The Manifesto of the American Aristocrat

A specter is haunting America—the specter of actual democracy. Can you imagine? Regular people thinking they should have a say in how things work? Adorable. Under our enlightened guidance, all the powers of the real America have entered a holy alliance to exorcise this demon: Evangelicals praying for our tax cuts, Republicans voting for them, police protecting our property, courts enforcing our contracts, and especially our brilliant media personalities explaining to the peasants why it’s all for their own good.

The Democrats—bless their ineffectual hearts—are labeled as socialists, communists, and enemies of freedom by our expert propaganda machine. We’ve convinced half the country that universal healthcare would literally end America, while we quietly cash in on their insurance premiums. It’s honestly impressive how easily the working class can be persuaded to fight against their own interests, isn’t it?

Two things result from this gloriously profitable arrangement:

1. Our wealthy elite power is acknowledged by everyone as THE power that matters.
2. It’s high time we just openly publish our actual agenda, since even when we say the quiet part out loud, the peasants keep voting for us anyway!

I. Elites and Useful Working Class Servants

History has always been about class struggles—and buddy, we’re winning this one!

Throughout history, whether between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, or bosses and workers, there’s always been the smart, superior people (us) and everyone else (them). This conflict has usually ended with either society being fundamentally changed or everyone being ruined. We’ve perfected a third option: convincing the workers that their suffering is actually freedom!

Our modern American society hasn’t eliminated class conflicts—we’ve just gotten remarkably good at hiding them behind culture wars and reality TV. We’ve established new conditions of oppression that most people don’t even recognize. It’s genius, really.

Our era—the golden age of the Wealthy Elite—has beautifully simplified class antagonisms. Society is splitting into two camps: Us (the Wealthy Elite who own everything) and Them (the Wage-Dependent Class who think they’ll join us someday). Spoiler alert: they won’t.

From the industrial workers of the 19th century somehow came the first corporate overlords. And boy, have we improved the model! The discovery of new markets, colonial exploitation, and technological domination created unprecedented momentum for commerce, allowing us to rapidly accumulate wealth at the expense of the working masses. Don’t you love efficiency?

The old guild system where workers had rights and protections couldn’t survive our need for maximum profits. Manufacturing replaced it, with each worker doing one mindless task repeatedly. Then mass production replaced manufacturing, and industrial millionaires—the early wealthy elite—replaced the middle-class manufacturers. Now we’ve reached our final form: tech billionaires who don’t even need to see the workers we exploit!

Global markets, created through American military and economic dominance, expanded trade and transportation, which further consolidated our wealth and power. As industries grew, we grew richer, pushing aside older social classes and any notion that working people deserve dignity or fair compensation. Isn’t progress wonderful?

We wealthy elite are the product of centuries of development, revolutionizing production methods specifically to extract maximum profit with minimum labor costs. Every technological advancement has been accompanied by corresponding political advancement for us. From being merely rich industrialists, we’ve become the exclusive holders of political power. Modern government is simply our committee for managing our affairs—we’ve bought both parties, though one is definitely giving us a better return on investment.

We’ve played a truly revolutionary role in history—just not the way Marx predicted!

Wherever we’ve gained power, we’ve destroyed those quaint patriarchal and idyllic relationships that kept people content with less. We’ve pitilessly torn apart the ties that bound people to their communities and replaced them with naked self-interest and cold cash transactions. We’ve drowned religious fervor, local pride, and family connections in the icy water of profit calculation. We’ve replaced exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions with shameless, direct exploitation—and convinced the peasants it’s called “freedom!”

We’ve stripped away the dignity from every profession—turning doctors, lawyers, priests, and scientists into our paid wage slaves. We’ve reduced family relationships to financial transactions and recreation to consumption opportunities.

The display of force in establishing American dominance (which our media celebrates constantly) found its natural complement in our laziest indolence. We’ve accomplished wonders by directing other people’s labor while taking all the credit and profits! Our expeditions to extract resources from weaker nations make previous conquests look like amateur hour.

We wealthy elite cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing production methods and disrupting social conditions, creating endless uncertainty that keeps workers desperate enough to accept whatever wages we offer. All fixed relationships are swept away; every tradition is profaned; everything solid melts into air—except our offshore accounts, which remain quite solid indeed.

Our need for constantly expanding markets drives us across the entire globe. We establish connections everywhere, especially with foreign dictators sitting on natural resources we need.

Through exploiting world markets, we’ve made production and consumption international. Despite occasional protectionist rhetoric to please the rubes, we’ve removed national foundations from industries because patriotism is less profitable than cheap overseas labor. Traditional national industries have been destroyed and continue to be destroyed daily. We replaced them with industries using raw materials from the most distant regions and selling products worldwide. National self-sufficiency has given way to global interdependence—with us at the top of the food chain, naturally.

We’ve drawn even the most remote regions into our civilization. Our cheap products are the heavy artillery with which we batter down all protections and force every nation to adopt our economic system or face extinction. We compel all nations to introduce our version of “civilization”—meaning they must allow us to extract their resources and exploit their workers too. In short, we create a world in our image because it’s more profitable that way.

