Alex Callinicos: The capitalist state is watching Trump
As Musk and his tech bros influence the state, Trump is trying to cut "Big Government" and refashion his presidency around Nixon—but it was mass protest that took Nixon down
Trump is refashioning the capitalist state after Nixon
By Alex Callinicos
Tuesday 11 February 2025
“The modern state is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists,” he wrote.
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.”
Engels was saying that the state isn’t the tool of individual capitalists. It acts in the general interest of the capitalist class as a whole. So it taxes the bosses, regulates their activities, and sometimes even takes their assets over. Under the pressure of organised labour, it has developed extensive welfare services that maintain working class families as efficient and relatively compliant objects of exploitation.
Now one very big capitalist with the support of new president Donald Trump is seeking to reverse this process, and drastically to shrink the state. The New York Times newspaper points out that Musk is using the methods he adopted to get rid of workers at Twitter.
He’s fulfilling plans set out in Project 2025, devised by the ultra-neoliberal Heritage Foundation. Russ Vought, the scheme’s architect, has just been confirmed as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.
But more is involved than attacking “Big Government”. Edward Luce argues in the Financial Times newspaper that Trump wants “to recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation”. This is a very shrewd point, much more accurate than all the overheated commentary comparing Trump’s second presidency to Hitler’s seizure of power.
Trump as a young man had as his mentor the sinister and corrupt right wing Republican lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn had been senator Joe McCarthy’s accomplice during his anti‑Communist witch hunt early in the Cold War. Nixon himself owed his political rise to his role in this witch hunt.
As US president between 1969 and 1974, Nixon sought to bypass the limits that the constitution put on his power. For example, faced with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he claimed the power to “impound” money that it voted for purposes he disapproved of. He also built up a vast secret apparatus of surveillance, repression, and dirty tricks to crush the anti-Vietnam War movement and secure re-election in 1972.
The gradual exposure of this apparatus in the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. New restrictions on presidential powers were afterwards imposed by Congress. Now Trump, politically formed in the milieu that produced Nixon, wants to get rid of them. For example, Musk and his gang, in taking control of the US Treasury and cutting off spending they dislike, are reasserting the presidential power to impound money.
Trump is greatly aided by the fact that, unlike Nixon, his supporters control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. He also has, for the time being at least, the enthusiastic backing of Big Tech and Wall Street. If he succeeds, the result will not be outright fascism, but a much more authoritarian and racist version of capitalist “democracy”. Political power will be concentrated in the White House.
What could stop Trump? So far the Musk hit-squad has steered clear of the core of the US welfare state—Medicare, Medicaid and social security. The attempts to purge parts of the repressive apparatus, notably the FBI, have bypassed the core of the national security state, the Pentagon and the CIA. It was when McCarthy tried to investigate the US army that he was brought down. And other bosses may tire of “the ideal personification of the total national capital” becoming the playground of one erratic and highly-subsidised tech bro.
But there’s no substitute for mass mobilisation. It was the giant anti-war movement that was responsible for Nixon’s downfall. People, initially stunned by the speed and brutality of the assault, are beginning to organise and protest.
Determined and courageous resistance can eventually rid us of this noxious bunch of crooks and fanatics.
Tuesday 11 February 2025
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2942
As Elon Musk and his gang of techies run amok in Washington, I’ve been thinking of something Frederick Engels wrote in 1879.“The modern state is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists,” he wrote.
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.”
Engels was saying that the state isn’t the tool of individual capitalists. It acts in the general interest of the capitalist class as a whole. So it taxes the bosses, regulates their activities, and sometimes even takes their assets over. Under the pressure of organised labour, it has developed extensive welfare services that maintain working class families as efficient and relatively compliant objects of exploitation.
Now one very big capitalist with the support of new president Donald Trump is seeking to reverse this process, and drastically to shrink the state. The New York Times newspaper points out that Musk is using the methods he adopted to get rid of workers at Twitter.
