It is true to state that most societies have elites. It is equally true to say that MUCH–certainly not all–of the wealth amassed in the 19th century concentrated itself in the hands of industrialists.
But this was an era of real money. It has since concentrated itself in the hands of banks, who are in the business not of making money, but MANUFACTURING it. I have dealt with this many times. Just look at how much M1 has increased since 1970 or so, when we dropped the last vestige of restraint on the creation of new money.
The amount of money in existence has roughly quadrupled since 2000 alone. Do you recall the so-called Quantitative Easing program of the Fed, which it practiced for most of Obama’s two terms? They gave $50 billion a month to Wall Street banks–which also run the Fed, to be clear, who also sit at both tables, to be clear–for something like 80 months straight. That would itself account for the M1 increase from 2008 to present.
But the point I wanted to make is that systems are always run by people, and people always have the same motives: power, greed, and sex. This was true when the Babylonian kings ruled, it was true when the French monarchy ruled, and it was true when the French Revolution replaced it. Something different, but always the same.
Capitalism is CERTAINLY not the enemy: it is an unmitigated boon, which raises all boats–some more than others, but that is to be expected in a fair system, in which you are rewarded in proportion to your contribution.
Our system is not Capitalism, though. I have struggled what to call our system. Perhaps Plutocracy is as close as anything, with the qualifier that it is not just the rich who rule, but those with the power to create money at will.
But the core point is that the enemies of God, of Goodness, of shared power, of generalized prosperity, of freedom and justice worthy of the name, are always the same. They find a variety of words, use a variety of systems, take and wield power in a variety of ways, but their core crimes, and their core deficiencies as human beings do not vary all that much.
The enemy of “the people”, of the ordinary, are people who are incapable of valuing Beauty for its own sake, who are incapable of breathing honest breaths, and truly inhabiting their bodies. Who are incapable of true friendship, true kindness, and true warmth.
Virtuous people do not create monolithic power structures, and people who create such structures are not good people.
But everything comes down to morality, to Goodness, to either feasting on the sumptuous banquet of life directly, or being forced to settle for power and continual, unsatisfied and unsatisfiable hunger.
I am rambling. Perhaps you get what I am saying. People always want cartoon enemies, but in reality our enemies are always relatively dull, scheming, plodding, perceptually unoriginal people who seek power in lieu of life. There is no one simple “them” when the true enemy is dullness itself.