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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Samual Francis on Immigration and the Ruling Class My topic is the theory of elites in American society as developed by Sam Francis, and about the role that mass immigration plays in that theory. As far as I know, Francis did not fully and explicitly explain in a single essay or article why he believed mass immigration became one of the major underpinnings of the contemporary American ruling class—as he understood it—but I do know he believed that immigra- tion was in fact an integral component of the means by which con- temporary elites maintain and expand their social, political, and cul- tural power in the United States today. Francis made this explicit in an introduction to America Extin- guished: Mass Immigration and the Disintegration of American Culture, a collection of his newspaper columns on immigration. He wrote: The truth is that support for immigration comes from the ruling class, from . . . businesses and organizations that represent the most powerful forces in American economic, political, and cul- tural life, and these forces support immigration for one simple reason: it brings them money and power. Francis alluded to this question in numerous columns and essays, but I don’t believe he fully developed that view in a single work or essay, or explained comprehensively just exactly how immigration brings money and power to the ruling class. That is what I will try to do today—to present a general outline of Francis’s theory of elites and show how Francis viewed the role of immigration in that theory of elite behavior. The information I will present comes from a variety of his columns, essays, speeches, private This is a lightly-edited version of a lecture delivered at a conference sponsored by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, ”Shots Fired: Sam Francis on America’s Cul- ture War,” at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C., March 20, 2007. The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, Winter 2007–2008 32 I will first discuss the basic outlines of Francis’s understanding of elite behavior, and then I’ll examine how mass immigration serves the interests of those elites. The phrase “ruling class” usually does not sit well with people who regard themselves as conservatives. To many conservatives the words “ruling class” sound like some sort of left-wing curse, usually hurled dishonestly at conservatives. But in reality, the phrase “ruling class” does not have a pejorative meaning—it is simply a neutral description of a social and political reality. That reality is simply this: There is a class of people, always a mi- nority, that rules, and a class of people, always a majority, that is ruled. A ruling class is simply that group of people in every society that performs political functions, tends to monopolize power, and en- joys all the benefits and advantages that power brings. Ruling classes can themselves be stratified, with some people hold- ing the formal titles of power, while others, who might not hold for- mal positions or titles of office, are able nonetheless to influence the exercise of power through their contacts, their wealth, or their ability to direct social forces or lead constituencies that can influence the for- mal governing group. For the purposes of our discussion, one of the most significant char- acteristics of a ruling class or elite is the fact that all ruling classes rule through the use of a myth or ideology that explains, justifies, and le- gitimizes their rule. In an unpublished manuscript, Francis explained that elites, or rul- ing classes, “do not hold power purely through force and intimida- tion. They formulate doctrines that rationalize or justify their control in logical, moral, theological, or philosophical ways.” He provided this example from history: The ideology of the landed elite of seventeenth century England, for example, did not baldly assert that crown and parliament must protect the rights of privileges of landed property because it was in the material interests of the landed elite to do so. Rather, it presented a set of formal arguments, drawn from reli- gious, historical, legal, and philosophical sources, that the power and privileges attached to landed property were morally right and socially necessary. It is unlikely that very many members of the landed elite doubted the truth of this ideology. In other words, elites do not simply make up their ideologies out of whole cloth. The members of elites generally believe in their own ide- ologies, and they try to behave consistently with their implications. So a myth or ideology identifies the interests of the elites and de- fends them, but does not do so overtly, but in a way that satisfies both the elite and those classes outside the elite that power is institutional- ized in a form regarded as just and that serves the interests and rights of everyone. Ideologies are not generated spontaneously. They evolve through a process that Francis described this way: An ideology often builds upon elements of belief that were gen- erally accepted prior to the rise of the elite that espouses it (and often such elements are themselves the remnants of older ide- ologies of earlier elites), but these elements . . . are reinterpreted or adapted to fit the new ideology that the new elite formulates and imposes. The process of imposition varies . . . but common instruments of ideological imposition in history . . . have been churches, schools, art and literature, and the press and other media of mass communication, all of which may possess official or semi-official ties to and privileges from the regime of the elite. . . . In any society, different individuals, sects