Chris Kromm wrote:
> there are no "contradictions" or any
> other divisions as wackos such as Marx, Lenin, Mao and others would have
> suggested.
Most "marxist" theories over the last 30 years re splits in the u.s. ruling class have been somewhat clumsy attempts to apply the thought of Mao directly to the u.s. I don't know whether you read Chris Burford's bizarre commentaries on the U.S. aggression in Yugoslavia, but if you did you saw the perfect ripening of this misapplication of "Mao Thought" as though it were a universal theory somehow necessarily applicable to any and all historical conditions. For real splits in a ruling class, study the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the U.S. Civil War. Even the hatred of Roosevelt expressed by many individual members of the u.s. ruling class (including even an abortive attempt to interest Smedley Butler in leading a coup) was mostly a tempest in a teapot. David Harvey has a magnificent account of the record of the Democratic Party:
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I think it important to recognize the conditions which led the Democratic Party, a political party which from the New Deal onwards sought to absorb but never to represent, let alone become an active instrument of, working-class interests, to enact legislation of such an interventionist character. [He is referring to legislation passed by a Democratic Congress during Nixon's administration.] The legislation was not, in fact, an outcome of the class and sectional alliance policies which had created the New Deal, but came at the tail-end of a decade in which politics had shifted from universal programs (like social security) to specially targeted programs to help regenerate the inner cities (e.g., the Model Cities and federally funded housing programs), take care of the elderly or the particularly impoverished (e.g., Medicare and Medicaid), and target particular disadvantaged groups in the population (Head Start and Affirmative action). This shift from universalism to targeting of particular groups inevitably created tensions between groups and helped fragment rather than consolidate any broader sense of a progressive class alliance. . . .
(_Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference_ [1996], p. 339)
It is hardly a compliment to Marx, Lenin, or Mao to take their very specific analyses of particular class conjunctions under particular historical conditions of a given time and place and turn them into eternal truths, always necessarily the truth of the day.
I think Marxism (as well as some other understandings of history, beginning with Plato) does suggest that ruling classes will always _eventually_ develop deep fissures, but it happens to be almost self-evident that such fissures are not present in the U.S. today -- or even within the collective capitalist ruling classes, though I would expect such international contradictions to develop eventually. But I would also expect that unless revolutions in at least some of the advanced capitalist nations occurred first, _that_ particular set of contradictions will be settled by nuclear or other equally destructive means.
Carrol