----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> NB, have people noticed that this is a case for relative autonomy. Despite the importance of oil in this equation, the war and the
US hegemonic drive is decidedly NOT reflecting the wishes or interests of the big bourgeoisie. This is state-driven, primarily.
>
> jks
>
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Hey, let's follow Anthony Downs, Robert Lucas, George Stigler and Charles Tilly and disaggregate/reaggregate the State in order to explore it's contradictions. We forget all to easily that, following Schumpeter's denial of 'the common good' for the sake of elucidating and justifying competitive elitism, the Right has been pursuing a form of micropolitics of privilege preserving, Rent seeking behavior that has become ever more conscious of itself since Reagan. Patronage politics with a postmodern twist, as Deirdre McClosky might put it.
When we substitute 'national interest' for 'common good' in the above, it doesn't mean we need to go down the reductionist path for the sake of finding some magical 'cui bono' group within the capitalist class that will benefit from the completion of this 13 year war. The State in it's war making capacity is constantly creating opportunities for Rents, whether-which factions of the capitalist class seize on them is another issue entirely. I would only note that even though they are deluded and megalomaniacal, Rumsfeld, Cheney etc. know their microeconomics of 'discretionary spending' and their micropolitics; they're members of the capitalist class, after all.
"[F]rom the point of view of technology - through which the average skill level of a group of people is assumed to affect the productivity of each individual within the group, a *national* economy is a completely arbitrary unit to consider." [Robert Lucas "On the Mechanics of Economic Development"]
i.e. capitalists have no-many home[s], unless-when they can commodify stabilizing regime[s] for the securitization of expectations.
"It is commonplace to assert that today we are unable to agree about virtually anything, which is why searching for and even debating the common good and the public interest are likely to be deemed futile or hopelessly idealistic. All conceptions of these terms are contestable, and appear more like rhetorical devices used by political elites to justify their particular interests...Thus the solidity of the ground, and hence the derivation of power from legitimate authority, crumble, pari passu with their politicization...In each struggle, and hence each interest, there is a surplus of meaning that constitutes the interest and situates it in wider contexts, whilst also defying attempts at being defined since definition entails fixity and position, which takes the form of particularity. Hence dislocatory effects are, so to speak, inherent in the attempt by power strategies to become hegemonic...When the common good and the public interest function as metaphors of the empty place of power which political strategies attempt to circumscribe in order to become hegemonic, there is an obvious risk that these metaphors become loaded with hypocrisy, manipulation, fraud, lies, and so on. From a cynical point of view, this is just what the public interest is: a strategic device to make it easier to digest elite domination and social control." [Torben Dyrberg, "The Circular Structure of Power"]
Following Stigler, Schumpeter and Tilly, 'we' can say that the UState[s]G is an 'imagined community' of institutions that are subjected to the revolving door of regulatory capture for the sake of creating-distribruting Rents to those well connected members of the protection rackets we call the Democrat and Republican parties. In such a Capitalist State, the recursive dynamics of such patronage etc. makes it a futile exercise to attempt to tease apart and thus determine whether such and such events are in the interests of the big bourgoisie ex ante as if they and the State were some highly unified monolith. Only time will tell.....
Ian