On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 7:20 PM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:
> Arguments about to what extent the capitalist class rule by political
> repression miss the point. The ruling class do not need political
> dictatorship, they rule via economic dictatorship.
Yes, we've definitely seen over the last few days how the ruling class doesn't need "political" repression.
But--and I should have made my point clearer--this division is totally specious. The economic dictatorship can't exist without the state dictatorship, to use your terms. I think Chomsky's point about the Marines is a good one, but it treats the moments and the spheres as discrete, temporally and spatially. In exceptional cases, things do work that way, but that's not how daily life is structured.
^^^^^^^ CB: You are very much correct that the state is the main repressive apparatus of _all_ ruling classes, including the bourgeoisie ( See _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_). However, in the US, we have at least 80 years of protest of the state directly in the form of "protest demonstrations" at state institution sites such as Washington , D.C. ( probably hundreds of demos) and state and municipal govt. sites ( thousands ?) . Americans are substantially conscious of the role of the state in political repression. Americans have a long tradition of criticizing and protesting their United States. What Americans lack sorely is consciousness that the actual bourgeois politifical ruling class is in the private sector ,in monopoly corporations , symbolically concentrated at "Wall Street". In other words, the important specious division that most of the 99% of Americans make is that the state is the only locus of _political_ repression. They separate the 1% from the state, the economic masters from their government agents. Wall Street is a _political_ institution. That is the great lesson of OWS "pointing" to Wall Street with what is culturally a _political_ form, the protest demonstration.
Interestingly, the Flint Sitdown strike ("occupation" of General Motors' plant) and the protests in WW I to discourage workers from joining the army for WWI ( resulted in the very first First Amendment Supreme Court decisions in which the great Liberal Mr. Justice Holmes found an exception to Constitutional protection of freedom of speech of socialists ) were protests at private locations.