How to Class Analyze Anything, Part III

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Similarly, what is the ethical core of the middle class but self interest? I mean, how else can the rich get some of the workers to fight for them, other than appealing to their greed? This was taken for granted so hard by middle class academia that bourgeois economics said it out loud from Adam Smith until modern liberals under institutional economics finally realized there were other factors in economic decision-making.

And what is the ethical core of the working class, save the dialectic, or as it was called in pre-Marxist times, tradition? Workers are brutally oppressed and kept in all the intellectual darkness that liberal false consciousness can muster. They do not have the luxury of utopianism; what they do must work, or they will die. They haven't had the benefit of much formal education in most eras, so they must lean on traditions that worked in times past, or if they're educated Marxists, upon the dialectic.

We can plot that on our triangle compass like so:

As we will see, the other main ideologies can be plotted as follows on our triangle compass, and the next section will explain why:

So what happens when a class cannot express its ideological preference in society? It cannot be a coincidence that postwar Germany, with the West's strongest proscription on fascism, has the most extensive social democratic welfare state in the West. The middle class can't heil and stormtroop there anymore, so they're voting for their wallet through the welfare state.

But it didn't just snap into place this way immediately after the war. Germany was occupied by the Allies, and its loyal Nazis and Hitler Youths found their ideology defeated, banned, and a source of shame especially after the revelation of the Holocaust. A couple kept the diabolical faith, but most became disillusioned with fascism and, at least for a while, believed in nothing but day-to-day survival. They were, in other words, dragged across the triangle compass by the rest of their society, and the occupation forces temporarily at its head. They were dragged across the nihilistic lumpen void towards social democracy.

Remember the lumpenproletariat? Their ethical core is nihilism, the belief in nothing, and they dwell in the center of the triangle. Few people remain in the lumpenproletariat for long before gravitating towards a more class-based ideology. But when someone abandons such an ideology, as the German middle class abandoned fascism after World War II, they first stop at nihilism.

In most cases, the class so dragged retains the character of its class, and so flips to the opposite position across the nihilistic lumpen void. The German middle class was still middle class, and therefore though they were told to embrace democracy, they still equally distrusted the liberal rich and the socialist workers. So they opted for social democracy. The first election in West Germany was a showdown between the still-Marxist Social-democratic Party of Deutschland (SPD) and the remnants of the Catholic prewar Center Party, rebranded as the Christian Democratic Party (CDP). The CDP put out an election poster saying "All Marxist roads lead to Moscow" while offering social welfare programs via the American Marshall Plan, and they won in such a convincing landslide that the SPD officially ditched Marxism by the next election to avoid scaring the formerly fascist middle class.

It makes sense that they would have done this on multiple levels. Noticing this connection between middle class socialists and fascists, Stalin correctly remarked that they "are not antipodes, they are twins." And middle class socialism - whether it be social democracy, democratic socialism, anarcho-anything, Trotskyism, or Maoism, does represent a sort of halfway house between liberalism and socialism. Again, Stalin noted exactly this in his first theoretical work, "Anarchism or Socialism?"

So what about workers? I've already suggested that they become conservatives when they can't be socialists. False consciousness is usually the means of dragging workers across the nihilistic lumpen void, by the rich and their middle class employees collaborating to make devoted capitalists out of the workers. Before the modern era, this mostly happened through any religion hijacked by the rich. In the modern era, that is still sometimes the case, although it often takes the case of civil religion and traditions like "constitutionalism" in America, with pundits like Sean Hannity being the priests of this civil religion.

Without being able to blame their problems on the real culprit, capitalism, conservatives construct paranoid theses and conspiracy theories, each more outlandish than the last. Their problems must be caused by immigration! Or the Illuminati! Or the lizard people that must control the Illuminati! This is what happens when people who cannot be permitted to know the dialectic nonetheless attempt dialectical reasoning. It's not their fault they're wrong; they are kept in ignorance by great effort.

Their intentions are good, and they are the only such capitalists for whom this is true. Since you can argue people into understanding that they have their facts wrong, but you can't argue people into loving people if they're sociopaths, conservative workers are the best recruiting grounds for socialism. Simply punch through the mask of false consciousness, or "fake news" as they call it, and they will be loyal comrades. But the other two classes, whatever their ideology, must be talked into class treason as well as the facts, and that must be continual. As an ancient socialist once rightly observed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God (or, as we would term it less poetically today, solidarity with the working class).

So what about the liberals? Do they ever get dragged across the nihilistic lumpen void? It's rare, because liberal sins are usually papered over by their oceans of money. But it does happen, and indeed happened three times in history, and every time it spawned a mighty empire.

Read the conclusion, Part IV