On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:
> 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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