It's a nice irony that one of the most capitalistic nations on earth should be one of the few which has a government which is acting against the interests of capital.

This isn't, however, merely embarrassing for those bankers and tech billionaires who supported Trump. It's also awkward for a Marxian conception of politics.

"The executive of the modern state" wrote Marx "is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." But Trump is managing these affairs appallingly. His tariff rises have wiped trillions off stock prices and threaten to cause a recession that will hit the interests of the whole bourgeoisie - not just of mainstream corporate America but also of the tech billionaires who have lost hundreds of billions.

Marx's theory isn't a fringe view. All those investment bankers who stayed in equities (until a few days ago!) in the belief that Trump wouldn't be as good as his word also seem to have believed it. They thought Trump wouldn't act against their interests because the prospect of a stock market crash would prevent him imposing such stupid tariffs: such a prospect is one of many levers that capital has over governments, which it often uses to maintain its power and influence.

So, where do recent events leave Marx's theory?

One possible defence of it is that Marx was speaking of the state, not of particular governments. And the state is still managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Courts, for example, still defend property rights, and the Fed is trying to maintain some degree of financial stability.

Another defence is that Marx wasn't so daft as to think that the state always maximally pursued capitalists' interests. Governments do sometimes harm capitalism, but when the damage is big enough, they are compelled to either change course or be deposed. Allende, Mitterrand and Truss among many others discovered this. Maybe, somehow, Trump will too.

We don't, however, need to look far to find a government behaving more consonantly with Marx's theory: just look at Starmer's Labour.

Capitalism has always demanded two things from the state (though these can sometimes conflict): profitability and legitimacy. Labour is providing both.

For example, not nationalizing utilities helps to keep profits in private hands; Reeves' desire to relax merger rules will help big companies earn monopoly profits; her refusal to tax the rich ensures that profits remain in private hands; increased military spending is good for contractors; reduced planning restrictions boost the profits of developers and land owners; more infrastructure spending is good for construction companies; and "deregulation" can help firms make profits by cutting corners on safety.

Labour is also helping to legitimate capitalism. One way it is doing so is by raising the minimum wage and giving some extra rights for workers, thereby trimming the most egregious forms of exploitation.

But it is also trying to maintain capitalist legitimacy simply by keeping many questions off the agenda. Everybody knows that our economic performance has been terrible recently: real GDP per head has grown only 0.6% a year in the last 20 years compared to 2.5% a year in the previous 20 and 2% a year in the 20 before that. Why? Plausible explanations might include, among other things, the poor quality of management; the dominance of financiers and rentiers; high inequality; or an overly-complicated tax system with its many loopholes. Discussing any of these, however, would call our actually-existing capitalism into question and so antagonize powerful interests. It's easier to blame the powerless.

We should read this from Starmer alongside the attack on the disabled:

There is little that strikes working people as more unfair than watching illegal migration drive down their wages, their terms and their conditions through illegal work in their community.

He has to blame immigrants and the disabled, because to blame anything or anyone else would be to question capitalism. Which cannot be done.

It seems, then, that from a Marxian point of view we have a sharp, and paradoxical contrast: a (nominally) leftist UK government is slavishly promoting capitalists' interests whilst the (rightist) US government is attacking them.

But, but, but. It is often wrong to speak of capitalists' interests as if they were homogenous. Often, they are not. For example, financiers are content with weak aggregate demand if it delivers low real interest rates, but companies wanting to sell into a mass market are not: one reason why we have full employment for almost 30 years after WWII is that mass market capitalists then had more influence than financiers. Similarly, utilities companies want high energy prices but manufacturers want low ones; landlords want high rents, retailers low ones; banks want high interest margins, companies lower ones. And so on. When Ed Miliband spoke of a distinction between producers and predators he was driving at these sort of distinctions.

This is why Marxists have often spoken of the relative autonomy of the state: these conflicts of interest mean that governments can sometimes choose, at least to some extent, which segment of capital to side with.

And the Starmer government is making such choices. There aren't many employers saying "I really want to hire drug addicts, wheelchair users and people with chronic anxiety but I just can't find them". It is newspapers that are pressing the goverment to cut disability benefits, not the entirety of capital. Welfare benefits, remember, are not so much a payment to recipients as a payment through them and thus a way of supporting some capitalists. In cutting benefits to increase military spending the government is shifting profits from Tesco (share price down 15% since early February) to BAe Systems (share price up 22% since ditto).

By the same token, in allowing water companies to pour shit into seas and rivers Labour is siding with these monopolists against tourist businesses; in allowing energy companies to charge high prices it is siding with them against energy users; and in not adopting a land value tax it is favouring landlords over businesses that must pay rates and corporation tax to make up for that lack of revenue.

In all these respects, Labour is choosing some parts of capital over others. The problem is not so much that it is obeying the diktats of capital, but that it is obeying the diktats of the most reactionary segments of capital.

Which brings us to a commonality between the UK and US. In both countries the right has stopped thinking about economics, and relies for its support on: incels, racists, xenophobes, Brexiters, and those who are not only uneducated but actively hostile to knowledge and learning. In the US, these client bases have tempted the government to act (for now?) against capitalist interests. In the UK, they've led Starmer to side with backward and sclerotic segments of capital. Which is itself an artefact of capitalist stagnation: as Ben Friedman showed, slower growth promotes reactionary politics.

People on Bluesky have been laughing at the banker quoted a few days ago in the FT as saying that Trump's election "liberated" him to say "pussy" and "retard" "without the fear of getting cancelled". But those words revealed a trend on the right. Much of it has been taken over by narcissistic obsessions with language (often pronouns), to the detriment of thinking about how to repair or defend capitalism.

Yes, some people do have intelligent ideas to try to make capitalism work better. But these voices of relatively enlightened capitalists have nugatory political influence. Which should worry anyone who wants capitalism to survive.