The Manifesto of the American Aristocrat
Correcting the errors in the Communist Manifesto, reflecting the truths of the 21st Century in America.
Introduction
The Communist Manifesto was published on February 21, 1848. It was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They incorrectly foretold of a revolution of the working class over the interests of capitalists. Instead, capitalists grew into true aristocrats and took over the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.
In response, as the leading voice of the Celebration of the American Aristocrat, I offer the following Manifesto of our true greatness.
Manifesto of the American Aristocrat
A specter is haunting America–the specter of democracy or worse, Democratic Party rule. Under the pure and enlightened guidance of wealthy aristocrats, all the powers of Conservatism have entered a holy alliance to exorcise these demons: Evangelicals and Republicans, Trump and McConnell, Wall Street and rural Main Street, the illegitimate Supreme Court, Southern racists, paramilitary wannabes, and especially right-wing news media.
Democrats are decried as liberals, socialists, or communists by the aristocrats in power. Fears of ruination by majoritarian rule are stoked on right-wing media, portrayed as the end of times, with heathen barbarians at the gates set to wreak havoc on America. Per the aristocratic narrative, the Democrats would open our borders, allowing Muslims worshiping a false god, and other black or brown people to overrun our cities, forever extinguishing the American Dream. Aristocrats arouse Christian Nationalists by claiming that when good Christians—the real Americans—want to protect themselves, the Democrats will take away their guns, leaving them helpless and impotent as the heathen hordes “diversify” our pure nation with their impure ways and impure blood.
Aristocrats favor authoritarianism to ensure their power can’t be undermined by the collective action of the majority, either by Democrats or labor unions. The mechanizations of the State must be deployed to ensure the laws that bind the workers do not apply to the aristocrat and do not protect the workers from aristocrats’ ruthless exploitation. The preservation of capital and the rights of property holders must be held sacrosanct, even at the cost of worker’s lives.
Two things result from this narrative:
I. Aristocratic money and control are already acknowledged by all American powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Aristocrats should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and amplify this cautionary tale of the Specter of Democrats with a manifesto of the Aristocracy itself.
To this end, American aristocrats sketched the following manifesto, to be published in all right-wing media outlets proclaiming our perpetual and unbreakable rule over the unwashed masses, the workers who should show gratitude for being watched over by their superiors—the American aristocrats.
I. Aristocrats and the Workers
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, management and worker, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. The American aristocrats must not befall the same fate as the French Monarchs who suffered the guillotine or the first generation of American aristocrats who were taxed into oblivion.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome, we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. There has always been a ruling class like the American aristocrat, born to rule, superior in every way.
The modern society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the aristocrat, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other–Aristocrats and Workers, Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats.
From the industrialists of the 19th Century sprang the chartered corporations of the earliest forms of soulless aristocratic rule. From these corporations, the first elements of the ruthless aristocracy were developed.
The plundering of Central and South America, the naval control of the world’s oceans, the dominance of the US military, and now the development of Internet tech monopolies, opened up fresh ground for the rising aristocrats. The subjugation and colonization of Africa, the slave trade in the US South, US financial, political, and military hegemony, and the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, to the Internet, an impulse never before known, and, thereby, to the vast increase in wealth of the American aristocrat.
The 19th Century system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed trusts, no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The financialization system took its place. The industrialists were pushed on one side by the financial class; the proliferation of bond debt and personal debt squeezed industrialists, labor unions, and individuals to the breaking point.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even financialization no longer sufficed. Thereupon, Internet technology revolutionized all production. The giant, modern tech company took the place of manufacture; the place of the industrial millionaires by technology billionaires, the leaders of the whole financial and technological armies, and the modern American aristocracy.
Modern Internet has established the world market, for which the financialization of America paved the way. The private equity market has given immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication. This development has, in its turn, reacted to the extension of technology; and in proportion as technology, commerce, navigation, Internet extended, in the same proportion, the American aristocrat developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Industrial Revolution.
