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MUELLER WORKS FOR THE GOVERNMENT; TRUMP WORKS FOR THE STATE.
Last edited Sat Jul 22, 2017, 02:18 PM - Edit history (2)
Most people, including myself and resistance friends, confuse government with the state, and vice versa.
How states and governments are different: (source cited below)
All states are governments but not all governments are states.
A government is a set of organized, responsible institutions that serve as a system of social and economic administration. They handle the problems of living in an orderly way. A government can be a dictatorship, monarchy, republican or libertarian. But without a rudimentary body of institutions to sort out rights an duties of its members (hopefully democratically), society would likely dissolve into a disorderly aggregate of individuals (what we might today call 'failed states', by way of example).
A government is a set of organized, responsible institutions that serve as a system of social and economic administration. They handle the problems of living in an orderly way. A government can be a dictatorship, monarchy, republican or libertarian. But without a rudimentary body of institutions to sort out rights an duties of its members (hopefully democratically), society would likely dissolve into a disorderly aggregate of individuals (what we might today call 'failed states', by way of example).
A state, by contrast, is organized to serve the interests of a privileged and often propertied class of a few (millions, today) at the expense of the majority (billions). The state is the central committee of the capitalist bourgeioisie. Capitalism’s growth depends on state power. The rise of the state transformed governance, rapidly or slowly, into a malignant force for social development. When a government becomes a state, coercive mechanisms for perpetuate class for exploitative purposes becomes a public feature; and then governance takes on different institutional characteristics (e.g., public and private forms of reproductive control, school or public discipline).
The modern state used to depend on oppressive centralism but it now decentralizes its relations of power to militarized police forces, private foundations, PAC, voting redistricting, cuts to public housing, food subsidies, upsurges in militias and religious organizations.
The state as FORM hoards and employs power. It expresses nationalist fervor, absolute authority, promise of renewal through elections and salvation through obedience. The state as APPARATUS imposes its order through (as one example) racist Jim Crow apparatuses of KKK, White Citizens Councils, Protestant Christianity in concert with elected officials, local police, banks, landlords, federal agencies that maintain redlining and ghettoes).
Concept source: “Guerrillas of Desire”, Kevin Van Meter (2017)
What's this got to do with Mueller and Trump?
The way I see everyday right wingers and conservatives now, is that they want the continuance of good government (Medicare, Medicaid, schools, infrastructure, etc.) for themselves and America. They just confuse their hatred of state exploitation with government. It serves their representatives in Congress for them to stay that way as these suited dupes do the bidding of their capitalist funders.
I see how right wing, conservative Americans are silent when they can’t figure, at this point, just who is on their side — Trump, or the FBI.
Now that I see George Will come on MSNBC to sort out the morality of conservativism, it occurs to me that morality of this government is at odds with the immorality of Trump's statist cabal, and that the government v. state differences could help make more sense of it all to them.
So I think I've found a better frame to mend a big divide in this country.
When I talk about this situation with my right wing friends and neighbors, my plan is to distinguish these two entities -- government and state -- so that we can,
First, understand which masters Mueller and Trump serve.
Second, unite to break down statist capitalists who weaken our statehouse governance and services, then strengthen state house democratic government.
Knowing this is why so many billionaires see the weakening of our government as against their best interests, people like Bloomberg, Buffet and Hanauer, EU oligarchs; while statists like the Kochs, Mercers, Putin fight to centralize capitalist power.
Without going into further details of government v. state, I prefer to distinguish how Mueller serves the ends of democratic government.
The FBI and Mueller are, right now, independent of the apparatus of state and capitalist power, by virtue of his and the FBI’s serving only the democratic ends of the US Constitution.
Mueller and the FBI are, right now, creating the rules by which capitalism may no longer encroach on democratic governments.
Mueller and the FBI are, thereby, cleaning house of Soviet Russian statists.
Mueller and the FBI will be indicting those who use state apparatuses to hoard and control power to turn the US into a Russian state satellite.
Because Russia is a capitalist statist entity.
America is still a democratic government.
Rescind Citizens United, and America will continue to be a democratic government, not a satellite of any capitalist state.
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