Dark Mutualist thought more

 

The Cathedral - "The Cathedral" within the context of Neoreactionary discourse is a term used to refer to a society's intellectual elite meaning a class of people who are able to decide what the average person thinks is true or false, right or wrong and important or unimportant.

Historically this role was fulfilled by religious institutions hence the usage of the term "cathedral", this is intentionally contrasted with the institutions that fulfill the role of the cathedral in the modern age that being Schools, Universities, the Media and the Entertainment industry who largely market themselves as "Secular". It is worth to note that the Cathedral (in it's modern incarnation) is not a formal institution that people just belong to but rather an informal network of leaders of the before-aforementioned institutions that happen to agree on most important matters (Harvard, The New York Times, Disney and The Guardian rarely disagree for example)

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Kevin Carson's New Class https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-studies-in-mutualist-political-economy

"As Wallerstein suggested above, some families in the old landed aristocracy lost out; those adaptable elements who survived absorbed large elements of the bourgeoisie into their ranks. The new agricultural class arose in the fifteenth century as a result of the fact that the landed aristocracy had failed to become a caste, and the gentry had failed to become a lesser nobility. In this new class, the old distinction between aristocracy between aristocracy and gentry was losing its significance. Wallerstein cited Perez Zagorin on the tendency for men “in a position to deploy capital in agriculture, trade, and industry” to acquire “the command of social life.” This combined class, which also included the old merchant oligarchs who were canny enough to invest in modern methods of production, enriched itself at the expense of the increasingly proletarianized peasantry."

"The rise of “corporate liberalism” as an ideology at the turn of the twentieth century was brilliantly detailed in James Weinstein’s The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State.[514] It was reflected in the so-called “Progressive” movement in the U.S., and by Fabianism, the closest British parallel. The ideology was in many ways an expression of the world view of “New Class” apparatchiks, whose chief values were planning and the cult of “professionalism,” and who saw the lower orders as human raw material to be managed for their own good. This class is quite close to the social base of the Insoc movement that Orwell described in 1984:"

"the key to efficiency, for the New Class, was to remove as much of life as possible from the domain of “politics” (that is, interference by non-professionals) and to place it under the control of competent authorities. “Democracy” was recast as a periodic legitimation ritual, with the individual returning between elections to his proper role of sitting down and shutting up. In virtually every area of life, the average citizen was to be transformed from Jefferson’s self-sufficient and resourceful yeoman into a client of some bureaucracy or other. The educational system was designed to render him a passive and easily managed recipient of the “services” of one institution after another. In every area of life, as Ivan Illich wrote, the citizen/subject/resource was taught to “confuse process and substance.”

"Although the corporate liberal ideology is associated with the New Class world view, it intersected in many ways with that of “enlightened” employers who saw paternalism as a way of getting more out of workers. Much of corporate leadership at the turn of the century

revealed a strikingly firm conception of a benevolent feudal approach to the firm and its workers. Both were to be dominated and co-ordinated from the central office. In that vein, they were willing to extend... such things as new housing, old age pensions, death payments, wage and job schedules, and bureaus charged with responsibility for welfare, safety and sanitation.[518]

The New Class mania for planning and rationality was reflected within the corporation in the Taylorist/Fordist cult of “scientific management,” in which the workman was deskilled and control of the production process was shifted upward into the white collar hierarchy of managers and engineers.[519]

This new intersection of interests between the progressive social planners and corporate management was reflected, organizationally, in the National Civic Federation, whose purpose was to bring together the most enlightened and socially responsible elements of business, labor, and government.[520] If, as Big Bill Haywood said of the I.W.W.‘s founding convention, that body was “the Continental Congress of the working class,” then the NCF was surely the Continental Congress of the New Class. The themes of corporate liberalism, as David Noble described them, were “cooperation rather than conflict, the natural harmony of interest between labor and capital, and effective management and administration as the means toward prosperity and general welfare.“[521]

The New Class intellectuals, despite their prominent role in formulating the ideology, were co-opted as a decidedly junior partner of the corporate elite. As Hilaire Belloc and William English Walling perceived, “Progressives” and Fabians valued regimentation and centralized control much more than their allegedly “socialist” economic projects. They recognized, for the most part, that expropriation of the capitalists was impossible in the real world. The large capitalists, in turn, recognized the value of the welfare and regulatory state for maintaining social stability and control, and for making possible the political extraction of profits in the name of egalitarian values. The result was a devil’s bargain by which the working class was guaranteed a minimum level of comfort and security, in return for which the large corporations were enabled to extract profits through the state. Of the “Progressive” intellectual, Belloc wrote:"

The New Class, its appetite for power satiated with petty despotisms in the departments of education and human services, was put to work on its primary mission of cartelizing the economy for the profit of the corporate ruling class. Its “populist” rhetoric was harnessed to sell state capitalism to the masses. Those overeducated yahoos admirably served their masters in the capacity of useful idiots.

But whatever the “idealistic” motivations of the social engineers themselves, their program was implemented to the extent that it furthered the material interests of monopoly capital. Kolko used the term “political capitalism” to describe the general objectives big business pursued through the “Progressive” state:

Political capitalism is the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security—to attain rationalization—in the economy. Stability is the elimination of internecine competition and erratic fluctuations in the economy. Predictability is the ability, on the basis of politically stabilized and secured means, to plan future economic action on the basis of fairly calculable expectations. By security I mean protection from the political attacks latent in any formally democratic political structure. I do not give to rationalization its frequent definition as the improvement of efficiency, output, or internal organization of a company; I mean by the term, rather, the organization of the economy and the larger political and social spheres in a manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run.[523]

This principle applies, not only in for-profit corporations, but in universities, charities, and other large organizations in “civil society.” The New Class paradigm of “professional management” has affected the structure of all large organizations in state capitalist society. In every case, the organization is either subject to outside control by a board of trustees, or to a top-down internal management. Paul Goodman has brilliantly described this tendency, as it operates in a wide variety of organizations. Such organizations come under the domination of a professionalized management, and politically selected senior administrators with “prestige salaries.” Because the organization distributes the costs and benefits of action among different people, the masses of productive workers within it are no longer motivated by the intrinsic pleasures of work. Instead, personnel must be subject to administrative compulsion or other forms of extrinsic motivation.

"The state is not a neutral, free-standing force that is colonized fortuitously by random assortments of economic interests. It is by nature the instrument of the ruling class—or, as the Marxists say, its executive committee. In some class societies, like the bureaucratic collectivist societies of the old Soviet bloc, some portion of the state apparatus itself is the ruling class. In state capitalist societies like the United States, the ruling class is the plutocracy (along with subordinate New Class elements). This is not in any way to assert that economic exploitation or class domination can arise outside of the state; only that the ruling class is the active party that acts through the state. C. Wright Mills, in rejecting the term “ruling class,” said that it implied an economic class that held political power. That’s right on target."