It's quite clear that many people feel that the world has turned into a place of rentier capital, where the toiling masses work and slave and where a coterie of rich and privileged people sit above them extracting the benefits of their toil. This is a Marxist analysis of the world but it's quite interesting how so many other political theories effectively espouse the same analysis but with different beneficiaries.
The neo-Trumpian analysis is that it is a bloated government sector and a distant corporate-government elite who sit atop the pyramid of mankind.
The racialised analysis is that it is a group of people from a specific racial or ethnic group, depending on your perspective, who sit atop the pyramid.
The libertarian-capitalist analysis is that there are a few entrepreneurial superstars who support something of an inverse pyramid, albeit they swell the ranks of this scant pyramidical base by including diverse groups such as "the self employed" which in the US includes virtually anyone in work because of the hideous "employee at will" system. Atop the pyramid sit an array of secure corporate and government interests (very similar to the Trumpian analysis but they accept more corporate interests in the libertarian base).
The Marxian analysis obviously places the workers at the base of the pyramid and the capitalists at the top of the pyramid. The way in which you define "worker" in this context being a point of contention which has been discussed between Marxist theorists for many decades.
These analyses are all well and good but there is an interesting generational trend which has developed over the last 80 years as the concept of pensions have been implemented throughout the (developed) world.
The owners of much of the worlds wealth have historically been, at least in the OECD countries in the preceding 100 years, both older, whiter and more female. There are a multitude of reasons for this, which I wouldn't even hope to dissect in any great detail here beyond saying imperialism, longevity and the nature of earnings power. Pensions and financialisation have provided an interesting backdrop for this as they have effectively converted what was an implicit promise of support; ie, you looked after me when I was a kid and so I will look after you when you are old; into an explicit promise of support; ie, you own lots of stuff which you can convert into cash when you are old and give to me in exchange for looking after you.
But "hang on" I hear you say, for it has ever been thus. The older members of society have always been in control of the majority of our collective wealth and this covenant between young and old is and explicit part of any social contract. The elderly, as we consider them today, looked after the nations wealth in the past and they continue to do so today. The pattern of wealth ownership by generational cohort (adjusted for life expectancy) in 2020 is similar to that of 1900. Why would this be different now?
The key difference that seems to be the case now is the explicit nature of the current promise via the structure of finance and capital. Historically we could say that a society looked after it's elderly because it built them things and provided them with services and looked after them, but this was not necessarily a consequence of a direct transfer of pecuniary wealth, similar to the type expressed in a conventional pensions arrangement. It did these things through a form of social engagement and interaction. Now the mechanism for this was very different and not really in anyway democratic, however it certainly was not at the behest of a global "market".
This provision often happened in the context of the family or social group. I use the term social group broadly speaking here, so for any purpose be it religious, cultural, military, state, etc. It also happened through existing social and political structures of power. I apologize at this juncture because I am now sounding like the aforementioned Marxist theorists. What I am really driving at is that in the past, there were civil and governmental organizations which determined the direction of this implicit promise to look after the next generation. The church maintained it's own enormous hierarchy and direction of thousands of lives and their collective power. The state and it's various tributary arms (be they military, judicial, legislative, etc) did the same. Civil society (guilds, societies, companies, etc) operated in much the same way. These structures had evolved from previous structures in feudal times which revolved more around family, feudal and local agglomerations.
Today these structures, while not dispensed with entirely, are enormously diminished from a power perspective. Power has instead been centralized between an administrative state and a market which determines what should and should not be purchased to the overall benefit of the collective good via the pensions mechanism which dominate our society. It sounds odd to talk of collective good when thinking about finance but in reality it's pensions which, at least until recently and this demented surge to turn your house into your pension fund, have driven the choices which are made from an investment perspective by our pension funds
But whither the old collective pension funds, whither the last vestiges of our old societal constraints. Today we are now all saving into our individual pension funds where we are apportioned what we put in with the delta of a series of personal investment decisions which we may want to make, or we may not want to make. With this final change, alongside the rise of the home ownership pension fund, the last vestiges of our old structure are finally disappearing. It is not that the elderly sit atop all others at the top of the pyramid, but that the pyramid is effectively now dictated by a force subject not to the will of human beings, but to the will of the market. And god knows where that will take us.
