----- Original Message ----- From: "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> More and more, I think of state bureaucrats and politicians under capitalism > as a fraction of capital, similar to banking capital. Remember that > industrial capitalists are willing to give up a part of the surplus-value > (interest) to the bankers even though the latter don't produce > surplus-value, since the bankers act as financial intermediaries, easing the > flow of capital funds. Similarly, the industrial capitalists are willing to > give up some surplus-value (taxes, bribes, campaign contributions) to the > state apparatus because of individual services rendered, along with general > protection of property rights and lawnorder. Just as with the relations > between industrial and banking capital, the relationship between industrial > capital and the state need not be totally happy all the time. =================== Been reading William Niskanen and William Riker lately, Jim? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > This would fit in with Wood's argument (in _Democracy against > Capitalism_) that capitalism artificially divided the political into the > two separate realms of "the political" and "the economy." If one takes > "politics" to be concerned with the allocation of human activity, then > "economics" is the guise that this political activity takes on under > capitalism. And in the latest stages of capitalism the line has become > thinner and thinner. > =============== Isn't more likely that the *narratives* and explanations offered by historians and other social observers either unwittingly or deliberately obscured the relations between State officials and capitalists? While I'd be the last to deny the ideological purposes that many of the narratives serve, we shouldn't brush aside how many in the business community truly hate governments and the way some of the capitalist class manipulate the State for advantages and privileges enrages many other from the same class. Small businesses *do* want to be left alone as much as possible and many hate politics as it currently exists. This is part and parcel of why proprietors of small business have enormous contempt for large companies, they know they got that way by calling on the nanny state. In an article titled "Towards a Libertarian Theory of Class" by Roderick Long, which I stumbled upon in the journal 'Social Philosophy & Policy', Long quotes a libertarian writer - Paul Weaver- who rails against the State-Corporate nexus: "The corporation had never been for markets, limited government, private property, or the other associated with the business cause...It had always tried to derive private advantage from public policy...The corporation was created by people who thought the market generally inefficient, backward, a drag on progress, a difficulty to be gotten a round...From the dawn of the modern corporation...the business lobby continued its campaign for public policies to keep prices high, provide subsidies and incentives, and control new entrants." [from 'The Suicidal Corporation'] The Smithian legacy still runs deep, not out of a nostalgia for small shops --although that does exist for some, but that human beings should make minimal demands on each other for the sake gaining mutual *advantage* -a most mysterious concept- in the process of developing commercial networks. Richard Epstein, Jan Narveson and others in the libertarian camp aren't afraid of economies of scale, they're just concerned with the manner in which human beings achieve complex forms of cooperation. Woe to those who ignore the contradictions of liberty..... The Roderick Long piece is interesting and worth a look.... Ian