We see, therefore, how the modern American aristocrat is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
A corresponding political advance of that class accompanied each step in the development of the aristocrat. An oppressed class under the sway of the Democrats and labor unions, a corrupt and self-governing association: here independent urban republic, the American aristocrat has at last, since the establishment of the Modern Internet and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. Through gerrymandering of political districts to ensure loyalists return to the legislature and nonstop propaganda coordinated on right-wing media, the executive, legislature, and judiciary of the modern state have become but a committee for managing the common affairs of the American aristocrat.
The aristocrat, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The aristocrat, wherever it obtained the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the ties that bound man to his “natural superiors” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.
Greed is good; Greed is God.
Using the “invisible hand” of the market, the aristocracy has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation—and convinced the populace it’s for their benefit. Workers are taught to be thankful for the opportunity to be exploited by the aristocrat who pays them as little as possible so that the value of labor becomes their own.
The aristocrat has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, and the man of science, into its paid wage laborers, slaves of the aristocrat worth only what the aristocrat says it’s worth.
The aristocrat has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation, digits on a balance sheet, every interaction a transaction.
The aristocrat has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the American Revolution, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. Through its self-serving narrative, the aristocrat alone was the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. Aristocrats imagine they accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; that they alone conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
The modern Internet tech company aristocrat cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and, thereby, the relations of production, and with them, the whole relations of society.
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the aristocratic epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, and all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Into this void step are the authoritarian aristocrats who claim that only through their steadfast and unquestioned leadership will everyone prosper.
The aristocracy has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Democrats and labor interests, all old-established national industries or labor unions have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. The intellectual creations of individual nations become the exclusive property of aristocrats. From the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature, owned by aristocrats via copyright and patent.
The aristocrat, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of right-wing communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization and control under the aristocrat’s thumb.
The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all foreign tariff walls, with which it forces the labor unions of barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of aristocrats to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the aristocrats’ protective laws; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become aristocrats themselves.
In one word, the American aristocrat creates a world after its own image.
The aristocrat has subjected the country to the rule of the towns, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Ironically, the rubes in rural America constitute a significant portion of the aristocrats’ power base, blissfully unaware of the damage they do to themselves, and aristocrats relied on the ignorant rural poor to dismantle the last vestiges of democracy that worked in their favor. Such is the power of right-wing propaganda.
The aristocrat keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization under the authoritarian aristocratic rule. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff imposed by American aristocrats on foreign nations.
We see then: the labor relations of property had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. The aristocracy crushed labor. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the aristocratic class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return put the existence of the entire aristocratic society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. Cries ring out to raise interest rates, which funnels even more money to the coffers of the aristocracy.
The modern working class developed—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. When their usefulness is extinguished, they are cast aside to survive on the diminishing vestiges of Social Security, one of the remaining State programs the aristocracy could not extinguish—yet.
As the use of Internet apps and division of labor increases, in the same proportion, the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of machinery, etc.
Modern Internet has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the tech billionaire. Masses of laborers, attached to apps, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the tech army, they are placed under the command of a perfectly heartless algorithm. Not only are they slaves of the aristocratic class, and of the aristocratic State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the app, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual aristocrat tech billionaire himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful, and the more embittering it is.
No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the tech billionaire, so far, at an end, that the worker receives his wages, then he is set upon by the other portions of the aristocracy, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all sink gradually into the worker, and become app dependent, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Internet is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large tech monopolies, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the worker is recruited from all classes of the population.
The worker goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the aristocrat. At first, the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, and then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual aristocrat who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the aristocratic conditions of exploitation, but against the instruments of production themselves; they rally against immigrant workers that compete with their labor, they build walls to keep them out, they seek to restore the vanished status of the union man of the mid 20th century—a man who fought for a better life for his family only to see his children sell out to the aristocrat for a bowl of pottage.
At this stage, the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form labor unions, the mechanization of the State must be employed to disburse such notions, and the various classes of workers must be directed to hate each other, and when that fails, at any outside scapegoat as can be found, particularly immigrants.
At this stage, therefore, the workers do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of the Democratic Party, the well-educated, the non-industrial aristocrats, and the petty aristocrats. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the aristocrat; every victory so obtained is a victory for the aristocrat.
