On 11/13/06, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And a problem with Yoshie's 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.
I often use such terms as "the ruling class," "the capitalist class," and "the bourgeoisie" interchangeably, which Mills doesn't do and which I might not do either if I were writing a book to clarify the overlap as well as difference between those who own the means of production and those who run the state and other major social institutions. Let's look at what Mills actually said in The Power Elite (1956): <blockquote>'Ruling class' is a badly loaded phrase. 'Class' is an economic term; 'rule' a political one. The phrase, 'ruling class,' thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically. That short-cut theory may or may not at times be true, but we do not want to carry that one rather simple theory about in the terms that we use to define our problems; we wish to state the theories explicitly, using terms of more precise and unilateral meaning. Specifically, the phrase 'ruling class,' in its common political connotations, does not allow enough autonomy to the political order and its agents, and it says nothing about the military as such. It should be clear to the reader by now that we do not accept as adequate the simple view that high economic men unilaterally make all decisions of national consequence. We hold that such a simple view of 'economic determinism' must be elaborated by 'political determinism' and 'military determinism'; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions. Those are the major reasons we prefer 'power elite' to 'ruling class' as a characterizing phrase for the higher circles when we consider them in terms of power.</blockquote> In other words, Mills does not reject the existence of an economic class; what he rejects is a notion that the entire capitalist class -- an economic class -- directly rules through the state, unilaterally, every day, the notion that I, too, reject. In short, it is not only possible but necessary to employ both Marx and Mills and their respective concepts. The degree of an overlap between the capitalist class (relationally defined by its power to expropriate surplus value from labor) and the power elite (whose composition is empirically analyzed) depends on a given society. E.g., In social formations like the Gulf states, there is a high degree of overlap between the capitalist class and the power elite. The Gulf royalty are the ruling class in both economic and political senses of the term. In social formations like the United States, the power elite is a subset of the capitalist class: many members of the power elite come from the capitalist class, and those members of the power elite who were originally born into classes below them usually become members of the capitalist class, before or through joining the ranks of the power elite. In social formations like Venezuela, the power elite who currently rule the state are at odds with the capitalist class as well as major civil society institutions that the latter own and control. The capitalist class under such conditions seek to assert themselves as the ruling class through their economic decisions and political machinations and attempt to remove the current power elite and replace them by a new power elite who are of and/or for the capitalist class. For the sake of illustrating a variety of relations between the power elite and the capitalist class, I abstracted each country from the world outside in the above examples. In the real world, the relations are even more complex, for capital is increasingly transnational, whereas the power elite are predominantly national. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
