Superclass
June 28, 2008
Doug Henwood reviews David Rothkopf’s book on the Global Power Elite. This argument has already been made in a far more compelling and comprehensive manner by Leslie Sklair in his Transnational Capitalist Class.
Are we now ruled by an international elite that has left national borders far behind? It’s a fashionable view across the political spectrum that enjoys special prominence every January, when the alleged members of that alleged class hold their annual shareholders’ meeting in Davos, Switzerland. David Rothkopf, the author of “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making,” would strike the alleged from the previous sentence. To him, there’s no doubt that this superclass exists and it’s running the show.
We’ve had a series of books in recent years that amount to little more than a pornography of wealth. But the connection of wealth to actual power is rarely explored. Sure, hedge fund managers can deploy billions, and CEOs can hire and fire thousands, but what is the relation of that narrow economic power to broader political, social and cultural power?
What are the limits to their power? How much are they at the mercy of competitors, impersonal financial markets or personal pressure from large institutional investors? There’s definitely a cult of the celebrity CEO, but to what degree are such executives embedded in a system larger than they are (mere personifications of capital, in Marx’s excellent phrase)?
For Rothkopf, the emergence of a superclass isn’t the product of struggle or contingency so much as the operation of a law of nature. To prove this, he turns to the sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 theory: 20 percent of causes are responsible for 80 percent of consequences. The phrasing is vague because Rothkopf sees it as applying to nearly everything; the relevant application here is to explain the distribution of income and ultimately power. In fact, the richest 10 percent of Americans pull down 46 percent of income, but presumably 80/20 is close enough for trade publishing. And Rothkopf sees no need to disclose the fact that Pareto was profoundly anti-democratic, was in love with violence and was greatly admired by Mussolini. Since the class question has been solved, no need to bring up such embarrassments.
“Superclass” proper opens in Davos—not in one of the meeting halls, but in a fondue joint at the edge of town. It’s funny to think of the hyper-elite engaging in such middlebrow cuisine (though I suppose the Swiss get a pass on that class judgment), but I guess the point is that at some level they’re just folks too. Rather than linger over the bubbling cheese, Rothkopf quickly moves on to C. Wright Mills, whose 1955 book “The Power Elite” (still in print, still selling briskly) provides a vague template for Rothkopf’s investigation. I say vague because while the Rothkopf book is full of the personalities that Mills’ book is lacking, it shows none of the rigor of the original. (And none of the style, either.) Although Rothkopf shows some admiration for the first half of Mills’ book, he laments the way the second half “veers into polemic.” Imagine being annoyed by an elite hellbent on accumulation and violence! None of that in this book, whose north star is “balance.”
But Rothkopf also declares Mills’ book to be obsolete because it’s focused entirely on the national ruling class; today’s power elite is global. Besides, the class-struggle question has been settled with the fall of the Soviet Union, you see; now our central battle is national versus global.
Certainly there’s some degree of truth to this critique of Mills, but Rothkopf mainly relies on asserting that putative fact over and over, while trusting the reader’s preconceptions to make the case. But to what degree has the U.S. elite, or any other national elite, left the nation-state behind? Politics still remain heavily national. Most senior U.S. corporate executives live in their headquarters country, and write checks to the campaigns of politicians whose ambitions focus on Washington, not the U.N. or the WTO. The frequency of currency crises around the world suggests that national economies are far from seamlessly globalized. When Bear Stearns hit a wall, it was the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury that stepped in to craft a rescue. Even the international machinations of the International Monetary Fund are directed to a large degree by the U.S. Treasury; as the late MIT economist Rudi Dornbusch once put it, “The IMF is a toy of the United States to pursue its economic policy offshore.” Neither the IMF nor the U.S. is quite what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but sometimes it seems that the borderless world exists mainly in fantasy. Even Rothkopf is compelled to wonder early in the book if Davos is just a “once-a-year Brigadoon of globalization,” but he never lets the question get in the way of his argument.
Just who is this superclass? Rothkopf is a little coy on the details—he has a list of about 6,000 names, but he’s not sharing, because its membership is so volatile. They’re rich, and mostly white and male, and they tend to fly on private jets a lot (and not just to Davos) because “they consider first class a downgrade.” They’re mostly CEOs and the like, though people like Bono also appear to be members. And since this is mostly a loving portrait, from an insider, or at least an aspirant, we’re told that the superclass is full of folks who are “brilliant, full of energy, and creative.” And happy, and “really interesting” too. They probably have better and more frequent sex than we do too.
