[lbo-talk] Class Power vs. Profit Maximization (was Tacticaldifferences at the top)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/12/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Yoshie wrote the following in reply to my comment that "the advanced
> capitalist countries led by the US want friendly regimes which will ensure
> access to their national resources, throw open their markets to their goods
> and services, and allow their multinationals to freely invest in their
> economies."
>
> She says:
>
> > That's what we might be interested in if we were running the empire.
> > But people who are running the empire do not think like profit
> > maximizers.
>
> [...]
>
> > Those who run the empire, too, don't care about which way of running
> > the empire might give higher rates of return.  What they really enjoy
> > and want to hold onto is class power, even if more of class power
> > leads to lower rates of return than less of it.
> =========================================
> If by "those who run the empire", you mean, as you should, the political
> apparatus - the government and the other state institutions - then, of
> course, they are more interested in class power than rates of return.
<snip>
> You draw an artificial distinction between the two spheres, and moreover
> have had, I think, a tendency to favour the political over the economic, to
> subordinate Wall Street to the state - certainly insofar as the Bush
> administration's conduct of foreign policy is concerned.
<snip>
> I'm not suggesting the state doesn't enjoy any relative autonomy - as it
> showed especially until the aftermath of the Iraq invasion - but it is Wall
> Street which is the dog and Washington which is the tail, not the other way
> round.

IMHO, Wall Street -- whether you mean the stock market in general or
investment bankers, hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, and
other fund managers, etc. in particular -- neither agitates for nor
agitates against any war.
-- 
Yoshie
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