Prometheus 6

Recently I wrote an oddly-structured essay that began with my extreme anxiety about current events, and turned immediately to the distantly related topic of US industrial management.

I think the problem is that the neoconservatives actually represent a tradition of industrial management from the USA. The "American System" of manufacturing emerged from the refining of petroleum and the production of machinery (which accounted for nearly all US exports from the late 19th century to the mid-20th); it involved firms that had a large, professional system of modular, bureaucratic management in distribution, development, and production. By the 1920's these industrial bureaucracies had replaced the old powerhouses of investment bankers.

Elsewhere, in an article on The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt), I wrote,

The professional staff of a large corporation are often far more zealous and hidebound in their bloodthirstiness than the top managers. Those warbloggers who chirp about murdering "traitors" who question the President's actions, are probably perfectly respectable members of the middle class whose bloodlust stems from their frustration at their mundane, insignificant role in an endeavor that fascinates them. They are anonymous, not out of cowardice, but because they hate the fact that they are nobodies. Nor is there any meaningful cleavage between them and the bourgeoisie (on the one hand) and the middle class (on the other) to which they technically belong.

Readers might find this bizarre in the extreme. Everyone knows the President's foreign policy is neoconservative, and neoconservativism stems from the philosophy of Leo Strauss. More confusing yet is my dragging in the concept of the "developmental state"[1], in which I attempt to demonstrate that attempts to guide development in the 3rd world have contributed mightily to the rise of neoconservativism. What could development policy and industrial management have to do with Israel's late invasion of Lebanon, or with proposals to invade Iran?

In order to answer this question, it's necessary to start with a proposition: political policy is driven chiefly (but not exclusively) by business interest.