No nation-state has ever gone through two true revolutions, unless it is a “staggered” revolution (a mini-revolution followed by a true revolution, e.g. Russia 1917-1917 and China 1911-1949).
The USA already had its own true revolution (1776); it won't have another one. The reason for this is that revolutions are extremely expensive, and nation-states are too small to have enough material base and social forces to ignite more than one. That's why, for example, there is no chance for the Russian Federation to go through another communist revolution (the only way for it to go to socialism is through restoration of the Soviet system).
What Trump is is the decline of an empire. When large empires start to terminally decline, they go through dramatic processes that, on the surface, look like revolutions (e.g. the Diocletian Reforms -- funnily enough, they were called by the surviving Roman elites as a restoration of the Empire to its glory, not as a revolution, as the concept itself didn't exist in ancient Rome). Trump is certainly no equal to Xi and Putin in the international arena of great statesmen, let alone a revolutionary of the level of Lenin -- that one we may not see for another 150-250 years, if we see at all.
I think if anything what the U.S. is experiencing today is more akin to the decline of the Roman Republic rather than the fall of its empire (which, who knows, might happen later). JD Vance himself has made this comparison, literally describing America as in its “late republican period”.
Is it not accurate though? Trump’s rise and the way he’s bent Congress to his will seems much more like Caesar’s ability to subjugate the Senate and declare himself dictator. America is on the cusp between republican and authoritarian government much like Rome was in Caesar and Octavian’s time.
But the decisive evidence here is the economy: the USA has already been a fully-fledged empire for some time now (since the Monroe Doctrine), and its economy is now inexorably declining. Trump and Vance are administering a declining empire (economy).
The Roman Republic was booming economically when Julius Caesar conquered Rome; it was in its best economic period ever.
That’s fair. Though I’d argue the American economy is, by many standards, booming, while by other measures challenged for sure. The argument that the U.S. economy is in some sort of terminal decline just seems not straightforward or self-evident. The U.S. leads so many other advanced economies in terms of gdp size and growth, productivity (which over the past couple years has finally reaccelerated), purchasing power, etc.; we also continue to benefit from the global reserve status of the dollar. On the flip side, America has high income inequality, rising debt, and (like most other wealthy nations) an aging workforce. My argument is the long term fate or direction of the U.S. economy is not yet determined.
That's an interesting question for another time because it is extensive, but the key here is the survival of the USA as a capitalist empire, not as a geographic or cultural expression. Capitalism is a different mode of production from its predecessors because it needs infinite growth to keep existing, so material opulence is not the decisive factor here.
Debt in the Ancient World was completely different from debt in the capitalist world. Long story short, it was not decisive in Antiquity as it is in Capitalism at the imperial (macro) level.
«No nation-state has ever gone through two true revolutions [...] revolutions are extremely expensive, and nation-states are too small to have enough material base and social forces to ignite more than one.»
That is a just-so "explanation"... I prefer another insight:
* "revolutions" are when the *type* of ruling class changes, not just which faction of the ruling class has power, otherwise it is just a civil war.
* So for example the War of the Roses in England and the USA 1860 war were not revolutions, but mere fights over which factions of the ruling class was in power, while the French Revolution and the Chinese Communist Revolution involved changes of the type of ruling class.
* The reason why revolutions are rare is that changes of the type of ruling class are rare, in part because ruling classes are also defined by dynastic (kinship) links, and different types of ruling classes are not, so all factions of a type of ruling class usually have a common interest in suppressing a new type of ruling class.
Musk spent $300 million (not counting $43 billion for Twitter) on Trump in order to stop the 30 something investigations into his companies' illegal activities and to keep the house of cards, meme stock supported, con game going. To attribute any sort of "revolutionary theory" to the naked greed and grift demoguary of these people is an insult to Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
You are correct that it's all about power. You are incorrect that there is any coherent ideology. Lenin and then Stalin and Mao were indeed all about power. The ideology was secondary to gaining power. And millions in each case suffered needlessly.
Maybe this is what the "February Revolution" looks like under liberal capitalism.
"Coherent ideology" might be waiting for "October".
There are seeds of an emerging doctrine, some in conflict with others, in this latest "Rise of the Right" in American post-WWII politics, so it remains to be seen how the future will view this revolutionary moment.
I only know that as a lifelong socialist who has become utterly alienated by what stands in for "the left" in N American politics, I am in awe and envy of "Trusk" as they initiate what any real political change would have to look like in a liberal capitalist state.
