>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 01/14/00 01:10PM >>>
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.
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CB: OK, but my version includes both your idea of complex development of consent, punctuated by use of illegal violence when the bourgeois democratic-republican methods of legitimacy or developing consent fail. So, that makes my version more complex than yours , not that being more complex is inherently superior from a theoretical point of view. Sometimes elegance ( the positive way of saying "simple" ) is put forth as a standard for scientific theories.
The transition of power from Kennedy to Johnson is at the level of the executive committee of the ruling class, not the board of directors. It was like firing a corporate president by the board of directors. So, this was not an ultimate tranfer or transition of power. We got to get the organizational chart correct to do this analysis.
Assassinating ML King or JFK may be a frictionless transmission of orders to the actual professional assassins, but it was not a frictionless, risk free course of action overall. It is an indication of desparation.
The bourgeoisie prefer democratic-republican form of government , but resort to dictatorial methods such as illegal violence, coup d'etat when in political crisis or desparation. The whole bourgeois form of government fascism is exactly such a punctuation in normal bourgeois rule.
It is important to recognize that things don't just go along smoothly with your complex consent obtaining model all of the time. It is more complex than always doing the "hard work" of obtaining consent through legitimate means.
And short of assassinations, the U.S. ruling class used political character assassination against the CPUSA and other communists and leftists in the critical McCarthy period. This was not a legitimate method of obtaining "consent". The point is the U.S. bourgeoisie cheat a lot in manufacturing consent. That is part of the complexity. People wouldn't consent if they knew the methods the U.S. bourgeoisie use in manufacturing consent.
>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.
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CB: Well , as I say it is a mixed democracy/dictatorship , as capitalism has always been. An example of the evidence I adduce to meet my burden of proof is exactly the assassination of Kennedy. That ain' t due process. That is a coup d'etat. Another example is the completely unconstitutional , anti-due process , anti-First Amendment annihilation of the CPUSA as a legitimate American political party. Another example is COINTELPRO which targetted the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party could have become a major electoral force in Black communities if it had not been annihilated by the dirty tricks of the FBI. If Martin Luther King had not been assassinated , he may easily have become what Jesse Jackson became as an electoral candidate and perhaps the initiator of a new party. So, I can easily meet the burden of proof you pose, because I have only listed a small amount of the evidence of the American dictatorship within its democracy.
There is a dictatorship, an oligarchy in the economic sphere too. But although the elements of a democratic republic that you mention exist, they are not quite so simply alone as you say. They are complexly and contradictorily mixed with real elements of dictatorship, including use of terror, violence, assassination, fraud, deceit, etc.
But even the due process , elections and other elements of democracy you mention are enormously flawed and often completely fraudulent. This is well known. The 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures has basically been ripped to tatters by the Rehnquist court. Just this week they took another bite out of the Warren Court advances in due process. I mean this list could spend its entire time detailing how much of a hoax the democracy you sketch above is a hoax. Those are systematic hoaxes, not getting into specific conscious "conspiracies" (that forbidden word; lets add it to the computer censor list) that are carried out in special cases. It is normal operating procedure for major police departments to violate the 4th Amendment, not to mention the 14th.
>From another approach, think how many youth have been dissuaded from becoming progressive political leaders and activists by the assassination of Martin Luther King ? Probably thousands who were not quite willing to risk their lives. The terrorist agents of the bourgeois ruling class sent a very powerful message by just that one act of terror. The bourgeois finesse includes limited use of terror, but we must not let them off the hook by refusing to name the dictatorship in their mixed system. That's their conception.
CB