[lbo-talk] Ralph loves the nice plutocrats

[Bhaskar Sunkara]

I've always wondered whether the capitalist democratic state was often an
agent of class conciliation instead of just direct class rule, as its
portrayed in the Leninist "intrumentalist" view of the state.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> 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.
>
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