I read most of this post hoping it was an explanation or analysis of the second Trump admin rather than a defense of it. But by the end it seemed that Dr. Milanovic admires Trump’s attempts to extirpate the civil service, or at least he is prepared to normalize it from an ethical standpoint. Why this might be the case is beyond me, and truly I hope I am wrong. Elon — the world’s wealthiest man whose companies receive tens billions of dollars in govt contracts and subsidies — is now personally commandeering the very agencies that fund and regulate his own businesses, a project that stands to steer more taxpayer dollars his way and free him of any modicum of independent oversight or restraint. For an economist historically so concerned with income inequality, Dr Milanovic should recoil at the plutocratic nature of DOGE’s work.
Branko seems to think the US has really been captured by a liberal “deep state” and that this justifies the Trump and Musk “revolutionaries.” But that’s nonsense. The US federal government is the result of left and right political currents clashing over the years, often gridlocked and permitting only relatively small changes. What Trump and Musk are doing is not about any so-called “deep state” but an attack on the very idea and operations of government. Their “reforms” will leave us without an operational federal government.
«Branko seems to think the US has really been captured by a liberal “deep state”»
That is what the «liberal “deep state”» itself has been claiming for a long time: that we are at the "end of history" and the "Washington Consensus" is the only possible choice. Margaret Thatcher claimed "There Is No Alternative", and the state organizations of the "Washington Consensus" have been remade to ensure that.
«and that this justifies»
Paraphrasing as "justifies" seems to be a comically silly misrepresentation.
«The US federal government is the result of left and right political currents clashing over the years, often gridlocked and permitting only relatively small changes.»
There have been clashes between right-wing and more right-wing currents but the USA government has been solidly controlled by "whig" interventionist globalists at least since WW2 and by reaganists since Reagan and Clinton.
Arguably the switch to "whig" globalist interventionism started much earlier, for example Senator Borah who was a one-nation "tory" non-interventionist was accused of being a russian puppet already in the 1920s.
Dr. Brankovic’s comparison of the Musk-Trump and Musk’s Lord of the Flies boy troupe’s ongoing Kristallnacht, with the FDR Administrations’ institutional innovations of the 1930s is a case of historical ignorance masquerading as erudition. Brankovic’s forte seems to be Central and Eastern European affairs, not United States history. The FDR efforts to rescue the country from the depths of what seemed to be an unending economic depression did not destroy government or social institutions. Roosevelt’s bluff to pack the Supreme Court, which was ruling every effort the administration introduced to alleviate the population’s misery simply encouraged the deeply reactionary (ring a contemporary bell?) to rethink its judicial outlook. The FDR administration added institutions to address problems that no institutions existed to deal with. Not even soup kitchens on an adequate scale. It took six years to establish lasting new institutions to protect ordinary Americans from the vagaries of the still emerging industrial world. The Progressive Movement had been addressing social problems beginning at state levels since the 1890s. In contrast, the Musk-Trump Administration is well on the way to extensive dismantlement of the United States government and social institutions along with its capacity for scientific research within three weeks. The concept of replacing or modifying institutions and procedures that address important issues facing Americans that no other institutions in the United States address is absent. Teenage vandalism is a more accurate characterization than revolution. The MAGA movement is devoid of non-negative goals or ideology and has carefully eschewed competence in the Musk-Trump Administration appointments to manage institutions it hasn’t targeted for elimination rather than terminal degradation. Where is the problem-solving associated with a revolution?
I arrived in Cambridge too late to be taught by Joan Robinson (who would die shortly afterwards) but stories about her revolutionary “turn” to Maoism were the stuff of legend. She insisted on seeing the future everywhere in the savagery of the Cultural Revolution. How she must rue her prognostications from her grave!
I rather suspect that Branko Milanovic, who has written an apologia here for the MAGA movement’s Leninist ardour and has portentously declaimed that it has the inevitable logic of a true revolution might also come to regret his enthusiasm. Whether the movement succeeds or fails in smashing the system (plumbing and all) we will all pay a high price.
«Whether the movement succeeds or fails in smashing the system (plumbing and all) we will all pay a high price.»
The "whig" globalist movement did succeed in "smashing the system (plumbing and all)" for a large part of the USA/UK/... population (various "Rust Belts" being pretty obvious) and the dozens of millions of people targeted did "pay a high price" already.
