The USA is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, this is known. From the vast sums of money dumped into political campaigns by monopoly capital, to the cushy corporate lobbyist jobs awaiting elected officials after retirement, to the huge gulf between the values and desires of the people and the voting records of their so-called representatives. But there’s one thing that I heard a lot of “progressive” liberals (or whatever you want to call them) saying over my many years in the USA: if voting didn’t matter, they (referring to the republican party, naturally) wouldn’t be trying to stop you from doing it.
Voting, and the outcome of elections in the USA, matters to somebody. Again, the capitalist powers that be invest quite a bit of money and effort into these political campaigns. But why? Why should contests over political office be so expensive and complicated if the result – that imperialism wins – is a foregone conclusion? Is it just the battlefield for the redivision of the domestic markets? How do the fights over civil rights issues and such factor in, or is it precisely because capital doesn’t really care either way that bickering over those issues is so fierce?
The dialectic of base and superstructure are useful here. Individual politicians are real people. Often they’re cynics, sometimes cold and unempathetic, and sometimes true believers in various ways. Despite carrying out the wishes of capital, they’re not all meeting up in a room with porky to come up with a game plan. Instead, their actions are dictated by the many tendrils of capital embedded in our society. Campaign contributions and nepotism and bribery are all obvious things, but these things are also pressures from capital in imperialist countries:
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The content of the education system.
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The focus and bent of media outlets.
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The intelligence state, how it funds itself, what it views as national security.
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The threat to stability inherent to capitalism.
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The whims of the fed.
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The self-interest in imperialism.
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Lobbying efforts premised on local support, like keeping a factory open.
Anyways, I haven’t answered your question yet but the idea is that capital’s influence is everywhere but politicians are still operating at sn individual and party level as incoherent jerks and sometimes ideologues, all shaped by capital.
So what are they fighting over if it’s all just influenced by capital? There are two important systems operating simultaneously.
The first is that capital often has shared interests, but not always. Different industries or subsystems of capitalism will fight with each other, attempting to eat each other’s lunch. Finance capital wants to strip every retailer for parts, for example. Politicians, factions, and parties will align themselves more with one of these industries and fight on their behalf. Our good comrade Joe Biden was notoriously in bed with credit card companies early in his career - Delaware is a hotbed of finance capital. Under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, politicians and the state often hash out the contradictions of capitalism, including the anarchy of production and these fights among the bourgeois class.
The second is that because there is still much consensus among the bourgeois class (keep wages fairly low, keep unemployment high enough to ensure this, etc), this would leave too few issues over which to have a supposedly democratic exercise. Politicians lean heavily into “non-economic” issues in this vacuum. It’s not that all of the issues are invalid or brought forward in bad faith, just that the inherent framing under hegemonic capitalism seeks to remove these issues of their economic basis and basis of social control in favor of capital and instead make them into a culture war. This framing is promoted by the media, by academics paid to adopt particular modes of investigation, and by politicians themselves that seek to hash out issues based on their individual bourgeoisie morality rather than systems of oppression rooted in capitalism. This is how politicians distinguish themselves from one another. Many of them are true believers in the culture wars, including the most reactionary ghouls, but this is itself still a product of a capitalist society. There is little relation between the Bible + Jesus and the things that right wing Americans focus on politically. Jesus wasn’t obsessed with supporting a racialized scapegoating of issues of poverty. They’re carrying out a social function required by capital which is to divide the working class via marginalization. What they’re really responding to is a degradation in their conditions but the only way they know how to respond is through a false consciousness backed by factions of capital. The historical process of propaganda bears this out, like the invention of blackness and the consistent dehumanization of the imperialized.
So, short version: politicians are fighting in their own interests, expressing the contradictions of capitalism. Sometimes it’s fights among capitalists and sometimes it’s over what is left by the vacuum of consensus, a bourgeois social critique. They really are attempting to secure their own power, which is why they seek out the money and influence and media attention and to disenfranchise. It just operates under a system for by and of the interests of capital.
This is exactly the answer I was looking for, thank you! I recently re-read Dialectical and Historical Materialism but learning how to actually apply those principles to analyze the world isn’t easy.
Do you have any further reading on the disagreements within the bourgeoisie? The “attempts to eat each other’s lunch”, as you say? I’d like to dig more into the gritty details of such things.
There are many examples! Two interesting ones are the North vs. South bourgeoisie leading up to, during, and after the US civil war and the overall competition between countries (imperialism), where a national bourgeoisie is at odds with (yet aspiring to) the international bourgeoisie. Russia’s in that situation as a resource-rich and fairly developed country that has been forcefully isolated from the international bourgeoisie. Consequently, they act more in the interests of their national bourgeoisie (who Western capitalist media hypocritically calls oligarchs).
I think Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai (mentioning both because they’ve been collaborating recently) speak on this well, particularly around imperialism and finance. Michael Roberts does as well. I don’t think I have one particicular reading rec on the civil war. Perspectives that treat it as a bourgeois revolution are interesting and that goes back to Marx and the people he was reading at the time.
I guess Lenin writes about this as well, ha.
Comments like these are why I love the “save” button. Nice one!
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Right now, they’re fighting over whether to go to war with Russia or China or both. Republicans are more anti-China and want to stop funding Ukraine so they can focus on China.
I’ve noticed this pattern forming as well as election season picks up and Ukraine turns into a stalemate. Can you elaborate at all on why this fight is happening though? Who are the winners and losers if there’s a pivot away from focusing on Europe to focusing on China?
With Russia-gate and Russian semi-whiteness, and Russian Homophobia Republicans see them as potential Allies against the evil commies in China. Some Republicans are also friends with Russian oligarchs. They see China as the obvious enemy as they are Asian, Communist, and an economic threat. Democrats are more anti-Russia because they are the scapegoat for why Trump won, they are homophobic, and they are occupying an anti-imperialist position. Dems wish they could go to war with both, but are not sure if the money and firepower is there.
Say someone is apolitical. “Maybe I should get invested in politics” they think. They only know of the contradictions between the democrats and republicans because that is mostly what is shown. They need to fight to have buy in to the system. By making it so obvious that you have a choice it hides how much you don’t have a choice.
I guess there is a divide within the bourgeoisie in some sense. Mostly a difference in industry.
Republicans represent manufacturing, agriculture, hotels, oil, and many small business industries.
Democrats represent lawyers, entertainment, finance, and tech industries
But then still, why invest so much into it? Surely many of those companies would rather pocket the extra profits than spending it on some kind of elaborate political theater performance. But they all play ball, they all invest in their own little cadres of corrupt officials, so there must be something to be gained from these little political battles beyond just a conspiracy to hoodwink the working class.
I think that’s more to the core of my question though, if democrats represent tech, entertainment, etc. and republicans represent manufacturing, agriculture, etc., what are the contentious economic policies that cause that split?
I think I can oversimplify this to a difference in vision of what workers they want to exploit:
Democrats support policies that create workers that are highly educated and culturally sophisticated to do more work in their industries, have a consumer base for those goods and services, and be able to suppress wages with the abundance of these kinds of workers.
Republicans want as many uneducated workers as possible to scramble for the few low paying jobs that exist to keep their industries afloat.
Anti abortion laws create people that are desparate, both the women and the born children. Allowing abortion allows high end uterus-having workers to work longer putting off having children to be more effectively exploited. Our immigration policy creates workers of ambiguous legal status that can be abused to work for less than legal wages. Whereas industries supported by democrats want to exploit the most technically adept from around the world for as long as possible.
No real change can occur if it undermines existing industrial interests, thus social democratic policies are suppressed by both parties even if many industries would benefit from them, particularly the Finance industry.