He’s fulfilling plans set out in Project 2025, devised by the ultra-neoliberal Heritage Foundation. Russ Vought, the scheme’s architect, has just been confirmed as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.
But more is involved than attacking “Big Government”. Edward Luce argues in the Financial Times newspaper that Trump wants “to recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation”. This is a very shrewd point, much more accurate than all the overheated commentary comparing Trump’s second presidency to Hitler’s seizure of power.
Trump as a young man had as his mentor the sinister and corrupt right wing Republican lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn had been senator Joe McCarthy’s accomplice during his anti‑Communist witch hunt early in the Cold War. Nixon himself owed his political rise to his role in this witch hunt.
As US president between 1969 and 1974, Nixon sought to bypass the limits that the constitution put on his power. For example, faced with a Democrat-controlled Congress, he claimed the power to “impound” money that it voted for purposes he disapproved of. He also built up a vast secret apparatus of surveillance, repression, and dirty tricks to crush the anti-Vietnam War movement and secure re-election in 1972.
The gradual exposure of this apparatus in the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. New restrictions on presidential powers were afterwards imposed by Congress. Now Trump, politically formed in the milieu that produced Nixon, wants to get rid of them. For example, Musk and his gang, in taking control of the US Treasury and cutting off spending they dislike, are reasserting the presidential power to impound money.
Trump is greatly aided by the fact that, unlike Nixon, his supporters control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. He also has, for the time being at least, the enthusiastic backing of Big Tech and Wall Street. If he succeeds, the result will not be outright fascism, but a much more authoritarian and racist version of capitalist “democracy”. Political power will be concentrated in the White House.
What could stop Trump? So far the Musk hit-squad has steered clear of the core of the US welfare state—Medicare, Medicaid and social security. The attempts to purge parts of the repressive apparatus, notably the FBI, have bypassed the core of the national security state, the Pentagon and the CIA. It was when McCarthy tried to investigate the US army that he was brought down. And other bosses may tire of “the ideal personification of the total national capital” becoming the playground of one erratic and highly-subsidised tech bro.
But there’s no substitute for mass mobilisation. It was the giant anti-war movement that was responsible for Nixon’s downfall. People, initially stunned by the speed and brutality of the assault, are beginning to organise and protest.
Determined and courageous resistance can eventually rid us of this noxious bunch of crooks and fanatics.
Nixon’s Letter to Elon Musk
Since his death in 1994, Richard Nixon has refrained from public comments. Today, however, he has broken his silence in a letter from Hell.
Mr. Nixon offered TBR the exclusive right to publish his letter on one condition: that his expletives not be deleted.
Dear Elon,
One thing people don’t realize about life down here is that Satan has CNN playing around the clock. It’s his way of ratcheting eternal torment up a notch. After a while, the spectacle of Wolf Blitzer claiming that something you’ve already heard nineteen times is “BREAKING NEWS” makes the white-hot flames incinerating your body seem like a spa treatment.
So it should come as no surprise that I caught your Inauguration Day speech in all its fascistic glory. And let me say this: that was some fucked up shit.
I realize that you didn’t exactly grow up in the cradle of civil rights, but even by South African standards, that “straight-arm gesture,” as the mainstream media politely called it, seemed a tad extreme.
Don’t get me wrong: back in the day, no one was more racist than Dick Nixon. But I tried to be subtle about it. I said, “I’ve got a Southern Strategy.” I didn’t say, “Hey, let’s suck off the voters who want to bring back slavery.”
If I’d ever fired off two Nazi salutes like you did, those bastards at the Washington Post would have had my head on a stick. (Excuse the dated reference—there used to be a newspaper called the Washington Post.)
And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I’ve got no beef with Germans. When I was president, the White House was crawling with them. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger—my Cabinet sounded like the cast of a Wagner opera. Still, those Teutonic fruitcakes somehow managed to get through a public appearance without turning it into the Nuremberg Rally.
