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

[Dissenting Wren]

I agree with your Weberian point here, but isn't the US at the stage where 
social practices so thoroughly reproduce the ideology, saturate the social 
system with it, and make it not just orthodoxy but doxa, that the overt role of 
organic intellectuals is secondary?  You have a point about Trimberger, but 
those cases of revolution-from-above are precisely located at an epoch when 
Weber would identify the conscious construction of ideology as primary. (Even 
so, Trimberger's later career took her in a remarkably different direction, and 
she criticized her earlier work as too structural).  I'm not so sure about the 
others.  Certainly ideology takes a back seat to structure for Skocpol.  I think 
that Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens also locate democratization primarily 
in class structure (strong working class and weak aristocracy most favorable for 
democracy, etc.)  Either early (Brazilian tripé) Evans or late (Brazil vs. India 
vs. Korea) Evans makes little of ideology, even though the location of these 
case studies on a Weberian map would suggest a greater role for ideology.  At 
any rate, even given your reading, organic intellectuals' role would be of 
primary importance only in restricted circumstances.

As for the power of intellectuals - I'm very, very wary.  I remember David 
Laitin talking about how his first book (a populist take on language politics in 
Somalia) had only one major influence - it was used by the South African 
apartheid regime as one justification for bantu education.  In nearly twenty 
years of work, I don't think I've produced a single revolutionary (apart from 
those that had that kind of interest before they met me), but I know I've helped 
produce people who work for the CIA, DIA, State Department, and oh my god how 
many lawyers.  

----- Original Message ----
From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Wed, December 15, 2010 1:05:49 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] "Ruling Class" as Agent?????

Re: " Karen Ho's ethnography of Wall Street investment bankers"

[WS:] Well, that is just one place and time and, I may add, a very peculiar
time in which investment bankers are unquestionable kings.  You may well be
correct in saying that investment bankers are both, capitalists and organic
intellectuals.  That may hold for certain high profile businessmen as well.
But that has not always been the case.  If we follow argument proposed by
Max Weber (_Protestant ethics_) the role of ideology changes quite
significantly in the life time of a political system - it is quite essential
in the initial stages, but it gets quite spurious after that system gains
hegemony.

In the broader time frame (the past 100 or so years,) the role of "organic
intellectuals" which includes not just academics but even more importantly
political parties - in shaping class interest and their relations to public
policy has been demonstrated quite convincingly by social historians like
Evans, Rueschemeyer, Skocpol, Heclo, Stepan, or Timbereger.  The latter is
particularly worth mentioning here because she demonstrates cases of state
and military bureaucrats actively taking on entrenching class interests to
build a better capitalist economy (Japan, Turkey, Egypt and Peru.)

I would also like to mention in this context those intellectuals who are not
normally not thought off as propagandists of the capitalist system but whose
work nonetheless feeds into the maintenance of the capitalist system.
Obvious examples may include management gurus, marketing researchers and
policy analysts, less obvious ones - psychologists, criminologists,
engineers or educators.  The latter is especially worth mentioning because
of their adoption of "business model" for education, which is not explicitly
intended to propagandize capitalism, but which nonetheless legitimates it.

To reiterate, I am not arguing that this is a one way street i.e.
intellectuals defining class politics, but rather - as one sociologists
aptly observed - that intellectuals have much more class power than they
think, but not as much as they would like to have.  Ignoring their role in
the maintenance of the capitalist system is a serious intellectual error in
my opinion.

Wojtek
___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk