Left and Right

Kamala Harris & The US Ruling Class – Caleb speaks to Center for Marxist Education

This talk by Caleb Maupin, given in January 2021,  provides an excellent overview of US politics, including an examination of different ruling class factions, with Kamala Harris representing the currently dominant faction, why Trumpism is a fraud, and why the Left is a gross failure.  Caleb is basically what I would be if I were a Communist.

But the Marxist view of the state is that the state is merely the creation of the ruling class as the administrative wing of its collective interests. The implication of the Marxist view is that the state has no identity apart from class interests meaning that on a sufficiently abstract level the state is value-neutral. The anarchist view is that the state creates whatever class system is currently in place, and that class power is a manifestation of state power, meaning that the state is an entity that has interests of its own that transcend specific class arrangements.

Anarchists would generally recognize that fascist, communist, and liberal regimes are all state systems that maintain a class system as their economic expression, but the form of statecraft, as well as the model of class relations, may vary considerably within different contextual frameworks. Caleb Maupin is a Marxist-Leninist-Dengist-Xiist who favors the concept of a popular state that administers the economy in a way that is ostensibly neutral to class interests but instead functions as the guardian of a kind of Rousseauan popular will to which class interests are subordinated. I would argue such a perspective is a conceptual as well as a practical impossibility.

 

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