PEN-L message, Re: Roy Medvedev interview (on Putin)

In a message dated 5/14/2004 8:40:35 AM Central Standard Time, Waistline2@xxxxxxx writes:

This bureaucracy - we are talking about real people, receiving money and spending money or helping to drive reproduction and the realization of surplus value - profits. No amount of sloganeering on the part of politicians is going to destroy the bureaucracy because it embody profound economic interest.

Additional

Bush W. or rather Congress "Patriot Act" . . . expands the bureaucratic order or the bureaucracy. Shifting half a million people off of welfare and adding half a million to structures performing police action and another half million into the military, does not change the material fact or shape of bureaucracy and the economic logic that drives this process.

Everything is tied to reproduction - value, and the realizations of profits in our society. Millions of people are jailed in our society as part of the bureaucratic order and its economic content is not hard to discern. The concerted effort to turn the penal institutions into production entities producing commodities for sale in the market, is only part of the equation.

Prison construction drove the "building" or "housing industry" for many years and capital only understands profits . . . and the prison administration . . . down to the lowly guard becomes important to the economic imperative of reproduction . . . which is driven by and presupposes consumption.

It seems to me . . . with my superficial views, that the Gulag in the old Soviet Union was designed to drive reproduction. Under such circumstances I personally would never be late to work and probably would have won one of the "Heroes of labor medals." I have no need to justify anything but rather try to discern - in a superficial way, the economic content of the social process.

The 30 year cry for "law and order" that was escalated during the Nixon years, contains economic logic, directing impacting reproduction. At that time I had not the opportunity to reach the superficial level.

Sure, we encounter this issue of "law and order" in the ideological and political sphere . . . but Pen-L is about economics.

The bureaucratic order is infinitely wider than simply the police and state, however.

Melvin P.