My guess is that these people are less than enthusiastic than you are about carefully preserving the system that smashed the "New Deal" and made the globalist "whigs" of finance and property so much richer and more powerful at their expense.
Good question, not less interesting would be to know where people purged from positions in institutions like the FBI or the CIA in particular would go or what they would do next.
Excellent analysis and diagnosis. Take the example of the US Aid. Trump and his team realized that this organization was supporting liberal causes domestically and throughout the world and thus needs to be shut down. However, this will not prevent them from starting an organization under a different name that will support their conservative agendas. Remains to be seen.
Synthesizing this with your piece "James Burnham’s managerialism eighty years later" from a year ago -- speaking of Lyons there, you noted that:
"Burnham grounds the definition of both capitalist and managerial societies in the relations of production...not in the ideology that is completely dissociated from the production side. The managerial society, according to Burnham, can exist only when the ownership of most means of productions is vested in the state, and the managerial class plays the dominant role. None of it true in the United States today, and Lyons’ attempt to enlist Burnham and the “managerial society” to his point of view is either a misunderstanding of Burnham or misappropriation of his ideas."
Could it be argued that in an increasingly information-dominated economy, the production of information is somewhat analogous to the "intellectual knowledge production" which you refer to in this piece? Of course, we're not talking here of the production of physical goods and services, but arguably America is a society where (1) the results of elections are steered by the information consumption tendencies of the masses and (2) information consumption increasingly dominates the mental bandwidth of a typical citizen, not necessarily in the spending composition (which is still dominated by the consumption of physical goods and services, but in their temporal composition (with the average American spending some, say, 7 hours per day online, a bit under half of all waking hours). It is a hackneyed phrase at this point to say that factions of Americans increasingly live in completely separate realities, rather than disagreeing about a rough consensus reality.
As you note, Burnheim said that “The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them…controls society, for they are the means whereby society lives." Is it not arbitrary to draw a distinction between "the means of production" and "the ideology that is completely dissociated from the production side"? Is not Musk's leveraging of Twitter to manipulate public opinion in the run up to the election an example of a seizing of the "means of information production" from the managerial class, which Lyons would say previously controlled the means of information production (via "legacy" media outlets, i.e. "legacy information production platforms", and social media platforms that appeared more cooperative with the desires of federal regulators in contrast to the sudden volte face of Zuckerberg under Trump 2.0 for example)?
Of course the United States is still governed by capitalist modes of organizing production and labor, but the point I'm trying to make is that in modern society dominated by information consumption, the distinction between production and ideology is perhaps breaking down to an extent not captured in traditional economic metrics (people don't pay for information out of income as much as they pay for it out of their limited budget of attention / mental bandwidth).
«Is not Musk's leveraging of Twitter to manipulate public opinion in the run up to the election an example of a seizing of the "means of information production" from the managerial class, which Lyons would say previously controlled the means of information production»
1776, a rebellion over treaties and taxes, simply substituted an hereditary monarch for an elected one, as William Henry Seward., Lincoln’s Secretary of State pointed out, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”.
Our Presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things.
China had real national revolutions in 1919, 1949 and 1965-75, the latter being the only bloodless, national revolution and the only successful revolution of the 1960s.
The post-Zhao switch from "socialism with chinese characteristics" to "thatcherism with chinese characteristics" initiated by Jiang Zeming and continued by Hu Jintao could perhaps be called both "bloodless" and "revolution": as party and government officials and their families acquired significant portfolios of real estate and stock shares they turned into a different type (landlord and business owner) of ruling class, but since this happened smoothly, gradually and "in-place" it did not appear as a "revolution".
«1776, a rebellion over treaties and taxes, simply substituted an hereditary monarch for an elected one, as William Henry Seward., Lincoln’s Secretary of State pointed out»
From my point of view that actually was a revolution because the *type* of ruling class of the USA changed: from a mix of english aristocracy and merchants to local business elites. As in all revolutions as opposed to mere civil wars the ruling classes before and after were largely unrelated by kinship, because kinship usually happens only in ruling classes of the same type.
«1965-75, the latter being the only bloodless, national»
That is a bit "optimistic": even in the aftermath Deng and family at one point had to take a sudden flight out of Beijing to seek protection by a southern army unit and there were local armed clashes between party factions and Red Army units loyal to them. But the armed fights were never as big and lasted less long than previous chinese episodes.
