On 11/13/06, Doug Henwood wrote:
And a problem with Yoshie's [and my] Marx + Mills is that Mills explicitly rejected the idea of a ruling class, especially one that reduced to the capitalist class. Marxists have criticized Mills for this.
In THE POWER ELITE, I don't think Mills rejected the idea of a _societal_ ruling class of the sort that Marx posited. He may have done so in some other context, but in that book, he specifically rejected the idea of the equation between the governing (political, power) elite with the (socioeconomic) ruling class. Maybe he wasn't saying exactly that, but he was absolutely right if he rejected that equation. His subject matter in THE POWER ELITE was the political (power, governing) elite, _not_ the structure of our society as a whole. I get the impression that his vision of society as a whole was an informal and nondogmatic Marxist one. That is, there's a difference between who rules society as a whole and who runs a part of society, i.e., the state. And, as is well-known among Marxists, the government enjoys some "relative autonomy" vis-a-vis the capitalists (even though the existence of the coercive power of the state is absolutely necessary to the perpetuation of the capitalist class system). The fact that it's well known is suggested by the fact that "relative autonomy" is a cliche among Marxists. Relative autonomy means that the state's managers are often hired guns or come from politically-ambitious coalitions formed to represent sections of the capitalist class. The cappos often find running the state themselves to be less than lucrative (by their standards, natch). Hal Draper, by the way, has a very good discussion of the government's autonomy in his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION (which mostly consists of quotes from Marx and Engels). Of course, sometimes this relative autonomy can be abused (again, by capitalist standards). I don't think that anyone in the organized capitalist establishment (the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.) ever thought that the Bushmasters would be so destructive to their class interests. (I've said it before, but I think the war against Iraq was totally irrational from a capitalist perspective. I'd be that James Baker agrees.) Military juntas -- which can save the capitalists' bacon -- can also accumulate wealth and power for themselves, allowing themselves to enter the capitalist class (e.g., in Guatemala). As I said before, it's not always clear what's good for the capitalist class as a whole in the long run. Contrary to what I said, it may not even be clear after the fact. BTW, on what basis did Marxists criticize Mills? Is there any reason to think that these critiques were valid? To my mind, the more valid parts of the dispute was merely about the meaning of words.
Bertell Ollman told me a few weeks ago that few Marxists have written about the ruling class because they think the matter is self-evident. But it's not.
He's wrong. The folks around Kapitalistate debated this kind of stuff for years during the 1970s. The debate showed up in MR, too. Of course, people like G. William Domhoff and Paul Sweezy have written about the power and capitalist elites. -- Jim Devine / "In economics, the majority is always wrong." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