and schools of thought formulate a variety of ideas. Some of these ideas are more or less consistent with the perceived interests of the elite, which tends to sponsor or promote them and those who formu- late them; while other ideas are not useful to its perceived inter- ests or appear to represent a threat, and the elite tends to ignore or suppress them and their sources. This process of selection leads to the evolution of an ideology. The myth or ideology also serves to integrate the ruled with the rul- ers, uniting them in a very broad common outlook. “Only by the ideo- logical integration of the population at large can the elite obtain more or less spontaneous obedience and deference . . . ,” Francis wrote. “An ideology that successfully integrates a society is often called a ‘public orthodoxy’ and dissent from it is frequently subject to severe sanc- tions.” To understand how Francis applied this view of ruling elites to contemporary America, we must turn to the work of James Burnham, because Francis was very much influenced by Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution. The theory has had some lasting influence and has sparked consid- erable controversy. It is also very rich and complex theory, much too complex to go into great detail here. But Francis agreed with several major parts of the theory, so we will just cover those parts relevant to our discussion, albeit in a very general, perhaps oversimplified, way. The core of the theory of the managerial revolution is that the en- trepreneurial or bourgeois elite that prevailed in Western and Ameri- can societies in the nineteenth century is being replaced by a new elite of technically skilled “managers” who will over time undermine the economic, political, and cultural institutions, beliefs, and moral codes of bourgeois society and construct a new set of institutions and social values that reflect the needs and interests of the managers. We’ll examine the nature of those “managers” in just a minute. Francis emphasized that the origins of managerial society lay in the revolution of mass and scale in economics and population that erupted in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century. The central characteristic of that revolution consists in the vast and dramatic enlargement of organized, civilized human activity—that is, the growth of mass populations concentrated in huge urban areas, the development of large factories and offices for mass economic production, the emergence of mass consumption by mass markets, and other organized mass activities such as voting, electioneering, communicating, and entertaining. The inability of traditional capital markets to finance the huge sums required for giant enterprises in the new mass society—such as rail- roads, for example—helped spur the growth of corporations that raised capital by selling shares of ownership to a very large number of investors. The size and scope of these new economic projects obliged corpora- tions to hire and depend on technically trained professionals—that is, managers—who understood the details and operations of new tech- nologies of economic production and possessed the training and skills for organizing mass production and distribution on a mass scale. The owners of the corporation—that is, the scattered shareholders— possessed neither the cohesion as a group nor the required skills to participate in the day-to-day economic operations of the corporations. One of the main sources for Burnham’s theory came from a work by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means entitled The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Berle and Means found that independently owned business firms were declining in numbers and importance in America and were be- ing replaced by the managerial-style firms, that is, the corporations in which the stock is owned by one group while the operation and con- trol are maintained by a different group, the managers. Berle and Means noted that this separation between ownership and control meant that those who operated and controlled the means of production no longer had a vested interest in the rights of the prop- erty of the owners. The managers of large corporations therefore had no direct economic stake in opposing a significant governmental role in the economy as much as traditional entrepreneurial business firms had. At the same time, the natural tendency of government to grow was no longer restrained with the same strength once displayed by bour- geois economic forces that traditionally favored limited government, but which were now in decline. Burnham explored the social ramifications of this separation of con- trol and ownership, and refined and extended the concept of manage- rialism to other social institutions besides the corporation. Managers, in Burnham’s theory, were not only the operating executives and pro- duction managers, but also those bureaucratic administrators in gov- ernment agencies who shared the same skills and what Burnham called the same “habits of mind.” Burnham expanded the definition of manager to include not only the board of directors of corporations, but also any professional or ex- ecutive who contributed to the technical control of production, and by further extension, to any professional whose expertise was essential to running any large-scale organization. Thus, to Burham and Francis, the manager can be not only a corporate professional, but also a gov- ernment bureaucrat or administrator of any large organization con- cerned with social and cultural affairs. What has come to distinguish the new ruling elites is not their legal, formal ownership of the means of production, but their proficiency and control of the apparatus of economic, social, and governmental organizations. Besides extending the idea of the manager, Burnham expanded the concept of technology to include a broader sense than is usually un- derstood. To Burnham, technology includes not only the applications of physical science to economic production, but also the applications of social science to human activity. That includes such disciplines as public relations and advertising, which more or less came to rely on human psychology and other investigations into human behavior. Francis believed that even “mass organizations themselves are a form of social technology, and there are a number of more or less scientific disciplines or technologies that facilitate the organization of large numbers of people within single social structures.” Among the new social structures of mass society are the bureaucra- tized mass state and its manifold agencies affecting nearly every as- pect of human activity. In the economy, they are the mass corpora- tions and labor unions. They are also reflected in society through giant universities and mass public education, as well as mass media and communications systems designed to reach millions, and mass asso- ciations and clubs whose members also number in the millions. In a 1991 address to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Francis sum- marized the social ramifications of the revolution this way: The large scale and complexity of mass organizations, and their dependence on highly technical functions and the skills that per- form them, serve to create elites . . . that differ in composition, structure, mentality, and interests from those that presided over the prescriptive civilizations of Europe prior to the industrial and democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, and from those that ruled nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe and America. As we know, Francis believed that every ruling elite arrives with its own ideology, and the new managerial ruling class was no different. As a result, the new managerial elite came into conflict not just with the old elite of independent business owners that it was replacing, but also the old ideas that the old elite represented. In a very general way, the old ideology of the bourgeois capitalist society is represented by traditionalist, conservative forces. And the new managerial ideology—in the United States—is represented by modern liberalism. The conflict between them has had both political and cultural con- sequences. In his book on Burnham, Power and History, Francis gives this de- scription of the political conflict: Politically, traditional entrepreneurial capitalism tended to pro- mote parliamentary government and a decentralized political structure. Socially and intellectually, entrepreneurial capitalism had been associated with individualism, with the nuclear family, individualized religion, and an emphasis on individual respon- sibility and action. Internationally, capitalism had been associ- ated with the nation-state. . . . All these institutions and values expressed the economic and political interests of the old entre- preneurial elite; they were justified in terms of entrepreneurial ideologies, and they were now about to be replaced by new and very different institutions and values reflecting the ideologies and interests of the new managerial class. Under the new system, managers shift power away from decentral- ized parliamentary bodies and toward the administrative bureaus of the expanded state. The executive branch of government and its auxil- iaries in the bureaucracy work to undermine and supersede the older assemblies such as state legislatures, and local governments. In an unpublished note, Francis gave this general description of the social and cultural conflict: When one ruling class or elite gives way to a new one, the sys- tem of morality, religion, manners, and taste by which the one legitimized its dominance also gives way to a new system com- patible with the interests of the new elite. From the perspective of the old elite and its adherents, the transition appears to be an abandonment of all morality, a period of anarchy and the tri- umph of vulgarity. But what appears to them in this light, will seem to the emerging elite and its apologists to be a period of liberation, creativity, and progress. Thus, the complaint of . . . conservatives today is that the family, patriotism, sexual moral- ity, religion, and common courtesy all are in a condition of abso- lute collapse. What is collapsing, however, is simply the system of legitimization by which the bourgeois elite supported its so- cial power . . . Francis believed the new managerial elite displaced the older bour- geoisie as the dominant force in politics, the economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. The new elite found a rationale for its as- pirations in the ideology of liberalism, which offered justifications for the enlargement of the state and its fusion with other mass organiza- tions such as corporations and unions, mass universities, large foun- dations, and the mass media. Francis sometimes referred to the new ideology as managerial hu- manism. This ideology has several salient features, but I’ll mention just three major pillars of it that were important to Francis’s analysis. First, managerial humanism promotes and feeds on social change. Managerial humanism believes that human beings and their social and economic activities can be managed by the same skills and tech- niques applied to inert materials. In other words, management skills can manipulate people just as management skills can manipulate mass production and distribution of goods and services. One need only have the right experts who are able to skillfully apply the right techni- cal principles to achieve the desired