************************* The Ledger and Its Keeper *************************
On the Oakland Socialist interview and the confusion of two theses John Reimann has published an interview with an unnamed worker who follows military affairs and the security services, and I want to give the reporting its due before I say why the argument fails. [^1] The reporting is the better half. Rodney Mims Cook Jr. chairs the Commission of Fine Arts and has been made the ad hoc organizer of the East Wing demolition and the ballroom that is replacing it. He turned up at the Saint Petersburg forum, the Russian answer to Davos that the United States is nominally boycotting, apparently without Rubio's knowledge, showing photographs of a dacha he had built for himself in Czarist style. Ulchi Freedom Shield, the annual full-spectrum exercise with the South Korean military, has been scaled back to the point where it no longer does what it exists to do, because Kim Jong Un asked. Seoul has drawn the obvious inference and revived its demand that wartime operational control pass to a Korean officer. The Lincoln is coming out of the Pacific because the Gulf needs hulls, and the Navy does not have enough of them to cover two theaters at once. Speaker 1 is sharp on all of this, particularly on the logistics, and Reimann asks good questions. Then comes the conclusion, and the conclusion is that the capitalist class has lost control of its president. Reimann names the destination: not yet a one-man dictatorship standing outside the control of any class, but major steps in that direction, with a stolen November as the next one. I think the evidence shows something real, and the inference from it is wrong. What has been established is that a portion of American capital is losing a strategic position it valued. What gets concluded is Bonapartism. The gap between those two things is never crossed, and it is never crossed because the interview holds a theory of the state in which there is nothing to cross. ---------- I. Control ---------- Control is the verb that does all the work. The bourgeoisie controls the president, or it has lost control of him, and the test is whether he does what the Wall Street Journal editorial page would like. That is instrumentalism, and it fails in the way instrumentalism always fails. Make the capital-state relation a relation of instruction; discover that the instructions are not being followed, and you will conclude that the relation is gone. [^2] The Watergate comparison shows the premise better than anything else in the piece. Reimann's version has the capitalist class deciding Vietnam was unwinnable, disposing of Agnew on a corruption charge it had been sitting on, running a press campaign, and moving public opinion in a matter of weeks. Whether that is good history is a separate question; I do not think it is. What matters here is what the comparison has to assume in order to work. It needs a moment when the bourgeoisie, deliberating as a class, removed a president who had stopped serving it. What we actually have from that period is a convergence of editorial boards, congressional factions, and a special prosecutor, and calling that a class decision does not make it one. The diagnosis of the present is resting on a nostalgia for the past. Drop the assumption that capital is governed by instruction, and the whole finding shrinks. The state depends on accumulation because it depends on the revenue accumulation throws off, and that dependence works on any officeholder regardless of whether he takes advice. [^3] A president who ignores the foreign policy establishment while profits run at records, regulators are gutted, and labor enforcement collapses has not escaped anything structural. He has stopped taking calls, which is a different matter. ------------------- II. Whose consensus ------------------- The second premise gets even less scrutiny than the first. Speaker 1 speaks of the classic national interest and glosses it as the consensus strategic goals of all the different major aspects of the American bourgeoisie. The clause concedes that there are different major aspects and then stipulates that they agree. They do not agree. Capital with Chinese markets and Chinese suppliers wants something other than what capital positioned for decoupling wants. Energy has an interest in a long Gulf confrontation that the chip sector, which needs Taiwan's bearings, does not share. The primes do well out of procurement whether or not deterrence works. Firms living on case-by-case tariff relief are not in the same position as firms whose exposure is to the dollar. Name the fractions, and the finding reads differently. Some are losing badly. Others are doing extremely well. There is no aggregate subject sitting above them to be either served or betrayed. None of which is news, and I should not pretend otherwise. Samuel Farber made this argument at length a few months ago in Against the Current : the American ruling class is no monolith, it is divided by sector and industry in ways that produce colliding and shifting interests, and the split between economic and political decision-makers is itself a structural obstacle to the class seeing the whole. [^4] The interview proceeds as though none of that had been written. And the unitary subject is not a stylistic slip in it. It is the machinery. Only a class that wants one thing can lose control of a president who does another. -------------------------- III. Marx, and then Draper -------------------------- Reimann's Bonaparte stands outside every class. That formulation has a pedigree, and it is worth being exact about where the pedigree actually runs, because the interview has taken the conclusion and left the reasoning behind. Marx makes the executive's independence something the bourgeoisie buys. In chapter four of the Eighteenth Brumaire , before