The Way of the Bourgeois and the Dream of Aristocratic Living

In his essay "The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality" Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the capitalist "does not want competition, but monopoly," desires "to accumulate capital not via profit but via rent," and the members of the class altogether aspire "not to be bourgeois but to be aristocrats."

Wallerstein seems to me to have been quite right in arguing all that. He also seems to me quite sound in his exploration of many of the implications of that reality in that very essay. Still, it seems to me possible to say a good deal more about the matter--not least, about the dividedness that goes with this, and its societal implications. Simply put, monopoly, rents, elevation into the aristocracy are what the bourgeois really wants, because they entail things that it is quite natural for humans to want--the security of a monopoly position against a competitive market with its uncertainties and pressures, the comparative ease of collecting rent as against fighting for profit, the freedoms and graces and prestige of aristocratic living as against the grubby practicality and grind and outright life denial of the bourgeois with his narrow round of accumulation without enjoyment. Indeed, it seems telling of the force of those unattractions that so many have seen this way of life as inexplicable, and cultural persistence in it as unsustainable, without a forceful religious sanction--to regard Protestantism as having made possible modern capitalism, and to wonder if the decline of Protestantism has not also meant the unavoidable decadence of that capitalism.

However, if it is entirely natural for the bourgeois to prefer to be an aristocrat--and so one might surmise, endure it only until they can become an aristocrat--this is not what the bourgeois admits to wanting, or can admit to wanting. The good bourgeois, after all, is supposed to regard bourgeois values not as rules for a particular situation, but the rule for all people in all times, as universal and eternal as they believe the economic institutions of capitalism to be, property and markets and trade and credit as they have known them how they have always been and always will be, forever and ever, amen, with any suggestion to the contrary not to be countenanced, historical facts be damned. Thus does the bourgeois endlessly commend such to people of all backgrounds and situations as indeed they deny that there is another valid way to live, such that a bourgeois values-championing media delights in retailing stories about people who, for example, won the lottery or experienced something else similar but "kept the day job" as an example to all of the importance of "hard work" to people's lives. Yet, belying the official line with which we are endlessly beaten over the head, at the same time one also sees everywhere the hope of leaping out of that way of life not through the protracted "hard work" almost certain not to provide an escape from the bourgeois grind but some stroke of action or fortune--the eminently respectable path of "inventing something" and on that basis rising from rags to riches so dear to American mythology (and so distorting of American perceptions of the realities of technology and economic life), the not quite so respectable but still respectable enough hope for a financial speculation that yields life-changing results that has them yearning to participate in whatever new bubble has just got going, and, below the level of respectability but ubiquitous the infamous bourgeois fascination with the criminal who got ahead by breaking the rules, and the "overnight success" that is celebrity.

To the critic of the bourgeois this can itself seem very characteristic of the social stratum--repression, frustration, narrowness of mind as well as path, the hypocrisy of purporting to believe in a thing but endeavoring to do the opposite as they moralize relentlessly at everyone else--and I don't dispute the critique one bit. However, what interests me more than the implications for individual psychology here is what this means for society at a higher level--obvious in that eagerness to extend or translate competitive success into an enduring monopoly. More fundamentally there is the ever-present tendency of capitalism toward financialization, which it seems is resisted only when either exceptional opportunity seems to exist in the industrial kinds of activity--in actually making and selling things--such as can motivate a critical mass of investors to move in this direction; a strong government is determined upon industrial prosperity and implements the appropriate policies at the price of incurring the wrath of the rentiers by reining in their value-appropriating in favor of the value-creating; and usually the combination of the two as the former brings about the latter. However, in time that critical mass of investors is apt to see the attraction of making and selling things pall and the comparative attraction of the path of the rentier rise (typically, as forces outside their control have made it less profitable--"the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" Adam Smith and others observed, the loss of "comparative advantage" as technology and geopolitics change, etc.), leaving the tendency to financialization (and the revenge of the rentiers) unopposed. Thus did it go with Venice, the Netherlands, Britain--and thus is the United States well along such a path as well. There is also how in countries where there is no formally established aristocracy the part of the bourgeoisie which can forms a quasi-aristocracy, without legal titles, but all the same, the informally recognized status of a certain set of "old families" with Old Money, with their subtler trappings (certain educational institutions, certain country clubs and other social haunts), which "outsiders" aspire to join. Meanwhile both those outside and inside that informal aristocracy display a fascination with those formal aristocracies that do exist and their more blatant trappings, like title and ritual, as seen in the fawning of America's elite over Britain's monarchy in the fulsome manner so evident in recent years amid kings and succession being so much in the headlines. Looking at it all a certain kind of moralist is prone to see a falling away from virtue, lament the fact that the scion of a captain industry elects to become a "fox-hunting man" rather than follow his father in business, but in the end it seems fair to say that this is what the game had always really been about, and that mere moralizing about it has never made the slightest bit of difference in the working out of the cycle.