Summary: 150 years ago, capitalists needed to construct the nation-state in order to demolish aristocratic rule and create the literate, regimented workforce needed for industrial capitalism... Like free markets, nation-states are not natural; they must be constructed. The Victorian-era bourgeoisie created the nation-state to enforce the free market and the horrendous conditions of the new working class.

Today, the oligarchs need to destroy the middle class nation-state in order to create international corporatism and the global surveillance state. To them, 50 years of stable middle class prosperity was merely some scaffolding that enabled the creation of the computer industry. With that industry up and running - and able to largely automate the literacy-requiring jobs that were essential to its creation - it is time for them to tear down the scaffolding and force the 99% of the First World population back to being precarious, illiterate day laborers with no government protections who can be herded like cattle, and culled with wars and starvation.

I began with a summary because this article is very long - IOW, TLDR. Don't say you weren't warned. Also, see the NOTE at the end.

----------

The Deconstruction of the Nation State at the hands of the new Praetorian Bourgoisie

Naomi Klein has covered what is happening much better than I could:

...the time for conspiracy theories has past. The conspiracies are real. These are practices now, not theories: “the deconstruction of the regulatory state; a full-bore attack on the welfare state and social services (rationalized in part through bellicose racial fear-mongering and attacks on women for exercising their rights); the unleashing of a domestic fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science and the gagging of large parts of government bureaucracy); and a civilizational war against immigrants and ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ (with ever-expanding domestic and foreign theatres).

(The goal of neoliberals) is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest... It’s a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions.

The Church of Naomi Klein

In contrast to Ms. Klein, I want to discuss why this is happening, to place this in the context of the ongoing rule of the capitalist oligarchy and its recent toxic mutation from constructive (industrial) capitalism to destructive (financialized, looting) capitalism as a means of making a collective living.

There is plenty of writing about the oligarchy. We have names for it, such as "the .01%". We know their ruthless, sociopathic fanaticism from the stories of people like the Koch Brothers and Peter Thiel. But, we have only epithets for the non-oligarch members of the 1%. We call these footsoldiers vague, derogatory terms such as The Village, the professional classes, yuppie scum, etc. In this essay, I want to focus on the footsoldiers, whom I call the "Praetorian Bourgeoisie" (PB). This term has both historical resonance and social meaning. These apparatchiks, like the old Victorian-era bourgeoisie (OB), make a nice living doing the paperwork (these days, the computer work) and middle management for the oligarchs. The PB demographics resemble the original, Victorian size of the bourgeoisie - about 1-10% of the population. (It was only after WW2 that we had the massive class, encompassing 50% or more of the society, which we today call "middle". )

----

1. Who are the Praetorian Bourgeoisie?

I refer to them as Praetorian because, they are even more militaristic and confrontational than the OB. They think they can push even First World countries around because, as Hilaire Belloc said,

"Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not"

- or in the case of the PB, the data center and the call center. Amazon has flouted the tax laws of many countries since the day it was founded; it has used monopoly practices against Hachette and other publishers. Most of the FAAGM** have been sued all over the world for various attempts to monopolize or bundle services. Recently, we have seen an escalation in the contempt in which the PB holds governments. Companies like Uber and AirBnB openly flout the law, and when met with lawsuits and regulatory actions fight them with a Wall St.-supplied multi-billion dollar warchest. Peter Thiel openly supports this lawlessness, saying that democracy is in the way of monopoly profit.

Beyond economic belligerence, the PB have created the internet version of the Stasi. The FAAGM keep databases on everything you do, and work seamlessly with the CIA and the military. The recent hysteria about "Russian" hacking is just the GWOT power grab repeated on line, with hacking events corresponding to terror incidents. Only, it is even easier to false flag a hack than a terror incident, as we know from actual CIA code given to Wikileaks. Like the Roman Praetorian guard, the PB are a small group of highly trained mercenaries who are legitimized by and report only to an out-of-control Imperial Presidency. Also, as we are seeing with the Russian hacking BS about Trump, they are more than willing to depose an emperor who does not obey and enrich them.

There are other similarities to Victorian times. Like the OB, the PB fervently believe the hype that technology has made them omnipotent, and these underlings frantically scheme to be elevated to oligarch status. Like the OB, many of the PB hacker elite are "navvies" - people without a deeper understanding of what they are doing, but merely logic-chopping skills - who take their success (often from writing a mere couple of thousand lines of code) as a right to preach, ala Herbert Spencer, their ignorance and contempt of society as a virtue. Like the OB, they are ruthless, religious zealots for laissez faire and financial fundamentalism - the Church of Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher; they find the lower classes (everyone who is not an internet millionaire) an obnixious, whining bunch of losers (can you say "useless eaters") who deserve to be kept in their low, deplorable place in the world. With Amazon leading the way, they have recreated part-time work and the Victorian workhouse.