the coup, he has the bourgeoisie confessing that its own interests require it to be delivered from the danger of its own rule: its political power must be broken so that its social power survives, and the individual bourgeois may go on exploiting and enjoying his property, his family, his religion, and his order only so long as his class consents to count for nothing politically alongside every other class. To save its purse, it gives up the crown, and the sword that protects the purse hangs over its own head. [^5] That is autonomy with a price on it. Draper goes further, and I say so knowing it cuts against me, because he is usually enlisted on my side of this. What he calls the autonomization of the state gives it more independence than most Marxist accounts will allow. In his reading, the heart of Bonapartism is not the class stalemate as such but the use made of it, the maximizing of the state's autonomous position against the classes under a personal one-man rule whose holder is not chairing anybody's executive committee. [^6] That is very nearly Reimann's sentence. It is why the interview's conclusion feels like it has warrant. What Draper is doing, though, is specifying a mechanism and stating its conditions. The interview supplies neither, and it never asks the question that would force the issue, which is what capital is getting in return. Speaker 1 comes right up to it. He says profits are very high and the capitalists are happy about that, and then he sets it aside and returns to Russia. It is the one piece of evidence in the interview that cuts against the thesis, and it is treated as background noise. --------------------------------------- IV. Farber's no, and what it leaves out --------------------------------------- Farber's essay is the most serious recent attempt to settle this, and he settles it again. His case is that the precondition is missing. Louis Bonaparte rose on a working class freshly beaten in June, a bourgeoisie frightened out of wanting to govern, and a peasantry too scattered to act, none of them able to rule alone. The United States has the strongest bourgeoisie in the world, faces no organized working-class threat worth the name, and has been through nothing resembling 1848 or Weimar. No stalemate, no Bonaparte. If this country goes fully authoritarian, he suggests, it will look more like Orbán's Hungary, with democratic content emptied out and the shell kept on. The historical objection is sound, and the interview has no answer to it. But something in Farber's own evidence does not get absorbed into his conclusion. He notices that alongside the fear of retribution there runs a hope of access and sectoral favors, and he lays out the record: Paramount buying its merger with a settlement of a suit nobody thought had merit and a supervised newsroom thrown in; charges dropped against a border czar the FBI had filmed taking cash; a pardon for the founder of Binance; the family's Gulf deals; the White House operating as a retail counter. All of it is then gathered under avarice, fear, and opportunism and read as evidence that capitalists can live with democracy or without it. That is true as far as it goes. Avarice and fear are dispositions, though, and what the record describes is a mechanism, one Weber named. In patrimonial administration the office is not a bureau with a defined competence; it is a benefice held at the ruler's pleasure, and the staff owes itself to the person and not to the rule. [^7] Graft that onto the American executive, and you get precisely the things the interview files under insanity and Farber files under corruption: a man with no departmental standing running a construction project the Secretary of State has not been told about, a defense secretary picked for his want of independent judgment, a Joint Chiefs reduced to making recommendations that carry no cost when ignored, and tariff relief and prosecutorial mercy handed out one case at a time. I am not making a point about greed. For any individual firm, a discretionary exemption beats a general policy, because a general policy is available to its competitors too. Every fraction that has secured one acquires a stake in the discretion continuing, and that stake is not reducible to the aggregate strategic interest the interview treats as decisive; often enough it runs against it. There is a real basis for executive autonomy here, and it does not need the stalemate Farber rightly says is absent. It is paid for in a currency the geopolitical ledger has no column for. Which is why the interview, holding only that ledger, ends up reaching for a psychological explanation, an American exceptionalism in the minds of observers who cannot imagine a president slipping the leash. The bourgeoisie is not suffering from a failure of imagination. It has been paid off one firm at a time. ---------------- V. The scorecard ---------------- Reimann stops the interview once to say that describing what American capitalism wants is not endorsing it, and Speaker 1 agrees that he does not have to be for something to know what it prioritizes. The instinct is right, and the disclaimer does not fix anything. The piece is scored throughout on an inter-imperialist ledger. Russia gains. China picks up a foothold. North Korea gains massive strategic advantage. Taiwan is ceded, and Taiwan makes the chips. Every entry is reckoned from Washington's side of the board, and we are asked to register each one as a loss while being told not to mind losing. You cannot disclaim a metric. The third camp was never the position that American capital's interests are bad and should be identified as such. It is the refusal of the board whose interests get counted on, because the workers of every state on it have no side in the count. The interview treats the Korean deterrent as a good thing whose degradation is a defeat. A defeat