When you read “elite overproduction” read “bourgeois...
R.Сам 🦋🐏@Logo_Daedalus
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Mar 22, 2025
~2 min read
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When you read “elite overproduction” read “bourgeois overproduction”— having too many college graduates isn’t “producing too many elites”— it’s producing downward pressure on “middle class labor power” — this is the consequence of financialization, exerting downward pressure on the remaining “post-industrial service class” of the bourgeois & petty bourgeois. To even suggest that a doctor or lawyer is an “elite” says everything about the general decline in the middle classes that has occurred as a consequence of deindustrialization.
USofMind@USofMind
@Logo_Daedalus I’ve heard of the theory of “elite overproduction” which refers not to hereditary aristocracy but simply to highly educated people who have become a dime a dozen. It seems relevant today:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_ove…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_ove…
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Middle class jobs are superfluous, in the sense of being unproductive services— lawyers do not produce value, they extract value as a “cost of doing business”— the actual elite are not “overproduced”— the actual elite are the .1% of hereditary aristocrats who employ armies of middle class service workers in servicing their wealth, living on capital gains & interest payments on hordes of accumulated capital. There are the beneficiaries of a “family office” of legal & financial services, & then there are the middle classes who are paid to protect the interests of the elite— what’s happening isn’t that we’re producing new aristocrats too much, what’s happening is that, for instance, there is more competition over the roles that service this aristocratic class, which is lowering the “cost of doing business” for the aristocratic class. They don’t have to pay their lawyers & accountants as much because there is a massive pool of lawyers & accountants &c produced yearly.
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When the aristocracy can have a purely automated AI defense force for their wealth— putting their accumulated wealth in an algorithmically managed fund, automated legal services that proactively sue for breeches of NDAs & so on (like the Gettys produced via Getty Images etc)— then they no longer have use for the “middle classes” at all. That’s why their interest is in managing the culling of the herd of “superfluous people” — imagine roman latifundia plantations enforced by AI directed drones, imagine a concentration camp where the guards are robots & work for free— that’s essentially what’s happening.
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Things will make more sense if you consider the feudal economy as we are in a neofeudal time period here.
Who are the coterie of the landed aristocracy?
Clowns, jugglers, knights, lawyers, etc. These are not “the elite”— they are the employees of the elite. What we are seeing is that there are now “too many clowns knights lawyers &c” — so there is ruthless competition to enter these coteries. Hedge funds are the coteries of the elite, but they are not themselves the elite.
Who are the coterie of the landed aristocracy?
Clowns, jugglers, knights, lawyers, etc. These are not “the elite”— they are the employees of the elite. What we are seeing is that there are now “too many clowns knights lawyers &c” — so there is ruthless competition to enter these coteries. Hedge funds are the coteries of the elite, but they are not themselves the elite.
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What use does a man of the peerage have for the clown when he can have a robot clown that doesn’t need housing & food & so on? What Thiel calls “elite overproduction” is more akin to the “overproduction of clowns.”