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Notes -
Gaetano Mosca explains well the need for the magic story in The Ruling Class. He calls this the "political formula".
All regimes forever and always are, in the practice of power, oligarchies of an organized minority. But to organize, which is a prerequisite of maintaining power, the minority needs an ideological substrate. It can be a lot of things, it can even be farcical and insane, but it has to be coherent and at least somewhat grounded in the reality they occupy, otherwise people stop believing in it and you start producing counter elites.
This is what happened in the Soviet Union if you remember, the elites themselves lost faith in socialism and reformers collapsed the Union, as nobody in power had the will to maintain it by force.
Overt dictatorship of the managerial class ("hard managerial regime" as the DR calls it) is perfectly viable in the short term as a replacement for the soft variant that thinks it's a democracy. But it requires might and it exhausts itself fairly quickly even when backed by it as we saw in the XXth century.
The fact is, regimes usually fall when they start having to employ hard power to maintain themselves but can't actually bring themselves to do it. And a less convincing political formula combined with a need to use violence is the recipe to become Louis XVI.
If we want to believe that the managers will keep the ship together, we therefore must find who among them has a fanatical enough devotion to managerialism to send troops to gun down people in the streets in its name.
I can find this force of will in the bourgeoisie of the revolution. I do not see it in the managerial class of today. I think the only reason they are still in power is that no serious counter elite has what it takes to challenge them as of yet. And I see challengers growing their strength yet.
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