Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
5-17-26
The System Is the Problem
Every political crisis produces its villains. Today, the dominant figure in that story is Donald Trump without doubt a distasteful, degenerate human being. The anger directed at him is understandable. But there is a danger in making any single individual the center of our analysis. When we do, we lose sight of something more important: the system that produced him, that accommodates him, and that will outlast him.
This is not an accident. In the political struggles between different factions of the ruling class, the focus on individuals is actively welcomed because it is a useful distraction from the root cause of the crises we face. That root cause is not a person. It is the system of production we call capitalism.
What capitalism actually is
In a capitalist system, the means of producing the necessities of life — factories, land, technology, financial institutions — are owned by a small group of private individuals. What sets those forces of production in motion is not the needs of society, but profit. The machine turns on when there is money to be made. It turns off when there isn't — regardless of what people need.
Marx explained it beautifully: "A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation." *
The point is simple: under capitalism, what matters is not what is produced or who benefits — it is whether the owner of the operation turns a profit. Education, healthcare, housing, food — all of it is subordinated to profit and the accumulation of capital.
What exactly is the state?
In my youth, had someone asked me to describe the state I would have said simply that it is the government.; I had never given it much thought. We are accustomed to thinking of government as a neutral institution — a referee that stands above competing interests in society and serves the common good. This is a comforting idea. It is also wrong.
The modern state is not neutral. It is an organ of class rule and the ruling class in our situation are capitalists and we live in a capitalist or bourgeois democracy. Its laws, its institutions, its police, its courts, its military — all of these have been shaped over time to protect and reproduce the existing order: the order in which a small class of people own the productive wealth of society and the rest of us work for them.
This does not mean that every politician is consciously conspiring, or that nothing can be won through political struggle. It means that the state, as a structure, exists to manage the affairs of the class that owns and controls the economy; Marx wrote in 1848 that, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
When we watch the battles between the Republicans and Democrats (the two major capitalist parties) over which party gets to govern society for the next four years, we are witnessing different factions of the ruling class compete for control of the state apparatus, we are watching a fight over who manages the system, not a fight over whether the system should continue. When it comes to the working class, they are united against us.
Contradictions, not villains
This brings us back to the question of crisis. Capitalism is an exploitative system, and suffering, poverty, war, hunger etc. is integral to it. As capitalist crisis intensifies, we are told the cause is greed, incompetence, or the moral failings of particular leaders. If only we had better people at the top, the story goes, things would be different.
But greed is not a cause. It is a feature. Capitalism does not merely tolerate the single-minded pursuit of profit — it requires it. A business that fails to compete and accumulate will be swallowed by one that does. If individuals can’t pay for health care they don’t get it. If less developed nations, (the former colonies plundered by the advanced capitalist states) can’t afford the costs of infrastructure development, sewage, drinking water, etc.; they don’t get it.
In the global competition between nations, there is no such thing as fair trade. Trade disputes and tariffs are actual wars. When the competition becomes acute. When capitalist states cannot resolve disputes over trade and markets, they go to war. Both WW1 and WW2 were a product of the competition between nation states over resources, markets and global plunder.The system produces this scenario but the capitalist education system and mass media blames it on individuals.
The real causes of crisis are structural. Capitalism contains internal contradictions — built-in tensions between the drive to accumulate and the limits of what any society can absorb — that periodically produce exactly the kind of economic and political instability we are living through now. These crises will recur, under different leaders, with different villains, until the structure itself is changed.
Why this matters
None of this means that individuals don't matter, or that who holds power is irrelevant. It means that changing the individuals without changing the system is not a solution — it is a reset that leads back to the same place.
Understanding that the state is an instrument of class power, and that crises are produced by the system rather than by the moral character of its managers, is not pessimism. It is clarity. And clarity about the nature of the problem is the first condition for doing something about it.
* Marx Communist Manifesto 1848
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