as Elites grow decadent they become more and more alienated from the culture that produced them into which they owe their prosperity as Empires near their end they turn more and more hostile towards their own original core people what historian Arnold toy called the internal proletariat think Appalachians in the US but it isn't only the elite the political class that grows disdainful it's also people who identify with the elite political activist Barbara Arin Reich wrote that in her research and experience of the labor market quote there was a real difference between people who worked essentially telling
other people what to do and people who do the work that other people tell them to do it becomes a difference between manual and mental labor but it carries with it a lot of weight I see it all the time contempt for especially White workingclass people among leftists of college backgrounds end quote and she herself was on the left Barbara and her husband John coined the term professional managerial class or PMC in the 1970s to describe these folks and their dislike of native born workers in the US but the same Dynamic plays out elsewhere Elite
hostility against a core demographic makes some sense there may be a cost associated with that population's living standards compared to foreign labor willing to work for Less writing in the first century Plutarch provides a historical example of this preference for foreign over native labor by the economic Elite quot the rich drove out the poor and held most of the land then the poor who had been ejected from their land no longer showed themselves eager for military service and neglected the bringing up of children there are modern parallels here with the military recruitment crisis and low
birth rates in the first world now this led to quote gangs of foreign Slaves by whose Aid the rich cultivated their Estates from which they had driven away the free citizens and the chapter deals with the conquest of Spain from which slaves could be drawn for example plutar then gets into how one Tiberius graus tried to solve things he was assassinated but in any case these processes can be reversed and have been reversed in the past now the point of that passage is obviously not to demonize The Foreigner both Roman poor and foreign slave Arnold
toin be's internal and external proletariat are in a bad spot the global economy like some or most empires in the past roughly divides between a core and a periphery with higher purchasing power in core areas the so-called Global North let's say and periphery areas the so-called Global South having more poverty and being among other things a source of cheap labor including cheap immigrant labor if that simplistic model is more or less true it makes sense that the workers and farmers in core countries Europe North America Etc with higher salary expectations whose Grandparents were able to
support a family on one salary say would be seen as an impediment by the Pol iCal and economic Elite for the most part it also makes sense that their cultural and national identity would be a problem the more homogeneous a society is the more likely folks are to organize on their own behalf and fend for their own interests we have the case of the amazon-owned Whole Foods company conducting internal research for example on their own workers and finding that the less diverse a Workforce was the more it would form unions and try to negotiate for
high higher salaries so the conclusion was diversify the workforce bring in people of more backgrounds and so reduce the risk of them communicating and unionizing and turning into a headache for management I've made a video about that in the past as its ambition and technological abilities increase a political class may also feel that it does not need inherited communities and traditional institutions like the family Family Church Etc to manage people it may see identities and values like national identity or religious values outside of its power structure as Rivals to that structure and it's this kind
of sentiment that also manifests in folks who feel they are winners in that structure the pmc's today many decades after the Ain reich's initial research well-paid managerial jobs have become scarce fewer in number compared to the people who are qualified to do them and yet crucially it isn't only the PMC that now tends to be hostile to the say rural religious working population but also those who merely aspire to PMC status it makes sense that a political establishment would want to demonize these native workers and get some of the more conformist but also ambitious in
some cases disenfranchised members of society would be pmc's to hate on them the political power structure benefits from having people take out their frustration at the degrading material conditions around them and at their own thwarted Ambitions on each other and specifically on folks likely to Rebel the kinds of people that made up the trucker protests in Canada farmer protests in Europe Etc turning people in other words into enforcers of the political establishment whose policies actually hurt them as well there's a few mean-spirited terms now for people who become enforcers of the status quo of dominant
discourse of the political class the unpaid HR department of society at large we could say policing speech and propping up official narratives we can think of the quote bugman obsessed with mainstream cultural products the so-called non-player character NPC so named on account of his submission to whatever is being trumped up by the media at a given moment the so-called fail Sun Etc again mean but they do make a point I would argue that in practice these terms generally apply to aspiring members of the professional managerial class beginning with Generation X but more so with Millennials
