The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry

But then neither did Marx really call for this, nor did Jesus really mean a real sword to divide (Matthew 10:34) – it’s all a metaphor. Apart from telegraph, they’re literalists.

Yes, well I am not surprised it is clear who is still fighting the class war.

http://oxfordkevin.carbonclimate.org/?p=135

Which helps explain his plan, spelt out last night, to set up a three-man Office for Budget Responsibility to advise him on how far to cut spending. The hope is that the OBR will attract the opprobrium when state-sector workers are laid off or given pay cuts, when VAT is raised, when the retirement age is increased, and when public-sector pensions are finally tackled.

Thought so: the OBR is nothing but a smokescreen for Osborne to evade any kind of direct accountability. It would be easier for him to resign and get someone else to do the job. He’s effectively ‘outsourcing’ his much-touted ‘Emergency Budget’.

Carl @1: “But then neither did Marx really call for this”

According to Engels, Marx really believed that in England we could reach a state of Communism by “peaceful and legal means”.

“Surely, at such a moment, the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a lifelong study of the economic history and condition of England, and whom that study led to the conclusion that, at least in Europe, England is the only country where the inevitable social revolution might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means. He certainly never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a ‘pro-slavery rebellion,’ to this peaceful and legal revolution.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p6.htm

Every time I hear the Tories seemingly lamenting class warfare I am reminded of a comment before the onset of the GFC by the richest man in the world, Warren Buffett.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html

“Better to start thinking about free-market reforms that share the wealth more equitably than to leave it to the Left to suggest that taxes on the wealthy are the only solution.”

Osler: “Off hand, I can think of few free market mechanisms that tend to redistribute towards the poor, and most have quite the reverse effect.”

True, but as Sid will tell you, there are some you can spin to make it look like they share the wealth. This is no doubt part of the ongoing campaign to get Osborne to flog off the govt’s RBS shares, guaranteeing a massive payday for all the City wankers who will handle the sale. It’s an unbelievably crass and stupid idea, but that gives no guarantee that Osborne won’t do it.

try a British Gas style re-privatisation

Richard @6: ““There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Always worth quoting Warren Buffett IMO.

“Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

How about “free-market reforms” like paying banker scum the amount they’d get in a free market, that is nothing whatsoever, as they’d all be living on the streets if it weren’t for the bailout that Thatcherite filth like Boris support.

We should have a fucking class war like they did in Greece, where the workers demanded that rather than face higher taxes (for them, not for the plutocracy) and spending cuts (for them, not for banker scum who can continue to sniff coke off strippers’ tits at public exense) by rising up against the Blatcherite consensus.

If we really had a free market these fucking cunts wouldn’t exist at all. I don’t think the majority of self-proclaimed “libertarians” have any intention of following this system, as the likes of Boris (who has been proven totally wrong on this alleged exodus to Switzerland and talentless “artists” like the right-wing cunt Tracy Emin) are too wedded to the idea of making themselves more money.

And I also think that there needs to be some government involvement in encouraging firms to invest in particular areas, as was done on a very limited scale even under Thatcher, and worked, but was not extended for fear that it might benefit too many working-class people when the rulers were happy for them it be kept just above the level at which they’d start a riot but below the level at which it might cost their corporate backers too much of their ill-gotten gains.

Scum like Worstall don’t acknowledge that the “avoidance” they love will mean higher direct and indirect taxes for people who are trying to work and build at least some excuse for the life their grandparents took for granted.

The way things are going moving abroad will not stop you being liable for UK tax if you hold a British passport. If all EU states introduce a common policy the only way to avoid UK tax for a British passport holder will be to renounce their citizenship. As the FT editorial says-

‘…any citizen of a country enjoys the implicit legal and physical protection it affords. Can it be unreasonable to impose on those citizens the reciprocal obligation to account to it for tax? ‘

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/97d158ba-1ef2-11df-9584-00144feab49a.html

That’s ‘the Tories’ as in ‘a Daily Telegraph journalist’ I see.

And all the scum at Conservative Home and on blogs.

Can anyone enlighten me? What is a class war? Is it a really stylish war, with everyone dressed in in designer wear?

No surprises there.

There really is a class war and it’s mainly waged by the loaded ones.

On the left we just need to stop pussyfooting, cut down on the “yeah but” and endless debates on semantics and say it like it is.

‘Class’ is a bit of a ropey concept – at least when it comes to solidarity
People stick together, close ranks, secure sisterhood or brotherhood… Unions versus aristos / robber barons etc etc
But those groups or classes are made up of individuals, and individuals are capable of stabbing their colleagues in the back, sisters stab sisters with stilettos etc.
Class is a very flaky concept. Even in the Big Tent of New Labour, Brown was more of a threat to his boss than the Tory leader.

BobB & RichardW:

Dealing with Mr. Buffett first, you’re right, it’s always worth listening to him. He’s unusually clear, for someone who is so at home with the crap-shoot of financial capitalism, on the reflective truth that he’s playing for poker chips. Money is just a way of keeping score; better than most who are as rich as him, he recognizes that being good at what he’s good at has little real value.