The subsequent civil war against the "Gang of Four" might be called a nearly-bloodless one even if there were minor armed clashes.
«revolution»
For me not a "revolution" but a mere civil war: there was no change in the type of ruling class, it was between factions of the same ruling class.
It's curious that Branko Milanovic, a well-known economist, tolerates blatant lies in his comments.
The Cultural Revolution is still in people's living memory. There were at least hundreds of thousands of victims, yet this obviously paid commenter who can be observed, over many years and many blogs spreading China's Communist Party propaganda all day, every day, claims it was "bloodless".
«The Cultural Revolution is still in people's living memory. There were at least hundreds of thousands of victims»
That is 0.1% of the China-mainland population, over 10 years, so around 0.01% per year. Many China-mainland statistics look huge because the population there is so big, especially when counted over several years.
From a cynical point of view one could observe that probably more people died of the flu in China-mainland in the same period (also because of the economic disruption) and from the same cynical point of view it was not a revolution but a mere political repression, and as those usually go (compare with the Suharto/CIA repression in Indonesia or the White Terror by Chiang in China-Taiwan for example) it was therefore *nearly* bloodless.
“The American state has become an enormous machinery that is largely unrelated to whoever is in power.”
That “enormous machinery” has insulated the American state from accountability to the people.
Over the past decade, that “enormous machinery” pursued the elimination of liberal principles that constraint its power:
- Freedom of conscience / expression
- Equality-before-the-Law
- Objective Truth
- Etc.
Populism is a fundamentally liberal response to the effort by the State — and the elites who influence and benefit from it — to further or completely insulate itself from the ordinary people it rules.
I hate to say this, but there were a bunch of mistakes in this essay. What parts of the Federal government did FDR "smash"? I can't really think of any and he actually was against becoming a dictator, which advisors and allies were telling him to do.
Lenin more or less carried over institutions from the old Czarist days; state-led economic development, the KGB had a czarist predecessor, gulags, etc. The only thing he did to smash was The Whites, but I am sure The Reds had some former Czarist soldiers in their ranks.
France, for all of their changes in government over the last 200 years, still carries over a strong executive, which is kinda a monarchist residual. Yes France did away with a lot of rights for aristocrats, but other European countries did that for the next 100 years.
Elon Musk and Trump are just firing people at random, cutting things largely at random (NIH and US AID) for example. Tariffs that are random and none sensical. His "revolution" is more tempt tantrum than anything else.
This is kinda emblematic of Marxist thought-lots of talk of revolution, inability to create truly new institutions after revolution, reliance on the old institutions.
I suppose the revolutionary upending stops at those parts of the state apparatus that provide billions of dollars in subsidies to the principal revolutionary. Selective upending?How convenient. This ‘revolution’ is also keen to upend those few mechanisms of material and symbolic redistribution that still function in the US. A seemingly reactionary revolution, quite different from the cases referred to here.
Has the US administrative state really been made up chiefly of ‘extreme liberals’ – liberal presumably in the American sense here, meaning something approaching social democracy?
Looking at indicators around inequality & the overwhelming influence of corporate & donor interests in the US state apparatus, I find it hard to see. That this administration made quick work of Lina Khan is just one indicator of it swinging back to a neoliberal baseline – with the crucial exception that laissez-faire is to be restricted within the nation from now on.
«Has the US administrative state really been made up chiefly of ‘extreme liberals’ – liberal presumably in the American sense here, meaning something approaching social democracy?»
In not-so-recent american sense it means "woke"/"DEI"/"identity politics" not "social democracy". Perhaps you have been rather distracted since Clinton's election because the switch has been quite noticeable for over 20 years.
«Looking at indicators around inequality & the overwhelming influence of corporate & donor interests in the US state apparatus, I find it hard to see.»
What matters is that the USA state apparatus has been obsessively pursuing DEI policies and propaganda both domestically and abroad in tight concert with corporate HR departments and corporate media, and "coincidentally" in parallel with a huge surge in outsourcing to and immigration from "people of global majority" countries.
No nation-state has ever gone through two true revolutions, unless it is a “staggered” revolution (a mini-revolution followed by a true revolution, e.g. Russia 1917-1917 and China 1911-1949).
The USA already had its own true revolution (1776); it won't have another one. The reason for this is that revolutions are extremely expensive, and nation-states are too small to have enough material base and social forces to ignite more than one. That's why, for example, there is no chance for the Russian Federation to go through another communist revolution (the only way for it to go to socialism is through restoration of the Soviet system).
