Subject: Re: Bonapartism vs. the normal institutions of class rule Ben,
Start with the part I agree with, because it is not a small part. Capital is the impersonal compeller. The people who own it are its functionaries before they are its authors, and a class does not need to understand what it is doing in order to do it. That is my position too, and I take no credit for conceding it. But look at what the salmon costs you. A salmon does not calculate. It does not survey the river, notice the window closing, and conclude that it is now or never. If our ruling class acts on instinct, and the internal rationalizations carry zero weight, then nobody delegated anything to Trump and nobody reached a use-it-or-lose-it judgment about a declining MAGA movement. Your central thesis two posts ago required a subject capable of seeing a card about to disintegrate in its hand and playing it while it still had value. That is a decision, or it is nothing. You can have the functionalism, or you can have the now-or-never. I do not see how you keep both, and the one you keep determines what we should be watching in the next six weeks. The same problem runs through your original question, which was a good one and is why I answered it at all. Why did our ruling class allow someone like Trump to come to power? "Allow" is an agency word. If the distinction between installing him and failing to stop him is a distraction for the naive, the question dissolves before anyone can answer it. Now the leash, because your evidence is better than you think, and it runs against you. The tariff retreat is real. I remember the week. But notice the organ: it was the bond market. A market is a price mechanism. It aggregates, it does not deliberate, and it has no membership, no quorum, and no capacity to form an intention. It disciplined Trump because tariffs are priced, immediately and in public, on instruments that a great deal of capital is sitting on. That is the whole reason it worked. Now price the portal. A verification standard applied to mail ballots in thirty-six states moves nobody's yields. There is no instrument that reprices when a batch of ten thousand goes back to Michigan to be cured. Your own example establishes that the leash operates exactly where capital's valuations are exposed and nowhere else, which is precisely why an assault on the franchise conducted through an agency's technical standard is safe from it. If the constraint you are describing is a bond market, then it is not a constraint on this. Bartiromo and diGenova, I read the opposite way. Fox is a family firm with a controlling shareholder. A US attorney's office in Florida is a personal grant. Both of those are inside the household. Somebody in a retinue got crosswise with somebody else in the retinue and lost the office, which is the ordinary weather of patrimonial staffing and happens most often when the staffing is working. You are reading personnel churn inside the structure as evidence of a body outside it reclaiming power. Those look similar from the outside, and they are opposites. On the unions, you will get no argument from me about the officialdom. I have made the same complaint at more length than anyone here wanted. But the proposal never ran through the officialdom. It ran through members who physically handle the mail. The disclosure that has done all the damage to this scheme in the past three weeks did not come from a resolution, a convention, or a leadership. It came from one employee with access to a process, and it is now the evidentiary spine of the coverage, the Blumenthal demand, and the litigation. I am not asking a bureaucracy to act. I am saying the people who will see the returned batches first are already in the building. Which brings me to the part of your post I want to be straight about rather than polite about. You have answered the absence of a social force by proposing better communication among the people who write. Higher signal, more subscribers, a journal with comments. I have read "A Place to Stand," and it is serious work, and I am not dismissing it. But the form of the answer is the thing Draper described. There is no force, so the program is refined instead. Six hundred subscribers becoming six thousand subscribers with a better ratio is still six thousand readers. So, the October question, and then I will stop. I have asked twice now whether anyone on this list has a line into an APWU or NALC local. Nobody has said yes. I take that as the answer. The honest consequence is that this thread, which has been the best discussion of Bonapartism I have read anywhere this year, is going to produce commentary and not intervention, and I include myself in that and have no standing to be superior about it. What I am going to do with the time is small, and I will say it plainly so it can be measured later. I am writing to the two postal locals in this county and to the Clark County elections office, and I am going to spend October on the canvassing boards, because the nullification everybody in this thread has been describing will happen in a county building in front of five people in November, and the people who show up to those meetings are mostly the ones who came to overturn 2020. On the joint essay, I am going to decline for now. Not because it is a bad idea. Because the six weeks it would take are the six weeks the ballots are moving. Ask me again on November 4, and I will mean it. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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