But is it really a class if its constitution can vary so much from year to year? Doesn’t the very concept of class imply some degree of stability—not permanence, of course, but some continuity? It’s certainly the case that the constitution of the American ruling class has changed over the centuries—but there’s enough stability over the course of a few decades to periodize the thing. (See the excellent collection “Ruling America,” edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, for the full story.) Rothkopf’s analysis seems informed by the spirit of the Forbes 400, with its constantly changing cast of characters, itself a reflection of the volatility of the stock market. One year oil is up, the next it’s consumer staples, the next it’s e-tailing.
Rothkopf is at pains throughout the book to differentiate himself from those disreputable sorts, the conspiracy theorists of left and right, who’ve sullied the very notion of what sociologists call power structure research. Fair enough, they have. But his treatment of the conspiracists highlights a fundamental weakness of his book.
In his chapter on the conspiracists, he offers up a Michelin guide of some of the standard targets: the Masons, Skull & Bones (which, as Rothkopf notes, is said by conspiracists to control his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the Bilderbergers, the Bohemian Grove, the Trilateral Commission and of course Davos itself. In most cases, he cites some fevered description of how the organization secretly runs the world, then summons some insider to say that they’re really just irrelevant gasfests populated by has-beens (that’s the final judgment on the Trilateralists, the great demons of the 1970s), or just an excuse to get drunk and engage in weird rituals of male bonding (the Bohemian Grove, elegantly described by Richard Nixon as “the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”).
This weird juxtaposition of conspiracy theory and the alleged irrelevance of so many of the conspiracists’ favorite groups reflects the incoherence of Rothkopf’s project. These institutions and networks are important, but they’re not almighty. They’re somewhat fluid but not totally. They’re dependent on prominent individuals, but also make those individuals prominent. A book like this should investigate the machinery of power, but it ends up treating it all as something of a black box.
It’s not exactly true that Rothkopf considers the class question solved—he worries about the possibility of “backlash,” troublemaking by the excluded 99.9999 percent. (That percentage is no joke; 6,000 people are 0.0001 percent of the world’s population.) That’s a difference between a Democrat like Rothkopf—he served in the Clinton administration—and a Republican. The Republican never has doubts about the rightness of a money-driven hierarchical society ultimately backed by violence. The Democrat, though, is troubled by doubts and anxieties in the back of his mind that get diluted by evasion and qualification by the time they work their way toward the front of the mind.
The backlash is far more likely if the elites don’t find enlightenment, govern with wisdom and write large checks to their foundations. It is true that there is a risk of backlash in a world where opposition to the status quo has become so shriveled and thoughtless. But when has such enlightenment ever occurred without the threat of expropriation? Elites have had it way too easy lately, and the laziness of their chroniclers is one proof of that.
In the end, Rothkopf—who undermines his credibility early in the book with a declaration of love for his former employer, the “brilliant and charming” Henry Kissinger—piles together a series of anecdotes about life at the top, held together with assertions that are presented as if they were self-evident, when in fact they’re not. The book is desperately lacking in analysis or argument, and one finishes hardly any wiser than one was on first having picked it up. It’s less a book than an anthology of listicles, and an awkwardly written one too.
Doug Henwood edits the Left Business Observer, www.leftbusinessobserver.com, and is the author of “After the New Economy” (New Press, 2004) and “Wall Street: How It Works and For Whom” (Verso, 1997, now available for free download at www.wallstreetthebook.com). He also hosts “Behind the News,” www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html, broadcast on WBAI, New York. He is working on a book on America’s modern power elite.
The are perhaps only three or four great writers on elites who should be compulsory reading and Rothkopf isn’t one of them.
Research on the roots of elites,their shared cultural mores and their interconnections might be classed as an early form of conspiracy theory.Indeed the real masterworks in the field are those by authors who were banned or marginalized at that time and are not widely read today.
After all there must be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy at work when a book about elites is received by those people who are the object of its research with either outrage or stony-faced silence.If the work is any good at exposing their machinations then the powerful elites it describes will quickly work to diminish the possibility of its exercising any decisive influence.The elites themselves while marginalizing the work will use it to assess the current level of general awareness and heed the warning.
Magisterial in its command and scope is Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment which falls into that category of elite research.It was received by its subjects with stony silence.In one of his more lucid moments Bill Clinton a former student mused on the long-term benefits he had derived from reading Quigley’s magnum opus.
Less stony silence and more outrage was the reception meted out to another of my all time favourites:Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins.Roy Cohn the infamous lawyer-in-waiting to Macarthy saw to it that all copies of Mullins’ fine expose of the Wall St.cartel were removed from US libraries in Germany in the 1950s and burned.
The official reason given was the usual one that the book was one of several other un-American and anti-semitic works that were better off out of the hands of a US and already corrupted German readership.It was none of those things.
