Elon Musk and Donald Trump are attempting to transform the architecture of the federal government. The American state under their influence is not merely a vehicle for broad capitalist governance but a tool for the personal enrichment of individual business elites.
Many of DOGE’s cuts to public spending thus far remain more performative than transformative, but the intent is clear: to gut the regulatory apparatus, loot public resources, and erode one of the state’s core functions — providing the conditions for capitalism to reproduce itself. A truly transformative shift, such as a major Medicaid cut in Congress, would mark a decisive turn in this trajectory. This is not simply an assault on the administrative state; it is also an attempt to replace a system geared toward the functioning of capitalism as a whole with one that privileges specific capitalists.
There are lessons to be drawn from Marxist theory, which, in its long and unshakable commitment to being right about this sort of thing, has rarely missed an opportunity to make a rather big deal about the difference between the capitalist system as a whole and the agents inside it.
Capitalism, for all its routine savagery, requires a basic framework to function: some degree of competition, costly public investments in education and physical capital, the containment of externalities, a semiregulated financial system, and control of the most predatory business practices. The state has traditionally played a crucial role in maintaining these conditions, not out of benevolence but out of necessity.
Marxist theories of the state have long recognized that, for capitalism to sustain itself, the state must act on behalf of capitalism as a system, not merely at the behest of individual capitalists. When the state abandons its role in overseeing capitalism’s long-term viability and instead caters narrowly to specific firms (or individuals), the results can be ruinous.
Marxist state…
Auteur: David Calnitsky
