Professor EXPOSES the Transatlantic Epstein Class (Formation) | Prof. Kees v.d. Pijl

## Atlantic ruling class A striking theme that runs through the conversation is the idea that contemporary Western governance is best understood not as the outcome of isolated state decisions but as the expression of a transnational ruling class. This is not a conspiracy theory of a single cabal pulling strings, but a sociological process of class formation: a segment of capital—marked by shared economic interests, occupational backgrounds and lifestyles—coheres into a socially and politically dominant formation. Over the twentieth century, this “Atlantic ruling class” crystallized around particular modes of production, institutions and imaginaries that made its rule both effective and acceptable to broad swathes of the population. The conversation highlights how ruling-class cohesion depends on two intertwined elements: economic primacy and ideological appeal. Historically, leadership within the capitalist class has shifted with the dominant sources of profit. When mass manufacturing (Fordism) was the engine of prosperity, social order was held together by workplace discipline, standardized consumption and the promise of steady improvement. Later, as finance and then information technologies came to dominate, the ruling group reconfigured itself—seeking to appropriate the largest share of profits while projecting a vision of society that made that appropriation appear desirable or inevitable. Class formation, in this view, is not simply structural; it is also cultural and psychological. The material clout of a capital fraction is reinforced by its capacity to produce “magical” narratives—about mobility, innovation, freedom, or mastery over nature and information—that attract younger generations and legitimize its ascendancy. The Atlantic ruling class, in its various incarnations, has thus governed by shaping what counts as the good life and the sensible political horizon. ## Marxism and class power One of the most useful conceptual moves in the exchange is to put class formation before system determinism. Rather than treating a static economic structure as mechanically producing political outcomes, the conversation leans on a more dynamic reading of Marx: class is a social formation that acts strategically, ideologically and institutionally. Kees van der Pijl argues that Marxian theory—properly understood—offers an indispensable analytic toolkit for grasping this process. Marx is presented not as a dogmatic monocausal determinist but as a foundational thinker whose insights about the relation between economic power and social-ideational leadership remain central. This perspective complicates common caricatures of Marxism. It invites scholars to re-engage with Marx’s method as a way to analyze how particular fractions of capital—finance, technology, media, intelligence—come to set the agenda for broad swaths of political life. The conversation also recognizes that the political failures and historical discrediting of twenty-century communist projects have left critical social theory marginalized in many academic institutions; yet those failures do not erase the analytical value of class-centred critique. Instead, by focusing on class formation rather than on deterministic economic laws, the analysis accommodates contingency, agency and the ideational work that sustains rule. ## Zionism tech and elite networks Perhaps the most controversial and eye-opening thread in the discussion concerns the intersection of technological innovation, intelligence communities and the geopolitical loyalties that animate elite networks—specifically, the influence of pro-Israel (Zionist) elements within the transatlantic ruling formation. The conversation documents how, after the Cold War, a new triangle of power emerged: Silicon Valley tech, consolidated media conglomerates, and intelligence services. Where these three sectors intersect, they create a powerful infrastructure for surveillance, narrative-shaping and strategic intervention. Historically, these networks did not form in a vacuum. Investments, personnel exchanges and institutional partnerships—some with explicit links to Israeli firms and intelligence—helped globalize certain Israeli technological and security paradigms. The emergence of venture vehicles connected to intelligence communities, and the role of private data firms in facilitating military operations, show how commercial technologies are woven into the fabric of geopolitical power. This entanglement raises acute questions about accountability, the exportation of surveillance practices, and the loyalties that animate elite decision-making when national interests, corporate profit and ideological commitments overlap. The analysis does not suggest a monolithic Zionist conspiracy; rather it points to a sectoral ascendancy in which identification with a foreign-state project can become a defining axis of elite alignment. Where members of the ruling formation prioritise the fate of an allied polity or ideological cause, their policy choices and institutional affinities will reflect that orientation—often with profound consequences for foreign policy, intelligence cooperation and military engagements. ## Globalism Europe and nation states The conversation underscores a broader structural shift: the waning of the nation-state as the pre-eminent container of political authority and the rise of transnational governance networks. Treating 1648 as the end point of politics obscures the historical contingency of state sovereignty. The Atlantic ruling class itself is pictured as a stage in an evolving sequence of capitalist political formations. When the geometry of profit shifts—first to manufacturing, then to finance, then to digital platforms and security services—the organizational architecture through which elites exert influence changes with it. European institutions, NATO, think-tank networks and forums of elite socialisation—where personnel circulate between corporate boardrooms, state bureaucracies and philanthropic networks—form the connective tissue that sustains transnational governance. These structures allow elites to coordinate policy preferences across borders, to normalise particular economic models, and to orchestrate interventions in other states. The net effect is that political judgment increasingly follows the logics of capital fractions and networked elites rather than the traditional calculus of territorial national interest. This has normative and strategic implications. It explains why conventional international-relations paradigms—rooted