WS: >It seems like your relationship between state and bourgeoisie is a tautology. <
I am not going to defend what I said against charges of tautology except to say that tautologies are often useful. You find the tautological System of National Accounts useful, while your hero, Barrington Moore, found the allegedly tautological Marxian class concepts to be useful. As I've said before, it's very hard to use Popper-style rules about falsification or even prediction for the social sciences. Lakatos is a bit more useful, but there are real limits because of the nature of social science.
As usual, the only thing that can really trump a theory is another theory. I've shown you mine (see below), so show me yours.
>… you deny that bourgeoisie speaks in one voice, which is a necessary
pre-condition for that class to define their "common interests" and
then force the state['s] government to pursue them. Instead you claim
that it is the state that defines those interests from which it
follows that whatever the state does it must be in the interests of
the bourgeoisie. …<
No, the capitalists don't have to "speak with one voice" in order to define their common interests. As I said before and you seem to have ignored, there's a difference between
1. the "will of all" for the bourgeoisie, i.e., the aggregation of distinct bourgeois voices of the sort I describe above; and
2. the capitalist "general will" implied by their position in the class system. This is to a large extent unknown _ex ante_, but as a bottom line involves preservation of the structure of capitalist exploitation, domination, privilege, and accumulation. All sorts of "think tanks" and groups (including the editorial page staffs of major newspapers) work hard to give a more complete vision of this "general will" (i.e., capitalist _class_ interest), though of course, it's usually described as the "public interest" or the "national interest."
It is NOT "the state that defines those interests," though the government's people can contribute. I'm sure that the US government's cabinet typically has discussions about what the "public or national interest" is that are really discussions about what's good for (US) capitalism. They identify the "public or national interest" with the capitalist class interest (as shaped by the capitalist "will of all").
Beyond the basics of preserving class exploitation (cf. Sweezy's chapter on the state in his THEORY OF CAPITALIST DEVELOMENT), the capitalist class interest (general will) is really known only from experience, _ex post_. If the government does anything that's clearly against the class interests of capital, it will provoke all sorts of bourgeois protest and even economic crisis.
Sometimes the latter can get out of hand, so that it doesn't serve capitalism very well. A few years back, Mitterand was elected president of France with a somewhat radical social-democratic program. Even though social democrats are usually wise stewards of capitalism, it provoked financial capital flight, so that Mitterand retreated, cutting off a lot of his program (something he was probably ready to do all along). But it's possible that some of his abandoned reforms could have helped French capitalism. But they weren't given a chance.
The capitalist "will of all" (expressed, for example, by financial capital flight) can be very short-sighted, even from the view of capitalist class interests (the capitalist "general will").
>One certainly may get such an impression by watching the US state for
the past twenty years, but that is a rather limited empirical range….<
I was specifically talking about the US during the last 25 years or so. You should have noticed that I referred to the weakness of countervailing forces… So your contrary evidence ("empirical facts") is irrelevant. It might be worth your while to examine the "empirical evidence" of what I write with greater care before you criticize it.
>… State government in various countries were controlled by various
social classes, sometimes by the bourgeoisie, sometime by the alliance
of bourgeoisie and land owners (who are [allegedly] not bourgeoisie!),
and sometimes by the working class or some sort of alliance of working
and professional classes. The latter was and still is true of the
Scandinavian countries, where the government is controlled by labor
since 1930 and it is implementing the labor agenda including to
nationalization of industry, which was at some point considered but
then abandoned. And it does so against the wishes of the bourgeoisie
that has no other choice but go along, screaming and kicking. …<
It's vaguely insulting that you think I am not familiar with the above. (However, since you don't make a serious effort to read what I write, I can't be insulted, since you're insulting some strawMarx.)
As I said before, if the working class is well-organized, militant, and has a coherent vision, it can gain a seat at the table (i.e., attend meetings of the executive committee), forcing the bourgeoisie to accept its presence and even to win some gains.
Social-democratic coalitions – as I've said before – can actually run capitalism better than conservative governments can, on the national level at least. But the state itself remains capitalist (in that it preserves capitalism as a system). And the normal development of capitalism involves such matters as capital flight and international competition, which progressively tends to undermine social-democratic governments. (Simultaneously, social-democratic parties tend to bureaucratize the labor movement, so that their base is weakened.)
> … The question remains how do we treat that empirical evidence? If we accept Marxist view that state is nothing but executive committee of bourgeoisie as given, then the only thing we can do is to develop some sort of problemshift …to neutralize evidence that states not always implement the bourgeois agenda. <
Since I already said that the state does not always implement the capitalist class interest (the bourgeois "general will," largely a notional or latent concept), this "problem shift" isn't needed.
>Hence the propositions that this evidence is some kind of exception
from the norm, that in those particular circumstances the state had to
act against bourgeoisie to save it from its own excesses, or that
exceptional circumstances, such as economic crisis or social unrest
demanded it. <
It is just not true that the Marxian view is that the "state is nothing but executive committee of bourgeoisie." The theory is that
1. that the state is by its very nature a repressive organization needed to preserve class domination (and it doesn't really matter which class(es) are dominant); and
2. under capitalism, the executive branch of the government and to a lesser extent the legislative branch (at least according to Marx) tends to represent and aggregate the bourgeois "will of all." (NB: the government is NOT the same as the state. It's the body of people running the state, or trying to do so.)