What Trump is is the decline of an empire. When large empires start to terminally decline, they go through dramatic processes that, on the surface, look like revolutions (e.g. the Diocletian Reforms -- funnily enough, they were called by the surviving Roman elites as a restoration of the Empire to its glory, not as a revolution, as the concept itself didn't exist in ancient Rome). Trump is certainly no equal to Xi and Putin in the international arena of great statesmen, let alone a revolutionary of the level of Lenin -- that one we may not see for another 150-250 years, if we see at all.
Diocletian stabilised the empire, except for the inflation, right?
Does your example hint at that or it's just a coincidence?
As we know, Diocletian didn't revolutionize Rome.
If the US really collapse, it would surely involve a hyperinflation crisis.
But I think it is merely convergence.
I think if anything what the U.S. is experiencing today is more akin to the decline of the Roman Republic rather than the fall of its empire (which, who knows, might happen later). JD Vance himself has made this comparison, literally describing America as in its “late republican period”.
Of course he's gonna say that. No one wants to be Romulus Augustulus.
Is it not accurate though? Trump’s rise and the way he’s bent Congress to his will seems much more like Caesar’s ability to subjugate the Senate and declare himself dictator. America is on the cusp between republican and authoritarian government much like Rome was in Caesar and Octavian’s time.
From a legal perspective, maybe.
But the decisive evidence here is the economy: the USA has already been a fully-fledged empire for some time now (since the Monroe Doctrine), and its economy is now inexorably declining. Trump and Vance are administering a declining empire (economy).
The Roman Republic was booming economically when Julius Caesar conquered Rome; it was in its best economic period ever.
That’s fair. Though I’d argue the American economy is, by many standards, booming, while by other measures challenged for sure. The argument that the U.S. economy is in some sort of terminal decline just seems not straightforward or self-evident. The U.S. leads so many other advanced economies in terms of gdp size and growth, productivity (which over the past couple years has finally reaccelerated), purchasing power, etc.; we also continue to benefit from the global reserve status of the dollar. On the flip side, America has high income inequality, rising debt, and (like most other wealthy nations) an aging workforce. My argument is the long term fate or direction of the U.S. economy is not yet determined.
That's an interesting question for another time because it is extensive, but the key here is the survival of the USA as a capitalist empire, not as a geographic or cultural expression. Capitalism is a different mode of production from its predecessors because it needs infinite growth to keep existing, so material opulence is not the decisive factor here.
Wasn't there a huge debt crisis when Caesar marched on Rome?
Debt in the Ancient World was completely different from debt in the capitalist world. Long story short, it was not decisive in Antiquity as it is in Capitalism at the imperial (macro) level.
«No nation-state has ever gone through two true revolutions [...] revolutions are extremely expensive, and nation-states are too small to have enough material base and social forces to ignite more than one.»
That is a just-so "explanation"... I prefer another insight:
* "revolutions" are when the *type* of ruling class changes, not just which faction of the ruling class has power, otherwise it is just a civil war.
* So for example the War of the Roses in England and the USA 1860 war were not revolutions, but mere fights over which factions of the ruling class was in power, while the French Revolution and the Chinese Communist Revolution involved changes of the type of ruling class.
* The reason why revolutions are rare is that changes of the type of ruling class are rare, in part because ruling classes are also defined by dynastic (kinship) links, and different types of ruling classes are not, so all factions of a type of ruling class usually have a common interest in suppressing a new type of ruling class.
SPAM
Musk spent $300 million (not counting $43 billion for Twitter) on Trump in order to stop the 30 something investigations into his companies' illegal activities and to keep the house of cards, meme stock supported, con game going. To attribute any sort of "revolutionary theory" to the naked greed and grift demoguary of these people is an insult to Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
You are correct that it's all about power. You are incorrect that there is any coherent ideology. Lenin and then Stalin and Mao were indeed all about power. The ideology was secondary to gaining power. And millions in each case suffered needlessly.
Maybe this is what the "February Revolution" looks like under liberal capitalism.
"Coherent ideology" might be waiting for "October".
There are seeds of an emerging doctrine, some in conflict with others, in this latest "Rise of the Right" in American post-WWII politics, so it remains to be seen how the future will view this revolutionary moment.
I only know that as a lifelong socialist who has become utterly alienated by what stands in for "the left" in N American politics, I am in awe and envy of "Trusk" as they initiate what any real political change would have to look like in a liberal capitalist state.