In short, the PB combine Victorian moral hypocrisy with Roman brutality. But, there are huge differences - mostly to do with the destructive nature of computerized financial colonialism and the ever shrinking economic pie that such looting causes. The economist, William Lazonick calls them "predatory value extractors". With the exception of computer and telecom hardware vendors, the PB manufacture almost nothing; and the little they do make is outsourced to China.

What the PB have done is to enable and preside over the repurposing Wall St. into a gambling casino of leverage and derivatives; the sell-off of our industrial base for a one-time profit; and the hijacking of our politics with computerized polling and voter suppression, and targeted advertising. Basically, the PB are smash and grab looters, using computers for their breaking and entering. They can whitewash this fact with buzzwords like "entrepreneurialism" and "value creation", but its still theft. Like burglars, they maximize their short term profits with no thought for the future of the people whose livelihood they have ruined. Like the great Highland Enclosures, they are making a fortune from destroying a way of life - regulated industrial capitalism and middle class democracy - as they dismiss their victims as backwards bumpkins.

The unspoken irony in all of this is that the PB are destroying what the OB created. Of course, to the oligarchs, its not ironic; its merely another chapter in their continuing dominance over the little people. 150 years ago, the oligarchs needed to construct the nation-state in order to demolish aristocratic rule and create the regimented literate workforce needed for industrial capitalism. Today, the oligarchs need to destroy the middle class nation-state in order to create international corporatism and the global surveillance state. To them, 50 years of stable middle class prosperity was merely some scaffolding that enabled the creation of the computer industry. With the computer industry up and running - and able to largely automate the literacy-requiring jobs that were essential to its creation - it was time for them to tear down the scaffolding and force the 99% of the First World population back to being precarious, illiterate day laborers with no government protections who can be herded like cattle, and culled with wars and starvation.

** FAAGM = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. (a.k.a, FAANG, with Netflix for Microsoft)

----

2. Why did the OB create the middle class in the first place? (A necessary history lesson.)

At the start of the Industrial Revolution, capitalists had to overcome an entrenched aristocracy of blood and title. This aristocracy was in the way of the capitalist reliance upon contract law, as opposed to social law. There is a large literature, completely ignored by the disciples of laissez faire, about how capitalists manipulated or controlled the government in order to construct and enforce the so-called "free" market; e.g.,modification of the Poor Law of 1834, the repeal of Corn Laws, etc.

Left-leaning readers are familiar with the artificiality of the free market. I want to focus on the less well-known, but similar, construction of the nation-state (as opposed to the nation), which occurred together with the construction of the free market. Like free markets, nation-states are not natural; they must be constructed. The Victorian-era bourgeoisie created the nation-state to enforce the free market and the horrendous conditions of the new working class.

There was a fundamental difference between the movement to found nation-states and 'nationalism'. The one was a programme to consturct a political artifact claiming to be based on the other...in the age of nation building (national identity) was believed to imply the logical, necessary, as well as desirable transformation of 'nations' into sovereign nation-states with coherent territory defined by the area settled by the members of a 'nation', which was in turn defined by its past history, its common culture, its ethnic composition and, increasingly, its language...The nation was not a spontaneous growth but an artefact...It had actually to be constructed. Hence the crucial importance of the institutions which could impose national uniformity, which meant primarily the state, especially state education, state employment, and military service...for new nation-states (public schools) were of crucial importance, for through them alone the 'national language' could actually become the written and spoken language of the people...schools and institutions, in imposing one language of instruction, also imposed a culture, a nationality. In areas of homogeneous settlement this did not matter...(but minorities) demanded the right to their own schools...The paradox of nationalism was that in forming its own nation, it automatically created the counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into choices between assimilation and inferiority.

- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975)

What Hobsbawm says about the civic religion of nationalism is critical to understanding what the PB are up to today:

with the decline of the real communities to which people had been used...a decline which occurred because they clearly no longer encompassed...most contingencies of people's lives, their members felt a need for something to take their place. The imaginary community of "the nation" could fill this void...

Governments now reached down directly to each citizen on their territory in everyday life, through modest but omnipresent agents, from postmen and policemen to teachers and railway employees. Authorities...needed a way of welding together the state's subjects against subversion and dissidence. "The nation" was the new civic religion of states. It provided a cement which bonded all citizens to their state...and a counterweight to those who appealed to other loyalties over state loyalty - to religion, to nationality or ethnicity not identified with the state, perhaps above all to class...

