The repression launched by the Wilson Administration successfully undermined democratic politics, unions, freedom of the press, and independent thought, in the interests of corporate power and the state authorities who represented its interests, all with approval of the media and elites generally, all in self-defence against the ‘ignorant and mentally deficient’ majority. Much the same story was re-enacted after World War II, again under the pretext of a Soviet threat, in reality to restore submission to the rulers. ibid.
When political life and independent thought revived in the 1960s, the problem arose again, and the reaction was the same. The Trilateral Commission, bringing together liberal elites from Europe, Japan, and the United States, warned of an impending ‘crisis of democracy’ as segments of the public sought to enter the political arena. The ‘excess of democracy’ was posing a threat to the unhampered rule of privileged elites – what is called ‘democracy’ in political theology. ibid.
The influential political scientist Harold Lasswell explained in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social managers must turn to ‘a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda’. He added the conventional justification: we must recognize the 'ignorance and stupidity [of] ... the masses' and not succumb to ‘democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests’. They are not, and we must control them, for their own good. The same principle guides the business community. ibid.
Once popular organizations are dispersed or crushed and decision-making power is firmly in the hands of owners and managers, democratic forms are quite acceptable, even preferable as a device of legitimation of elite rule in a business-run ‘democracy’. ibid.
The ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power: Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power … (1) Reduce Democracy; (2) Shape Ideology; (3) Redesign the Economy; (4) Shift the Burden; (5) Attack Solidarity; (6) Run the Regulators; (7) Engineer Elections; (8) Keep the Rabble in Line; (9) Manufacture Consent; (10) Marginalize the Population. Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, F-Movies 2017
When elites fail and what we should do about it: there’s a simple answer and the simple answer is get rid of them. Noam Chomsky, lecture Portland Oregon October 2009, ‘When Elites Fail’, Youtube
How they become the architects of policy … The easiest one is just buy elections … ‘The investment theory of politics’. ibid.
The United States happens to have a highly class conscious business community which is committed to fighting a continuous and very bitter class war. ibid.
‘Too big to fail’ is of course an insurance policy. It exacerbates built-in inefficiency of markets. ibid.
The cost of elections has skyrocketed … democracy has eroded … 70% of the population is essentially disenfranchised … their opinions have no effect on policy; influence increases slowly as wealth increases; you get to the top fraction of 1%, they pretty much get what they want. Noam Chomsky, lecture 8th July 2017, ‘The Corporatization of the Universities’, Youtube 1.39.35
[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy. Michael Parenti
You are the elite – and therefore are expected to behave as such. Chariots of Fire 1981 starring Ben Cross & Ian Charleson & Nicholas Farrell & Nigel Havers & Ian Holm & John Gielgud & Lindsay Anderson & Cheryl Campbell & Alice Krige et al, director Hugh Hudson, advice to Harold Abrahams
When you look at the US ruling class you’d have to say that they are a pathetic bunch of failures and bunglers. They are a miserable excuse for a ruling class ... What stays the same is the ruling elite that gives these puppets the orders that they act on ... They’ve hijacked this country and you’ve got to take it back from them. Webster Tarpley
They have created a power elite, and we’re not talking about the millionaire down the street; you can’t even be a member of their club unless you are a multi-billionaire. George Humphrey
Hegel says that the individual should be 100% obedient to the state. And the state should take on the image of God. Now, in the Hegelian system the state is all-powerful. So we should ask ourselves, what is the State? Well, the state is the Elite. The state is the royal aristocratic hierarchy who are able to manoeuvre and live their life in any way they choose because they are super-wealthy. Chris Everard, Illuminati I
Occult technology is the highest secret of the Elite. Chris Everard, Spirit World II
The theme of this book is that fire down below. If society is to change in a socialist direction and if capitalism is to be replaced by socialism, the source of that change must be the fight against the exploitative society by the exploited people themselves. To knuckle down to the notion that changes can only come from the top is to accept the most debilitating and arrogant of all capitalist arguments: namely that there is at all times in human history a God-given elite, a few who are equipped to rule, while most people are not capable of government or politics and should count themselves lucky to have the occasional chance to choose which section of the elite should govern them.
This assumption of the rights of the few and the ignorance and inefficiency of the many is the hallmark of class rule through all our history. The reformer who believes that an educated elite in a parliament can change things for the masses, can – in the words of the Labour Party’s famous Clause Four – ‘secure for the workers ... the full fruits of their industry’, is really playing the same game and making the same assumptions as the most bigoted class warrior. Both believe that whatever is right and wrong for most people can only be determined by the enlightened few. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch6
The argument, which swept like wildfire through the rapidly growing labour parties in Europe, was contested by a revolutionary minority boosted by two enormously powerful pamphlets – Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1900) and Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917. Both pamphlets continued in the tradition set out by Marx in the 1840s. Far from contrasting socialism with democracy, they started from the principle of a democratic society controlled from below. Lenin specifically hailed the ‘elective principle’ as indispensable to a socialist society. Rosa Luxemburg’s passionate identification with the spontaneous movements of the masses shines out of every sentence she wrote. Her whole approach was democratic from start to finish.
Like Marx’s, their argument was not at all that there is some choice to be made between socialism and democracy but that the two are indivisible. The problem, they argued, with the ‘democratic’ approach proposed by the main European workers’ parties was that their democracy was not strong enough to contest the hierarchies of the rich. It locked democracy up in a small parliamentary island, while control over the ocean – industry, finance, law, armed forces, police, media – stayed in the hands of the unelected rich. The contest between the new confined democracy in parliament and the boundless undemocratic hierarchies of the rich would be, they warned, no contest. The rich would win; and in the process the workers would lose confidence in themselves and lower their guard still further. For the essence of the parliamentary argument was that ordinary people could and should do nothing to emancipate themselves. They should leave the sophisticated business of emancipation to their betters, to the educated elite within the movement who would make their way to parliament. If and when, as was inevitable, this elite failed to achieve even a small part of the emancipation they promised, the workers would be left high and dry, rudderless and hopeless. If the educated elite couldn’t do the job, they would ask, who could? Passivity would lead to despair, to the triumph of the right, with disastrous consequences for democracy.
The experience of parliamentary democracy this century grimly vindicates what Lenin and Luxemburg predicted. Paul Foot, Socialism & Democracy
This was the grand idea of the ‘representative democracy’ which first stirred in England in the revolution of the 17th century, and was taken up with much more force at the time of the French Revolution. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man denounced all governments which were not chosen by the people. To the government of the day, which was chosen by a handful of brigands and courtiers, this was dangerous subversion, and Paine was sentenced to death for it. Similarly, when the Chartists in the late 1830s and 1840s demanded the vote as part of an organised working class movement of strikes and physical force, the rulers set their faces firmly against the proposal.
The idea of a representative democracy is essentially distasteful to a class of people who owe their wealth to the process of robbing the majority. Exploitation of the many by the few is the most hideously undemocratic process imaginable. How could the minority exploiters agree to a system where the majority can vote?
After the Chartists were beaten in open class warfare, the British ruling class, then the strongest and most cunning in the world, applied itself to this question. It was obviously impossible forever to resist the popular demand for the vote. Was it not possible, however, to concede the vote bit by bit, making sure that the concessions coincided with relative industrial peace, and above all making sure that as each new concession led to new governments, those governments could be constrained against any action which would threaten the wealth and power of the ruling class? So, for a hundred years (1867-1970) the vote was conceded piecemeal. Governments were elected of many different colours; but the real power, especially the economic power, stayed exactly where it was.