Well, I can't endorse the template of any part of the Russian Revolution.
I read most of this post hoping it was an explanation or analysis of the second Trump admin rather than a defense of it. But by the end it seemed that Dr. Milanovic admires Trump’s attempts to extirpate the civil service, or at least he is prepared to normalize it from an ethical standpoint. Why this might be the case is beyond me, and truly I hope I am wrong. Elon — the world’s wealthiest man whose companies receive tens billions of dollars in govt contracts and subsidies — is now personally commandeering the very agencies that fund and regulate his own businesses, a project that stands to steer more taxpayer dollars his way and free him of any modicum of independent oversight or restraint. For an economist historically so concerned with income inequality, Dr Milanovic should recoil at the plutocratic nature of DOGE’s work.
Branko seems to think the US has really been captured by a liberal “deep state” and that this justifies the Trump and Musk “revolutionaries.” But that’s nonsense. The US federal government is the result of left and right political currents clashing over the years, often gridlocked and permitting only relatively small changes. What Trump and Musk are doing is not about any so-called “deep state” but an attack on the very idea and operations of government. Their “reforms” will leave us without an operational federal government.
«Branko seems to think the US has really been captured by a liberal “deep state”»
That is what the «liberal “deep state”» itself has been claiming for a long time: that we are at the "end of history" and the "Washington Consensus" is the only possible choice. Margaret Thatcher claimed "There Is No Alternative", and the state organizations of the "Washington Consensus" have been remade to ensure that.
«and that this justifies»
Paraphrasing as "justifies" seems to be a comically silly misrepresentation.
«The US federal government is the result of left and right political currents clashing over the years, often gridlocked and permitting only relatively small changes.»
There have been clashes between right-wing and more right-wing currents but the USA government has been solidly controlled by "whig" interventionist globalists at least since WW2 and by reaganists since Reagan and Clinton.
Arguably the switch to "whig" globalist interventionism started much earlier, for example Senator Borah who was a one-nation "tory" non-interventionist was accused of being a russian puppet already in the 1920s.
Dr. Brankovic’s comparison of the Musk-Trump and Musk’s Lord of the Flies boy troupe’s ongoing Kristallnacht, with the FDR Administrations’ institutional innovations of the 1930s is a case of historical ignorance masquerading as erudition. Brankovic’s forte seems to be Central and Eastern European affairs, not United States history. The FDR efforts to rescue the country from the depths of what seemed to be an unending economic depression did not destroy government or social institutions. Roosevelt’s bluff to pack the Supreme Court, which was ruling every effort the administration introduced to alleviate the population’s misery simply encouraged the deeply reactionary (ring a contemporary bell?) to rethink its judicial outlook. The FDR administration added institutions to address problems that no institutions existed to deal with. Not even soup kitchens on an adequate scale. It took six years to establish lasting new institutions to protect ordinary Americans from the vagaries of the still emerging industrial world. The Progressive Movement had been addressing social problems beginning at state levels since the 1890s. In contrast, the Musk-Trump Administration is well on the way to extensive dismantlement of the United States government and social institutions along with its capacity for scientific research within three weeks. The concept of replacing or modifying institutions and procedures that address important issues facing Americans that no other institutions in the United States address is absent. Teenage vandalism is a more accurate characterization than revolution. The MAGA movement is devoid of non-negative goals or ideology and has carefully eschewed competence in the Musk-Trump Administration appointments to manage institutions it hasn’t targeted for elimination rather than terminal degradation. Where is the problem-solving associated with a revolution?
I arrived in Cambridge too late to be taught by Joan Robinson (who would die shortly afterwards) but stories about her revolutionary “turn” to Maoism were the stuff of legend. She insisted on seeing the future everywhere in the savagery of the Cultural Revolution. How she must rue her prognostications from her grave!
I rather suspect that Branko Milanovic, who has written an apologia here for the MAGA movement’s Leninist ardour and has portentously declaimed that it has the inevitable logic of a true revolution might also come to regret his enthusiasm. Whether the movement succeeds or fails in smashing the system (plumbing and all) we will all pay a high price.
«Whether the movement succeeds or fails in smashing the system (plumbing and all) we will all pay a high price.»
The "whig" globalist movement did succeed in "smashing the system (plumbing and all)" for a large part of the USA/UK/... population (various "Rust Belts" being pretty obvious) and the dozens of millions of people targeted did "pay a high price" already.
