Elites envy subordinate classes’ cohesion because economic necessity bonds the poor together.

Evidence

The mirage held out by the neoethnic groups — it was stronger in the sixties than it is today — is still the cultural envy of the achieved collective: the “groupie,” something of a caricature of the class traitor, is one who casts his or her lot with a collective that is fantasized as being more strongly cohesive and archaic than your own. The class content of the phenomenon persists, since it is a feature of the social dynamic of capitalism (and perhaps of other modes of production) that in a first moment, and before a reaction of panic whereby they pull back together, the ruling class will be less cohesive socially and more given over to individualism and anomie than the subordinate ones, whom economic necessity holds together. If the fundamental premise of any Marxian social psychology lies in the well-nigh ontological attraction and force of gravity of the achieved collective as such, then the envy and nostalgia of elites for the realer people of the underclasses is at once given (and something of the same effects can be distributed spatially, by imperialism and tourism, among the metropolis and the Third World). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 738

Categorization

• XREF: The elite’s cultural envy of the ‘achieved collective’ maps onto the reader’s attempt to locate their own position in the world system — Jameson offers a class-psychological mechanism for why intellectuals romanticize subaltern cultures.