----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Hoover" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Devine, James wrote: > > Instead of being pelted with petty personal attacks, > Domhoff should be > > given credit for doing excellent research to produce >his books. > re. domhoff, his study of social backgrounds of powerful white men was significant contribution to wright's 'power elite' theory in indicated further interlocking directorate of such types... > still, if origins of this theory were leftist, it was > attractive and popular enough to be appropriated by > political right via dye's 'irony of democracy' notion that "masses are asses" such that it is 'responsible elite' that guarantees democracy as well as more generalized rightist claim of 'eastern liberal establishment'... michael hoover
Or worse, such theory leads to weak politics on the Left. I agree that we've got to look at this relationship of political theory to personal practices based on the theorists' implicit assumptions about social change and how states work. We regularly use Domhoff's work here in Jo'burg at University of the Witwatersrand -- even last week, when I taught a good group of comrades from Southern African social movements -- as an exemplar of power-elite theories, that verge on conspiratorialism. It is terrific material, because it gets into the black boxes of decision-making and policy formulation. But without the correctives in the form of structural theories, this sort of approach takes you directly to a politics of influence-peddling squarely within the confines of the two capitalist political parties, as from Lou's post it sounded like Domhoff was endorsing. Here we're very sensitive to these relations, because our trade minister Alec Erwin -- once an outspoken marxist, then caught up in the late 1980s' move by the white left intelligentsia towards French Regulation Theory -- exemplifies how you can promote rampant neoliberalism on behalf on int'l capital using left-sounding phraseology associated with a post-fordist fantasy. I think the roots of this problem go quite deep, into the failure of our 1970s-80s structuralists -- largely at my university -- to put forward durable material to explain not only state processes, but even the class-race relationship. Like Domhoff, I just don't think they did a sufficiently robust job of coming to grips with the accumulation process (in our seminars, we use as correctives the soc-dem theorist Gosta Esping-Andersen and papers by Vicente Navarro and Ben Fine -- what do others rely upon?).
