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

Dissenting Wren dissentingwren at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 15 11:30:28 PST 2010


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



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