WS:]... My problem with Charles' train of though was of a slightly different nature - that he seems to think that there is some strategic thinking on the part of the elites, some kind of hedging against popular discontent. Frankly, I doubt.
^^^^^ CB: There is strategic thinking by the US ruling class with respect to US working class. on issues of objective and material conflict between them. I gotta say "r u serious ?" (chuckle). They didn't just fall into this increasing redistribution of wealth upward over the last 40 years. Or do u believe in God ( an Invisible Hand) and God favors the rich ?
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There was certainly this kind of strategic thinking when the empire was in it ascendant phase (cf. FDR "New Deal") but I do not think much of is left anymore now, when the empire is in its decline. I think it mostly opportunistic thievery and apres moi le deluge. Just like in the x-USSR - the strategic empire-building thinking was replaced by progressing corruption and thievery. So what that Russia was degraded from a world superpower to a second-rate regional player? The elites did well in the process by pilfering what the empire had accumulated.
^^^^^^ CB: The Soviet Union wasn't an empire.
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I think that the same thing is happening in the US. In the past, the US business elites sucked blood out of the working class, but they built an empire that eventually improved the lot of all, including most of the working class. But that is over now, and the elites are coasting and pilfering what has been accumulated while everybody else's lot is deteriorating. This is not the productive capitalism that Karl Marx was talking about anymore, but gangster and crony capitalism in which parasitic elites live off of the handouts given to them by corrupted politicians without adding much value to the production process.
^^^^^^^ CB: Karl Marx described the capitalism of his day and before as substantially gangstered and cronied with parasitic elites.
"In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted."
"Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. "
"But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation "
"Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. "
"Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong [Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work and ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide.... The beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire, secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many a murder."
"If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
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I this context, this whole talk about laws of capitalist "system" is way to abstract to my taste - like talking about theological problems while the Catholic Church was slaughtering heretics and pilfering the New World. I prefer to focus on business elites and their stooges, not on capitalism or some other abstract "laws" or "systems." "Systems" do not rob people of their wealth and rights, other people do. And those who do do not do so because of some "systemic law" or other functionalist abstraction, but because they can and can get away with it.
Wojtek
^^^^^ CB: Your taste for no abstraction falls into rank empiricism. Of course, cogent thinking about US today must include conscious abstraction or theory as well as factual investigation. The assertion that "abstract laws or systems don't rob people other people do " is too cockeyed a half ( nay one quarter) " truth", silly, to even respond to.