The Tyee has published my review of Chrystia Freeland's book Plutocrats: The Higher World of the Plutocrats. Excerpt:
Freeland's plutocrats are mostly self-made also, and overwhelmingly male; one very rich man suggested to her that women lack the "killer instinct" needed for real success. But they are not the idle heirs of rich parents. The "working rich" are a distinct class: smart, ambitious and often outsiders.
What's more, they represent a dramatic change from the 19th and early 20th century, Freeland argues. Then, the conflict was between capital and workers, with workers doomed to lose because they couldn't own the means of production.
The communist revolutions were supposed to transfer those means to the workers, but instead transferred them to a new class of upstart intellectuals and technical experts. She cites Milovan Djilas, Tito's second in command in communist Yugoslavia. In the 1960s Djilas wrote "The New Class" to describe this phenomenon as a corruption of communist orthodoxy; Tito threw him in jail.
Even more ironically, the same new intellectual class now runs capitalism -- with the exception of the princelings of the Chinese Communist Party, the billionaire sons and grandsons of Mao's old proletarian comrades. But elsewhere, smart young men got possession of ex-Soviet resources, or an operating system for newfangled personal computers, and within months were rich beyond imagining.
They didn't come entirely out of the blue. Freeland documents the gradual but decisive shift in fields like finance, which since the 1930s had been regulated to the point of boredom. This came along with a new struggle: Now it wasn't capital versus labour, but capital versus talent.
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