[lbo-talk] Re: conspiracy

[Michael Dawson]

Conspiracy theory is rotten apple theory.  It holds that cabals of bad
individuals, rather than ordinary institutional and situational imperatives
cause bad results.  All power structures employ conspiracies and there are
conspiracies in the world, but those are not the same as conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy theory is liberalism parading in radical clothes.  Some
conspiracy clearly plotted JFK's murder, but claiming that was a pivotal
event for the shape of the society does not follow from that fact.  To say
it does is a classic conspiracy theory.

One classic anti-conspiracy theory was Marx's rejection of putting excessive
blame on individual capitalists:

"To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and
the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt
with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories,
embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My
standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is
viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the
individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains,
however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."