which we work and the government who works for us. We pick
them—they’re our servants.
And that’s all there is in the world—no other conflicts, no other
categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond
that. Certainly nothing like class—unless you happen to be in the
ruling class, in which case you’re very well aware of it.
So then equally exotic issues like class oppression and class warfare
occur only in obscure books and on Mars?
Or in the business press and the business literature, where it’s
written about all the time. It exists there because they have to
worry about it.
You use the term elite. The political economist and economic
historian Samir Amin says it confers too much dignity upon them.
He prefers ruling class. Incidentally, a more recent invention is the
ruling crass.
The only reason I don’t use the word class is that the
terminology of political discourse is so debased it’s hard to find any
words at all. That’s part of the point—to make it impossible to talk.
For one thing, class has various associations. As soon as you say the
word class, everybody falls down dead. They think, There’s some
Marxist raving again.
But the other thing is that to do a really serious class analysis,
you can’t just talk about the ruling class. Are the professors at
Harvard part of the ruling class? Are the editors of the New York
Times part of the ruling class? Are the bureaucrats in the State
Department? There are lots of different categories of people. So
you can talk vaguely about the establishment or the elites or the
people in the dominant sectors.
But I agree, you can’t get away from the fact that there are sharp
differences in power which in fact are ultimately rooted in the
economic system. You can talk about the masters, if you like. It’s
Adam Smith’s word, and he’s now in fashion. The elite are the
masters, and they follow what Smith called their “vile maxim”—
namely, all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.
You say that class transcends race, essentially.
It certainly does. For example, the United States could become a