprise soon meant that great wealth could arise with distributed ownership. Soon it was no longer necessary to own wealth, or property, to generate additional wealth and property. The key now became control. Besides ownership, skills and education became critical attributes and requirements to wealth. The New Class controlled the wealth of society as managers, professionals and administrators. Although technically employed as salaried workers, they ran the new enterprises, while ownership was distributed and disguised through vast interlocking networks of anonymous ownership and equities. Ownership itself became a commodity to be bought and sold, traded on the open market. Those who controlled this flow of information, the managerial/executive class, whether in private enterprise, government bureaucracy, or the state power structure itself, became what really mattered. And to join that class required only education and professional certification and documentation. It didn’t matter what your family owned any more, it only mattered that they could afford to send you to college. And of course, exactly what you studied in college was pretty much irrelevant. The New Class didn’t need specific skills, they needed a new stamp of nobility, a badge of entitlement: the college education. A degree in Pharmacy or French Literature somehow made you a more valuable recruit for the corporate hierarchy than actual on-the-job experience working in the industry or the specific field where the company competed. An education became not a certification in specific job skills, but a guarantee that you could fit in socially with the officer class of the corporate general staff. It was like having noble blood, or having a rich daddy. It was a passport to power.

Just as the landed aristocracy opposed the uppity up-and-coming business and commercial classes, so the now-established capitalist class soon recognized the threat posed by the New Class of professional managers, administrators and executives. These upstarts had no property of their own, and often came from working class (peasant) backgrounds. Suddenly they were competing on an equal basis with the sons of Big Money, especially those who were of little or no academic distinction. And since there were so many more of them, (and because they were hungrier) they came out on top more often than not. Just as the ancient nobility made every effort to monoplize the ownership of real estate, the capitalist elite soon realized that it was necessary that access to education was denied to those who could not afford it, and was restricted to those who deserved it because of the superior pedigrees of their social class. State funding for education dried up, just as academic standards collapsed and grade inflation took over. Yeah, you could still get your degree…if you could afford it. Whether you actually learned anything really didn’t matter. That’s not really what college is about, is it?

Meanwhile, the working class, once convinced that hard work and cooperation with the system was all that was needed to guarantee their own eventual financial progress (or at least, that of their children), soon found their own contributions undervalued, and their children systematically denied the advantages of education by being financially shut out.

This conflict is still in progress, and has not yet been decided. The ownership class is struggling to survive, it is under attack by managers, administrators and technocrats, corporate and state bureaucrats, as well as a handful of actual trained professionals who actually know how to do something and have a document to prove it. How it will work out is anyone’s guess, but if you’re looking for a historical example, look at America in Colonial times. There was a huge continent to be exploited, and the aristocracy already had it well in Europe, they didn’t need to come here, so the lowlifes came instead and fought amongst themselves for the goodies. It turned out pretty well, But the situation today is not quite the same. We no longer have an uninhabited rich continent ready for us to expand into.