On 3/27/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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-- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles