Valid Conspiracy Theory: the Bourgeois finesse

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jan 14 10:10:07 PST 2000


Charles Brown wrote:


>Why do you think dictatorship and "conspiracy" are simpler than open
>and obvious ?

Because they imply a pretty simple transmission of power and a relatively frictionless transmission of intention into action. Dictators are obeyed, under pain of death; conspirators succeed without the knowledge of the conspired-against. In the U.S. and other capitalist democracies, there has to be a considerable amount of consent among the governed. How that consent develops is very complicated.


>Why do you think the U.S. and capitalism cannot be a contradictory
>combination of dicatatorship and open system ?

If you're talking about capitalism as a dictatorship of money, then I have no problem with that. But politically, a system with regular elections, with minimal state censorship, with reasonable amounts of due process, and with a great deal of information published about its workings cannot usefully be thought of as a dictatorship. Pinochet's Chile was a dictatorship. Clinton's U.S. isn't. I'd say the burden of proof is on you to prove it is.

Doug



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