This article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed "Caesarism," a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form. 1 | INTRODUCTION For many observers of American politics, the rise of Donald Trump has been a thoroughly discombobulating experience. A generation of analysts, brought up on a diet of Washington Consensus policies, could be confident that the Republican Party pre-Trump was neoliberal in the strict sense. Such an understanding was abundantly confirmed by the fact that the Republicans were always to be found on the hard edge of issues such as financial deregulation, trade liberalisation and the marginalisation of organised labour. Then came Donald Trump. Suddenly, it seemed as if the political certainties and sensibilities that had formed over decades were thrown out the window. Here was a man who, at the rhetorical level at least, abnegated key planks of the Republican platform. In place of free trade, he advocated (and later delivered) tariffs to protect American jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector (Shelton, 2019). He threatened companies who planned to relocate production to other countries (Thielman, 2017). He railed against the philosophy of free trade, attacking the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrawing America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (Duffy, 2017). In its place, and under the influence of key advisor Steve Bannon, he offered "economic nationalism." To complete this confusion, Bannon, appearing in an interview on Australian news programme Four Corners, claimed that Trump had prevailed against the Republican establishment in
This article employs the methodology of the Parisian regulation approach to periodise Australian capitalism into distinct models of development. Within such models, labour law plays a key role in articulating the abstract capitalist need to commodify labour-power with the concrete realities of class struggle. Given the differential ordering of social contradictions and the distinct relationship of social forces within the fabric of each model of development, such formations will crystallise distinct regimes of labour law. This is demonstrated by a study of the two successive models of development that have characterised Australian political economy since the post-Second World War era: antipodean Fordism (1945 to mid-1970s) and liberal-productivism (late-1980s to the present). The result of this examination is a model of legal analysis that, although tailored to the Australian experience, is capable of application in other contexts.
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