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Showing posts with the label "capitalist state"

Reform or Revolution

The twentieth-century question is back. We saw it in the Arab uprisings from Tunisia to Algeria and Sudan, in Occupy, in Greece, in France, etc. And we see it now in the U.S. " The rebellion [in the U.S.] has accomplished more in two weeks than have decades of slow, incremental electoralism." —Ahmed Kanna
In his classic The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband wrote: "In an epoch when so much is made of democracy, equality, social mobility, classlessness and the rest, it has remained a basic fact of life in advanced capitalist countries that the vast majority of men and women in these countries has been governed, represented, administered, judged, and commanded in war by people drawn from other, economically superior and relatively distant classes." These words were written in 1969, but, as we are ruled by a government dominated by daddy-bankrolled Etonians, they still seem somehow relevant. Ralph Miliband: six key ideas
Against liberal nostalgia "[T]he neoliberal variant of capitalism was not the result of a a “corporate coup.” It is the result of the familiar, systematic workings of a capitalist state seeking to resolve a crisis and restore the system to 'health'... ... to say that the last thirty years of neoliberal policy were not simply the result of a “corporate coup” does not mean that Donald Trump is simply a “boilerplate” Republican. If he were, how could we explain the tremendous fight the GOP establishment waged against him? Trump did   not receive a single donation   from a Fortune 100 CEO, while a broad range of top military brass and   establishment Republicans  — including George Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Paul Ryan, Hank Paulson, Bill Kristol, and others — either endorsed Clinton or suggested they couldn’t support Trump. All this indicated a wide-ranging consensus among the capitalist class behind Clinton, founded upon maintaining the status quo abroad (“fre...