Is this really what people want?

Indeed. So we are now left with precisely what.....or rather who?

Yeas, but so were millions of other people. That doesn't mean anything.

I don't know, what I do know is that Rothschild (anshel) was in Germany working as a Goldsmith at the same time! That is not a matter of conjecture but a fact.

As I understand it, the Illuminati were a Freemasonic group from Germany at around the time of the French Revolution. That may well be the case, but I don't think they are or were the elite.

I haven't heard of them, but I have heard tales of the Illuminati, which I think are rubbish.

Illuminanti ?

I am not sure that the nobles are no more. The Rothschilds are rich but I don't think they are the elite.

When we look at the world, we see that

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

We see many actors, players and puppets e.g. the Bolsheviks, but we never see their masters.

Claig the whole of history has been about class struggle, the nobles though are no more. They have been dispossessed of their wealth and power thankfully. I don't think little queenie wields much power these days.

If you want to talk about the type of elite class that are above all others these people are still capitalists. Rothschilds are not nobility, they lent money to the nobles in the 18th and 19th centuries and then dispossessed them through massive interest and crooked dealing, they were knighted and feted, these people though, this very elite 0.1% are not however nobility. The nobility went into decline in 15th century. In the 19th the working class upstarts became the bourgeois when they CREATED the means of production under industrialisation. The Bolsheviks looked at what the results of industrialisation and capitalism were in western Europe and started a revolution that sought to bypass capitalism. doh.

I don't know who they are, but I do know that they are not capitalists.

'And why does it matter if they look down on us?'
Because they are sometimes in positions aof power and influence policies that may not be to the interest of the public.

The whole history of democracy is that the people have fought for a representative government that reflects their wishes.

And why does it matter if they look down on us?

Who are these people claig? this elite.

I think we need new terms of reference in the 21st century. We're not talking nobles and serfs, elites and workers any more, although it is interesting to get a historical overview.

We're talking about those who are most, more and least-motivated by money. Haves and have-nots are still relevant terms (though they leave out the have-a-bits, the have-more-than-is good-for-uses and the I-want-to-have-what-you-haves among us).

What's happening now has been made possible by technological innovations that could never have been imagined by previous economists. It might not be possible simply to adapt the old ways of doing things to a completely new set of circumstances.

The capitalist is anti-racist and anti-sexist. America takes people from all over the world into its industries, it doesn't care about sex, colour or creed. There are more women CEOs of American corporations than of any other country.

The capitalist cares not who you are, but cares only what you can do.

The elite are different. They look down on "plebs" and think they are better than the people across the planet. They care about who you know, not what you know.

'Can you not see that the next logical step in the evolutionary chain is the workers dispossessing the bourgeois of his wealth and power'

No because the workers want to become bourgeois too. We are all the same. We are "in it together". There is no divide and rule or class war among the working and middle class, except the divide and rule that is created by the elite that thinks that both working and middle classes are just "plebs".

The capitalist class is not the elite. The capitalist class is a business/merchant class and in the days of Ancient Greece and the British Empire, this merchant class was looked down on by the real elite - the hereditary nobility who felt they were above grubby commerce.

The capitalists, the merchants, the traders, the middle classes, grew in power and wealth and their investments and earnings sometimes dwarfed those of the land-owners who had few business skills and whose wealth sometimes stagnated because of it.

The gap between the nobles and the serfs narrowed.

The real elite feel they are above commerce, trade and industry, they are not capitalists. They want zero growth and a reduction in business (which helps ordinary people gain employment). The real elite are conservationists and conservatives who want zero growth and a halt to progress. They want to go back to their "good old days", when the "plebs" knew their place and doffed their cap.

The capitalist doesn't care who you are or where you went to school as long as you can turn a profit. The capitalist admires talent, not privilege.

X posted Mini, but yes, thanks for the link. I will definitely read it.

In our so-called capitalist democracy, the rich get more say than the rest of us and keep telling us that it is trickling down ...

If we had a democracy that worked, we would not have so many bullies exploiting the rest of us.

I take back what I suggested about religion, btw - I was thinking of camels, rich men and needles. But it was a silly suggestion, since it hasn't ever stopped people from bullying others.

We need some new ideas here. It is possible to exist without money in an exchange economy, for example - though that's one of the oldest types of system that is communism what happened in Russia, China, Cuba, Korea IS NOT communism but state capitalism. Sorry I linked to some really digestible marxist economics.

Claig, the nobles indeed hate the bourgeois, the rising middle classes dispossessed them of the land and wealth, quite rightly so. Can you not see that the next logical step in the evolutionary chain is the workers dispossessing the bourgeois of his wealth and power. The elite that you speak of claig are all capitalists. Capitalism is fantastic in it's creativity, driven by human spirit, just a stop gap though in the great scheme of things.

