 Adolch chi, becamellos yw ac yn oed? Adolch wnaen nhw'n gwneud y ffordd. Roedd y gallwn wedi bod yn gymuned fath hwn i gefnodd Gwldshindd ar y gyfrif gwylo i gael i yma yw bethfawr sy'n cychwyn ei ddweud ar y fath. Roedd ei ddweud a'r cyfrif gafodd Gwldshindd yn unig yw'r cyfrif gwylo i gael i'r panfforddiwch. A'r cyfrifion nid oes gaeli ar gael eu gwneud ar gael i gael i gael'u panfforddiwch. Mae'r ddweud hynny yn cael ei gael eich cyflwytaeth i gael o'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud hynny yn cynnig, a'r ddweud hynny yn cael eu cyflwytaeth i gael o'r ddweud. The Prime Minister wants to interfere with any publication plans the Property and Freedom Society may have, but the Literary Alliance, in which I'm the director, does publish a wide range of material, If you do have a text and if you'd like to submit it to us, we would be delighted to publish it and put it on our website and give it the widest circulation of which we are capable. So if you do want your speech to appear through the Libertarian Alliance, please do contact me, either see me after the events today or email it to me. The last thing I'd say before I begin is that I did bring a few copies of this book with me. I do have a few left. It has been rather well received and I do strongly urge you to buy the few copies that I've brought with me. There is also this rather interesting novel written by Richard Blake, who is a very close and a very dear friend of mine. He has a little daughter and the more copies of these that people buy, the less likely it is that Mr Blake's little daughter will have to go to a state school and mix with common children and be taught by communists. I only have two copies left, but anybody who is interested should see me as soon as possible. So that is that part of my speech over. Let me begin with the main part. The subject I have been sent is who or what is the ruling class. I make no pretence for originality of thought in this. Everything that I'm about to say has been said, has been said rather better and at much greater length by other people. To mention just some of the recent writers, never mind those from the more distant past. There's Murray Rothbard, there's Hans Herman Hopper, there's Kevin Carson, there's Christian Michel. There are many other people who have done much better work on this subject than I have. All I can do is supply a certain brevity and clarity of presentation. I say clarity of presentation, but the chief difficulty for me in giving this speech is that although I do have certain strongly held beliefs about the nature of a ruling class, I'm still not entirely sure of the details of what this involves, and I'm still not entirely sure of how to justify my beliefs. So I do look forward to questions which will force me to think rather harder and rather better about this subject. Let me say what I do believe. I believe that in Britain, in America and in every other Western society with which I am familiar, there is a ruling class. And this ruling class consists of bureaucrats, politicians, therapists, educators, lawyers, media people and associated business interests. So far as these people act as members of a ruling class, they are parasitic. They derive income and position from an enlarged and active state. Their income and position comes from compelling ordinary people to do things that they would not otherwise do, or compelling ordinary people not to do things that they would otherwise do. It is based on force and on monopoly. Now, because ruling classes are always much smaller than the great body of the ruled, force is not sufficient to keep the ruled in line. And so any ruling class, if it wants to survive, indeed any ruling class if it wants to exist, will need to have what is called a legitimising ideology. This is a body of ideas which justifies the existence and activities of the ruling class. It doesn't really matter within certain limits what this legitimising ideology can be. It might be averting the wrath of the gods. It might be compelling people to believe in the true faith. It may be protecting the nation against certain internal or external threats. It may be raising the condition of the working classes. Or it may be equalising the condition of ethnic minorities or more recently it may be protecting the planet against human beings. Some of these legitimising ideologies may be true, but truth is less important than their usefulness. And if some of these legitimising ideologies strike us as bizarre beyond any possibility of belief, again that doesn't matter. A legitimising ideology will be suitable to the time and place in which it is held. Now, if this legitimising ideology is expressed with sufficient force, it will create what is called a discourse. It will create intellectual hegemony. What I mean by that is that it will become very difficult to conceive and to speak about politics, economics or other important issues except within the terms that are useful to the ruling class. To give an example of this, anyone who is worried about multiculturalism will have heard people say, I'm not a racist, but what this is is an expression of dissent which is couched in terms which accepts the rightness of the claims made by the multicultural lobby. There are very few people who are able to say, I don't believe a word of this, this is what I believe instead. Most people will couch any disagreement within the accepted terms of debate which will make dissent extremely hard. That is part of what is meant by a discourse. If this discourse becomes powerful enough, it will create in most people what is called false consciousness, a state of mind in which people will act against their own interests as reasonably conceived. There are many libertarians and conservatives who do not like talk of ruling classes and there are two main objections to this. The first is that it sounds rather Marxist and I have deliberately