I know what you’re thinking: of course Kissinger would never march around like an S.S. officer, because he was Jewish. Well, so is that sweaty weasel Stephen Miller, and that fucker seems to have gone straight from his bar mitzvah to the Hitler Youth.
Which raises another question: who the fuck is making the personnel decisions over there? I mean, no one despised Bobby Kennedy more than I did, but that commie never drove around with a whale’s head on his Volvo like his idiot spawn did.
But let’s get back to you.
You’ve probably deluded yourself into thinking you’re the Second Coming of another Nazi who liked to fire off rockets: Wernher von Braun. Well, I knew Wehrner, and, believe you me, that sneaky Kraut did everything in his power to hide the fact that he was a Nazi. When people at NASA asked him what he did during the war, he’d say he wrangled heifers at a dude ranch in Montana.
Think I’m being too hard on you? Look, if all you were doing was planning Martian colonies and enjoying the occasional goose step, I’d leave you be. But that jagoff Jake Tapper just informed me that you’ve got a ragtag team of amateurs in DC breaking into places they don’t belong. Why does that sound so familiar to me?
Mark my words, fuckface: this won’t end well. I’ll keep a place warm for you down here. Very warm.
Yours,
Dick.
Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.
By Robert Reich
February 11, 2025
Source: Robert Reich
Since his death in 1994, Richard Nixon has refrained from public comments. Today, however, he has broken his silence in a letter from Hell.
Mr. Nixon offered TBR the exclusive right to publish his letter on one condition: that his expletives not be deleted.
Dear Elon,
One thing people don’t realize about life down here is that Satan has CNN playing around the clock. It’s his way of ratcheting eternal torment up a notch. After a while, the spectacle of Wolf Blitzer claiming that something you’ve already heard nineteen times is “BREAKING NEWS” makes the white-hot flames incinerating your body seem like a spa treatment.
So it should come as no surprise that I caught your Inauguration Day speech in all its fascistic glory. And let me say this: that was some fucked up shit.
I realize that you didn’t exactly grow up in the cradle of civil rights, but even by South African standards, that “straight-arm gesture,” as the mainstream media politely called it, seemed a tad extreme.
Don’t get me wrong: back in the day, no one was more racist than Dick Nixon. But I tried to be subtle about it. I said, “I’ve got a Southern Strategy.” I didn’t say, “Hey, let’s suck off the voters who want to bring back slavery.”
If I’d ever fired off two Nazi salutes like you did, those bastards at the Washington Post would have had my head on a stick. (Excuse the dated reference—there used to be a newspaper called the Washington Post.)
And let me make one thing perfectly clear: I’ve got no beef with Germans. When I was president, the White House was crawling with them. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger—my Cabinet sounded like the cast of a Wagner opera. Still, those Teutonic fruitcakes somehow managed to get through a public appearance without turning it into the Nuremberg Rally.
I know what you’re thinking: of course Kissinger would never march around like an S.S. officer, because he was Jewish. Well, so is that sweaty weasel Stephen Miller, and that fucker seems to have gone straight from his bar mitzvah to the Hitler Youth.
Which raises another question: who the fuck is making the personnel decisions over there? I mean, no one despised Bobby Kennedy more than I did, but that commie never drove around with a whale’s head on his Volvo like his idiot spawn did.
But let’s get back to you.
You’ve probably deluded yourself into thinking you’re the Second Coming of another Nazi who liked to fire off rockets: Wernher von Braun. Well, I knew Wehrner, and, believe you me, that sneaky Kraut did everything in his power to hide the fact that he was a Nazi. When people at NASA asked him what he did during the war, he’d say he wrangled heifers at a dude ranch in Montana.
Think I’m being too hard on you? Look, if all you were doing was planning Martian colonies and enjoying the occasional goose step, I’d leave you be. But that jagoff Jake Tapper just informed me that you’ve got a ragtag team of amateurs in DC breaking into places they don’t belong. Why does that sound so familiar to me?
Mark my words, fuckface: this won’t end well. I’ll keep a place warm for you down here. Very warm.
Yours,
Dick.
Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.
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