end. Conservatives know this as- pect of managerial ideology as social engineering. Francis believed this drive for social change was at the heart of the managerial system. In his essay, “State and Revolution,” that ap- peared in Chronicles, he wrote: As it is presently constituted, the mega-state exists for the pur- pose of social manipulation. Its elite, trained in the techniques of social engineering and social therapy, gains power and budget- ary resources by inventing social problems and crises, and then designing and applying solutions for them. On the importance of social change in the morality of this ideology, Francis quoted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of the leading proponents of progressive liberalism, who wrote the following very revealing passage in his book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom: The reform of institutions becomes an indispensable part of the enterprise of democracy. Given human imperfection, society will continue to be imperfect. Problems will always torment us. . . . The good comes from the continuing struggle to try to solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution. What he is saying, in effect, is that the good, or even goodness itself, resides in the government programs themselves, and not in their effi- cacy. Second, managerialism promotes cosmopolitanism. The system sees human beings as interchangeable units. It is an abstract view of man that tends to ignore or reject the importance or significance of his historical and cultural roots in differentiated groups and local com- munities. In fact, these characteristics are often seen as impediments and barriers to what the managerial system regards as social progress. To the earlier elites of pre-managerial society, kinship, social connec- tions, and local loyalties were seen as being of special importance in defining one’s relationship to the larger community and differentiat- ing groups and persons. By seeking to eliminate these differences through its cosmopolitan universalism, managerialism tends to cate- gorize or see men through the use of a low common denominator, one that features or emphasizes simply what all men have in common, which is mainly their appetites. Third, managerial ideology believes expansion of the state and the application of managerial skills to virtually every facet of society is a public good, because managerial ideology sees itself as socially thera- peutic. Managerialism promotes the use of state power and money as solutions to every social and economic problem. This enhances the power of managers by increasing their scope of operations, and cre- ates new managerial agencies that will require new managers, bu- reaucracies and budgets. In his 1991 speech to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Francis bril- liantly characterized this aspect of managerial humanism: By discovering ever new technical dimensions of normal social life and redefining social life as a series of technical problems, the elite—in the state, economy, and culture—is able to locate new opportunities for extending its power. In the early part of the [twentieth] century, the elite discovered economic disloca- tions such as unemployment, underproduction, labor disputes, and slums to which it could apply its technical skills and by which its power could be enlarged. More recently, the elite has discovered social and cultural dislocations—crime, drugs, family breakdown, racism, homophobia, sexism, sexual harassment, il- literacy, homelessness, child abuse, spouse abuse, environmental abuse, AIDS, gun ownership, smoking, junk food, alcohol, date rape, Eurocentrism, etc., for which it has a bottomless supply of sciences, therapies, and technologies from which it can expect to gain even more power. Now that brings us to the question of immigration and how it serves the interests of the managerial system. No doubt the manage- rial system can continue to operate just as it has without mass immi- gration. But mass immigration provides the opportunity to accelerate the drive of the managerial system for more power and increasing so- cial change. Given the nature of the system and its ideology, there are many possible ways that mass immigration can be seen to serve those inter- ests, but I’ll mention just four of the ways that Sam Francis often stressed in his writings. First, immigration serves the interests of the ruling class by fueling expansion of the state. Consider the impact on public education. The more immigrants that come, the more the schools will need bi-lingual education programs, for example. That means bigger budgets and more managers to run the programs. Just a few years ago, the Cali- fornia Research Center of the University of California complained that Spanish speaking students made up 80 percent of students with lim- ited proficiency in English. In a report, the Center noted that those students routinely scored low on academic achievement tests. The Center then suggested that the state of California will have to spend more money to meet the needs of these immigrant students. That means bigger budgets and expanded programs that will have to be administered and managed. Importing large numbers of low-skilled workers has a similar effect on the demand for government intervention nationally. The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., released a study entitled, cluded that immigrant use of public assistance continues to be signifi- cantly higher than that of the native-born. When larger numbers of people receive the benefits of the welfare state, it becomes increasingly difficult for political opponents of the welfare state to argue for its dismantlement. As the state creates more and more dependents, the constituency for it grows