[lbo-talk] get ready for Pres Clinton - again!

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Nov 5 06:09:24 PST 2007


Michael Smith wrote:
>
> On Sunday 04 November 2007 21:57:06 Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > I dunno, it seems to me the war on Iraq and the threat of war with
> > Iran is being led by the political sector, not capital. I don't see
> > any evidence that capital is pushing a bellicose agenda - almost all
> > sectors would be hurt by $120 oil
>
> Indeed. This has been the puzzle all along, hasn't it?
>
> What do you make of Greenspan's rather startling "war
> for oil" trope?

Why did the media so completely suppress news of the October 27 demos? The suppression was so complete and even startling that the CSMonitor published an article on it.

I'm not sure that our tendency to idenity capital with BIG capital, the ruling class with the BIG ruling class, is correct. And I'm also not sure that it is correct to identify the "interests of capital" _either_ with the _real_ interests (whatever those might be) with The Interest as collectively perceived by the whole capitalist class (about 5% of the population, and going 'down' quite a bit from the billionaires and the multi-millionaires). All capitalists individually might be hurt by $120 oil, but their collective perception, filtered through all the ways in which it gets filtered*, might define their interest (rightly or wrongly) as more threatened by lack of military control of the mideast than by their immediate or even long range economic interests.

*Domhff doesn't help too much here because he only deals with the top of the class, not with all its reaches and how they intersect.

Carrol



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