Indeed politics does make for strange bedfellows. Classical Marxist view holds the state as "administrative apparatus the bourgeois have constructed to accomodate the requirements of capital." Marx held the state as a macrocosm of the corporation as defined by Galbraith in his "New Industrial State."

Writing in the "Eighteenth Brumarire of Louis Bonaparte" Marx worried the state would turn on the bourgeois and become what he called the "parasitic state" that would over-tax capital and destroy the bourgeois (middle class) if unchecked. Republican conservative elites constantly fret and fear their majority will become dilute, government will become independent and evolve into Marx's parasitic state. Republicans see welfare liberalism as defining exactly what Marx feared, the parasitic state. This is a domestic fear and it is given voice in the calls to eliminate the inheritance tax, which they relabled death tax, a call for the abolishment of the graduated income tax in favor of a flat tax, etc. All veiled efforts to perpetuate an aristocracy based on accumulated wealth.

This administration's foreign policy can best be explained as an externalized manifestation of domestic corporate concerns.

It's almost comical the way the Republican policies of the Bush administration address the concern of Karl Marx and follow the same policies while they demonize Marx as the devil incarnate. Actually. Bush, Rove, Frist Republicans are in a very real sense "fellow travelers."

Publius