in methodological nationalism and state-centrism—struggle to predict key behaviours of Western governments. Policies that look irrational from a nation-state perspective may make sense as expressions of transnational class interests, shared institutional cultures or cross-border elite solidarities. ## Resistance and collective values If ruling-class cohesion depends on the social acceptance of its vision, then resistance must be conceived as more than a set of oppositional policies; it must recapture the realm of values, narratives and collective practices. The conversation stresses that elite power is not purely coercive: it rests on the diffusion of imaginaries about what a good life looks like. Counter-hegemonic strategies, therefore, require building alternative imaginaries that speak to shared needs and belonging. This raises difficult strategic questions. How can collective values be articulated in ways that transcend narrow nationalisms but still mobilise ordinary people whose identities are grounded in place and community? The interlocutors suggest that progressive resistance must do both: contest the institutional levers of elite power—regulatory capture, the surveillance economy, military-industrial networks—while also reconstructing public imaginaries of solidarity, common goods and economic arrangements that prioritize social reproduction over extractive accumulation. Y

Professor EXPOSES the Transatlantic Epstein Class (Formation) | Prof. Kees v.d. Pijl If it seems to you as if Western countries are ruled by a bunch of WEF globalist elites that have more in common with each other than with the vast majority of people in their countries, then that is because it's indeed the case. The phenomenon is called "Class Formation" and it's a sociological force. Today I speak with Dr. Kees van der Pijl, emeritus professor of international relations at Sussex, and one of the worlds leading experts on Class formation. We also discuss, Marxism, finance, tech, intelligence, Zionism, and the shift from nation states to transnational power networks. We discuss Europe’s decline, war, BRICS, social collapse, collective values, migration, and the limits of resistance against a violent Western-led order. Links: Kees van der Pijl on Academia.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/KeesVanderPijl Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz. substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack. com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Atlantic ruling class 00:08:25 Marxism and class power 00:11:43 Zionism tech and elite networks 00:18:54 Globalism Europe and nation states 00:40:44 Resistance and collective values 00:47:27 Violence migration and world order 00:54: 44 Russia China Iran and restraint 01:01:54 Guest links and closing #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. I am Pascal Lottaz, and I am joined today by Dr. Kees van der Pijl, an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Sussex University and the author of many books, among them *The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class* and *Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq.* Kees, welcome. Thank you, Pascal. Thank you very much for making time today. You have researched this topic of transnational class formation, among others, and you're trying to take kind of a bird's-eye perspective of how it is that these groups form and then project political power. Can we maybe start a little bit with the first book that I introduced, *The Atlantic Ruling Class*? What do people need to know about it? #Kees v.d. Pijl Well, this is really an idea of how we must imagine that the ruling class rules. The capitalist ruling class is not an economic formation which then imposes itself politically, but it is a social formation which operates on several fronts at the same time. So the capitalist class, and that's the argument of the book, of course, the capitalist class always restructures itself depending on the most successful -- 1 of 16 -- formats of how it operates. So, very simply put, capitalism emerged from trade and early manufacture. And in the time when it did so, the forces associated with these particular forms of capitalist activity were also leading the entire property class. So all different elements in the capitalist class looked to this particular group because they identified it with success—not just economic success in the sense of appropriating a large share of the mass of profits, which is more important than the rate of profit, but also politically, its ability, for instance, to manage foreign relations, its ability to manage social issues and keep society together. Because ultimately, the problem facing every ruling class is how to convince the majority to be governed by a minority. And the book *The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class* actually discusses the period of the 20th century from, well, the late 19th century to the 1980s, when it was published. And the basic transition that we see in that period is actually the shift from intensive manufacturing—you know, the manufacturing of durable consumer goods like cars, mainly—to finance. And when finance appropriates the largest share of the mass of profits, but also is able, by its ideological activity, to imbue society with the idea that we are heading in the right direction if we follow the notion of the self-regulating market—the idea that you only live to make more money, and so on and so forth—once society shifts to embracing that idea generally, even if it's against the interests of most of the people who are not helped by a society entirely dependent on individual economic activity, once it succeeds in convincing the rest of society to go in that direction, a new cohesion, a new consistency of society falls into place. And that happened roughly in the 1970s. Before that time, society was held together by the notion that ultimately you might have a car; you were living in a disciplined society, very much standardized. You know, the whole idea of Fordism, named after Henry Ford, a carmaker, was that not only were there cars, but also society was standardized. People led lives that, well, Gramsci compared to the life of peasants—you had to rise early. You know, you couldn't be dancing all night if the next day you had to appear in your mass production factory and be precise where you put your little screws and so on. Now, at the same time, that was the period of the Cold War. Now, I'm drifting a little bit, but I hope you see the idea is never that there is an economic process which translates itself into politics, but that there is a process of class formation, which means that a particular group within the larger capitalist class moves forward on the basis of what we in Amsterdam at the time called a comprehensive concept of control. It means that you have a vision of society which, on the one hand, is associated with the economic system—so-called capital fractions—which appropriate the largest share of the mass of profits. But on the other hand, it's associated with ideas that are embraced by many people. Like today, for instance, we have the young generation growing up with the Internet. You don't have to explain to them, “Listen, before you embrace the Internet, please realize that Silicon Valley is appropriating the largest share of the mass of profits.” They wouldn't understand what you're talking about. -- 2 of 16 -- The Internet itself has a certain magic, and that magic can be compared to the magic of money, can be compared to the magic of having a private car with four seats in it. These were things that at the time were as intoxicating as the Internet is today. And so when we talk about class formation, we talk about groups that move forward in the economic process but at the same time have the ability to spread ideas that have a magical quality, that inspire young generations, that people associate with the good life, that people associate with, well, sometimes with peace, sometimes with dominating other people. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this can happen anytime again. So please consider subscribing not only here, but to my mailing list on Substack. That's pascallottaz.substack.com. The link's going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. It's quite fascinating because what you're saying here is what other people would then, you know, frame as the output, right? The output of what the system generates, and the output is something that pushes society forward. Therefore, we get mass adoption. But you're kind of doing the other thing. You're saying like, no, no, no. It is the coming together of the class that then constantly tries to justify its own existence by producing new things. And it's... Can I ask you, how does your analysis differ from the closest one that this sounds like to me, which is Marxism? Marxism then says it is the underlying structure of the economy that creates these elites that then abuse, and out of the system's logic have to abuse and further grow and whatnot, and cannibalize on the weaker, and so on. If I understand you correctly, you actually put the class first and not the system, right? #Kees v.d. Pijl Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also think that has to do with how you interpret, you know, Marx. He's a bit like Einstein in physics, you know, in the sense that if Einstein had been isolated for a whole century from academic life, you and I would know Einsteinists and anti-Einsteinists, and so on and so forth. And now it's the same with Marx, because he was so politically too explosive, he was excluded from academic life, and that made people Marxist, or academia basically anti-Marxist. Now, I've always felt, and I was lucky in that, being part of that generation, that Marx was simply the Einstein, or if you will, the Marx-blank of social science, maybe of all science, following on Hegel. And so the idea that anyone would be different from Marx and yet be an advanced social scientist is, for me, hard to take. That does not mean that there are not, in the anti-Marxist tradition, very important thinkers like Karl Polanyi, for instance, in the 1940s with his book *The Great Transformation*, and others who nevertheless made progress. But they made progress in a separate lane, you know. Many aspects of Marxist thinking have still not been fully assimilated in general academic thought, in general social -- 3 of 16 -- theory. And that is because of this long exclusion and the association with profound political changes—an association that in the 20th century went sour—which added to the unattractiveness of the idea of Marxism to the average academic. You know, if the Soviet Union would still exist and it would be flourishing, it would be a different matter. But the fact that it went down also harmed the status of all critical thinking, but especially, of course, of Marxism. #Pascal It did, it did. But, you know, the Marxist critique or analysis still stands very tall and strong as a framework to understand the development of societies as a whole, and especially of these kind of transnational ones that we're looking at. I mean, we try to understand this, right? How is it that you then have whole large groups moving in one direction or another? And you work on this in terms also of ruling classes. You actually also look at Zionism as a political ideology that then is part of how this ruling class at the moment is working or has developed over time. Can you maybe speak about that, and just in general, how these classes that then are not so much interested in the good of their particular country but of their class—how do they work? #Kees v.d. Pijl Well, as I said, at every juncture in social development, there is a sector of the capitalist system, or what we call a capital fraction, which leads the process by projecting, on the one hand, a particular type of society that is seen at the time as particularly attractive, and on the other hand, it's backed up by the fact that it appropriates the largest share in the mass of profits. Now, in the 1990s, the spearhead of capitalist development was embodied in a triangle, you might say, of IT industries—so, let's say, Silicon Valley—and the media, which in the 1990s were consolidated into a handful of very large groups, conglomerates. Especially in the United States, right? Yeah, but some of the largest US conglomerates in the media were also foreign. Like, for instance, Bertelsmann in Germany is a very powerful firm, or concern, but also Murdoch, who of course originally comes from Australia before he set up Fox in the US, and so on. Now, the third of the triangle is the intelligence services. And people often forget that in the 1990s, the intelligence services also became a player on many chessboards. Like, for instance, the CIA set up, basically jointly with the Israeli service Unit 8200, which is the signals intelligence body of the Israeli intelligence world—they set up In-Q-Tel. And In-Q-Tel is an investment firm run by the CIA, which aims at securing the most innovative technology techniques for the American system, and basically through the CIA. So basically, what you now have through Palantir—the ability to surve