I wrote:
> at any given time, the US ruling class is that part of the class > structure that owns financial claims to means of production based in > the US. It rules the economy, but not necessarily the government
Doug:
That's not what a ruling class has usually meant; it sounds like you're describing capitalists. To be a ruling class, doesn't it have to be formed socially and act politically?
this is what Marx meant by the "ruling class," IMHO. Under capitalism, that's the capitalists. They are formed -- defined -- socially by capitalist class relations, while they _do_ act politically. Unfortunately (from their collective, class, point of view), the different capitalist political organizations (the Dems vs. the GOPs, etc, etc.) often compete with each other, sometimes even violently. They sometimes have to rely on noncapitalist groups in order to run the government (to participate in the power elite) Of course, definitions _always_ involve a certain amount (a ton, an ounce, or something in between) of arbitrariness. Definitions are defintional, not true. However, I find the definitions above to be extremely useful to organizing though in order to understand the world.
And much of the "financial claims to the means of production," by which I suppose you mean stocks and maybe bonds, are owned by pension funds on behalf of workers. They're managed by professional money managers, but does that make the portfolio managers the ruling class?
those funds are run in a way that _must_ be "prudent." That means they must give the highest return (given risk and the like). There's a certain amount of leeway there (e.g., diversification can cancel out the increased risk from limiting investment in, say, Wal-Mart, for moral reasons). But balancing risk and return from an individual perspective fits well with the general principles of capitalist financial investment. Now, divesting from Wal-Mart (and before it, apartheid South Africa, etc.) does not necessarily go against capitalist class interests. It might be that Wal-Mart's current policies undermine the long-term persistence of the system, so that a little outside pressure might be a good thing. It is more likely that the existence of the apartheid system hurt the legitmacy of capitalism. Social-democratic policies can be good for capitalism (as seen in W. Europe until 1980 or so). We don't know for sure, though. Even the capitalists don't know for sure what their class interests are, despite their hiring of all sorts of intellectuals and capitalists to figure thinks out for them. We -- and they -- can't really know what their class interest is until _after the fact_. The capitalists rule society, but that doesn't mean that they do so well, even from their own perspective. For example, one of their fractions can take over the government and then push narrow (particularistic) and even extremely stupid policies, as has happened in recent years in the US.
I'm in the early stages of a book on this topic, so I'm not going to let anyone get away with easy formulas!
It's a mistake to presume that others are presenting easy formulas until they have been explained. -- Jim Devine / "In economics, the majority is always wrong." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
