Two great hostile camps,
or, The increasing us and the decreasing them.
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.”
The British Ministry of Defense is prognosticating, trying to part the mists of time for a glimpse of the year 2035: criminal flashmobs, city-killing EMPs, ethnic cleansing with neutron bombs, and still that dam’ specter haunts Europe. —Momus has a good question:
Isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?
I think the sticking point is the ‘to shape transnational processes’
bit. Most neophobes* are alarmed by ANYthing that crosses national borders in a non-normal way; e.g., we (usually Americans or Europeans) buy raw materials from funny dark people and sell them finished goods – normal.
Some of ‘our’ middle-class people and ‘their’ middle-class people get together and try to figure out a better way to run things without gummint getting in the way – that’s just weird. They stay on their side of the big lines on the map, we stay on theirs, and everything’s fine.
That’s one of the reasons why repressive regimes are freaked out the the intertoobs – it crosses every border every which way, and it’s hard to control.
*Tip o’ the pen to the late RA Wilson.