used a number of Marxist terms, hegemony, discourse, false consciousness. These are terms taken straight from Marx himself, from Antonio Gramsci, from Louis Alterser and from Michel Foucault and these are people against whom our movement has been fighting an all out intellectual war for three generations. It is not surprising that many people should be disturbed to hear another libertarian or conservative using the terminology of the other side. Is this not a concession? Indeed, is this not a concession that amounts to a certain intellectual surrender to what is undoubtedly an evil ideology? The second objection is to question whether the term ruling class is appropriate to a modern society. Let me give you an example. In November 1605 there was a conspiracy in England to blow up parliament as it was being opened by the king. If Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators had succeeded, they would have killed the king, the prince of Wales, the senior aristocracy, the senior churchmen of the Church of England and give or take a few nominees, they would have killed the leading men of every county and town in England. They would have killed the entire English ruling class, which at that time could not have numbered more than about 700 men. 700 men who were often connected by ties of blood, who had a common education, who dressed differently from ordinary people and who were often cleaner than ordinary people. There was no problem in 1605 in knowing who was and who was not a member of the ruling class. There was a very strong sense of class consciousness among the English ruling class. They spoke of persons of quality, persons of gender degree, gentlemen. They distinguished themselves very sharply from the great body of the ruled. Indeed, they often accepted that they had far more in common with the ruling class of France or Spain or other European countries than with the great body of the people over whom they ruled. If you look however at modern societies, we'll look at the definition I gave of a ruling class. I said politicians, bureaucrats, therapists, educators, lawyers, media and business people. The senior leaders of these groups in themselves are larger than the whole English ruling class of 1605 and there is a great diversity within this ruling class. Is it legitimate to talk of these groups as constituting a single ruling class or should they much rather be seen as people like the people at a French bus stop, this enormous crowd of people, all struggling to get to the front of the queue so they can get on the bus first? You could try defining these people as a class because they all want to get on a bus but that is probably not a very satisfactory defining characteristic. They are a bus queue, that's it. Perhaps this collection of groups I've mentioned is no more than that, a collection of groups all competing for influence and power and influence and income. Perhaps they do not form a ruling class as it can be usefully described and analysed. Another argument against the distance of ruling class is based on the difficulties of collective action. People have interests as members of a group, they also however have individual interests and we know in the economic analysis of cartels that individual interests will often come out far on top of group interest. It may be that people will preach class solidarity while undermining it in their behaviour and so perhaps again any talk of a ruling class is illegitimate, it is not useful, it does not help us to analyse the kind of society in which we live. So these are the two objections. One is that it all sounds rather Marxist. Two is that it just may not have any useful meaning. Let me deal with those two objections in turn. The first objection that it all sounds rather Marxist. Yes it does, but Karl Marx, as many of you will be aware, was not the only 19th century philosopher to talk about class. Adam says, wealth of nations can be read as an analysis of class power. In France there was a much sharper school of classical liberal analysis of class. I think it started with the great economist J.B. Sey. It was then developed by people like Charles Comte, Charles Dounway and Augustine Thierry. There are classical liberal theories of class and when Marx began to write or to preach in the middle of the 19th century his class theory was one among others. It was not even the most prominent and it was perhaps not even the most intellectually distinguished. There is an independent classical liberal and libertarian theory of class and so if we talk about class we are not necessarily making any intellectual concessions to the Marxists. We are simply recovering a heritage which fell into a certain obscurity during the 20th century. That being said, although when Marx first began to write he was one class theorist among many there is no doubt that during the past 150 years there has not been a lot of work done on liberal and libertarian class theory but there has been an enormous amount of work done on Marx. Many of the Marxists had been men of considerable talent and considerable insight and there are certain incidental truths in what they wrote which I think it would be a mistake for us to overlook or to reject. What would you think of somebody who rejected motorways simply because the first person to build them on any scale was Adolf Hitler? The sciences of astronomy and of chemistry owe a lot at the beginning to the false sciences of astrology and of alchemy yet I don't think any chemist or astronomer would reject those aspects of astrology and of alchemy which are incidentally true. Marxism taken as a whole is a false theory of human behaviour. I don't need to say more than that but just because the overall theory is false does not mean that every aspect of a theory is without value and so I see no problem at all in taking over those aspects of Marxian class theory which I think are useful for our