Before the Rothschilds took over the crown, the great banking family in England was Baring Brothers & Co. At the time of his death in 1810, Francis Baring was known as Europe’s foremost merchant. How had he become so wealthy? Professor David Landes provides the answer in his book Dynasties: by financing wars. In Europe, the Barings were known by the nickname ”The Sixth Great Power,” and they were able to influence—and even determine—the fate of entire nations, Professor Landes explains. A tradition that has continued into modern times.
Since the establishment of the private note-issuing bank, the Banque de France, in 1800, financial power in France had rested in the hands of approximately ten to twelve Protestant banking families, led by Mirabaud, Hottinger, Mallet, and Neuflize. Historian Professor Carroll Quigley writes in his monumental work Tragedy and Hope that all of these families were deeply involved in the agitations that led up to the French Revolution and that by 1811 they had moved into opposition.
After Napoleon’s fall, German banks, led by the Rothschilds, also entered the French market. The two groups were so closely connected that Mirabaud and the Rothschilds dominated the entire financial system and often cooperated, even when they appeared to be competitors on the surface. In 1838, a third group emerged in the form of Catholic bankers. This group later split into two factions, which aligned themselves respectively with Mirabaud and the Rothschilds. During the nineteenth century, according to Professor Niall Ferguson (The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money’s Prophets: 1798–1848), the Rothschilds possessed the largest fortune in the world.
After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the feudal powers sensed an opportunity to regain ground, and many of the legal and political rights that had been achieved during the Revolution were curtailed. During the 1820s, a new wave of revolutions swept across parts of Europe, and in France the elite responded by restricting voting rights and freedom of the press. This eventually led to the July Revolution of 1830, whose revolutionaries came primarily from the middle and working classes.
The system of property-based suffrage, combined with the fact that only one-thirtieth of the male population was allowed to vote, provoked widespread anger. These conditions, together with economic crisis and mass unemployment, culminated in the so-called February Revolution of 1848. In France, the king abdicated, and regimes fell in several other countries as well.
It was during this period that a certain Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto, in which he wrote, among other things, that ”all private property should be confiscated and nations abolished,” but also observations such as:
”You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.”
And:
”The family ties of the proletarians are torn apart by modern industry, and children are transformed into articles of commerce and instruments of labor.”
In 1849, he arrived in England and, supported by the organization League of the Just and by Engels, began working on Das Kapital (Capital). An important influence on Marx’s early intellectual development was the philosopher Hegel, whose doctrine of dialectics Marx developed in a more radical direction.
Marx described a model of progressive development in which conflict was the central driving force: social development occurs through a struggle between two opposing camps and results in an increasingly intense conflict in which one side is eventually eliminated. This principle, he argued, applied not only to humanity but to the world as a whole.
In other words, all natural development takes place through ”leaps,” occurring when the conflict between two opposites reaches a certain level and results in the destruction of one side or its absorption into the other. For Marx and his followers, the communist revolution was therefore a natural stage in social development.
One of the central elements of Marx’s economic theories was the question of surplus value. The labor theory of value had already been discussed in the fourteenth century by the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun and later by Petty, Smith, and Ricardo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but no one had analyzed it in as much detail as Marx did.
Value, Marx explained, was not the same thing as price; rather, it lay in the amount of labor time required to produce something. Exploitation is rooted in the distinction between labor power and labor. Labor power is the cost of production measured in labor time, whereas labor is the actual time worked. Employees are paid for the labor power they sell to the capitalist, while the capitalist is paid for the labor when the product is sold. The difference between the two—the surplus that arises—is profit. This surplus is therefore a surplus value created by labor power for the capitalist. The worker does not receive a share of this surplus value, even though he or she created it, because the capitalists own the means of production. As a result, the worker becomes highly dependent on the capitalist, since the worker must sell his or her labor power in order to earn a living and survive, thereby becoming exploited.
According to Marx, this system was the reason the capitalist class could grow continually richer. Wages—the price of labor power—are never as large as the profit they generate. Workers simply work for their employers without compensation for part of the day, and this is how surplus value arises.
