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Masters: The Invisible War of the Powerful Against Their Subjects
From the breweries of Colorado and the faculties of Harvard to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm, Marco D’Eramo guides us through the places where a new war has been thought out, planned and financed. The flow of funding from large corporations and wealthy individuals to institutions and political lobby groups has been rewarded by one of the largest ideological captures in modern times. It’s a real war, though it has been fought silently, without us realizing it. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said it ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’.
The victory is such that nowadays words like ‘capitalists’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ have almost become taboos that we’re ashamed to utter. In place of the traditional aversion to the state, an unprecedented form of economic liberalism has revolutionized the dynamics of domination. Today it remains ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. The revolt from above has affected all fields – not only the economy, but also justice and education. It has twisted our ideas of society, family and ourselves. It has taken advantage of every crisis, whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, recessions or pandemics. It has used every weapon, from the information revolution to the technology of debt. It has changed the nature of power, from discipline to control. It has learnt from the workers’ struggle, using Gramsci and Lenin against them.
Maybe the time has come for us to do the same and to learn from our opponents.
The victory is such that nowadays words like ‘capitalists’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ have almost become taboos that we’re ashamed to utter. In place of the traditional aversion to the state, an unprecedented form of economic liberalism has revolutionized the dynamics of domination. Today it remains ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. The revolt from above has affected all fields – not only the economy, but also justice and education. It has twisted our ideas of society, family and ourselves. It has taken advantage of every crisis, whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, recessions or pandemics. It has used every weapon, from the information revolution to the technology of debt. It has changed the nature of power, from discipline to control. It has learnt from the workers’ struggle, using Gramsci and Lenin against them.
Maybe the time has come for us to do the same and to learn from our opponents.
272 pages, Paperback
Published January 31, 2024
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About the author
Marco D'Eramo
20 books18 followersMarco d’Eramo, nato a Roma nel 1947, laureato in Fisica, ha poi studiato Sociologia con Pierre Bourdieu all’École Pratique des Hautes Études di Parigi. Giornalista, ha collaborato con “Paese Sera” e “Mondoperaio”, e collabora con “il manifesto”.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 27, 2024
This deserves a longer and more considered review, another time.
Masters by Marco D’Eramo is tough going at times, and the author’s attempts at sarcasm should have been edited out, or don’t translate from the Italian very well. The book is a well-constructed account of how the “The Invisible War of the Powerful Against Their Subjects” unfolded. Special emphasis on the think tanks and foundations that set the agenda (singling out how the Chicago School served as a vanguard).
I don’t think that I can improve upon the author’s own words: it’s a “… meandering journey to the depths of the neolib counter-revolution, through the twists and turns of the revolt of the dominant against the dominated, of the war those on top have unleashed on those below…” (p.232). If you skip the boring bits there’s a great deal of material in here that we can learn from, and D’Eramo strikes a hopeful note even when demonstrating how complete a victory this Invisible War engendered. I think that’s naive of him but so very human.
As a case study in how to build hegemony in the Gramscian sense it’s a shame the author seldom extrapolates to fields other than Economics, and is silent about geopolitical factors… but base and superstructure etc etc I suppose.
It’s entirely ‘natural’ how the maniacs got to control us all when you look at it in retrospect. (See also Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher.)
How can these people unabashedly lie at every opportunity? They despise us. Did Johnson really think we needed to be taught how to wash our hands? Yes: he genuinely thought it would be helpful. Or he was laughing at us. (Why did he not deign to teach us how to wipe our arses while he was at it?)
The elite are so utterly confident they have us by the goolies. Here’s how they did it.
Unfortunately, the book seems rather dated as it stops short of the coronavirus years when everything accelerated madly. In a slightly half-baked conclusion, D’Eramo adds how religion in the orthodox sense (not the religion of the market, which he deconstructs much earlier) helped to seal the deal in the US and suggests that we get our own think tanks, take over the media, etc. Yeah: that’s gonna happen.
Masters by Marco D’Eramo is tough going at times, and the author’s attempts at sarcasm should have been edited out, or don’t translate from the Italian very well. The book is a well-constructed account of how the “The Invisible War of the Powerful Against Their Subjects” unfolded. Special emphasis on the think tanks and foundations that set the agenda (singling out how the Chicago School served as a vanguard).
I don’t think that I can improve upon the author’s own words: it’s a “… meandering journey to the depths of the neolib counter-revolution, through the twists and turns of the revolt of the dominant against the dominated, of the war those on top have unleashed on those below…” (p.232). If you skip the boring bits there’s a great deal of material in here that we can learn from, and D’Eramo strikes a hopeful note even when demonstrating how complete a victory this Invisible War engendered. I think that’s naive of him but so very human.
As a case study in how to build hegemony in the Gramscian sense it’s a shame the author seldom extrapolates to fields other than Economics, and is silent about geopolitical factors… but base and superstructure etc etc I suppose.
It’s entirely ‘natural’ how the maniacs got to control us all when you look at it in retrospect. (See also Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher.)
How can these people unabashedly lie at every opportunity? They despise us. Did Johnson really think we needed to be taught how to wash our hands? Yes: he genuinely thought it would be helpful. Or he was laughing at us. (Why did he not deign to teach us how to wipe our arses while he was at it?)
The elite are so utterly confident they have us by the goolies. Here’s how they did it.
Unfortunately, the book seems rather dated as it stops short of the coronavirus years when everything accelerated madly. In a slightly half-baked conclusion, D’Eramo adds how religion in the orthodox sense (not the religion of the market, which he deconstructs much earlier) helped to seal the deal in the US and suggests that we get our own think tanks, take over the media, etc. Yeah: that’s gonna happen.
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