What made state nationalism even more essential was that both the economy of a technological era and the nature of its public and private administration required mass elementary education, or at least literacy. The nineteenth century was the era when oral communication broke down...From the state's point of view, the school had a further advantage: it could teach all children how to be good subjects and citizens.

- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987) p 148-150

It seems today, that literate written communication has broken down. But that's OK, because corporations communicate via images and sounds, as Neal Postman explained decades ago. Today's civic religion is consumerism, instant gratification, constant titillation. Loyalty is to corporations - witness the pathetic Apple fanboys. Church services are conducted at rock concerts and sporting events.

3. Why is the PB destroying the First World nation-state and public education?

The PB is destroying the First World nation-state because, via banksters and the MIC, it is now its own super-national entity. The corporatized Wall St./Pentagon aristocracy no longer has need of the nation-state or its systems of mass education. In the same manner in which it was constructed from above for the benefit of the business class oligarchs, and for the same reason, the nation-state is being deconstructed. The neocons started the privatization of the military, the signature cadre of the nation-state, under GWB, and it has continued unopposed. The entity formerly known as Blackwater has more say in US foreign policy than 90% of our elected representatives.

The nation-state is now disposable because the leading oligarchic corporations are bigger than most countries. The companies don't need countries anymore, so they don't need to share prosperity with workers anywhere. To the global corps, workers are disposable parts. Elizabeth Warren's on-target observation that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on their own" merely highlighted this PB fantasy of self-made-ness without causing them to reflect on it.

Corporations move their money around the world to dodge the taxes and regulations of nation-states. With the rise of computerization, they have no need for armies of educated first world workers. In fact, being educated and having civic religion patriotism about a nation-state is an obstacle to total corporate one-world government. Financialized capitalism doesn't want literate, regimented workers; it wants ignorant, anesthetized slackers and opiate-suiciding lumpenproletariat. So, not only is the nation-state under assault; but so is any kind of mass public education. Peter Thiel, the uber-Libertarian, pays people not to go to college.

The assault on public education began in the 1970s, in response to desegregation. It gained velocity in the 1980s under the guise of religious and Libertarian home schooling. In the 1990s, the corporations decided there was plenty of loot to be had in public education budgets. They saw schools as profit centers, not public goods of value to society. They turned colleges and universities into bottom-line businesses, importing cost-benefit analysis and overpaid executives, and extracting patents from government-funded research. They jacked the rates on student loans and made them non-dischargable, thereby creating a generation of indentured slaves. They replaced tenured faculty with underpaid, itinerant, teachers (most with student loans) who are paid per course, in a return to the notorious piecework practices of industrial sweatshops. They made college into an expensive lottery ticket for a real life, so that no one of meager means would dare rock the boat or choose a social, as opposed to a STEM, curriculum. Having devalued the social sciences, they let go many of those faculty members.

In short, they turned public higher education into a trade school, while returning elite private schools to their role as social gatekeepers. In the 2000s, Wall St. started heavily funding and lobbying for the complete privatization of public education, from kindergarten through college. This is the final act of the deconstruction of nation-state education. It is well underway. Since education, especially language skills are critical to nation-state identity. The oligarchs love it when the 99% can't think critically, can't organize.

In parallel to the right wing assault on education, the left wing started dis-assembling the idea of equal-before-the-law citizenship in a nation-state. What started out as color-blind Civil Rights laws and regulations was mutated by the Clinton crowd into Identity Politics, which is a halfway house between democracy and tribalism.

IP is a recipe for divisiveness, as groups compete to prove who is more victimized. What used to be a single American polity, with inclusive, coalition-forming interest groups, has become a tribalistic fracas among self-defined, exclusive minority groups. This has lead to the reductio ad absurdum of elevating the miniscule group of "transgendered" people (including, ludicrously, children as young as five) into a cause celebre overnight. Cynical observers note that the publicity for the so-called transgendered started the minute the last genuine and significantly-sized minority group, the gay community was granted equal rights under the law.

The synergy between college as a profit center and IP has turned the historical role of free speech on its head. College campuses ban speakers because they might make their students "uncomfortable", thereby causing a loss of revenue; or because they might offend an important donor. Truly, tribalism has arrived on college campuses; and the hypocrisy of so-called liberal PB intellectuals on the matter is stunning.

4. The PB has lots of practice destroying nation-states. They've been doing it in the Third World since the CIA was founded.