The book was actually commissioned by Ezra Pound then languishing in a US state mental hospital.Mullins was a former student and the work has features of high literary style and refinement one might more often expect to find in a classic Gothic novel.
Novel it is not.It provides a masterly account of one of the key conspiracies of the early 2oth century.
If you get time dip into Avro Manhattan and discover the taboo world of Vatican power elites as well.
Don’t forget the,in his own words-”always persecuted but never prosecuted” elite research of the late Anthony C Sutton.A writer more prolific and penetrating on US elites would be hard to find.
Forget Rothkopf!
Like the other non-canonical researchers above,Scott has proved uncannily prescient in many of his observations.
His study of early twentieth century US industrialists and Wall St financiers’ assistance to the Bolsheviks and later Stalin in the Soviet state’s industrial take-off was not well received at the time of its initial publication in the 1970s.The removal of his tenure at Stanford where he’d found the documents that corroborated his account followed swiftly on its heels.
The dismissal actually bore witness to a feature of elite behaviour that Chomsky and other establishment left writers would do well to learn from.As Scott himself knew well US elites have always sought to control the writing of history.So effective have they been in this surreptitious revisionist endeavour that it is now seldom that real historical research gets to see the light of day.When it does one becomes immediately aware that not everything that happens is written down on paper!
The apparently Manichean dichotomy between Soviet communism and US capitalism that was inculcated into the McCarthy generation did not actually exist when the fledgling Bolshevik state was finding its feet.The dichotomy certainly did not exist for the US public in the first decade of the last century when the extent of Wall St’s efforts on behalf of the Bolsheviks was well known even prior to their seizure and solidification of power after 1917.
Scott like the other writers mentioned used the historical evidence to reconstruct events in a way that gives due weight to the priorities of the actors who shaped them.Thus he traced the willingness of US elites to collude with supposedly antagonistic forces to the teaching of the right Hegelian dialectic that prevailed in fin de siecle US Ivy League universities.
The Harrimans,Warburgs and Khans et al saw no insuperable contradiction whatever between the two systems.In fact as Scott makes clear they were just as ready to hedge their bets and back the White Russians as well until it became clear just who was about to solidify their rule over the captive market the elites coveted.
As well as giving due weight to the sensibilities of the actors involved writers like Scott have turned out to be extraordinarily prescient in their observations.
Revisiting the state of play between Russia today and the West Tim Pendrey in a recent piece on his TPPR blog has noted the emergence of the ostensibly private energy giant Gazprom and its wish to subvert OPEC in the European and US markets.The nationalist ideology of harnessing Western finance capital to Russian state capitalist enterprises which is the avowed goal of Gazprom CEO,Alexei Miller,bears uncanny resemblances to the relationship between Russia and Anglo/US elites described by Scott as inhering in the first decades of the last century.
It seems to be the case that researchers whose work is a chosen vocation rather than an academic obligation have always been the intellectual insurgents and trail-blazers.Unrestrained by overseers who would limit the scope of their inquiries they forge alliances with independent and loyal publishers and their insights are not missed by those who seek knowledge rather than disinformation passed off as mainstream history or the latest modish social research.
If their work is undervalued in their own lifetimes they can rest assured that it is to these writers researchers who want the truth will always return.
Sklair’s work on the transnational capitalist class is excellent. You should also read William I. Robinson’s “A Theory of Global Capitalism” and van der Pijl’s work. These are much more rigorous academic works on transnational class formation.
References to Scott above should read Sutton of course.
Much of Sutton’s work is available online http.//www.reformation.org
Another masterwork by Scott is Wall Street and FDR which documents FDR’s work as bond salesman and speculator prior to achieving the Presidency.
In Chapter 10 Scott describes the infamous Wall St plot of 1934 in which FDR almost featured as the “Man on a White Horse” or fascist leader envisaged by J P Morgan et al.He also accounts for the media black-out of the story in a quote from the Congressional Record for 1917.
Here Congressman Callaway told of a highly organized March 1915 plan engineered by the Morgan interests to effect extensive control of newspaper output across the US on behalf of elite interests.
Callaway discerned that the distortion and outright falsehood that featured daily in the 25 most influential newspapers Morgan et al had targeted especially were now evident in the then current campaign to propagandize the US public for US intervention in WW1.
The Morgan interests who then financed the allied war effort stood to gain massively from US entry into the war.
Sutton surmised that Congressional and media manipulation allowed Wall St to suppress the mountain of evidence that they were behind the fascist plot of 1934.
Scott would certainly have seen through the Paulson public looting….sorry “bail-out”/”rescue package” so lauded by the current corporate media and recently passed by Congress.
I,of course,confused Sutton with the equally eminent and likewise neglected Peter Dale Scott who like Scott is an invaluable source on US elites.