purposes. They are after all only aspects that we might have developed for ourselves if we had taken the trouble to do so a hundred years ago. So that is my reply to the objection that it all sounds rather Marxist. Yes it does and for a good reason. Now the difference between the Marxian theory of class and Libertarian class theory depends on where we locate the source of class power. For a Marxist class power derives from ownership of the means of production. So far as I understand the theory, mankind started in a state of primitive communism in which the means of production were held in common. These were then privately appropriated by a class which acquired enormous power and which then set up the state to act as its executive committee. Overtime changes in the means of production led to the rise of other groups to prominence who then overthrew the existing ruling class and became a ruling class of its own. And so from this it may follow that the state is a morally neutral institution. The state is a malevolent institution only when it is used as the instrument of class domination. Let there be a communist revolution and the state may be dispensed from the liberal forms of due process and of general limitation because the state will then be used to destroy the last vestiges of class power after which it can be trusted to wither away of its own accord. Now again I don't need to go into any detailed refutation of this theory. We know that it's false. We know that Marxist revolutions, whenever tried, have led to a mountain of corpses with some deified dictator standing on top. There is something wrong with the theory and we don't need to say more than that. Libertarian class theory does not locate power outside the state. Class power depends on control of the state. Take away the state and class power falls to the ground. Take away the state and many of the groups which comprise the ruling class that are described will wither away. They will die. They will shrivel away like take ones in a dead rat. Or, if they do not shrivel away, the members of those groups will need to offer their services on the market or on terms acceptable to willing buyers. For us class power is almost entirely bound up with the state. It is the state that allows a ruling class to exist. It is the state that allows the ruling class to exploit ordinary people. That is Libertarian class theory, it briefly expressed. But let me turn now to the second of the objections to the concept of a ruling class, that modern societies contain ruling groups too large and too diverse to be regarded as a ruling class. Here I am not entirely sure that I'm right. I think I am, but I'm not sure of it. I'm not sure that I have the best set of arguments to assert that I'm right. But let me say what I can about this. The first is to look at the problem of collective action. Yes, people will tend to follow their own personal interests, but at the same time there are any number of examples where people have been willing to put their personal interests as reasonably defined behind those of the groups to which they belong or to which they perceive themselves as belonging. In every generation there are young men who are quite happy to be put into uniform or to volunteer to be put into uniform to be sent out to be shot at for causes that they don't fully understand. They do this because they believe they are serving their nation. There are many other cases in which people are willing to put up with short term damage to their own personal interests in exchange for the promotion of longer term group interests. Yes, in the economic sense cartels are unstable. Nevertheless, they do emerge and they do last for a few years. When you move away from simple economic matters, it may be that group loyalties can persist very strongly for quite long periods. Something else that we must always remember is that a legitimising ideology is not just a pack of conscious lies preached by a ruling class to justify its position. A legitimising ideology must be believed by the ruling class itself. The moment significant numbers within a ruling class stop believing in their legitimising ideology and certainly the moment they start laughing at it in public, then the days of that ruling class are numbered. Obviously example, the French aristocracy at the end of the 18th century, they were quite happy to entertain ideas which proved utterly disastrous for their social position. I'm not too worried about arguments on the basis of the problems of collective action. That is an argument against, but I don't think it's a decisive argument. Coming to the size and diversity of what I define as ruling classes, yes, that is a problem, that is a problem and it's all the more of a problem in that I do not define a ruling class in economic terms. If I remarkist, I would say a ruling class is defined by those who own the means of production. You might then raise various arguments over what do you mean by the means of production, but the point is it sounds half convincing. Libertarian class theory, I do not think, is based on a purely economic analysis. A ruling class is not defined purely by access to wealth. It is defined by many other things. What I need to do is find some common characteristic that meaningfully unites the ruling class. As I said, we do have a very diverse number of groups within this supposed ruling class, politicians, bureaucrats, therapists, educators, lawyers, media people and associated business interests. These groups will often have mutually hostile interests. For example, the tax-gathering bureaucrats in most Western societies want to maximise the amount of revenue they can take from alcohol and tobacco. The therapeutic and media wins of these ruling classes, however, they want to reduce the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. There is always an argument going on between the tax-gathering bureaucrats, the