What is even more dangerous for First World nation-states is that IP propaganda campaigns are the major tool of hybrid warfare - Color Revolutions and Arab Springs. Hybrid warfare exploits IP, or any other de facto subdivision of the polity. Just like the first round of imperialism, hybrid warfare is out to destroy any local resistance to corporate imperialism via divide-and-conquer tactics.

Anxiety is growing in Latin America – the United States and the United Kingdom are preparing a « Spring » for them on the model of the « Arab Springs ». Of course, this time, it will not be a case of spreading war and dividing the populations along religious lines – Latino citizens are practically all Christians – but by using elements of their local identities. The objective will, however, be the same – not to replace the governments with other governments, but to destroy the States in order to eradicate any possibility of resistance to imperialism.

- Voltaire Net

The goal of hybrid warfare is to destroy countries and create lawless zones of conflict between tribalistic fractions. This is US foreign policy as driven by the PB.

Among the emblematic ideas of the Neo-conservatives, features prominently the theory of “creative chaos” - developed mainly by Michael Ledeen, a former correspondent in Rome of the New Republic. It is a project aiming to “establish a state of war and permanent instability in the Middle East that would enable the Americans and Israelis to preserve their geostrategic objectives in the region, even by re-redrawing it’s map”. Neo-conservatives do not consider the stability of the world a good to maintain but instead advocate the virtues of destabilisation.

- The Saker, Neoconservatives and the Coming World

Hybrid war is not only used in the third world, but is also increasingly applied to the first world. First world nation-states must be deconstructed to cement the domination of the financialized economy. The creation of the massive refugee wave from Libya may not have been planned, but it has certainly been weaponized into an IP tactic to splinter just about every country in the EU.

5. Conclusion

Today's globalized, corporatized world is nothing more than computerized colonialism. The PB have destroyed local industry and installed a comprador class of mega-corporations. Their militarized police and data fusion centers stand ready to crush any inchoate rebellion that might arise. Their propagandists blame all problems on bogus liberal and government boogeymen. They have destroyed public education, resulting in a generation of poorly educated people who can't write a paragraph, with the attention span of the next mouse click, and a social skill set warped in an authoritarian direction by helicopter parents and disproportionate punishment for IP infractions. The oligarchs have centuries of experience at dealing with such clueless, backwards natives. They are already sitting down to the perpetual banquet of corporate feudalism.

The oligarchs didn't just "muddle through" to this counter-revolution. It is the result of high-level actions - changes to laws and regulations, analogous to the Victorian changes I mentioned - that were not merely short-sighted grabs for profit. Operations like ALEC were heavily-funded strategic assaults on democracy; and they have completely succeeded in the US. We have about as much chance of going back to non pay-to-play democracy and regulated industrial capitalism as the Victorians had of going back to the government of the Glorious Revolution. Our (America's) only way out is for the rest of the world to pull the plug on our financial and military aggression. China has the financial muscle to do that. Russia has the military muscle. Western Europe could grow a spine. That is why all of them (essentially the rest of the First World) are under assault by the neocon/neoliberal gangsters that dream of global domination.

For me, this exercise in understanding where we stand - triggered by the suicidal insanity of the sanctions on Russia - convinces me that parliamentary politics (and discussions of such, as are prominent on this board) is now useless to the 99%. Parliamentary politics presumes the elites support the nation-state, and that literate rational discourse is how politics is done.

But our political game is so rigged it isn't even a game anymore. (Is anyone at all shocked that DINO Joe Manchin decided to become a GOPer?) The incessant, lying hypocrisy of sold-out politicians cannot stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Everyone recognizes we have a rule of men, not law.

That is why censorship (we will tell you which news is "fake") has been implemented. That is why Net Neutrality is under attack, although it is defended by the powerful computer industry. The only effective national-level actions left to the 99% are boycotts (already under legal assault by the Israeli lobby), strategic work stoppages, occupation-style disruptive protests, and leaking the plans and actions of the oligarchs (on the net, because the corporate media will not cover pro-democracy leaks). Local activism has still not been systematically targetted, so there is opportunity there. Although the "sanctuary cities" fracas indicates the intention to push Federal authority down to the beat cop.

So, I will not be posting about parliamentary politics anymore. It is a mugs game. I will post about corporate repression, the encroaching police state, and the active opposition to it.

----

NOTE: After writing this, I found so many other people writing about the same topic that it seemed redundant to post this, because the essay doesn't suggest any course of action. It merely gives a historical context to our demise. That demise might seem to have happened very quickly, but it is really about the same length of time it took the Victorians to complete the shift from aristocratic rule to capitalist rule.

In the end, I decided to post the essay, because I think its important to try to teach people about history.