https://mlrg.online/current-events/theses-on-trump-2-and-the-usa-ruling-class/
*The Class That Could Not Coordinate* A Reply to the MLRG Theses on Trump 2 and the USA Ruling Class Anthony P. Teso The Marxist-Leninist Research Group has issued a set of theses arguing that the second Trump administration executes a unified ruling-class project, a “re-set to a new imperialist order,” backed by “the overwhelming majority of the ruling class.” [1] ( #_ftn1 ) The document has real virtues. It refuses the liberal consolation that Trump is an accident, it grasps that tariffs against China are the strategic center of gravity rather than mere caprice, and it assembles a genuinely useful dossier on the European fracture. Its weakness is theoretical, and the weakness is precisely the one a Marxist account of Bonapartism exists to correct. The Theses dissolve the autonomy of the executive into the will of capital, and in doing so they explain too much. ***************************************** *The unity thesis as inverted conspiracy* ***************************************** The argument’s load-bearing claim is that capital is a coordinated subject. The bourgeoisie faces three problems, the Theses say, and Trump is the instrument it selects to solve them. From this it follows, for the authors, that the Democrats did not merely lose in 2024 but were made to lose, that the campaign was “thrown” because the agenda “was best served by the Republican Party.” [2] ( #_ftn2 ) This is functionalism in its purest form, and it is structurally identical to the conspiracy theory of the state that Marxists are supposed to reject. It converts contingent strategic failure into conscious design, and it endows the capitalist class with a unity of purpose and a capacity for coordination that the class does not possess and has never possessed. The whole interest of Bonapartism as a category lies in the opposite premise. Marx did not describe the Eighteenth Brumaire as the bourgeoisie getting the executive it wanted. He described an executive that achieved independence because the contending fractions had fought one another to exhaustion and none could rule in its own name. The bourgeoisie accepted Bonaparte not as the expression of its coordinated will but as the price of its inability to coordinate. It surrendered the right to rule in order to keep the right to make money. Poulantzas formalized the point. The relative autonomy of the capitalist state is not a loophole but a condition of the state’s functioning, and authoritarian statism names a mutation internal to that state, the concentration of power in the executive and the decline of the institutions that once mediated among fractions. [3] ( #_ftn3 ) Autonomy is greatest, not least, when the dominant class is divided. The Theses invoke none of this. They present a class with a single program and a state that transmits it without remainder. There is, on their account, no Bonapartist moment in Trumpism, because there is no fissure for a Bonapartist moment to occupy. ********************************************************** *The evidence cuts against the unity it is asked to prove* ********************************************************** The Theses concede, in a single clause, “the repugnance of some of the ruling class” for Trump, and they name a real intra-class division over Ukraine. These are treated as residual exceptions to an otherwise settled unity. They are better read as symptoms that the unity thesis is doing more work than the facts will bear. The document’s own sources describe a tariff rollout that cratered equities, spooked the Treasury market, and was placed on a ninety-day “pause” within a week. [4] ( #_ftn4 ) A class executing its considered common program does not improvise like this. A regime with substantial autonomy from a fractured class, lurching between the incompatible demands of old industry, the technology sector, and finance, each with sharply divergent exposure to China, improvises exactly like this. Here the Theses surrender their sharpest available weapon. If one begins from fractions rather than from a monolith, the chaos is not an embarrassment to be explained away but the central datum. The reshoring industrialists, the hyperscalers who depend on Chinese rare earths and on the very export markets the tariffs threaten, and the financial houses exposed to a bond-market revolt do not share a program. They share a regime that is trying, and visibly failing, to reconcile them. That is the phenomenon. The unity thesis cannot see it because it has already stipulated it away. ****************************** *The rate of profit, asserted* ****************************** The Theses ground their three problems in “the tendency for the historical falling rate of profit,” said to be “especially acute” for American capital. The tendency is named and then asked to carry the argument, but it is never measured, never specified, never connected to a mechanism. Which rate, computed on which stock of capital, over which interval? The law of the tendency, in Marx, is a law of countervailing tendencies, and to invoke the tendency without its counter-tendencies is to invoke a mood rather than a magnitude. A value-theoretic account would have to show the mediation between the falling rate, if it is falling, and the specific policy form of tariffs and state restructuring. The Theses leap from a gestural crisis to a concrete program with nothing in between. The leap is the place where the analysis should have been. *************************************************************** *What the Theses get right, and why it does not need the frame* *************************************************************** The strongest section is on Europe, and its strength is independent of the unity thesis. The Theses assemble, from Oren Cass and from the remarks of Rubio and Colby, a coherent picture of a deliberate American move away from the unipolar order toward a hub-and-spoke architecture, in which Washington leads a bloc of market democracies, concedes China a sphere, and demands balanced trade and exclusion of China as the price of the alliance. [5] ( #_ftn5 ) This is real, it is documented from the New Right’s own mouth, and it is the most analytically valuable material in the document. It describes a strategy of imperial transition. It does not require, and is in fact weakened by, the premise that a unified bourgeoisie willed it into being. A strategy pursued by a state apparatus with its own personnel, its own doctrine, and its own relative autonomy is a more economical explanation than a class that secretly agreed to lose an election. The Russia analysis deserves credit on its own terms. The Theses name the invasion of Ukraine “revanchist and imperialist,” which is more than most of the campist left will say, and they read the humiliation of Zelensky as a calculated use of Ukraine as bait to discipline the European Union. The instinct is sound. It belongs to a third-camp analysis the document does not otherwise hold, one that would refuse to launder any imperialism, Washington’s or Moscow’s, through the optic of a single coordinating villain. ************ *Conclusion* ************ The Theses are most persuasive where they are most empirical and least persuasive where they are most theoretical. The unity of the ruling class is asserted, the falling rate of profit is asserted, the thrown election is asserted, and in each case the assertion substitutes for the demonstration. The corrective is not to abandon the structural ambition but to recover the category the document discards. Trumpism is legible as a Bonapartist form, an executive that has won extraordinary autonomy from a ruling class too fractured to govern in its own name, improvising a program of imperial transition that no fraction fully authored and that none can fully control. That reading keeps everything the Theses get right, the China-centered tariff war, the European fracture, the assault on democratic rights, and it explains the one thing the unity thesis cannot, which is why a class supposedly in command of events keeps governing by lurch and reversal. A class that could coordinate would not need a Bonaparte. The proof that it cannot is sitting in the White House. [1] ( #_ftnref1 ) Hari Kumar, “Theses on Trump 2 and the USA Ruling Class,” MLRG.online, April 13, 2025. [2] ( #_ftnref2 ) Kumar, “Theses,” §§3 (“Ensuring the Democratic Party lost the election”), where strategic error is read as deliberate design. [3] ( #_ftnref3 ) Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: NLB, 1978). Authoritarian statism names a transformation internal to the capitalist state, not the bourgeoisie’s acquisition of a single will. [4] ( #_ftnref4 ) On the bond-market reaction and the April 9 “pause,” see the FT and NYT reporting the Theses themselves cite (April 7–13, 2025). [5] ( #_ftnref5 ) Oren Cass, “Europe must choose between America and China,” Financial Times , April 13, 2025; Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby as quoted therein. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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