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Arthur Bough's avatar

"Never mind the state being a committee to manage the whole affairs of the bourgeoisie; Musk is the state."

Not really, for all the reasons you set out later in your post. The state is the state of the ruling class, and, today, the ruling class is a global class of speculators, "coupon-clippers" as Marx and Engels called them, in "Anti-Duhring", owners of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds and derivatives) from which they derive interest/dividends, and in the last 40 years, more significantly, capital gains from inflated asset prices, mostly fuelled by central bank liquidity.

Musk is certainly an important and powerful individual, but he remains that, at best he might reflect the interests of similar US tech billionaires, though I doubt even that. Most o them have fallen into line, simply because they are spineless, and sought to avoid coming into the cross-hairs of Trump's regime. Already, of course, those tech billionaires came into conflict with the MAGA base, because they need continued migration into the US to meet their needs for skilled labour-power. Its a similar contradiction to that faced by the Brexiteers in Britain, as net immigration rose massively after Brexit, the very thing that those that voted for it wanted to stop!

So far, there is nothing in what Trump and his regime have done that seriously threatens the global ruling-class, or even its US fraction. Most of the things he threatened such as the ridiculous tariffs, he has had to abandon, at least for now. If he tries to reintroduce them, the bond market will sell-off again, and the stock market will follow suit, indicating some of the real power of that ruling-class, as also Truss found in 2022.

But, the real power of the state resides in a thousand institutions, and social and family connections. Ultimately, it resides in the armed forces and bodies of armed men, which do not need, in the US to even go as far as an open coup, such as that which faced Allende and others on the Left. A simple bullet to the head has more often been sufficient in the US to remove the threat of a troublesome priest. Indeed, the last time Trump's strategy was tried in the US, by McKinley, in the 1890's, a time when the rest of the world had entered a new period of secular growth, not only did it cause US growth to be hit hard, prices to rise and so on, but it caused the Republicans to get wiped out, and later McKinley himself took a bullet.

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