xtisme: Well, as I pointed out above, no class analysis, no matter how sophisticated, can be hard-and-fast. Not in the U.S., anyway. There will always be a certain number of people on the fringe between two classes, who might be assigned to one class or the other. You might be in the white overclass, the Hispanic overclass, or the middle class. You probably won’t know for certain until you see where your children end up.
What does the white overclass DO? For one thing, while it does not, as a class, rule the country – a class is not an organization – it does produce the people who rule the country, the “institutional elite.” Here is another excerpt from TNAN, pp. 142-143, which I omitted from my earlier post in the interest of (hah!) brevity:
. . . Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about “the political class” or, with C. Wright Mills, about “the power elite,” are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite – top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country’s class system.
The United States at the end of the twentieth century has both an institutional elite and a dominant social class. The institutional elite is composed of upper-level officials in the federal and state governments, plus executives and professionals in the concentrated private sector and foundation and university executives (low-level government officials and small business owners are not part of the institutional elite). Almost all of the members of the American institutional elite also happen to be members of a single social class: the white overclass. To put it another way, the labor pool from which most elite positions are filled is the white overclass. The overlap is not complete. Though most members of the institutional elite belong to the white overclass, most members of the white overclass are not part of the institutional elite (since the overclass greatly outnumbers the elite); and – though this is uncommon – a person can become a high-ranking politician, military officer, judge, CEO, foundation president, or university president in the United States without having been born into the white overclass. It is possible to imagine a United States in which most members of the institutional elite did not have similar class origins. But that is not the country in which we live.
Now, as you pointed out, the overclass produces political liberals as well as conservatives. In another of his books,
Up From Conservatism, which I don’t have in front of me right now, Michael Lind show how the liberalism of the overclass is very different from any political viewpoint of the working class.
And, yes, the American white overclass controls the means of production, in three obvious
ways:
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All our major corporations (which directly own and control most productive property, including, nowadays, agricultural as well as industrial property) are run by overclass executives; in particular, the CEOs and boards of directors are almost certain to be of overclass origin.
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All our major corporations are, technically, owned by their stockholders, and most of that stock is in the hands of overclass investors.
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Corporate control of the means of production is to some degree mitigated by the superior power of the government, but the overclass controls that too, as explained above.
Revolution eventually!