What can Marx teach us about the MEGA moment in US politics?

 

What can Marx teach us about the MEGA moment in US politics?

Some brief notes (to be continued)

The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions ... alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquility, most solemn preaching of tranquility in the name of revolution – passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events 

Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 3

 

1- Marx, in his "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," remarks that two factions of the ruling class and the "Order party" during the third republic (1848-51) who were loyal to different royal dynasties were not fighting over identities and principles, but rather, their economic and material mode of existence, their different "kinds of property". In his words:

"Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators [...] What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property."

2- What we see in the MEGA populism, factions of the capitalist and CEO class lining behind Trump and his billionaire lieutenants
like Musk is not first and foremost a clash of identities, values, and royalties to different dynasties. It is not a clash of two different philosophical understandings of liberalism, democracy, or governments. It is a clash between two different "kinds of property" or dominant patterns of running capitalism called "patterns of accumulation."

3- Marx's concept of kinds of property was coined to describe how the early capitalist development of mid-19th century France was to be managed and run. With the primacy of industry and financial sector (Oralanists) or big land owners and agricultural capital (Legitimists or Bourbons). The right way to understand and update Marx's conceptu of "kinds of property" is that capital accumulation and long-term and sustainable profit-making in each historical context needs a specific coalition of class forces (a certain level of concession from lower classes to the capitalist class, certain mutual understanding, arrangment and concession between certain groups of the ruling class).

4- the clash of different groups of the ruling class should not be understood in abstract and context-independent terms (like between financial or industrial capital or between globalist or nationalist-protectionist capital). These terms are too abstract and distort the historical reality. As Marx very well understood, it was not the case that the Legitimists were against industrialization or bank capital. Rather, they had their own vision of how to manage and develop them. It is historically contingent on how these groups or factions are shaped at the level of cultural identity construction. They will get structurally determined roles and power when at the pivotal turning moments they can gather around one program of development against another as far as their material interests allow them. Trump had a different program. Some, whose material interests allowed them, lined up in the new camp and left the old camp (The Democratic party) and its old program of capital accumulation.

5- Trump (like the populist Louis Bonapart) was able to do this because not only did he have a new program (pattern of accumulation) with a new coalition of class forces but also because he could capitalize on the grievances of the populace (non-elite public) against the other more globalist program.

6- the power of Marxian analysis is not in prophecies about the future, rather, it is in dismantling the mainstream, confused, and idealist portrayal of the conflict and the crisis.

Firstly, American imperialism, interventionism, financialization, and globalist tendencies are not over, they are only organized in different ways.

Secondly, this is not the death of functioning civilization and mainstream politics, this is not a march to fascism, this is just a new form of mainstream politics. It is more aggressive and blunt, but still going to be the new normal.

Thirdly, Trumpists (like Orleanists) are not a temporary deviation, there is not going to be a restoration of the old liberal Pax Americana order. The next democratic party is not going to offer restoration, rather, it is going to play under the new pattern of accumulation and collation of class forces.

7- It is important for those on the socialist left to not fall for the liberal left apocalyptic picturing of the new order. We should avoid their idealist description of this turning point and the crisis. It is not a crisis of democracy, of liberalism, of misinformation, a counter-revolution of conservative or racist lifestyle against progressive lifestyle. It is a new way of running capitalism with some modifications in the old tools of ruling domestic and foreign affairs. There is nothing to lament about the fall of the Democrats. There should be no nostalgia or illusion to restore the old order. Not least because the old way of running the show was doomed and irreversibly gone for the good.

8- The problem with the new ruling coalition is not that they are not rational or good managers for capitalism. They are. The problem is not that they are going to act against the interest of their national economy. They have different interpretations of their national interests. One should not fall for the illusion that we have to save capitalism from itself. Capitalism and its ruling elite best know how to save themselves and their social order while paying some necessary costs of getting rid of remnants of the old coalition. In simple words, the problem with the new coalition is not that they are trying new ways of ruling, but that, they are the ruling elite.



To be continued ...


The full quote from Marx:

Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the Party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis and tricolor, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism – was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, the big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. At the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses that separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests that forbade the uniting of the two royal houses. And as in private life, one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles, one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital - sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they were enthusiastic only about ground rent.