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The Ruling Class 3. The Structure of The Ruling Class
The Ruling Class 3. The Structure of The Ruling Class
The Ruling Class 3. The Structure of The Ruling Class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
building or merely satisfaction and the quiet life. The essential point
is that - irrespective of how they use their power - a small number of
men possess it, and they are not publicly accountable for it.9
These formulations could lead to different views of the ruling
class: in the one case to the idea of a class with systematic
divisions on various points that are overridden by unity on the
issue of its relations with another class; in the other to the idea
of chunks of a class that have largely broken loose from each
other and which operate under very little constraint at all.
Clearly the role of competition and internal conflict needs close
examination.
The idea of ' neo-capitalism \ expounded by Playford in
particular, is based on the view that there has been an increasing
integration of business and the state. The most important
feature of this is taken to be support of business and its
interests by the state elites, both bureaucrats and politicians.
There is 'support' in the sense of attitudes: bureaucrats and
politicians are favourable to business and unwilling to act
against its interests. This is the main thrust of Playford's
account of influential people in the state, such as party leaders
and arbitration judges. The massive evidence he and Encel have
collected about the movement of officials into well-paid jobs
in business provides support for this judgement, and points to
one of the ways the link is maintained.10 On the other hand there
is support of business by the actual policies of governments:
tariff policies that benefit manufacturers, subsidies, provision
of infrastructure, etc. This has been documented in particu-
lar detail by McFarlane for the period of Liberal rule, and
by Catley and McFarlane for the period of the Whitlam
government.11
A good deal of attention is given by Playford and Encel to
organizations that link government and business. These are the
boards of public corporations like TAA and AIDC on which
leading businessmen sit; the liaison and advisory committees
that are set up by government for this particular purpose; the
peak organizations of industries that function as lobbies in
Canberra; and the finance committees of the Liberal Party (we
may now add the Labor Party). These provide a series of links
which, be it noted, go below the level of directorships and
involve executives of the large companies.
The basic concept here is of a negotiating or bargaining
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
CRC3 53
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
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The structure of the ruling class
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The ruling class
of the state 6lite and the business 6\ite from arguments about
their respective role. The similarities are evident. They arise
from common social backgrounds, have common levels of
comfort and income, and common patterns of work. The prob-
lems of managing a large organization are reasonably similar
whether it is a state department, a public corporation, or a big
company; the routines of work - t h e offices, conferences, air
travel, and so forth-are much the same; and the outlook
fostered by it, the tendency to see the world as something to
be administered from above, is naturally shared. Some bureau-
crats (Coombs is the most striking example) resist the social
complacency that all this fosters, but the smooth integration of
government officials into corporate employment that Playford
has traced argues a general compatibility of outlook.
Senior officials, then, are readily able to become members
of the business leadership, and there are some cases (e.g.
Ellicott, who recently went from being federal solicitor-general
to being a Liberal front-bencher) to show that they can move
into the political leadership. But this does not imply that, as
officials, they are part of the leadership of the ruling class. Their
power, as already suggested, rests on a quite different basis.
It may seem odd to argue that the society has a ruling class,
and then to suggest that the most powerful officials in it are not
members of that class, or at least not members of its leadership
(since civil servants may well be small property owners). Yet
this is what the argument implies. The difficulty is partly an
ambiguity of language: the phrase 'ruling class' does not imply
'rule' in the sense of executive control (no one, and no group,
rules a capitalist society in that sense). What is implied is a
collective domination, the maintenance of an institutional struc-
ture within which the class appropriates benefits, the choking
off of alternatives - the only sense in which a class can intelli-
gibly be said to rule.
On the other side, this argument points to limitations of the
power of the state £lite that are not immediately obvious when
one looks at the scale of their executive activity. Paradoxically,
their power as individual office-holders is more marked than
their collective power as a unit within the social order. The
rhetoric of conservatism, which attacks the expansion of 'un-
productive ' government as a 4 burden' on the productive sec-
tions of the community, here reflects in a distorted way, an
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The structure of the ruling class
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