Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images “The state,” Marx wrote, “is based on the contradiction between public and private life.” In other words, the vast number of individuals labour in full view while a small number of individuals reap the profits from the labourers’ work in secret. Social crisis erupts when the contradiction is laid bare. That is why, Marx believed, the capitalist state “must assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction”. This process of concealment, he wrote, amounted to an “exorcised contradiction”. Leave it to the unbalanced Donald Trump, for the first time in the history of the modern capitalist state, to shrug off the concealment and make the explicit exposure of the contradiction between capital and labour part of his governing style. On the eve of America’s