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

[Wojtek S]

Re: "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? "

[WS:]  It seems so, indeed.  But I wonder what would happen if (and that is
an unlikely counterfactual) these secondary organic intellectuals ceased to
do their work for the system?  How long would the system run without turning
into outright repression?

The only approximation of that counter-factual comes from my own personal
experience in Eastern Europe in the 1970s - at certain point just after 1968
the increasing number of organic intellectuals of the ruling class became
less and less cooperative in maintaining the system and things went downhill
for the elite rather quickly, even though living standards generally
improved.  I am of course well aware of alternative explanations (the rising
expectations aka the J-curve theory) - but I wonder how much the slow
defection of their organic intellectuals (cf. Leszek Kolakowski) played a
role in the process.

Just a conjecture.

Wojtek