The Marxists seem to think that investors and capitalists have an easy time. They invest their capital in businesses, but this investment is not risk-free. The companies can fail, the management may be corrupt and they can and do lose their money

Investors and capitalist are having a dreadfully difficult time knowing what to do with the capital absorption problem, capitalism can only sustain itself on 3% aggregate growth. There is now a massive problem knowing what to invest in. You can't invest in goods and services to meet the needs of the proletariat because they can not afford to pay for the goods and services. So here you have demand and no supply. No supply because their is no actual demand when it can not be paid for. Demand is not the same as actual need but is dictated by capital itself. (see something strange there)
This is why so much is now being privatised and why government expenditure will in time rise whilst welfare need grows but is increasingly unmet. The capitalist will only invest to make a return, that return of 3% is the difference btw public and private ownership. And that profit will come out of OUR TAXES and also OUT of OUR POCKETS in the difference between labour hours and rate of PROFIT.

Can companies fail? only smaller ones that have less strategic significance, the states have bailed out the car companies, these companies must now realise a profit so ford is closing it's transit factory here because labour is cheaper in Turkey. Is that a positive development. Banks are not left to fail, the elite (who are the capitalist class Claig) will not allow capitalism to fail, even when in the final analysis it will fail them too.

'There must be many ways to run the world, not just capitalist or communist.'

The best way that humanity has found is democracy. We don't have a perfect democracy, but it will undoubtedly improve over teh coming centuries. That is the whole history of human progress and equal rights. It can't be turned back.

We don't want elites who think they are superior to us or think we are "plebs", just because they went to public schools and Oxbridge. We don't want people who think they know what is best for us and don't listen to what the people have to say.

We need a representative government of the people that carries out the people's will and regulates for the good of the public.

We are not there yet, but every scandal brings us one step closer.

I hope so, Claig. Not sure what Marxism has to do with it though, or have I missed something?

There must be many ways to run the world, not just capitalist or communist. Both of these systems are wide open to abuse, as has been shown.

We need some new ideas here. It is possible to exist without money in an exchange economy, for example - though that's one of the oldest types of system.

But if we are to stick with what we've got, ie just the two models, then we have to do something about human nature (religion?); and failing that, we need stringent laws and the political will to apply them.

'It's obvious that the law alone can't deal with this. If it could, it would have.
I think it might be capitalism itself that is the problem, coupled with lack of democracy, lack of transparency etc.'

We need open and transparent government with full disclosure of lobbyists and thinktanks etc. We need a better democracy with referenda and proportional representation so that the will of teh people can be heard. We won't get it overnight, Rome wasn't built in a day, but one day many years hence, it will surely come. They can't keep the people down forever, lies will be exposed and corruption revealed. There is a better future over the horizon, we may not achieve it in a lifetime, but can we get there - "Yes we can!"

Xenia came from a mining family and now she owns an island. The nobles must be fuming. They will have to step up their green plans to keep the public down. But, of course, they will fail because humanity is on the rise, the nobles can't hold onto the prize, because the public doesn't believe their anti-capitalist lies,

Read the Marxism stuff and don't agree with it. I get the feeling that it is a trick (just like the elite green trick) to take us back to a feudal system of an elite (nomenklatura or nobles) and the proletariat (the serfs). The Marxists' main enemy is the bourgeois (the middle-class); they want to eliminate the middle-class (the strivers who have escaped poverty) so that the elite (nomenklatura) face no opposition to their rule over the proletariat.

'Most food and other necessities were made by the serfs themselves. Workers today cannot grow their own food or make most of their own clothes. They are forced to work for the boss to make ends meet.'

Capitalism freed the serfs from the land, freed them from a subsistence level existence dependent on the weather and storms and hurricanes and droughts that might lead to starvation. It freed them up to partake in enterprise and gain riches that rivalled theose of the land-owning nobles. A working class lad like Alan Sugar rose to become a millionaire and sits in the House of Lords, where before only the hereditary land-owning nobility would have sat.

'Workers create the wealth'

The bricklayer was not equivalent to the architect who designed St paul's Cathedral. The bricklayer was paid for his services but the value was not equal to the work carried out by the architect. The wealth that they created was not equal.

Steve Jobs was paid more than an Apple receptionist because he created more wealth.

The Marxists seem to think that investors and capitalists have an easy time. They invest their capital in businesses, but this investment is not risk-free. The companies can fail, the management may be corrupt and they can and do lose their money.

There is no free lunch in capitalism, unlike for the socialist apparatchiks paid for out of the public purse.

The nobles, the elites and the nomenklatura dislike capitalism because it allows ordinary oiks and hoi polloi to do better than them, because it is a meritocracy and not a heritocracy.

They have created many movements and organisations to squeeze the middle class (their main enemy) and prevent the progress of the population.

They want us back as serfs under austerity with rising fuel and energy prices drowning our prosperity. They want a green new world with low trade, zero and negative growth to keep the people down. They don't like growth, which is why they don't like capitalism.

I think we have far too many laws. Often an existing law is perfectly able to deal with things and yet even more laws are brought in. Our laws from 1267 (1267 I think being the earliest still in force) are on here www.legislation.gov.uk/ )