>>The intellectual victory of capitalism - a battle advanced and won by political ideologists - has deprived the political elite's of independent power and placed them in the service of financial markets.
In the process, the only elite's left standing are the financial ones, which also exercise predominance over the business elite's 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 left-wing 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, nor was such desirable . . . at least in my estimate. 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 the old romantic notion of workers against capitalist as such or the dying cry of the industrial worker as the vanguard of the social revolution. Today's social struggle takes place in a radically new environment involving the dismantling and overthrow of the last artifacts of the industrial bureaucracy. We are at the beginning of a new historical process. An era of communist revolution. Sure, one can call this "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 notion of struggle between the two basic social classes of the industrial system proper. Nor does this new environment and struggle conform to the old notions of the "classical Marxists." Rather, we have entered an era of struggle where the forms of struggle we are to experience, must be understood as the movement of antagonism, caused and incited as one stage of development of the new 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 antagonistic or magically intensify - increase in quantitative density or boundary, 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 - the antagonistic element (aspect), all ways 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 magical passing of quantity into quality. This qualitative addition or the quantitative introduction of a new quality to an existing process, in this case industrial production, halts development of production on the old basis, and throws the system into a new kind of crisis. Here is the meaning of using up all the room - space, or development in a mode of production and here is the meaning of society moving in class antagonism. 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
