Re: [Marxism] Follow-up from Joel Kovel

["Tony Abdo" <gojack10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The quarrel lies, in that you want to support one element of the ruling
class against what you consider a rogue element of the ruling class, Joel.
  I just posted about how Clinton's " Drug War" blended so nicely into
Bush's "War on Terrorism".      The fact of the matter is that Clintonism
leads to people like Bush and Reagan, and so would a Dean or Clark lead to
yet worse.     If a Dean or Clark sweet-talked its way into office, it would
be an American/ world disaster.

The ruling class can get more from honey,, than it can with an incompetent
group of scoundrels like it now has with the Bush crowd in office.
Socialists should want a go-it-alone group in power at the WH doing its best
to divide the capitalist world.    There is nothing great about a unified
capitalist world order.    Bush has many in the ruling class more scared
than they even have you.

Tony
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't see much of a quarrel here, Louis. I certainly agree that the
Democrats only rose to the level of decency when they incorporated working
class elements, and that their decline is coextensive with the suppression
of this for a bunch of structural reasons and their political epihenomena.
Since I try to stay curious about the world, it is worth pondering how
Dean's surge is grounded in tapping into populist dissatisfaction via a new
technology, and also how limited this is precisely because it shows no signs
of going further than populism. But one should remain alert to such things.

As for fascism and fractional blocs of the ruling class, well, that would
more or less describe how it does happen. A segment breaks away from the
rest and bids for state power using authoritarism means, various
mythologies, etc. You can't think of the ruling class as homogeneous; if it
were, there would be no need for a state as an executive "committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." As Ralph Miliband
pointed out, Marx saw here that there were necessary differences, inherent
in the very character of capitalist competition and individualism. But there
is also a "common" dimension, which is not so much self-evident as produced
through political struggle and invested in the state. What certainly needs
to be emphasized is that the various fractions of capital can tend to come
together in support of the leading bloc once that seizes power. This
happened in Nazi Germany and could happen again now, particularly inasmuch
as capitalists see rationality in the Bush-Cheney drive to commandeer world
gas and oil resources, and to use heightened US militarism as a
counterweight to declining economic power.

Joel

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