Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Yoshie made use of an idea from:
>
> > "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," 1852
>
> The Eighteenth Brumaire makes the insightful claim that "the state
> power is not suspended in air." To apply this to the analysis of
> likely similarities and differences between Kerry and Bush versions of
> "state power," you need to examine the kind of self-consciousness that
> would underpin each, don't you? To find support in this kind of
> analysis for your claims, wouldn't you have to show that, on balance,
> the self-consciousness productive of an electoral victory for Kerry
> would be more "prejudiced" and "superstitious" (i.e. less
> "enlightened") than the self-consciousness productive of an electoral
> victory for Bush?
>
I can see your concept of self-consciousness as part of the complex of differences between two radically different social orders (or the process of struggle through which a transformation occurs), but I can't for the life of me see how it can enter into the comparison of two successive u.s. administrations. The relative superficiality of transformation from the Hoover to the Roosevelt administrations, for example, can be measured by the haste with which the latter began to dismantle its one really _new_ element, the WPA. The process of aborting/wrecking that great institution had alreay begun in the creation of the PWA, before the war dissolved both.
Were consciousness (over the relatively short run) as important as you seem to claim, and had any change at all occurred 1933-1938, the whole focus of the New Deal would have been on achieving permanent status for the WPA.
Actually, I'm not clear, either, as to what you mean, concretly, by "the kind of self-consciousness that would underpin each."
Carrol