Clyde W. Barrow is professor of political science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of Critical Theories of the State and Toward a Critical Theory of States.
Vilfredo Pareto once observed that history was a “graveyard of aristocracies” as ruling elites gradually become decadent, depraved, and dysfunctional. The contemporary United States is a disturbingly neat fit for Pareto’s model.
Seventy years ago, C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a scathing indictment of corporate executives, state officials, and their academic apologists. His analysis has lost none of its bite as we confront an increasingly degenerate US power elite.
When Donald Trump was forced to pause most of his tariffs, the country got a basic lesson in Marxist state theory: when states push policies that threaten profits, they trigger mechanisms that discipline them back into line with capitalist interests.
Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”