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Paul Bowman's avatar

Appreciate the line of direction here. A couple of random points. First the US is not the only polity that combines the last decades of neoliberalism with a relatively low rate of investment in fixed capital. The UK shows the same dynamics, and its generally accepted that this is a cause of the persistent low productivity crisis there. Empirically it seems that the two most enthusiastic embracers of the Chicago School gospel, the US and the UK (happy to play Mini Me to America's Dr Evil) show that neoliberalism and fixed capital investment, not just in public infrastructure, but in private enterprise as well, don't go well together.

The second point is that Marx (and Engels) had a name for Hegel's bureaucracy/"universal" class - they called them the "ideological classes". This term, along with the unloved lumpenproletariat, has gone out of Marxist fashion, but I would argue that we would be well-advised to reconsider it. For Marx, the ideological classes were not just politicians, judges and priests - people who may be thought to work purely in the ideational fields of the intelligentsia - but also soldiers, jailors and cops. That is - anyone employed by the superstructure, rather than the base of social production (under private capitalist organisation). Marx attributed a particularly distorted consciousness to these ideological classes, based on their self-image as the agents of history - an upside down view of a world where the real forces of historical change originated in the depths of social production (and its class struggle) in the economic base. But... that doesn't mean that change doesn't have to appear as events on the political surface of the superstructure, just as goods realise their value in exchange, even if its origin is in production. So, yes, factions of the ideological classes will be necessarily involved in the struggle to change over from exhausted "regimes of accumulation", to potential new ones. After all, the Mont Pelerin Society was originally just a group of ideologists, until the contradictions of Keynesianism (and the Vietnam War) opened up an opportunity for them.

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Gerald Fnord's avatar

'[…] a more just, verdant, peaceful and verdant world[….] `

—' You said "verdent" twice. '

' I _like_ verdent. '

—(with apologies to Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman et al.)

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