"}While a restive working class might provide fertile ground for \npo\u00adlitical upheavals, any fundamental transformation of Western politics\n will necessarily be led by increasing numbers of the \u201celite\u201d who defect\n from the dominant policy consensus and rethink their allegiance to \nestablishment paradigms. Conventional narratives, including many that \nare critical of the status quo, paint the elite as a unified block \naligned with neoliberalism. But the neoliberal economy has created a \nprofound fracture within the elite, the significance of which is just \nbeginning to be felt.
The socioeconomic divide that will determine the future of poli\u00adtics,\n particularly in the United States, is not between the top 30 per\u00adcent \nor 10 percent and the rest, nor even between the 1 percent and the 99 \npercent. The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the\n 10 percent\u2014or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on profes\u00adsional labor.
The last few years have brought about a new \u201cdiscovery\u201d of working-class immiseration\u2014a\n media phenomenon arguably pro\u00advoked by renewed elite anxieties. As a \nresult, the story of a declining working class is now broadly \nunderstood. It is, after all, decades old, and it was entirely \npredictable if not exactly intended. Much less understood, however, is \nthe more recent reshaping and radicalization of the professional \nmanagerial class. While the top 5 or 10 percent may not deserve public \nsympathy, their underperformance relative to the top 0.1 percent will be\n more politically significant than the hol\u00adlowing out of the working or \nlower-middle classes. Unlike the work\u00ading class, the professional \nmanagerial class is still capable of, and re\u00adquired for, wielding \npolitical power.
At bottom, the economy that has been constructed over the last few \ndecades is nothing more than a capital accumulation economy. As long as \nreturns on capital exceed returns on labor, then the largest capital \nholders benefit the most, inequality rises, and wealth becomes more and \nmore narrowly concentrated.1 Labor\u2014including elite la\u00adbor\u2014is\n inevitably left behind. Marxian thinkers have been analyzing these \ndynamics for almost two centuries, but they have often misread the \npolitical effects of these developments, which play out primarily among \nthe elite managerial class, rather than within the binary of capitalists\n and proletarians.
Pretty much what I was saying about how Leviathan and Its Enemies gets it wrong