I would add:
3. in "normal" times under capitalism, there is harmony between what the executive of the government does and the required state role of preserving and managing the capitalist class system and its dynamics.
The fact is that times are often "abnormal" in a dynamic and conflictual system such as capitalism, so that there are often contradictions in this system. That is, proposition (3) is more of a description of an "equilibrium condition" than anything else, while the nature of capitalism is to disrupt all equilibria. Contradiction can thus be seen when, for example:
1. the bourgeois "will of all" may reflect the narrow perspectives of one faction of the bourgeoisie over all others (e.g., with Zaire's Mobutu and perhaps G.W. Bush), undermining the capitalist class interest ("general will") over time, or at least seeming to do so for many class members; or
2. non-capitalist interests represented in the state get too much power, who then use it to go beyond social-democratic style management of capitalism, provoking economic crises and coups d'état, as in Chile in 1973.
As mentioned before, anti-capitalist movements and economic crises mean that the executive's job of running the state and managing capitalism isn't always easy. So you see the state doing things which go against the capitalist "will of all."
>It is precisely what I find objectionable in Marxism - it became
faith true by definition, and ceased to be empirical science. If a
hypothesis cannot be disproved by evidence, it becomes a religious
dogma. That is fine if someone is looking for religion, but I
personally have little interest in it. <
Since you don't really pay much attention to or understand what you're criticizing, your rejection doesn't mean much.
Me: >> the civil rights movement is easier: it was a large popular movement from outside the normal political channels that reacted specifically to Jim Crow but shook the whole political establishment. Something had to be done before the movement got out of hand! J. Edgar did his repressive and illegal part, but that wasn't enough. Reforms were needed, especially since some capitalists saw the Jim Crow South as an obsolete way to do things, in fact blocking the movement of capital. <<
>I disagree with this interpretation. [The] Civil Rights movement
would run out of steam before leading to any significant changes if it
were not for the support of the federal government. And the federal
government supported the civil rights movement mainly because of the
cold war and the challenge posed by the USSR - in other words did it
for the reasons of national security rather than to promote the
collective interest of the bourgeoisie. Again, we can a priori
declare that the two are synonymous, in which case we again enter the
domain of tautology and ultimately religion, or we can pose it as an
empirical problem i.e. examine under what circumstances they coincide
and under what they do not. The latter, however, logically implies
that state not always pursues interests of the bourgeoisie - or for
that matter any other social class - but acts to in its own right. <
I agree with the bit about "the challenge posed by the USSR." Being quite absent-minded, I'd forgotten that. My friend Phil Klinkner (who is not a Marxist, by the way) has co-authored a book specifically on how US race equality gets better during times of war. But I don't think that for the US elite there's any difference between "national security" (as defined by those in power) and the (perceived) collective interest of the bourgeoisie (the will of all).
If there were a difference, we wouldn't see Wall Street lawyer types running the State Department over and over again. In theory, the labor movement could have used its power (now gone) during the 1950s and 1960s to push US foreign policy away from the Wall Street view, but the official labor movement had been purged of commies and the like and its leadership decided that it was a good idea to try to trade support for the Cold War (sometimes criticizing government policy "from the right") for the possibility of domestic policy gains. The latter did not include civil rights issues in a big way.
It's true that the US federal government did help the CR movement a bit. This is because of the competition with the USSR and because of the pressure from the pre-existing CR movement. (Without the latter, the US elite could have figured out another way to compete with the USSR, such as ramping up the space race..) But if the US government had _not_ helped, the fear in Washington was that the Civil Rights movement would get increasingly radical. It did anyway, but this was not perceived, since the elite did not predict the rising opposition to the war against Vietnam, which helped make the CR movement more radical.
me: >> the war on poverty was largely a reaction to the civil rights movement. Its size was much much smaller than that of <<
WS:>Again, I disagree, War on poverty was largely a result of Vietnam war that was fought with a conscript army. If you ask poor people to fight, you have to give something in return. That is why conscript army is a strong democratizing force - something that the peace activists forgot. [so they should have favored the war?] The reason why Bush administration can fight a war and cut the social agenda at the same time is mainly because US Army is no longer conscript but professional mercenaries. The government simply hires mercenaries and sends them for a mission - it does not ask the general population for a sacrifice anymore, which would necessitate concessions. In fact, the administration can claim that by using mercenary force it actually gives something to the population ("security") and demand concessions from the public. That is why he thought he could roll back social security. <
I'd agree with the role of the war in encouraging democratization (ceteris paribus). But the "war on poverty" preceded the war against full-scale Vietnam by a couple of years. Allegedly, JFK got it from Michael Harrington (the social-democratic spokesman), but I think there were political reasons of the sort I described, i.e., pressure from the CR movement. -- Jim Devine
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin
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