Dealing with Marx and Engels; neither were aware that industrialism led to anything. They both thought it was just more industrialism all the way up. Marx also had precisely one nation to analyse which was industrialised. Germany wasn’t, Russia wouldn’t be for 50 years or more, France wasn’t, the Mediterranean nations had better things to worry about and the USA was too big, too far away and too hard to travel across. Full industrialism there took a very long time. China and Japan were still shut at this point. There was only one industrial nation which had already produced a proletariat, and that was Britain.

Britain is already post-industrial. What Marx and Engels saw in her is now history. There is very little one can learn from either of them about Britain’s future because it lies well beyond the furthest limits of their vision. Neither could imagine post-industrialism, let alone an information economy; neither of them provide useful analysis of why the Tories want a class war.

The Tories did not want a class war in the 60s and 70s because they were losing the one they already had. The 80s to some extent represent a cease fire, predicated on the explicit offer of upward mobility that was selfish, that was able to put you one up on your neighbors instead of just meaning everyone had a few bob more. That, ultimately, was about looking out for number 1, rather than helping the lads at the union look out for one another. The truce was sustained by North Sea oil and Thatcher’s remarkable spin machine.

As things stand now? For the first time since women got the vote, if the rich get into a class war the signs say they’ll win it. Inequality is higher than at any point since the War. The upward-mobility ladder was pulled up behind the Baby Boomers and has been mostly irrelevant to those born since 1975. Less people control more of the assets and pay a smaller proportion of the tax than ever before [1]; the plutocracy is finally winning again, at last, after 70 years of fairly systematic political reversals. Of course their political arm want a class war now; they might win.

And that’s also why the Left do not want anything of the sort. After 60 years of being able to (rightly!) feel that the class war was going their way, followed by two decades when at least some of the left gained a small slice of the affluence pie, they’re now looking at a new passage of hostilities. Their army is discredited, no-one trusts their generals, they have no ideology or guiding principle, and their demographic support base has been wrecked by the long-recognised tension between poor+bigoted vs educated+liberal within the broader church of the Labour movement. If we get into a class war right now, with the generation we currently have in the driving seat, then the selfish rich will win it.

[1] Caveat; ‘ever before’ should probably be taken to refer to the era since the People’s Budget, in this instance. It may well still be a true statement before that, but I’d have to look it up.

John Q. Publican, that is not what Warren Buffett is like at all. If it does not sound a bit naff he is a bit of a hero of mine. Although a multi-billionaire he still lives in the same modest house he bought in the 1950s. The annual salary he takes out of his company would not even be a quarter of what average and mediocre traders earn in the real crap-shoot of trading on equity. He is a value investor who does add real value to the companies he invests in. Moreover, any one who can consistently beat the market every year like he has is not doing it through luck. Making profits trading on equity with someone else’s money is often a crap-shoot and down to luck. Doing it through asset management is skill.

What I like about Warren Buffett and George Soros is they have consistently warned that capitalism is only sustainable if wealth and prosperity is shared. They warned that tax cuts for the rich were enriching those at the top and at the same time the median wage was stagnating, with whole swathes of the US middle class getting progressively poorer since the 1980s. Yes they are capitalists and want to make money but they realise that workers need to have a stake in society and feel they get a fair deal. All the rage in the US is real because people feel they are getting poorer and society is not given them a fair deal in relation to those at the top. The Republicans manipulate that rage for their own ends and try to direct it as rage against all forms of government. Buffett and Soros realise that those doing the manipulating are the real people to blame.

Well Labour and that siily cow in Crewe ended up with egg on their faces in the by-election.

15
“if the rich get into a class war the signs say they will win it”
I’m afraid you are a bit late here, the rich have already won it. they had by the time Thatcher became PM. north sea oil and the matter of 22 sell-offs of state-owned companies did not equate to a truce but the price for wiping away any potential challenge to the status quo. The irony is, this was facilitated by the very thing which the working-class believed to be socialism;- the state intervened
to give the masses a better share of the spoils. and most were kept quiet, until those pesky miners and other radical unions just wouldn’t lay still.
Of course, welfarism and state redistribution of wealth is not marxism. what we now learn from Marx is that the state will always serve the interests of the economic elites.
You are quite right about the inequal balance of wealth, there has been a widening of the gap between rich and poor and child poverty is worse under Labour than it was under Thatcher. But Marx did predict this. and, of course, this will eventually create problems for capitalism, post-industrial or otherwise. it needs a certain amount of consumption in order to fund another round of production. The strength of the economic elites can so easily turn into their weakness and it’s unlikely that next time the masses and their generals (in whatever form they take) will trust the state.

Oh. So thats alright then.

RichardW @16:

Uh, that was quite a vehement agreement we had going on there. Best I can tell, we both think much the same about Mr. Buffet and for much the same reasons.

SteveB:

I’m afraid you are a bit late here, the rich have already won it. they had by the time Thatcher became PM. north sea oil and the matter of 22 sell-offs of state-owned companies did not equate to a truce but the price for wiping away any potential challenge to the status quo.