Regardless of one’s views on Marx in general and communism in particular, there were undoubtedly valid points in several of his analyses, and the ruling classes were not so foolish as to overlook them or fail to recognize the danger they posed. As early as 1776, Adam Smith had written in Chapter 5 of Book I of The Wealth of Nations that:
”The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
The elite’s way of dealing with the situation was to take control of the new movement by supporting and promoting intellectuals who were passionate about reforming society, while at the same time holding ideological convictions that could be integrated with the idea that certain people were chosen to lead and ”refine” other peoples and cultures. In other words, the goal was to reduce injustices at home in order to keep the masses content, while simultaneously instilling in them the belief that, by virtue of their ethnicity, they had a duty to reshape more ”primitive” cultures.
The idea, then, was to borrow some of Marx’s ideas, combine them with Social Darwinism, and put them into practice without undermining the privileges enjoyed by the wealthy. Thereafter, these ideas would be exported abroad in an imperialist spirit.
What was needed was an intellectual champion who could market the elite’s new philosophy as a counterweight to the people’s champion, Marx.
Enter John Ruskin—an exceptionally gifted and wealthy English socialist, art critic, author, and poet who, in 1870, was appointed Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University. From an early age, it was clear that he was destined for something significant. At the age of three, he would often stand on a chair delivering speeches and sermons; by four, he could read and write with ease; and by five, he was already an avid bookworm. At seven, he was writing his own works, and by eleven, he spoke Latin and had begun studying art.
In 1853, he delivered a long series of widely discussed lectures on the moral and social uses of art, but over time he increasingly devoted his efforts to issues concerning social and industrial problems, education, morality, and politics. In his book Unto This Last, he wrote:
”A great fortune is the result of actions that have caused other actions which have drowned ten times as much in the process of accumulating it.”
Ruskin was heavily influenced by the ideas Plato presented in The Republic. Plato’s ideal was an aristocratic or royal state in which an elite governs everything and no one is permitted to own personal property; instead, everything is owned collectively by the citizens in a society without family ties. Men and women are not to know which children are theirs, nor are children to know who their parents are. Children are to be taken away after birth and raised in a separate place by nurses (in other words, an arrangement the author considers even more extreme than that practiced in the Soviet Union).
Ruskin saw the necessity of educating the masses and improving their standard of living because he realized that otherwise they would sooner or later rebel (something the elite, according to the author, have taken to heart ever since, though not out of compassion). The goal was, much like the Romans, to preempt the potential threat posed by the masses by providing them with bread and circuses, allowing the ruling classes to carry out their plans in peace and without interference.
In 1871, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex that:
”The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”
The idea was later developed by his cousin, Francis Galton, who coined the term ”eugenics” in 1883. Galton sought to rank the various individuals or races of humanity on a scale of developmental stages, an idea that became known as Social Darwinism, along with the notion of improving humanity’s biological nature through the elimination of less vigorous individuals.
In line with Galton’s philosophy, Ruskin told his students that they represented ”the best Nordic blood” and that they ought to rule the world. In the spirit of Plato, he taught his students that control of government should be exercised by a select few—or even by a single individual. Among other things, he stated:
”My continual aim is to show the eternal superiority of some men over others, and sometimes even of one man over all others.”
The intention was to plant these ideas in the fertile minds of Oxford students, many of whom would later become members of the country’s ruling class. If they then educated the working class and elevated it into the middle class, the elite could maintain their traditional control over economies and nations through land ownership, banking, and trade. The arrangement was envisioned as a form of legal slavery in which both classes would supposedly benefit—though, of course, one class far more than the other.
In this way, the elite could retain control behind the scenes while the ”rabble” was pacified with a few extra crumbs from the larger cake. Ruskin successfully instilled his visions in his students, several of whom would later become the bankers’ de facto executors in the political and economic systems that continue to shape the world today.
One of those students, more than any of the others, would embrace Ruskin’s vision and would soon make a name for himself…
Michael Delavante, How the oligarchs deceive the masses – part 4
