Charles Brown wrote:
... If there was a ruling class, wouldn't they somehow be able to ensure that their most capable representatives were placed in high office? It's like the old put-down, "if you're so smart why aren't you rich?",only in reverse.<
a few years ago, I was teaching students about Adam Smith's ideas and the like and a rich young student asked me something along the lines of: "why do we need to know this stuff? I know all sorts of rich people like Justin Dart [a drugstore magnate] and they don't know anything about Adam Smith." That's why I came up with a slogan: "if you're so rich, how come you aren't smart?" anyway, there's a difference between a ruling class as a position in the social structure of capitalism (a class in itself) and a ruling class as "organized capital" (a class for itself). The former clearly exists, but the latter is split into competing factions (and sometimes warring factions, with competing fragments of the world capitalist class sending off members of the working class to fight and kill each other). The process of a class in itself becoming a class for itself (ending competition among fractions) is an historical process, involving all sorts of stops, starts, and reversals and hasn't been completed. So there's as yet no way for them to insure "that their most capable representatives were placed in high office." perhaps thinking about the "ruling class" as a bunch of people is the wrong way to look at things. Rather, it's the logic of capitalist accumulation that rules society. We don't know what that logic is as well as we should, but I think looking at issues in these terms can be very illuminating. -- Jim Devine / "In economics, the majority is always wrong." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
