[lbo-talk] "Ruling Class" as Agent?????

[c b]

The whole thesis of both US parties as parties of big business would
be nonsense if "big business" did not have a centralized and conscious
way of running them. How is it that the DP and RP just happen to act
so thoroughly as agents of big capital ?  It's more than "structural"
; and the "structure" did not self-organize. It was put into place by
class conscious people.

CB

"Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> Domhoff to the contrary, there is no machinery by which the "Ruling
> Class"
> can act as a single agent, "doing" this or "doing" that. The class
> (if it is
> a class at all) has no Central Committee, and there is no evidence,
> really,
> that any particular "act" represents the majority of that "class."
>

Flashback to the 1970s!

It looks like that Carrol is bringing us back to the old debates
concerning strcuturalist versus instrumentalist views of the state:
Poulantzas (who was a disciple of Althusser) versus, say, Ralph
Milliband or, indeed, Domhoff. I, myself, think that I am inclined
towards the take that Richard W. Miller took in his book, "Analyzing
Marx", called for a synthesis of the structuralist and instrumentalist
views of the state.

^^^^
CB: It defies common sense to think that the capitalist ruling class
has without class consciousness and a high level of class unity won
the Cold War and retained dominance of the states of the imperialist
power nations over the last 100 years in the face of conscious,
Marxist led working class challenges.   There is all kinds of evidence
that the ruling class is centralized.

As to the term "agent", the ruling class is the "principle". It has
lots of "agents".  A principle directs and agent. A principle is the
subject.  This is the legal use of "principle/agent"  ( See the law of
agency).  Post modernists or whoever have given the term "agent" the
opposite meaning from this legal meaning.