Er, no. I’m not too late; you’re too short term. I apologise, I possibly should have mentioned I’m a medieval historian by training and tend to analyse socio-economy trends over a timescale measured in millennia.

The rich (in Europe; it’s very different in China, for example) won a round of the class war when they invented divine-right feudalism and standing cavalry armies, between Charlemagne and William the Bastard. Trailbaston and the Enclosures were what embedded that particular caste system in British thought to such a level. It is still axiomatic and unchallengable that anyone already rich clearly deserves it. The Overton window on the concept of ownership has been moved so far to the right that even our left-wing ideologues aren’t worthy of the name. Look at New Labour.

The Enlightenment, Victorian philanthropy and liberalism, the rise of politically engaged organised labour with the Chartists, the extension of the franchise, the People’s Budget and, ultimately, the Labour governments in the period 1936-1979 represent the longest sustained retreat by the forces of plutocracy that Britain has ever seen. I suspect that it’s the longest we will ever see, partly because a lot of it was led by the rich for reasons of genuine moral principle.

Modern rich people, as a class, have no philosophical narrative of responsibility which would make those kind of principles a viable investment; there’s no profit in it. Which is why no-one believes Cameron’s ‘progressive Tory’ pitch. When we look at Tories today, we do not see high-minded, principled and philosophic conservatives who believe in individual freedoms for all; we see fraudulent, arrogant, over-privileged white people who believe in self-determination, in the most literal possible sense. I.e. only for them.

After Labour spent our money to develop the North Sea, the Tories got the return on that investment and didn’t give it back. Instead, Thatcher used it to break the Unions and fund the propaganda effort which convinced the recently-arrived lower middle classes to pull up the ladder behind them. Enough upward mobility, thank you, we’re all right Jack. Ask the Fabians how that effected social prospects for those born since 1970.

But; to those who were born between 1948 and 1965, the Thatcher years were a successful truce between the plutocrats and the educated poor. The trickle-down effect was turned up to full, just enough people were “making it” that much of the country in that generation believed that they would make it too. Much of the country, in that generation, did. I would like to point out, again, that the generation we’re talking about are Blair, Brown, and Cameron. We’re talking about Simon Cowell and we’re talking about Julie Bindel.

The truce ended with the Poll Tax riots and the early 1990s recession. When I came back to England in 1993 there were more people out of work than there are right now. The plutocracy had effected an insurgency, under political cover provided by a truce bought with fictional upward mobility. Not only have they halted our progress towards socio-economic maturity, people are just now starting to realise how far they’ve rolled it backwards.

Look at the educated but broke 20-yr-olds of today. Born in 1990, they have at least a grand of student debt for every year of their lives. Many, if not most, will not get a job this year. If they do, it will be menial and the contrast with their education and expectations will lead to long-term mental health problems. Systemically, across an entire cohort of our young people. Some will not see employment at all before they’re 30.

They were taught all the aspirations of the 1960s middle class, but they were taught that those ambitions were the basic acceptability standard; that not being richer than your dad by 40 meant you were a failure. No-one, in or out of the Westminster bubble, thought such prospects were realistic. Anyone who was paying attention knew that it would be very, very difficult for the children the Baby Boomers to match, let alone exceed, that generation’s upward mobility. Yet we were sold the crock anyway.

Add to this Labour’s staggeringly reactionary legislative agenda, the LabCon alliance over aggressive wars. Add a system where neither of the parties which might get in believe in evidentiary governance. Add a lobbying industry which can get RBS staff millions in bonuses off a 3.6billion pound taxpayer-subsidised loss this financial year, and can get BAE off on corruption charges after they’ve already openly admitted guilt in a US court. Wealth is no longer derived from solvency; if you’re a plutocrat you can get stinking rich as a reward for business failure. That hasn’t been this true since we chucked out James II.

From here, for the first time in 70 years, the rich are not only winning, they’re pursuing a rout. During that 20-year truce, most of the country stopped thinking that Westminster’s denizens work for them. You can see this effect in the post-G20 politics: the infamous “summer of rage” turned out to be three wet farts and a LabCon marketing exercise. If they’d been murdering innocent men on the six o’clock news, during the Poll Tax demonstrations, would we all have just gone home and written blog posts? No.

On three boxes does democracy rest; the soap box, the ballot box, the ammunition box. Use in that order.

20
Clearly you know your subject and this post was very informative, but I don’t think that my previous post contradicts the historical details, the difference lays with the intepretation of those details.
I firmly believe that the rich (economic elite) have already won the class-war, and they were enabled to do so by the state. I am not asserting that this is the end of history and no class war will emerge in the future (I think it will), my point is that the many will not be fooled again by the notion of a benevelent state.

Bankers Anyone? A rich economic elite… and Brown is totally in their pockets. Control the flow of capital and you control this country’s ‘operating system’.
The Bullingdon stuff is a sideshow courtesy of Labour. Brown knows that the bankers
are more powerful than toffs from Eton. But he has a chip on his shoulder and dirty great debt off his balance sheet.