But with the development of industry, the worker not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. Thereupon, the workers begin to form Labor Unions against the aristocrats; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they must be stopped to sustain aristocratic rule.
The essential condition for the existence and for the sway of the aristocratic class is the competition between the laborers. Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The modern laborer, instead of rising with the aristocracy, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
And here, it becomes necessary for the State to provide assistance to the paupers to prevent starvation, food riots, and civil unrest. This increase in State assistance is first gained through labor taxation, with the most educated and highest-paid servants to the aristocracy being taxed the most. This creates a working-class distinction that aristocrats can exploit to get each group to advocate for their own selfish interests in service of the aristocracy. This assures the different groups of workers never unite to work against aristocratic rule or policies that benefit the aristocracy.
The danger here is that State assistance may grow to the point that the different wage slaves cannot support the food needs of the masses. If the government resorts to printing money, the value of aristocratic holdings declines. If the government resorts to taxing aristocrats generally, the results are even worse as aristocrats are subject to confiscation of wealth and assets for no benefit to themselves.
II. Aristocrats and the State
The State is necessary to ensure aristocratic control and to enforce property rights, provide for national defense, maintain law and order, prevent the rise of power of workers, and protect aristocratic liberties. Laws and law enforcement must be draconian and autocratic in defense of aristocrats, but they must never bind or limit them the way they restrict workers. Aristocrats must enjoy all freedoms, while the workers must be permitted only those freedoms necessary for aristocratic service.
The State must remain small, or the cost of operating the State may fall upon the aristocracy rather than on the workers who labor under its watchful eye. Large government is more likely to infringe upon the personal freedoms of aristocrats. Aristocrats believe in the individual responsibility of all workers to aristocratic law, while the aristocrats enjoy unlimited liberty to make their own choices without State intervention.
The private sector under direct aristocratic control is more efficient at handling many functions than the State. Even the extractive monopolies providing minimally acceptable products are superior to the government at providing goods and services. Large government can lead to inefficiency, waste, and bureaucratic red tape, which stifles innovation and economic growth essential to building aristocratic wealth and power.
Taxes on aristocrats must be kept as low as possible; non-existent is best, particularly inheritance taxes, the bane of aristocratic succession. High taxes are a burden on aristocrats and their businesses, hindering economic growth and aristocrats’ financial success. Further, high taxes only serve to feed the State, which must be kept weaker than any aristocratic business interests in order to prevent the power of the State from being wielded against aristocratic domination and control.
Large State programs, especially welfare and social support systems, create a dependency culture and liberate individuals from dependency on aristocrats for jobs and sustenance. State support disincentivizes work and prompts labor to bargain for higher wages, ultimately harming both aristocrats and the economy.
Large State programs lead to reduced accountability to the aristocracy as programs become too complex and opaque, leading to corruption and mismanagement. Further, State regulatory programs inevitably lead to expensive compliance requirements that hinder the ability of aristocrats to exploit workers or the environment.
Aristocrats must maintain complete control of the State while providing a superficial appearance of democracy and feedback to the populace. This control is arranged and sustained through right-wing media blasting the working class with nonsense, half-truths, and hyperbole that delivers emotionally charged voters to the polls to vote for politicians bought and paid for by aristocrats. These politicians must demonstrate complete allegiance to aristocrats for continued funding of the campaigns to sustain the ignorant politician’s illusion of power.
Corruption of the Republican Party is relatively simple, as aristocrats have always maintained functional control over the party and the media that supports it. It’s also necessary to support incompetent members of the Democratic Party who could not sustain their positions without aristocratic support. It only takes a few so-called corporate Democrats to foil any laws hindering aristocratic power.
In summary, the State is necessary for maintaining the power and liberties of the aristocracy. It should be kept small to prevent the aristocracy from bearing its operational costs, and to avoid infringing upon aristocratic personal freedoms. Taxes, especially inheritance taxes, are detrimental to aristocratic wealth, as are State welfare and social programs, which empower individuals and workers to demand higher wages. Large state programs hinder aristocrats' ability to exploit workers and resources. The state must be manipulated to serve the interests of a powerful elite at the expense of the wider population and democratic principles.
