The Trump administration resembles Gramsci's description of a Caesarian response to an ‘organic crisis’, a protracted event which comes about when ‘the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner’, leaving space for a third party to intervene (Gramsci, 1971, 219). As this chapter and Chapter 4 demonstrate, certainty there is an intense class war in the United States. Still, the prospect of a ‘winner-takes-all’ economy has created the conditions for the escalation of intra-elite class competition in the American ruling class. By this I mean an internal Gramscian ‘war of position’ as factions are slowly, but viciously, competing to attain or retain command of the US political economy; these factions are testing and trying to restore or reconstruct a world that better caters to their particular capital accumulation strategies, seeking to gain hegemony. Again, this slow violence of intra-class struggle should not be surprising. As Marx outlined, capitalists must accumulate or be accumulated.

Concepts like hegemony and the integral state are particularly useful aids in the analysis of the current organic crisis. By hegemony – in other words, the ways in which a class or faction comes to gain the power to lead a social structure and how this power is expanded then reproduced – Gramsci proposed that cultural practices and institutions generate and induce the consent of subordinate classes. The advantage of an analysis that begins with hegemony is that it is sensitive to class warfare directed both downwards and laterally, and is in turn attentive to the formation of alliances and other kinds of pacts. Peter Thomas provides a tidy summary of the integral state as ‘the image of “political society” as a “container” of civil society, surrounding or enmeshing and fundamentally reshaping it’ (2009, 189). This conceptualization offers an expanded understanding of how capitalist societies reproduce, which Gramsci notes is a ‘complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’ (1971, 244).