(I don’t think of it as marxist terms by the way. The west has always practiced

(I don’t think of it as marxist terms by the way. The west has always practiced the model of aristocracy, nobility, burgher, freeman, serf, slave, and ‘other’. All that changes is the distribution of power between aristocracy(military), nobility (managerial), and clergy (administrative). What’s ‘Novel’ is the expansion of the ‘burgher’ s (merchants) and the transfer of the clerical class and revenues from the clergy to what we consider the middle class. )

—“Results from these three research methods suggests that in the United States today approximately 15 to 20 percent are in the poor, lower class; 30 to 40 percent are in the working class; 40 to 50 percent are in the middle class; and 1 to 3 percent are in the rich, upper class.”—-

I use Paul Fussel’s book “Class” as the best overall analysis to date.

Prior to the enlightenment, 50% of europe’s lands were in the hands of the church and rented out for profit. The monasteries produced goods and functioned as the ‘big corporations do today’, The clergy, because it maintained a near monopoly on literacy, fulfilled much of the clerical labor force – at least as far as government went.

With the enlightenment and the printing press (a) the clergy no longer had a monopoly (similar to today’s academy/state/media complex is losing it’s monopoly on the control of information, and (b) the revolutions deprived the church of its means of income, and (c) private industry could concentrate capital and invest and the church could not.

When Darwin dealt a death blow to the only income stream related to the church (a channel to the divine), the academy ‘left the parent’s home’ so to speak and took over teaching the ‘new religion of sciences’ so to speak.

Unfortunately, the truth was only appealing to the upper classes. So once the academy found the lies of the cosmopolitans to serve as a product for the ascendent middle, working, and lower classes, they stepped in and replaced the church as the propagandists and ‘priests’ of the new state.

What has happened, primarily since (a) the failure of the great society program, and (b) the fall of world communism, the expansive corruptoin of all socialist polities, and (c) the incremental erasure of the (((cosmopolitan pseudosciences))) strangely enough, in no small part by (((a group of intellectuals))) who are nearly forced to admit that given the record of democratic voting, the economic and political record, the results of cognitive, genetic, and archeological science, that the conservatives (aristocracy) was right all along.