Big Business and the Nazis

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Thomas Ferguson's work had an enormous impact on me; along with Noam
Chomsky and Mike Davis, he is the reason I could not fit into a poli sci
department (later I would discover the council communists who had  a
major impact on the young Chomsky, it turns out). Ferguson's work
brilliantly demonstrates that the political spectacle  is often reducible
to intra-capital conflicts (has anybody ever carefully worked out the
situationists' critique of the political spectacle; there's a new bio on
Debored out that seems very interesting). But the role of money is
politics is no surprise: credit card companies write bankruptcy laws;
insurance companies are behind (I suspect) the new NIH standards of
overweightness (hefty premiums for the 25  and above body mass); Trent
Lott declares to a meeting of doctors that he wil lead the fight against
health care but they are going to have to pay for it. Of course these are
blatant examples, and Ferguson's work is subtle. 
But I do have questions:
1. I am not convinced that capital can be split into a financial and
industrial sector, with the former  controlling the Fed and implementing
deflationary monetary policy in the favor of financial capital. Actually
this more refers to Gerald Epstein than Thomas Ferguson. 
2. This image of the state as a contested arena in  which rival blocs
hegemonized by different fractions of capital fight it out seems to me not
quite right. It would be interesting to revisit the
Miliband/Poulantzas/Hirsch debates of the 70s. 
best, rakesh