in power and in- fluence. There are many, many other ways that immigration fuels the ex- pansion of the managerial state. The California Research Center, which represents just one small managerial apparatus in just one state, had plenty of recommendations to make to deal with mass immigra- tion, including the following—all of which call for expansion of the state: 1. Increase the number of labor law enforcement personnel to make sure immigrants are not unfairly exploited; 2. Provide for state-sponsored education to teach labor laws to immigrant businessmen; 3. Expand health care coverage for non-English speaking and poor immigrants; 4. Establish state adult education programs for immigrants; 5. Expand public school curricula to teach what they called “practical life skills” for living in America, to help them inte- grate into society; 6. Establish state-funded community organizations to help pro- tect immigrants’ rights; 7. Transform schools into neighborhood training centers in towns and cities where immigrants have settled in large num- bers; 8. Seek a new state-federal partnership to ensure that the state receives federal funding for immigration-impact assistance. Many of these recommendations are already being implemented, not just in California, but throughout the country. Second, immigration fuels the power, activism, and expansion of left-wing community organizations and labor unions that have great influence on, and important connections with, the ruling class. With mass immigration, they will have lots of community organizing to do and marches and demonstrations to plan in order to demand social justice and more of those very same government programs I just men- tioned. It also provides the opportunity to those left-wing groups and organizations to apply for more government grants to apply manage- rial therapy to the social ills caused by importing low-skilled labor. Those groups, many of which are already federally funded, include MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund), LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens), the National Council of La Raza, and countless hundreds of local advo- cacy community groups scattered throughout the country. According to the late Rep. Charlie Norwood of Georgia, The National Council of La Raza received as much as $15 million in 2006 from the federal gov- ernment to operate its various immigrant-related programs. Third, immigration augments the economic strength of a major so- cial and economic component of the ruling class, namely its corporate constituency. The people pushing for more immigration in the private sector are the people who stand to profit from it. They include soft- ware giants such as Microsoft and other high-tech corporations, the construction industry, the hotel and restaurant business, and of course agribusiness, as well as the national US Chamber of Commerce, which represents a variety of commercial interests. In 2004, the Center for Immigration Studies issued a report entitled, “Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration.” It found what any free market economist would have suspected, namely, that when you increase the supply of a commodity, such as labor, the price falls. The study found that the effects of mass immigration on wages and salaries were different depending on which labor group was being ex- amined. But overall, immigration was providing business with cheaper labor. For high school drop-outs, immigration lowered wages by 7.4 percent. For college graduates, 3.6 percent. For high school graduates and those with some college, wages were lowered at least 2 percent. There’s no need to wonder why the Wall Street Journal calls for abol- ishing America’s borders. Fourth, mass immigration is used by the managerial system to un- dermine and overthrow the remnants of the old traditional order that it seeks to eradicate, thus enhancing its social power and removing impediments to its continued expansion. Francis described the fourth use of immigration this way: Third World immigration allows for the importation of a new underclass and provides unglimpsed vistas of social manipula- tion in the form of new opportunities for managing civil rights and ethnic conflict. . . . Government elites thus anticipate using immigration as a fulcrum of bureaucratic power, and they will have allies in other elites, public or private, that can advance their own agenda of managing social change and displacing tra- ditional cultural institutions through the care and feeding of immigrants. Hate crime laws, racial sensitivity courses, and anti- Western curricula are among the instruments for imposing a new cosmopolitan cultural hegemony and plowing under Euro- American patterns of culture. In response to the efforts by American elites to undermine tradi- tional American habits, values, and customs, Sam Francis recom- mended that conservatives must adopt an insurgent, rather than a de- fensive strategy. Francis believed that the dominant social and politi- cal elites in the United States today not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival. In “Winning the Cul- ture War,” his 1993 address to the American Cause Foundation, Fran- cis wrote: “If our culture is going to be conserved, we need to de- throne the dominant authorities that threaten it.” Whatever the flaws or merits of Sam Francis’s theory of elite behav- ior and the role of immigration, it remains an important contribution to conservative thought and deserves serious study and attention.
Poster Comment: The "elites" are the enemies of America.
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Good stuff, thanks for posting it. According to Mozilla Firefox, Managerialism is not a word.
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