A recent post from Bruce Webb at Angry Bear gave me a new angle on the fecklessness of our ruling elites, who currently seem incapable of even running capitalism for their own benefit. The basic insight here is that capitalism requires the capitalist class to impose an austere kind of discipline not just on the working class, but on itself. And while the breakdown of worker discipline causes well-known problems for capitalism, the decay of capitalist discipline poses difficulties as well.

Doug Henwood has long observed (and long threatened to write a book about) the decay and decomposition of the American ruling class. Rather than a disciplined force that seeks to promote the long-run accumulation of capital, our elite increasingly appears short-sighted and avaricious — more interested in looting the system through bailouts and high-end tax cuts than in ensuring the its long term health. Henwood:

Well, you know it was once the WASP elite, but there ain’t none of that now. I think one of the problems of the United States is that there is a great deal of incoherence at the upper level, that unlike the WASP ruling class, there is no social formation that can think in the truly long-term, that can think beyond the short-term concernsabout the accumulation of money, the most amount of money in the quickest possible time.