Recently, on my website, I had this exchange with a reader. The exchange occurred on a thread related to the recent Supreme Court decision in which, by a 5-4 ruling, the Supremes overturned established practice and made it much more difficult for workers to sue employers over discriminatory practices. The exchange, as you can see, has to do with a much bigger set of questions.
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The reader wrote:
A powerstate or a ruling class is not a monolith; this is not only not my view it is not the marxist view. The members of a ruling class, who own or control major shares of corporations , compete with each other, and cooperate against their common economic enemy, the working class. And their are fractions within the ruling class that are more progressive and less so, but their common aim is to maintain and increase their economic position and power. And their are exceptions as well; Engels was a wealthy textile manufacturer.
Similarly a power system has many currents in it, but the actions of the powerstate reflect the ruling power structure, who support these actions. Only 5 justices voted for this action that I attributed to the powerstate; but how did they get in this position? they were voted there by both the Gops and Dems.
Why is there not mass outrage by the mass media? Why is this one editoral rather than hundreds. Becuase the media is owned by the ruling class and has been centralized. It supports actions that decrease the power of population.
Why does the professional class not object to this depowering of the population? Because they, in general, support the ruling class either actively or passively.
The professional class is a middle class economically placed between the ruling class and the population, but in power terms it is an UPPER class, although dependent on the ruling class. It has money assets, truth assets and expertise not availble to the general person of the population.
The professional class, under the guidence of the truth managers of the ruling class, staft the truth organs of the powerstate. Professonals compete among themselves but in general support the rule of the ruling class against the power interests of the population. They are elitist. By this I do not mean that they are stuck up or snooty, but that they tend to support the ruling class over the general population. The truth Elite, the teachers, jounalists, priests, artists and social scientists form a truth consenus formulated from the perspective of power, notably class power, rather than from the perspective of the population. Consequently the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling classes.
And the population is disoriented, distracted and our consciousness deranged by the transmission of these ideas of the class-based power structure.
So you can, if you wish, consider each act by the powerful as isolated and not part of a power system; just the act of five reactionaries. And this is the prevailing liberal idea in which we are indoctrianted in the schools and mass media. It is why the conceptual language of people and power, political and social reality, is so fragmented, restricted and complicated; to prevent the population from perceiving political reality as a overall Whole. This evolves historically largely without the conscious awareness of most people, and when outlined briefly , is attacked as a conspiracy theory.
But it is mostly excluded from the mainstream truth tradition because it gives people the Wrong ideas. So people are not exposed to the simple truth which subverts the mainstream truth of mindless political seditives and cliches.
The alternative is to consider a power system as a Whole and ask whose interests does it serve; the workers, consumers and residents of the population, or that of the ruling and professional classes?
Asking the latter question is part of my black and white presuppositions; but this question is not asked in liberal social science because it is unscientific by the liberal standards of scientism. Just as modern scientific conceptual structures in the natural sciences were repressed by the learned of agrarian powerstates, simplifying conceptions and preconceptions are currently ideologically repressed in social science.
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