The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Re: Cheers Mike. Perhaps a tad more serious ... Capitalism and conspiracy podcast here Archived Message

    Posted by margo on April 14, 2019, 2:34 pm, in reply to "Cheers Mike. Perhaps a tad more serious ... Capitalism and conspiracy podcast here"

    Thanks for the reminder of these great Parenti video clips.
    He's better than Chomsky at analysing how power players and their media use the "conspiracy theory" phrase as a truncheon with which to police official narratives. He correctly points out that conspiring = colluding ... and that colluding together towards achieving certain goals is what power players do, by definition.
    According to Chomsky there's a conflict between (A) structural and (B) functional/volitional theories when it comes to scrutinising malfeasance... and only the more abstract, academic (A) is truly valid and worthy of pubication in journals, etc. Chomskyites tend to reject functional/volitional theories in the same way that official narrators and corporate journalists do: those who scrutinise on a functional/volitional level (which actually gets far closer to the bone) are disparaged and side-lined as loony "conspiracy theorists".

    Parenti takes a different view: for him both (A) and (B) are valid and there should be no either/or choice between them. It should rather be (A) and (B), as the structural and functional are not separate entities but are intertwined. Parenti: "Structure plays itself out through functional/volitional forces" (paraphrase).

    Parenti's model has been superbly applied in South Africa with respect to the take-down of the corrupt Zuma presidency and the exposure of state capture by lobby groups. Both structural and functional factors were analysed by journalists, authors and political analysts and the combined structural-functional unpacking yielded far more inter-connected, revealing information than a pure structural analysis.

    Message Thread: