In an interview with Jana Bobošíková, we also touched on the current class conflict. Who actually rules? This does not refer to conspiracy theories, but asks who is the ruling class. The American economists Richard Wolf and Jeffrey Sachs talk about a narrow layer of the richest. There is some truth in this, but it is extremely simplistic. For example, Andrej Babiš (former prime minister and probably future prime minister) is the second richest person in the Czech Republic, yet he has failed to become a member of the ruling class. And the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has so thoroughly abandoned the ruling class that he is now considered a populist and a Russian agent.
There are other things at play. In addition to the tensions between rich and poor, there is also a quiet (and sometimes very noisy) conflict between people connected with real production and people involved in financial transactions, speculation, advertising, etc. The sociologist Peter L. Berger once described this as a class fed by the handling of symbols, and that this class includes both rich and poor people.
Then there is the relationship to globalisation. We have a class of those who are profiting from globalisation and a class of those who are paying for it. Then there are huge groups of those who are interested in being part of a social class, who are not actually part of it, but who are often the most ardent fighters in class conflict. Moreover, society is divided into many bubbles – even people from the same social class can be divided into hostile bubbles.
Perhaps the most succinct way to describe it is that the current ruling class is a coalition of corporate and state bureaucracy and professional intellectuals. Who is the opposition? In America, an alliance of the working class and industrial magnates is emerging; in Europe, no such coalition has yet emerged, perhaps because there is much less industry and a much smaller group of people associated with industry.
This is a view that can be worked with, but it is still grossly simplistic.