From Mises.org:
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....Secular improvement that is taken for granted and coupled with individual insecurity that is acutely resented is of course the best recipe for breeding social unrest. (pp. 159–160)
Therefore, capitalism, by providing a previously unknown standard of living — unobtainable through other forms of social organization — actually undermines its own support, essentially by performing its tasks too well, so that the origin of prosperity is overlooked by its greatest beneficiaries.
This brings us to another of Schumpeter's pathbreaking contributions to understanding capitalism: his work on the "Sociology of the Intellectual." As mentioned above, eroding social protections of capitalism and feelings of grievance against the system itself provide the basis for an assault on the capitalist system. All that remains is that "there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it, and to lead it" (p. 160). The intellectual class provides this driving force.
The intellectuals watch the economic process from the sidelines; by definition, they essentially have no direct experience in economic affairs. However, they wield decisive power in influencing public opinion, and their bias is strongly anticapitalist. They represent a very real threat to the capitalist system.....
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....Capitalism provides the means the intellectuals require to attack it: innovations that make disseminating opinion both possible and extremely inexpensive; education delivered to enough of the population to provide an audience big enough to influence lasting social changes; and perhaps most important, capitalism encourages the principle of freedom of expression which is necessary for public criticism of social institutions (pp. 155–179).
Schumpeter's insights into the sociological and psychological characteristics of the intellectual class are breathtaking:
The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.… All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unsatisfactorily unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals … whose numbers increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into … social criticism … [and] moral disapproval of the capitalist order. (pp. 173–175)
Thus the intellectual opposition is built and supplied with weapons by the very system that it opposes. Through no fault of its own, the capitalist system is attacked by those whose very occupations are made possible by the efforts of the entrepreneurs and capitalists who drive the economy in a ceaseless process of innovation and improvement.....
https://mises.org/library/can-capitalism-survive
We'll be back next week with more Schumpeter, some Turchin and a special guest.