and now Zoomers jobs guaranteeing what was a middle class standard of living have become precarious the aspiring PMC is a product of so-called Elite overproduction the proliferation of people with degrees and qualifications that they were told would land them stable generous salaries except there are more people qualified to be pmc's than there are PMC positions instead of abandoning the disdain for others for we could say their fellow Losers of the current economy the aspiring PMC will often double down that's what we're seeing in the west at least he wants to signal identity with establishment values
that he perceives to be high status be it just for psychological Comfort or as a way to show competence and Conformity and get a better position so he promotes mainstream cultural products established political narratives Etc the children of middle class or aspirational workingclass families whose prospects for securing the stability and purchasing power of their parents is rendered Bleak by economic conditions and who skills are geared towards those PMC jobs really through no fault of their own that's what they were sold on that's what they were told to study may go in for this strategy that's
where the term failson comes from as well it can refer to the Sons and Daughters of extremely wealthy well-connected people Jared Kushner Hunter Biden the so-called nepo baby but also more broadly it applies to the sons of a shrinking middle class and a working class less able to sustain itself instead of viewing the political class as the enemy for supporting policies that have hurt them Mass migration driving salaries down for example or a version of feminism that essentially means women and men both have to work in order to afford what was once the yield of
one man's salary Etc they find a scapegoat elsewhere whereas the obstacles to their desired goal of high status could have led to rivalry and political and cultural dissent Against The Establishment they instead lead to a great Gater Conformity basically lashing out against scapegoats to ward off low status and Signal allegiance to high status culture the dynamic here maps onto what French thinker Rene Gerard describes as the structure of desire there's a subject that desires something there's the object that he desires like the high status well-paid job and there's a model who mediates that desire the
kind of person that has the high status that the subject wants now the subject will tend to engage his model as a rival especially if there's obstacles to obtaining the desired object such rivalries might destabilize Society were it not that eventually a scapegoat is found for aggression to be directed at for anger to be taken out on Gerard doesn't exactly describe what we see today but I do think the basic Dynamic is in fact playing out sadism against the scapegoat corresponds to a sort of masochism or graveling towards the establishment and again the scapegoat is
Gen generally identified with traditional folks and folks of a lower status whose Allegiance it's perceived has been given to older institutions and values religion and the like the attack on older cultural forms as though the 1950s Norms were still prevalent has long defined counterculture youth culture Etc its supposed rebelliousness is the means through which the aspirant to PMC status the high status punches down to the less privileged in order to prove his Conformity to establishment ideology he has to pretend that the people he's fighting against are the actual power structure and not the victims of
the power structure and in a way this precisely proves his managerial competence his ability to police discourse and at bare minimum it provides an escape valve for his frustration if tobe's internal proletariat tends to identify with the nation including its pre-imperial IAL past the political class increasingly is interested in Global Supply chains and economies of scale and the nation is a bit of an archaic Relic to it today we have an obvious example of elite hatred towards internal proletariat receiving sanction by mainstream culture in terms like redneck white trash inbred hick Etc all of which
are racial insults to some degree in fact you'd think they'd be quite Politically Incorrect but they are more or less accepted the scapegoat here is pretty clear of course that's not the only demographic that gets dehumanized or demonized but the disdain for that group is quite clear and it is claimed that that group no matter how poor how disenfranchised has a certain inherent structural privilege and so can be attacked on that basis we can think of this as the culture of the modern political left but all of this also applies to The Establishment right to
some degree AG ree we get a strange dynamic in the west where if the mainstream left has detached from its older workingclass concerns The Establishment right manages frustration among the internal proletariat by appealing to them in its rhetoric but siphoning off their support into corporate tax cuts growing the military and the like the left can pretend to be Pro worker if it's also socially liberal and the right can pretend to be conservative if it's also economically liberal at least in ways that help a certain economic bracket but even the social and economic concerns they pretend
to are excuses for among other things reducing the political clout of that internal proletarian I'm using toy be's terms because they're useful not necessarily because I agree with his General Outlook by the way okay that was a bit broad a lot of this John and Barbara Aaron reich's theories on the PMC toin be on the interal proletariat Etc could make for their own video as a footnote by the way I am narrating these videos I don't use AI voice I only mention that because I often get comments that say I'm using AI anyway thank you
very much for watching I hope that was interesting and subscribe if you would like to until next