therapists, the educators and the media over the correct policy on alcohol and tobacco. There are arguments between big business interests and between the leading educators over how and what children should be taught. The ruling class is not a monolithic entity. It is a cluster of groups and these groups do have different interests quite often and again quite often these interests may be very strongly hostile to each other. What is the common characteristic that unites a ruling class? Quite often these people are related to each other. It is no longer the case in modern societies that membership of a ruling class is very strongly correlated with birth. Not many people occupy positions in a Western society purely on the basis of who their parents were. Nevertheless, if you look in detail at the British establishment and I don't know too much about America but I should imagine if you look at the American establishment you will see that there are these interlocking networks of families which have been there for quite a long time. In England, for example, I can think of Paulie Toinby who is a member of a family which has been very prominent for 150 years. If you look at the relatives of politicians and senior bureaucrats and media dynasties you do see that there are connections of blood and marriage between these people. However, simply because you are married into one of these networks or simply because you are related by blood within one of these networks does not mean that you will be a member of the ruling class and you do not need to be part of one of these networks to be in the ruling class. Nonetheless, there is a certain commonality of blood between these people that is far more significant than many people believe. We do not live in purely meritocratic societies where people rise or fall according to their natural abilities. There is still a lot of what may be called nepotism. You then have the similar educational backgrounds of most people within the ruling class. Most of them went to the same kind of school. Most of them went to the same universities. Most of them mix with each other on terms of friendship or on terms of associated common interests. Let me think there is blood, there is connection. Oh yes, and of course there is the mutual recognition of legitimacy. Let me go back to the arguments between the tax-gallon bureaucrats and the educators and therapists and media people. The arguments over public policy on smoking and drinking are very sharp because there are very large amounts of our money involved. Is the ruling class to forego billions upon billions of pounds or dollars every year in the interest of stopping us from consuming these products? Or is the ruling class to maximise its revenue by allowing us to consume them but simply by taxing them very heavily? This is a bitter argument fought within the ruling class. However, it is a dispute fought within certain limits. Neither side will deny the other's legitimacy as a part of the ruling class. Roderick Long has described this as rather like the relationship between church and state in medieval and early modern Europe. Church and state had different interests and those interests often came into conflict and there were very sharp disputes between church and state. Even at the best of times there was always a strong tension between throne and altar. Yet in very few cases did these disputes boil over to the point where one side recruited ordinary people against the other and indeed tried to destroy the other side. Their conflict was always kept within limits because of this mutual recognition of legitimacy. They knew that they both had a common interest in keeping ordinary people in line. You will find this within the modern ruling class. They will argue over many things but at the same time they all know that their power and income comes via the state and they all believe that the state is a good thing and that they are the right people to direct the state. They may not have quite the same legitimising ideology but they have brought the similar legitimising ideologies and they will not word their criticisms of other ideologies sufficiently sharply to amount to a refutation. That is what I would try to mean by a ruling class. It is a much larger, it is a much more diverse and therefore it is a looser clustering of groups in modern societies than we had in the past. But I do say that there is a ruling class. It is a useful concept and it is tactically useful for us as libertarians or conservatives to accept the existence of a ruling class and to see what, if anything, we can do about it. One last point I would make. I haven't kept a very good look at the time but I think I'm running out. I said earlier that a ruling class when it acts as a ruling class is by definition parasitic. However when you look at the cluster of groups within the ruling class you will see that quite often these groups will act partly within the market and partly as members of a ruling class. To take organisations like Tesco or Walmart for example, they are exploiters. They receive large subsidies from the state in terms of incorporation laws that allow them to exist, subsidised transportation that allows them to externalise their economic scale and they receive preferential treatment in terms of tax and subsidy. Taxes and subsidies impose proportionately greater costs on their smaller and medium sized competitors. At the same time however, Walmart and Tesco operate very well within the rules of the game. They are provided with food, prices and of a quality that people would once have had trouble imagining and the quality and range of the food they provide has noticeably improved during the past few decades and we have a reasonable expectation that the range and quality of food will continue to improve during the next few decades and that in real terms the prices will come down. The media acts as a creator of...