We’ve subjected rural areas to urban rule while simultaneously convincing rural voters that cities are evil. We’ve created enormous cities while buying up rural land for corporate farming. We’ve centralized population, production, and property in a few hands (ours), naturally resulting in political centralization under our control.

During our rule of barely one hundred years, the wealthy elite have created more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations combined. We’ve harnessed natural forces, computerized everything, and created unprecedented wealth—mostly for ourselves. What earlier century could have imagined that such productive forces would be used to make a handful of men richer than entire nations?

We’ve replaced feudal property relations with free competition—at least that’s what we call it when we crush small businesses and absorb or destroy any company that threatens our monopolies.

A similar movement is occurring before your eyes. Commercial crises periodically threaten the existence of our entire system. During these crises, we destroy products and productive capacity while convincing taxpayers to bail out our failures. Society suddenly finds itself back in momentary barbarism—and we use that chaos to consolidate even more wealth and power!

When workers receive their wages (which we’ve kept stagnant for decades despite soaring productivity), they’re immediately set upon by other portions of our class—the landlord raising rent, the health insurance company, the credit card company charging 29% interest, and so on. Nothing leaves our system!

The middle class—small business owners, shopkeepers, and once-comfortable professionals—are all sinking into the wage-dependent class as our monopolies swallow everything. Their specialized skills become worthless as we automate and outsource. Thus, the working class grows from all segments of the population, creating more desperate people willing to work for less.

Modern workers have lost all individual character in their labor. They’ve become mere appendages to our machines and algorithms, performing the simplest, most monotonous tasks. Therefore, their cost is limited almost entirely to the minimum subsistence needed to keep them working and reproducing more workers. As work becomes more tedious and soul-crushing, wages decrease. As automation increases, the burden of work increases through longer hours, increased quotas, and accelerated machine speeds.

Our modern corporations have converted small workshops into massive factories and gig economies. Workers, crowded into warehouses or isolated in their cars desperately chasing the next delivery, are organized like soldiers under the command of our algorithms. They are enslaved by machines, supervisors, and ultimately by us, the individual wealthy elite who own it all. This despotism becomes more hateful the more openly we proclaim profit as our only purpose—but what are they going to do about it?

The essential condition for our continued rule is maintaining competition between workers. The modern laborer, instead of rising with industry’s progress, sinks deeper below the conditions of a dignified existence. They become poorer, and their poverty grows faster than our wealth.

And here it becomes evident that we wealthy elite are unfit to be the ruling class in society if “fitness” were judged by how well everyone lives. We cannot assure workers even the most basic security within their servitude because our profit model requires their precarity. Society can no longer live under our rule—but we’ve rigged the system so thoroughly that they have no choice!

The essential conditions for our existence are the formation and growth of capital through wage labor. Wage labor depends on competition between workers. The advance of industry, which we involuntarily promote, replaces the isolation of workers due to competition with their revolutionary unity due to association—which is why we’ve systematically destroyed unions, atomized workplaces, and demonized collective action.

The development of modern industry might cut from under our feet the very foundation on which we produce and appropriate products. What we produce, above all, are our own grave-diggers—which is why we’ve invested so heavily in preventing them from recognizing their shared interests. Our fall and their victory might have been inevitable—if we hadn’t purchased the government, the media, and the courts!

II. The Wealthy Elite and Their Useful Idiots

Our relationship with our voting base is simple: they adore us while we pick their pockets.

We don’t form a separate party—we own both! We have no interests separate from maintaining our wealth and power, regardless of which team wears which color tie.

We differ from actual representatives of the working class in only two ways:

1. In national struggles, we always prioritize our global investments over national interests, though we constantly wave the flag to distract from this fact.
2. In various stages of political theater, we always represent our own interests while pretending to care about “the people.”

Therefore, we wealthy elite are practically the most advanced and determined exploiters in every country. Theoretically, we have the advantage of clearly understanding the conditions, direction, and ultimate results of the class struggle—which is why we spend billions on think tanks, media, and politicians to make sure workers never understand them.

Our immediate aim is simple: prevent the wage-dependent class from organizing as a class, maintain our rule, and expand our political power. Our theoretical conclusions are not based on ideas invented by some would-be reformer but express our actual experience extracting maximum profit from human labor.

The distinguishing feature of our system is not the existence of property generally but the concentration of property in our hands while everyone else lives paycheck to paycheck. Modern private property is the final and most complete expression of producing and appropriating products based on class antagonisms—and buddy, we’re winning!

Workers have been accused of wanting to abolish the right to personally acquire property. But does wage labor create property for the wage worker? Not at all! It creates capital for us—property that exploits wage labor and can increase only by creating new wage labor for fresh exploitation. Property in its present form is based on the antagonism between capital and wage labor, and we’ve made sure the capital always wins.