for whom, and a good thing for whom? The question does not come up, because once the ledger is open, it does the thinking. Those of us who have spent years arguing against campism ought to recognize the structure when it runs the other way. It is the same mistake. A state's interests become the unit of account, and the class content of the conflict disappears into the arithmetic. -------------- VI. Two theses -------------- The confusion here is general now, and I would rather state it plainly than keep circling it. Loss of bourgeois control and Bonapartism are being used as if they were the same claim. They are not the same claim, and in the forms usually given, they are not even compatible. Loss of control says a state manager has escaped the class whose instrument he was. It is instrumentalist at the root, it needs the unitary class subject to work, and it treats autonomy as a break in the relation rather than a form of it. Nobody ever draws the practical conclusion, but it sits there waiting: if the problem is that normal bourgeois governance has broken down, then restoring it is a gain. That is how an analysis meant to be revolutionary ends up doing the institutionalists' work. The Bonapartist thesis is narrower and harder to sustain. The executive wins real independence from the political representation of capital while staying bound to capital's reproduction, and that independence has conditions and a price. Draper puts the conditions in a class stalemate. Farber shows the stalemate is not there. The patrimonial reading puts them instead in the discretionary provisioning of fractions, which is there and is documented, much of it by Farber himself. The autonomy is real either way. What it is not is free. The interview's material points toward the second thesis and gets used to argue the first. Correcting that does not make the picture any gentler. An executive that provisions fractions of capital by favor while running down the general conditions all of them finally depend on is worse than a president who has simply gone off the rails because it has a constituency and a working mechanism, and a constituency that is being paid does not defect on anyone's schedule. -------------------- VII. What is missing -------------------- The best line in the interview is Speaker 1's last one: things do not work the way we thought they did; they have changed. Reimann answers that the ruling class is not the only one with a problem here; we have one too. Then it ends. In the whole piece the working class appears once as anything but an object, in the remark that there is a crisis in it that the capitalists cannot figure out how to approach and that Trump alone has. That is all. Otherwise, workers are a consciousness to be influenced, a poll number, an opinion the bourgeois press has lost the ability to manage. Nowhere are they a class that might do something. This follows from the frame and not from any lack of sympathy on Reimann's part. Ask who controls the state, and the available answers are one bourgeois faction or another, with the working class in the gallery. Ask what form the state has taken and what that form is doing to the people under it, and the class comes back in as the only agency that could change the answer. Draper's principle is not a preference about tone. [^8] It is a constraint on the method. An analysis with no place in it for self-emancipation has described a quarrel among rulers, whatever it meant to describe. Reimann is right that this is unprecedented and right that the old explanations are not fitting. Bonapartism is the name our tradition keeps for situations that do not fit, which is why the interview reaches for it. Having reached for it, it should be made to meet what the concept asks. [^1]: "Trump, Iran, North Korea, China & Russia: U.S. capitalists can't be happy," Oakland Socialist, August 20, 2026, https://oaklandsocialist.com/2026/08/20/trump-iran-north-korea-china-russia-u-s-capitalists-cant-be-happy/. Reimann's interlocutor is identified only as a worker who follows military affairs and the security apparatus. I summarize the factual claims as the interview gives them; none are independently confirmed here. [^2]: Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); Nicos Poulantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State," New Left Review 58 (November–December 1969): 67–78; Ralph Miliband, "The Capitalist State: Reply to Nicos Poulantzas," New Left Review 59 (January–February 1970): 53–60. [^3]: John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, eds., State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), especially the editors' introduction; Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). [^4]: Samuel Farber, "On Donald Trump and the U.S. Ruling Class: Bonapartism in America?," Against the Current 241 (March–April 2026). For the wider discussion Farber surveys, see Dylan Riley, "American Brumaire?," New Left Review 103 (January–February 2017): 21–32. [^5]: Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , chap. 4, in Marx and Engels Collected Works , vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 99–197. [^6]: Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution , vol. 1, State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 426; on autonomization generally, chaps. 16–18 and 467–68. [^7]: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology , ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:1006–69. [^8]: Hal Draper, "The Two Souls of Socialism," in Socialism from Below , ed. E. Haberkern (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), 2–33. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43108): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43108 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120855917/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
