Trump, the State and the Revolution

The most important and momentous change compared to Trump No. 1 is that he now has Elon Musk and his merry band of convention-breakers who are proceeding to the dismantling of the state apparatus. What they are doing under the title of the Department Of Government Efficiency seems novel for the people who have not had the experience or even the knowledge of any revolutionary change. The last such revolutionary change in the United States was done by FDR in the 1930s; it included smashing the old state, creating a new one and endowing it with multitude of new functions, most of which have endured for decades. It is Marxism 101 that if you have a revolutionary movement that movement in order to survive has to smash the old state apparatus and create a new. Marx wrote of that with regard to the Paris Commune: “The next attempt of the French revolution [the Commune] will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash [emphasis by Marx] it” (Letter to Kugelman, April 12, 1871). Lenin later implemented it when he came to power. Without the control of the state apparatus every revolution is incomplete and in danger of being overthrown.

The current revolution comes with certain (so to speak) American characteristics. The American state has become an enormous machinery that is largely unrelated to whoever is in power. This has been noticed by the ideologues of the Trumpist revolution: the apparatus of the state continued functioning and producing the same outcomes regardless of who was in power. While this happens in many countries, it has been exacerbated in the US by the American specificity where large parts of the decision-making have been “outsourced” or taken away from both the executive and the legislative branches. The Treasury Department is run, whether it is under Democrats or Republicans by Wall Street (Paulson, Rubin, Mnuchin, Brady e tutti quanti), the Fed is legally independent, and America has been well-known in the 19th century, and has returned to be, a “system of courts and parties” where the judiciary makes many of de facto political decisions that in the parliamentary systems are made by politicians. When one puts these things together one quickly realizes that the scope of the executive power is fairly limited, not only by what is conventionally considered as the limits imposed by Congress and the independent judiciary but by the fact that large segments of decision-making (monetary and fiscal policy or regulatory policy) are done by the “apparatchiks” who are independent of, and pay scant attention to, the party in power.

The ideologues of the Trumpist revolution (and here I have in mind especially N. S. Lyons1 who has produced several ideologically very clear texts, in particular The China Convergence and American Strong Gods) have noticed a further phenomenon that limits the scope of their revolution. The apparatus of the state has been over the years populated by the extreme liberals [sic] who obviously do not share the view of the world of the Trumpist revolutionaries. The state apparatus has thus additionally and ideologically become insulated from the Trumpist executive. The revolutionaries believe that the state apparatus has been filled by liberals because of liberals’ dominance in the intellectual sphere, through the control over the top American universities, the world of think tanks, and quasi governmental institutions. The liberal point of view has come to dominate all those who join the state apparatus or participate in parastate activities. (Obviously, people who populate the apparatus will select to help or replace them similarly opinionated people.) The ideologues ascribe the rise of a liberal Professional Managerial Class (PMC) to its dominance in the knowledge production. I do not find this a particularly persuasive explanation because it considers the locale of conflict to be in ideology, removed from “the infrastructure” or locale of social reproduction where more materialistic ideologies tend to see the key contradictions express themselves. In any case, the dominance in intellectual knowledge production gets translated, through personnel, into the control of the state apparatus.

If that diagnosis holds, then it is clear that revolutionaries have to take over and/or destroy the existing apparatus of the state.

The battle that we see between Elon Musk and his supporters and different parts of the US state are the usual battles that we see when a revolutionary movement wants to leave a deeper imprint over the future.