Do we in fact disagree on this?
--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/27/06, andie nachgeborenen
You wrote:>
> No. The "wise men" _can_ be in the power elite, but
> aren't always. The
> power elite, by definition, simply are those with
> the most power. (In
> our society, it's organized capital, the US
> government leadership.)
> Sometimes we see knaves and fools in the power
> elite, as currently.
> The capitalists' _intellectual_ elite (the "wise
> men") includes
> various establishmentarian types (whose names have
> slipped my mind)
> who disagreed with Dubya's Iraq attack, along with
> some that agreed.
> In sum, the power elite and the intellectual elite
> are overlapping
> sets, with less overlap of late.
I wrote:
>
> And to register a note of disagreement with Jim, the
"power elite" he refers to are precisely the penumbra
of far-sighted, forward thinking individuals, the
"wise men," who can think beyond the next quarterly
report are take in and synthesize different views of
the class as a whole. The "organic intellectuals" of
the RC, as it were --
some of them actual full fledged members who had wealth based on exploitation of labor, like John Foster and Allen Dulles or Paul Nitze, some of them merely trusted counselors, like Dean Acheson or Henry Kissinger, some more "traditional" types inhabiting the think tanks or university seats.
That group can be as much as part of the RC, even without vast ownership of productive assets, as the groups of intellectuals Marx says break away from the RC in times of crisis and join the proletariat.
I guess if we do it's that I have may have a more expnasive definition of the RC. You mean, I think, the big bourgeoisie. I mean the members of the group that rules (on behalf of the big bourgeoise). You can call that the power elite as opposed to the big bourgeoisie if you like. That sttikes me as a terminological difference.
You are right that people can be in the intellectual elite without ever gaining power, of course.
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