My guess is that these people are less than enthusiastic than you are about carefully preserving the system that smashed the "New Deal" and made the globalist "whigs" of finance and property so much richer and more powerful at their expense.
If the purge is successful where will all those people go? And how many are there to be purged, approximately?
Good question, not less interesting would be to know where people purged from positions in institutions like the FBI or the CIA in particular would go or what they would do next.
Excellent analysis and diagnosis. Take the example of the US Aid. Trump and his team realized that this organization was supporting liberal causes domestically and throughout the world and thus needs to be shut down. However, this will not prevent them from starting an organization under a different name that will support their conservative agendas. Remains to be seen.
Synthesizing this with your piece "James Burnham’s managerialism eighty years later" from a year ago -- speaking of Lyons there, you noted that:
"Burnham grounds the definition of both capitalist and managerial societies in the relations of production...not in the ideology that is completely dissociated from the production side. The managerial society, according to Burnham, can exist only when the ownership of most means of productions is vested in the state, and the managerial class plays the dominant role. None of it true in the United States today, and Lyons’ attempt to enlist Burnham and the “managerial society” to his point of view is either a misunderstanding of Burnham or misappropriation of his ideas."
Could it be argued that in an increasingly information-dominated economy, the production of information is somewhat analogous to the "intellectual knowledge production" which you refer to in this piece? Of course, we're not talking here of the production of physical goods and services, but arguably America is a society where (1) the results of elections are steered by the information consumption tendencies of the masses and (2) information consumption increasingly dominates the mental bandwidth of a typical citizen, not necessarily in the spending composition (which is still dominated by the consumption of physical goods and services, but in their temporal composition (with the average American spending some, say, 7 hours per day online, a bit under half of all waking hours). It is a hackneyed phrase at this point to say that factions of Americans increasingly live in completely separate realities, rather than disagreeing about a rough consensus reality.
As you note, Burnheim said that “The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them…controls society, for they are the means whereby society lives." Is it not arbitrary to draw a distinction between "the means of production" and "the ideology that is completely dissociated from the production side"? Is not Musk's leveraging of Twitter to manipulate public opinion in the run up to the election an example of a seizing of the "means of information production" from the managerial class, which Lyons would say previously controlled the means of information production (via "legacy" media outlets, i.e. "legacy information production platforms", and social media platforms that appeared more cooperative with the desires of federal regulators in contrast to the sudden volte face of Zuckerberg under Trump 2.0 for example)?
Of course the United States is still governed by capitalist modes of organizing production and labor, but the point I'm trying to make is that in modern society dominated by information consumption, the distinction between production and ideology is perhaps breaking down to an extent not captured in traditional economic metrics (people don't pay for information out of income as much as they pay for it out of their limited budget of attention / mental bandwidth).
«Is not Musk's leveraging of Twitter to manipulate public opinion in the run up to the election an example of a seizing of the "means of information production" from the managerial class, which Lyons would say previously controlled the means of information production»
https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1845222460838564156
«David Frum @davidfrum
Trump-Russia was real. The Twitter Files were the hoax.»
:-)
1776, a rebellion over treaties and taxes, simply substituted an hereditary monarch for an elected one, as William Henry Seward., Lincoln’s Secretary of State pointed out, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”.
Our Presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things.
China had real national revolutions in 1919, 1949 and 1965-75, the latter being the only bloodless, national revolution and the only successful revolution of the 1960s.
«the only bloodless, national revolution»
The post-Zhao switch from "socialism with chinese characteristics" to "thatcherism with chinese characteristics" initiated by Jiang Zeming and continued by Hu Jintao could perhaps be called both "bloodless" and "revolution": as party and government officials and their families acquired significant portfolios of real estate and stock shares they turned into a different type (landlord and business owner) of ruling class, but since this happened smoothly, gradually and "in-place" it did not appear as a "revolution".
«1776, a rebellion over treaties and taxes, simply substituted an hereditary monarch for an elected one, as William Henry Seward., Lincoln’s Secretary of State pointed out»
From my point of view that actually was a revolution because the *type* of ruling class of the USA changed: from a mix of english aristocracy and merchants to local business elites. As in all revolutions as opposed to mere civil wars the ruling classes before and after were largely unrelated by kinship, because kinship usually happens only in ruling classes of the same type.
