>>The intellectual victory of capitalism - a battle advanced and won by political ideologists - has deprived the political elites of independent power and placed them in the service of financial markets.
In the process, the only elites left standing are the financial ones, which also exercise predominance over the business elites as Britain's manufacturing economy produces less and less. . . . It is the prestige of Wall Street in America that comes closest to the British respect for the square mile. But even in New York, the power of finance has to exist within a milieu shaped by leftwing politics and by an intellectual tradition with deep central European roots." Comment A so-called superstruggle is evolving in all the most advanced bourgeois countries - imperial centers, on earth. Entrenched bureaucracies are undergoing crisis and collapse, as they had existed. The industrial bureaucracy decays and this is becoming increasing obvious to everyone. Imagine the deepening crisis of the trade union bureaucracies, with their various representatives as the old political elite. >>The writer is a historian, journalist and broadcaster, and was a special adviser in John Major's Conservative government . This article is based on a chapter in his latest book, Britain's Power Elites: The Rebirth of a Ruling Class (Constable), published on April 6 <<< Here is basically what I drably write as classes rise and fall based on changes in the means of production. The Rebirth of a Ruling Class is acceptable terminology for me. Along with this rebirth of a ruling class is a rebirth of the working class, meaning a change in its form that identifies it in its connection with production. Hence, the decay of the industrial working class. Fairly simple. In another 15 years no one will argue this. The industrial bureaucracy is what the communist and everyone else in the former Soviet Union faced rather than simply its ideological and political dimensions understood as Stalinism. This fight could not be won in front of changes in the technological regime no matter how noble the combatants. The most that could and did happen was internal blood letting. Political Trotskyism never understood this in its call for regime change. The Stalin sector could not commit suicide. The bureaucracy is not a subjective thing although its subjective features are very real. Nor is the bureaucracy simply "The bureaucracy" . . . it is always a historically evolved form and specific kind of bureaucracy that evolves and takes shape in conformity with development of the means of production and forms of wealth. Forms of wealth - the primary forms of wealth of a society, exists in correspondence with stages of development of the means of production. A ruling class and ruling elite detached from value production has already arisen. Its primary form of wealth is symbolic and stored in machines as data. This is different. Its polar opposite existing in external collision with these form of wealth (class) is a communist sector of the world proletariat, increasing shut out of and detached from production to the same degree that the new ruling class is detached from production. Here is the antagonism of present day society or the movement of antagonism and its expression as an external collision of classes. We are in for an extremely complex struggle involving class sectors rather than a romantic notion of workers against capitalist as such, in a radically new environment involving the dismantling and overthrow of the last artifacts of the industrial bureaucracy. Sure this is "the class struggle" but that does not tell one very much. Actually, it is not in fact the class struggle, in the sense of the romantic struggle between the two basic social classes of the industrial system proper and the notions of the "classical Marxists." Rather, it is a form of struggle where we experience the movement of antagonism as one stage of development of the mode of production gives way to another. Antagonism replaces contradiction. The antagonism does not grow out of the unity and strife of the social process of production that is the bond of worker and capitalist. The antagonism emerges as an expression of external collision between a new rising mode of production - with its corresponding new forms of classes, transforming the old infrastructure basis of a given society, with its old corresponding forms of classes. Society move in class antagonism ... Not simply class contradiction. Contradiction does not magically become antagonism but rather antagonism replaces contradiction as a form of development of the productive forces and this antagonism does not magically spring from the internal relations of the two basic classes of a social system. The antagonism emerges on the basis of a qualitative addition to an existing system of production. The process logic of things - production and society, are as Marx stated: the quantitative addition of a new quality to an existing process, rather than a magically passing of quantity into quality. This qualitative addition halts development of the basis of the old qualities of a system and here is the meaning of using up all the room - space, for development in a mode of production. At any rate this is how things appear to me in March 2006. Without question more will be revealed. Melvin P. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
