[lbo-talk] Ralph loves the nice plutocrats

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Wed Sep 23 12:41:42 PDT 2009


On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:


> Face it.  The US political system is  plutocracy, not democracy.

I think this is wrong. It is a democracy. Or at least democracy is one of the "poles" (and the strong one, I'd say) that make up the U.S. state; you could say plutocracy is the other. I don't think you can make sense of things like World War II (or any war really), the postwar labor truce, and much of American history by attributing everything to the "kratos" of the "ploutos," and certainly the U.S. wouldn't be the center of world capitalism without the kratos of the demos.

Methinks the left is not nearly critical enough of democracy.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list