«1965-75, the latter being the only bloodless, national»
That is a bit "optimistic": even in the aftermath Deng and family at one point had to take a sudden flight out of Beijing to seek protection by a southern army unit and there were local armed clashes between party factions and Red Army units loyal to them. But the armed fights were never as big and lasted less long than previous chinese episodes.
The subsequent civil war against the "Gang of Four" might be called a nearly-bloodless one even if there were minor armed clashes.
«revolution»
For me not a "revolution" but a mere civil war: there was no change in the type of ruling class, it was between factions of the same ruling class.
It's curious that Branko Milanovic, a well-known economist, tolerates blatant lies in his comments.
The Cultural Revolution is still in people's living memory. There were at least hundreds of thousands of victims, yet this obviously paid commenter who can be observed, over many years and many blogs spreading China's Communist Party propaganda all day, every day, claims it was "bloodless".
«The Cultural Revolution is still in people's living memory. There were at least hundreds of thousands of victims»
That is 0.1% of the China-mainland population, over 10 years, so around 0.01% per year. Many China-mainland statistics look huge because the population there is so big, especially when counted over several years.
From a cynical point of view one could observe that probably more people died of the flu in China-mainland in the same period (also because of the economic disruption) and from the same cynical point of view it was not a revolution but a mere political repression, and as those usually go (compare with the Suharto/CIA repression in Indonesia or the White Terror by Chiang in China-Taiwan for example) it was therefore *nearly* bloodless.
“The American state has become an enormous machinery that is largely unrelated to whoever is in power.”
That “enormous machinery” has insulated the American state from accountability to the people.
Over the past decade, that “enormous machinery” pursued the elimination of liberal principles that constraint its power:
- Freedom of conscience / expression
- Equality-before-the-Law
- Objective Truth
- Etc.
Populism is a fundamentally liberal response to the effort by the State — and the elites who influence and benefit from it — to further or completely insulate itself from the ordinary people it rules.
Perhaps the concept of the ‘passive revolution’ from the Gramscite lexicon could also be explored.
I hate to say this, but there were a bunch of mistakes in this essay. What parts of the Federal government did FDR "smash"? I can't really think of any and he actually was against becoming a dictator, which advisors and allies were telling him to do.
Lenin more or less carried over institutions from the old Czarist days; state-led economic development, the KGB had a czarist predecessor, gulags, etc. The only thing he did to smash was The Whites, but I am sure The Reds had some former Czarist soldiers in their ranks.
France, for all of their changes in government over the last 200 years, still carries over a strong executive, which is kinda a monarchist residual. Yes France did away with a lot of rights for aristocrats, but other European countries did that for the next 100 years.
Elon Musk and Trump are just firing people at random, cutting things largely at random (NIH and US AID) for example. Tariffs that are random and none sensical. His "revolution" is more tempt tantrum than anything else.
This is kinda emblematic of Marxist thought-lots of talk of revolution, inability to create truly new institutions after revolution, reliance on the old institutions.
I suppose the revolutionary upending stops at those parts of the state apparatus that provide billions of dollars in subsidies to the principal revolutionary. Selective upending?How convenient. This ‘revolution’ is also keen to upend those few mechanisms of material and symbolic redistribution that still function in the US. A seemingly reactionary revolution, quite different from the cases referred to here.
Has the US administrative state really been made up chiefly of ‘extreme liberals’ – liberal presumably in the American sense here, meaning something approaching social democracy?
Looking at indicators around inequality & the overwhelming influence of corporate & donor interests in the US state apparatus, I find it hard to see. That this administration made quick work of Lina Khan is just one indicator of it swinging back to a neoliberal baseline – with the crucial exception that laissez-faire is to be restricted within the nation from now on.
«Has the US administrative state really been made up chiefly of ‘extreme liberals’ – liberal presumably in the American sense here, meaning something approaching social democracy?»
In not-so-recent american sense it means "woke"/"DEI"/"identity politics" not "social democracy". Perhaps you have been rather distracted since Clinton's election because the switch has been quite noticeable for over 20 years.
«Looking at indicators around inequality & the overwhelming influence of corporate & donor interests in the US state apparatus, I find it hard to see.»
What matters is that the USA state apparatus has been obsessively pursuing DEI policies and propaganda both domestically and abroad in tight concert with corporate HR departments and corporate media, and "coincidentally" in parallel with a huge surge in outsourcing to and immigration from "people of global majority" countries.