I guess this is your argument for the utility of functional explanationsbut you're junking the complexity to save the purity of your explanation. What about intra-class factions and disputes? what about cross-class racisms? What about contradictory themes within racism? What about contingencies? Do functional arguments truly provide satisfying explanations?
Looking at actors intetions can indeed only go so far. You don't always get what you want, as the song goes. If focusing on intentions means explaining things by resort to some super-duper class that could pull all the strings, then these explanations are limited. Moveover, it would be little more than conspiracy theorizing. Thats why invoking ruling elites works great as a slogan, less so but still viable as a metaphor, and positively iffy when attention turns to the details. Omnipotence and omniscience aside, individual capitalists are distinct from the capitalist class in part because the latter is component of the capitalist system. In this strucuralist theory, individuals matter for very little, consciousness least among them. But systems do have requirements that have to be met.
Unfortunately, you go too far beyond even the lyric: some groups, like the capitalist class, always get what they need. Or the system, mode of production, whathaveyou, always has its imperatives satisfied and so is reproduced. At least the Stones let it be a sometime thing.
In order to elaborate, let me offer some quick thoughts about functional explanations.
Functional explanations certainly involve telos - but they always depend on the invisible hand to deliver the outcome. In the conventions of anthropology and sociology, a function is unrecognized - neither intended nor anticipated and so does not rely on the conscious actions of actors (individuals or groups) for its existence. It is what gives the social scientist a leg up on the laity because it can observe _objectively_ how things really work.
Someone remarked on the usefulness of Merton's distinction between manifest and latent functions but I think the attractiveness is dubios. Robert Merton wasn't engaging too deep into social philosophy here; rather it was old fashioned damage control to save something of the language of functionalism from the growing chorus of criticisms. He wanted to abandon the abstract nonsense of largescale systems analysis for more modest efforts at substantive theories of different facets of social life. But manifest function is itself a kind of theoretical gerrymandering so that the meanings actors work with and the goals they consciously pursue can be folded into a functional theory. But Merton's effort occurred just at the point that interactionist sociology was taking off and that tradition worked far more easily with terms like intention, meaning, goals. Merton's backpeddling was too late and added little. His humbler version of latent function was met with considerable resistance insofar as even latent functions betrayed an inherently conservative/ideological bias. Not that the opposition didn't often see their own latent functions...
I prefer to look for signs of visible hands in the crafting social reality with the proviso that the efforts of groups _do_ have unintended and unanticipated consequences. Its my modification of Marx: people make history but they never know which one.
There's another limitation to functional explanations, perhaps _intrinsic_ to them but certainly in practice: its how functional explanations seduce an observer into _only_ seeing functions satisfied and order maintained. One of the major complaints that has long been levelled against sociological functionalism was its bias in favor of social order. Things always worked to sustain/maintain/long may you reign social order so that in its organismic and later abstract systemic theorizing, deviance, conflict, division, etc. were theoretically defined as irrelevant. Order was natural and typical; disorder was a departure and unusual. Not so much undesirable as theoretically besides the point. Its the godhead of equilibrium.
And this seduction in favor of system maintenance - capitalist reproduction has seduce more than one marxist scholar. Althusser and his ISAs comes mind shares a real affinity with Talcott Parsons. Even the musings of a sometime fellow traveller Foucault genuflects to functional language in his references to power (very Durkheimian, very French). Things always in the end, in the last instance, work to/function to/act to/as a consequence reproduce the mode of production. Conflict is always resolved in subordinate classes defeact or acquiesence, contradictions are always resolved so the the capitalist system is restored to health, the capitalist class once again reigns supreme and things chug along until another crisis erupts.
Years ago Albert Hirschmann noted how reactionaries always deployed a language that always noted the unintended consequences of social policy and how those consequences represented the most horrible things. He referred to it as his thesis of perverse effects. Sort of like the unintended consequence of a Parsonian tendency to see social action as genderally strengthening social systems. Some marxists seem to split the difference and explain things sort of along the lines of a thesis we might call the "perversely positive effects for capitalism anyway of intended and unintended social action."
I'll gladly defer to Justin or others who know far more than I, but I've always been thought there was a risk in using the language of functionalism in the social sciences.
In biology, something is functional because it is seen as contributing to the operation of something - e.g., some physical feature or characteristics adds to an organism's adaptabiility to environmental constraints and therefore survival. The adaptive quality of functions is unproblematic though theoretical assertions often seem little more than hunches about why critters have what they have. The ever present randomness and indeterminancy keeps functional analysis in check. The evolution of an uber-ant species could be wiped out in a rainstorm. And the stakes aren't so high when we employ theory to explain things other than humans.
The classic complaint about functional claism has to do with the theorized beneficiary. Functional for whom? The criticism was typically aimed at conventional social science but I don't think radical theories are immune. Even simple claims about imperialism's functional contribution to capitalism's development and consolidation contains the problem of a first world working class enjoying immense benefits at the expense of third world toilers. The issue of relative benefits aside, imperialism isn't a static thing but a problematic label covering a whole array of events, practices, relationships the constuction of which are crucial to an understanding of what imperialism entails (as opposed to whatever genetic changes were required to give leopard its spots). And rather than assume a one-way relationship, a valid functional analysis needs to incorporate the ways that imperialism _has not_ contributed to capitalism and/or the ways capitalism has itself changed in response to the contested play of imperialism. And in the latter case, some of the essentialist arsenal of marxian political economy becomes an obstacle.
That things produce and are themselves produced by unintended and unanticipated consequences can lead to some interesting observations. But these are not the same as functional explanations, especially if we attend to the meanings these things have for people.
DB