I wrote quite a controversial piece titled “Freedom from Boomers” that generated mixed responses. People either loved it or hated it. Predictably, the baby Boomers didn’t enjoy having a mirror being held up to them.
However, it’s important to address a deeper and more structural point on the economic architecture that gave rise to, and at the same time was created by, this generation and its overarching elite. I call them parasitic because of how they enrich themselves passively rather than creatively or through effort. They extract wealth from the real economy while separating wealth from value and responsibility. I will explain why this system is causing our demographic collapse and a lack of development and hope for the future. It is the primary cause of stagnation, besides government enrichment through taxation.
The current economic system is best described as a rentier gerontocracy. My theory is that wealth concentration in the hands of this unproductive class is leading to our civilizational decline. This may sound Marxist. Most conservatives use “Marxist” as a buzzword to insult their counterparts. However, I’m not a Marxist. As someone who was required to learn about Karl Marx at length while studying political philosophy, I feel confident enough to make this claim.
Marx believed that all existing problems could be reduced to the modes of production of a society (the structure). According to this theory, capitalism, our mode of production, is the base on which an ideology (the superstructure) is constructed whereby, for example, competition and individualism are being promoted as normal. Similarly, in the Middle Ages, feudalism, an economic system, created an ideology whereby a monarchy was defined as God-given. It’s a relativist philosophy. His theory is called historical materialism because history is understood through this materialistic lens. However, capitalists also make a similar argument: The only way society can prosper is through the growth and opportunities provided by free-market competition. The material world is the driver, and everything comes from it alone.
Debates on capitalism vs. socialism are myopic because both lenses are fundamentally materialist and two sides of the same coin. Julius Evola argued why this was a false dichotomy:
The true antithesis is not between capitalism and Marxism, but between a system in which the economy rules supreme (no matter in what form) and a system in which the economy is subordinated to extra-economic factors, within a wider and more complete order, such as to bestow a deep meaning upon human life and foster the development of its highest possibilities. This is the premise for a true restorative reaction, beyond “Left” and “Right,” beyond capitalism’s abuses and Marxist subversion. The necessary conditions are an inner detoxification and a renewed capability to differentiate between base and noble interests.
I could be accused of reducing human desires to those base interests for focusing on this parasitic class and the economic stagnation it creates as the leading cause of our civilizational decline. But in reality, I’m only doing so to suggest that freedom from this paradigm is the only way forward. Today, we are living in neither a capitalist (if we understand this to mean equal opportunity) nor a socialist (if we understand this to mean economic equality) system, but we are still living in a highly materialist society. Due to the economic lens itself and the generation that has created it and makes it our only option, our society remains fixated on a life predicated on the idea that passive enrichment for ourselves devoid of any purpose is the ultimate goal we should aspire towards.
Marx critiqued an economy in which the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, extracted wealth from its workers. Little did Marx know our society would become post-capitalist; now this bourgeoisie class has morphed into living off services that are largely based on speculative finance (consulting, hedge fund managing, etc.).
Instead of creating real value in a society through production, innovation, and artisanship, to name a few sectors, our financial system today preys on companies by “investing” in them only to extract wealth from their labor through interest rates to create a passive lifestyle for themselves. Similarly, this same generation has bought the majority of the housing market (a primary good), only to rent it to others, another form of passive wealth extraction that is directly correlated with the inability of younger generations to own a home for themselves and create families. The third, and last, way the parasitic class accumulates wealth today is through government power: this same enriched generation benefits from social security and a pension system by taxing the work of those coming after them, after having deprived them of most of the assets in the working economy, making it therefore structurally almost impossible for their descendants to build a future. They are living in a situation analogous to a plant lacking soil and water to properly flourish while its fruits are being picked out.
This is also known as usury, and why most religions forbid it, especially when this system preys on primary needs necessary for any civil and functioning society to prosper. In ancient Greece and Rome, usury was heavily restricted and regulated. All Abrahamic faiths forbid usury, with Judaism forbidding it only among Israelites. This economic system is largely how our ruling class accumulated their wealth, and why they still live off of it while the economy becomes incrementally poorer. It’s why we can no longer grow and offer basic opportunities. Whereas elderly generations once carried wisdom and passed down a heritage and a legacy to their descendants (and this is why they were cherished and taken care of), this concept has now been inverted, and the parasitic class today votes to perpetuate the system that is extracting wealth from the very future of a nation. That’s a failure of democracy.
However, this is no longer exclusive to our ruling class, though they obviously benefit the most from an architecture they’ve created for themselves. The “offshoot” for young people is that, because of the desperation of having to survive in this rigged system, they open an OnlyFans account or invest in crypto. More depletion of human resources, and more economic stagnation and social regression.
Most of us, still, if we have accumulated enough wealth, invest to try to live off of as much passive income as we can while leaving the capital itself untouched because this is what our economy offers to escape a survival-mode of living. The problem with this model is that it creates an incentive of enrichment devoid of basic responsibility towards anyone but oneself (sometimes, not even to one’s own family), a ruthless zero-sum game where we all become each other’s enemy, and we turn our gaze away from the value that wealth can create.
It’s no coincidence that the financial system collapsed. Investors were delegating responsibilities to a manager who diversified their portfolio to make their investments more “secure” until no one knew what they were investing in anymore, because they didn’t care. Again: not having any clue where your wealth goes as long as you receive more in return by doing as little as possible. The system fell under its own weight, only for banks to be bailed out using the money of the productive class and the bubble to continue. This economic system is unsustainable (as we’re seeing through rising debt, inflation, and plummeting birth rates) because it is by nature parasitic: It extracts produce from where it’s supposed to be - the engine of the economy itself. The fact that the resources are used to pursue a leisure lifestyle, particularly for Boomers and the elite that created it, adds another layer of hypocrisy and dissolution of the trust and social fabric that binds a society together.
To take an example, during the Renaissance, noble families invested through patronage; they would enjoy those arts themselves and share them as works of beauty with their people in a plaza or use them to pursue their political ambitions. The statue of Perseus and Medusa in Florence was commissioned by the Medici family as proof of their political might over rival families. In doing so, they allowed artists to thrive. They also invested in literature and translations from ancient texts, allowing philosophers, writers, and translators to make a living. They were “investors” in something that did not create monetary cash return through interest rates but another form of wealth that cannot be quantified. The statue by Benvenuto Cellini has gifted our civilization with a piece of art that holds priceless value. We are richer because of it. We are not richer today in these terms any longer because our economic system works against producing this kind of timeless, intrinsic wealth. Conservatives lamenting the loss of beautiful art, for example, rarely examine the economic architecture that is causing us to become spiritually and culturally impoverished.
Wealth in history, and wealth inequality, has always existed. But the difference between modernity and the past is simple: Wealth used to be commensurate with a sense of obligation. A King lived in opulence, but this extravagance was directly proportional to his sense of duty towards his subjects. Aristocracies enjoyed, at least, the use of wealth towards a higher purpose, similarly to what Evola envisioned (though he theorized on an aristocracy of the soul, as he was not a Christian), which made the wealth more justified in the eyes of their subjects. When this did not take place, as happened with King Louis XVI, a violent revolution unfolded in France. I’m not a reactionary making the case for a return to an aristocracy, rather making a point on the responsibility tied to wealth and how this creates more social harmony rather than breeding resentment and atomization.
Riches were meant to be tied to a sense of service towards the well-being of the members of your family, your tribe, or your realm. Of course, there were conflicts, feuds, even wars. But the parasitic class in post-capitalist, Western liberal democracies is inevitably marked by a sense of living outside the margins of society, through idleness and entitlement because they profit off depletion. For the wealthy today, doing something for the common good is merely a choice while they continue to enrich themselves from the work of others they know nothing about and don’t want anything to do with.
Generational wealth should at least require this parasitic class to become patrons or to engage in any kind of service and contribution (it could be as simple as opening a book club). Wealth should return to its intended purpose, which is to create value. We should start asking ourselves whether how wealth is managed today has something to do with the loss of our civilizational principles. You don’t need to be a reactionary nostalgic or a Bolshevik revolutionary to make a case against modern parasitism. We should find a new economic system, free from old ideological stigmas, compatible with our modern, technological life that restores value to wealth beyond self-indulgence.
Alessandra Bocchi is founder and editor of Alata Magazine and artist at Painting Life.
This was a great read. It’s one of those fascinating observations whereby you raise it with people (even the old) and they intuitively know it. Granted, as soon as you talk about the next steps (I.e. retracting resources) they get defensive (“I paid in to this system!”) but it doesn’t detract from the underlying agreement on the observation.
This is one of the many topics I’m exploring through my book, which my Substack is a vehicle for socialising the key ideas. I also draw on Marx to isolate productive labour capacity as the sole driver of value creation. I don’t make any moral arguments (which Marx leaned on heavily) but I do assess our world through the lens of what a purely value-driven framework would think about our world.
Thanks again for the great essay
The article correctly senses that something is deeply wrong, but repeatedly mistakes government-created privilege and monetary distortion for free market capitalism itself.
And the irony is that the article condemns this political economy while repeatedly demanding another political authority to correct it.
The crucial distinction the article misses is between voluntary exchange and political privilege. Subsidies, bailouts, central-bank manipulation, regulatory barriers, government pensions, compulsory taxation, and monetary inflation aren't evidence of free market capitalism failing. They're evidence of political power corrupting the market and redistributing wealth through political coercion.
Calling property owners, investors, landlords, financiers, and retirees a “parasitic class” doesn't explain how they acquired their wealth. Ownership is not parasitism. Earning a return on capital is not exploitation. Voluntary exchange is not a zero-sum game in which one person must lose for another to gain.
The article is right that wealth without purpose can produce a spiritually impoverished society. But that isn't proof that private property or capital accumulation is inherently parasitic.
The real parasite is the political system that allows one group to obtain wealth by coercively taking it from another—and then calls the resulting arrangement an economy.