[PEN-L:4382] Open letter to Marc Chernick

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lenin termed the increasing integration of the capitalist institutions and the state, the increasing control of the former over the latter, state-monopoly. Privatization is the latest massive trend of the state-monopoly institution.  This is an important example of why Lenin's analysis is fresh as a daisy in 1999. Truer than ever.

The bourgeoisie have always been good at hiding as a ruling class (the bourgeois finesse). Their hiding behind the state yet total control of the state in 1999 is the Great Public/Private Farce or great deception of our era. A leading player in this comedy is the Fed Chair, a public servant, ha, ha. Not to mention the President and Treasury Secretary.

The bourgeoie, the Invisible Ruling Class.

Charles Brown

>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx> 03/17/99 11:48AM >>>
William S. Lear wrote:

>Very nice riff there Doug, though I have one disagreement with the
>above.  Last night as I was leafing through volume 3 of Philip
>H. Burch's *Elites in American History*, I was reminded quite vividly
>that capitalism has very definitely not "split the economic and the
>political, market and state".  If you think about it, this take is
>very congenial to the views of someone like Paul Krugman, or Milton
>Friedman, who essentially sees the market as a self-organizing
>phenomena that only needs a tweak here and there to stay on course.
>What they fail to realize, and what the above quote seems to miss as
>well, is the immense amount of planning involved in the economy, the
>massive involvement of the state in the economy at every level, and,
>as Burch's multi-volume set shows quite clearly, the thorough staffing
>of the state with business owners and high executives who very
>decisively act to maintain a strong presence of the state in the
>economy.

Of course I agree with you here, but it appears to anyone who doesn't look
too carefully that market and state are separate, in contrast with feudal
society, where it wasn't hard to see to whom you were paying your bushels
of grain. On first glance, and even second, the market is that place of
liberty, equality, and Bentham that Marx said it was; the exploitation
isn't visible to the naked eye. I think one reason anti-statist attitudes
are so popular with the masses, at least in the US, is that state power is
obvious and centralized, while market/class power is subtle and diffuse.

Doug