To be a capitalist means having not only a personal position but a social position in production. Capital is a collective product that can be set in motion only by society’s united action. But we’ve privatized the profits while socializing the risks!

When workers through their labor merely secure enough for bare existence, they’re creating surplus value we take as profit. We’ve created a system where workers live merely to increase our capital and are allowed to live only as long as our interests require it.

In our society, living labor is only a means to increase our accumulated wealth. In our society, the past dominates the present; capital is independent with full personhood (thank you, Supreme Court!), while living people are dependent with no individuality unless they’re rich.

And abolishing this arrangement would indeed abolish our individuality and freedom! We’ve defined freedom as our right to exploit others—how dare anyone challenge that divine privilege!

By freedom, under current conditions, we mean free markets—which we’ve rigged in our favor through monopolies, regulatory capture, and outright corruption. Talk about free markets only has meaning when opposing any attempt to regulate our exploitation or tax our obscene wealth.

You might be horrified that we’ve abolished private property for nine-tenths of the population. It exists precisely because it doesn’t exist for those nine-tenths. You might accuse us of intending to maintain this system where most people own nothing while we own everything. That’s exactly our intention!

From the moment personal property can no longer be transformed into wealthy elite property, into capital, you claim individuality is abolished. You admit, then, that by “individual” you mean no one other than the wealthy elite owner. We’ve convinced people that their “freedom” means our freedom to exploit them!

Some object that without our exploitation, all work would cease and universal laziness would take over. If this were true, our society would have collapsed long ago from idleness, because those who work acquire little, and those who acquire everything barely work at all!

We’ve even convinced people that without our obscene wealth accumulation, culture itself would disappear! The culture they defend is, for the vast majority, merely training to act as our obedient machine operators and consumers.

Don’t argue with us using notions of freedom, culture, and law to critique our system. Your very ideas are products of our media companies! Just as our jurisprudence is only our will made into law—our interests determined by maintaining our material dominance.

You accuse us of destroying the family? The modern family is based on capital and private gain. In its fully developed form, it exists only among us wealthy elites. Worker families are destroyed by our need for their labor at poverty wages, forcing both parents to work multiple jobs while barely seeing their children.

Our rhetoric about family values becomes utterly disgusting when we deny workers parental leave, affordable childcare, or living wages that would actually support families. Our industries destroy family ties for workers by making survival require inhuman work schedules.

You claim we want to introduce “community of women”? We already treat women as instruments of production. Our corporate-owned politicians control women’s bodies while we profit from their underpaid labor. Furthermore, nothing is more ridiculous than our virtuous indignation about sexual morality while we build entire entertainment industries on exploiting women’s sexuality.

You accuse us of wanting to abolish countries and nationality? We wealthy elite have no country—only investments and tax shelters. We cannot take patriotism seriously when outsourcing jobs increases our quarterly profits.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are incredibly useful tools we use to prevent worker solidarity. Our media stokes these divisions constantly while our capital flows freely across borders.

The criticisms against our system made from religious, philosophical, and ideological standpoints don’t deserve serious examination—especially since we’ve purchased most religious and academic institutions.

Does it require deep insight to understand that human ideas change with human existence and social relations? The dominant ideas of any age have always been the ideas of its ruling class—and our media empires make sure that remains true!

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they express the fact that within the old society, elements of a new one have developed. But we’ve prevented those ideas from spreading by controlling education, media, and political discourse.

“There are eternal truths like Freedom and Justice common to all social conditions,” some claim. But we’ve redefined freedom as our freedom to exploit and justice as the protection of our property rights. We haven’t abolished eternal truths—we’ve just made them work for us!

The working class revolution Marx predicted might have been the most radical rupture with traditional property relations. But we’ve created the most radical system of propaganda and control to prevent it, convincing workers to fight each other instead of us.

We’ve perfected a system where workers use their political power to vote for our puppets who promise to take all capital from the “elite” (always defined as intellectuals and cultural figures, never us) while actually transferring even more wealth to us!

Of course, we occasionally allow some progressive-sounding policies to be implemented—just enough to prevent outright rebellion:

1. A modest property tax that we’ve made sure has countless loopholes.
2. A progressive income tax that somehow leaves billionaires paying lower rates than their secretaries.
3. A weakened inheritance tax that our dynasty trusts easily circumvent.
4. Occasional regulation of industries after they’ve caused catastrophic harm.
5. A banking system designed to transfer wealth upward during both booms and busts.
6. Transportation systems that prioritize our shipping needs and private jets.
7. Environmental protections that never seriously threaten our profits.
8. The illusion of equal obligation to work while we live off capital gains.
9. Agricultural policies that benefit corporate farms while destroying family farms.
10. Public education sufficiently underfunded to ensure workers remain compliant without developing critical thinking.

When class distinctions should have disappeared and production concentrated in the hands of workers, public power would have lost its political character. But we’ve ensured that never happens! Political power remains our organized power for oppressing the working class.

Instead of a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, we’ve created one where our unlimited development comes at the cost of everyone else’s potential. And isn’t that really the American Dream?