Who is Tom Homan and why is his arrival in Minnesota important? This enemy of the people started as a cop before joining Border Patrol in 1984. In 1988, he joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). By 2013, Homan had been appointed to serve as the head of Enforcement and Removal of what had by then become ICE by the “Deporter In Chief,” President Obama.

Compared to Bovino, who has spent his prior career in border cities acting with jack-booted impunity, Homan is much more polished. Bovino paraded around California as a Border Patrol sector chief, posing with long guns on horseback. He directed a short snuff film for Border Patrol called “The Gotaway” where a fictional migrant sneaks across the border and stabs the first person he sees. In a more recent Bovino production, Darth Vader is depicted as a Border Patrol agent. “We don’t want our border patrol agents quiet,” he said in an October interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We want them engaged in the fight. So I asked several times, ‘Well, how about, you know, I go up north?’”

Bovino’s settler-cowboy style caught Kristi Noem’s eye when he instructed his agents to mask up and carry out three days of raids on farms and Home Depot parking lots in 2024. Last spring, Bovino outlined a plan to take his strategy — using Border Patrol to engage in an “urban immigration crackdown” (in the words of the Wall Street Journal) — across the entire country with him at the vanguard of the reactionary spear. “A city-hopping campaign, an interior-operations campaign,” he told the WSJ. “Let’s take it everywhere in the United States.”

Bovino is the cocksure Erwin Rommel – or Andrew Jackson – of the Washington immigration strategy.³ Tom Homan isn’t like that. Homan knows how to talk to the press. He’s spent a good part of his career in press conferences or in front of cameras. If Bovino is Rommel, Tom Homan is the unassuming Heinrich Himmler – or the unassuming slaver Martin van Buren.

During his time in the Obama administration, Homan repeatedly proposed an idea that even the Deporter In Chief, a man who gleefully authorized hundreds of remote killings of civilians and even some American citizens, thought was inhuman. This idea was the horrific scheme he calls “Family Separation.” Homan’s policy was eventually put into place by the first Trump administration after he pushed again and again to get Washington to adopt it. The policy, pitched by the gray-faced police functionary as a punitive, zero-tolerance plan to “deter” undocumented immigrants, required DHS agents to forcibly separate parents from their children when being taken into custody. Using the machinery put in place by Obama, federal agents tore thousands of children and infants from their parents and guardians. These children were held in overcrowded “border control centers,” and many spent up to three weeks with minimal food, no clean clothing or bathing facilities, and no adult care.

This is the Tom Homan being rotated into Minneapolis. Washington is replacing a murderous cowboy with an equally cruel and far more efficient administrator. Since arriving in Minnesota, Homan has promised that DHS is “working on a draw down plan.” However, he has been clear: The draw down depends on local authorities submitting to DHS requirements and supporting ICE raids.

“We’re not surrendering our mission at all,” said Homan. “We’re just doing it smarter.”

Homan is the “good cop” to Bovino’s “bad cop.” He is the slick technocrat to Bovino’s cowboy. The administration wants you to forget Minneapolis, but to remember that it will deploy Bovino as a swagger-stick whenever the going gets tough. This bait and switch has been used by the “law” in this country since it was founded in the 19th century. This time, we aren’t falling for it.

Tom Homan is an enemy of the people, the architect of misery. Unlike Bovino, Homan reminded the press that “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. You haven’t seen me.” Homan is not a mediation of the Washington policy. Instead, Washington wants to go back to normal: cruel and inhuman mistreatment of working class people under a protective media blackout. Tom Homan doesn’t signify reform, and his unctuous presence does not mean Minnesota is any safer from the DHS army occupying the state. Replacing Bovino with Homan is the swapping out of one colonial administrator who was doing too much damage to the colonial infrastructure – the settlers themselves, the Euro-Amerikans – with another, who promises a “quieter” kind of monstrousness.

Resistance must continue, and Homan must be seen for the monster that he is.

1. We often refer to the right of the American political spectrum as the “right-fascists,” as compared with the Democrats, or the “left-fascists” here at the Clarion. ︎
2. The Clarion presently defines labor aristocrats according to a global average price of labor power; those workers who receive higher than the global average within the imperial center are considered labor aristocrats. It is debatable as to whether Alex Pretti was a labor aristocrat or petty bourgeois, as he was a VA nurse. For the purposes of this analysis, the distinction is not important. ︎
3. One of the Nazi regime’s most capable generals, often disgustingly praised by US historians. ︎

Federal government shutdowns are triggered when the federal legislature fails to pass a budget bill to fund government operations. Of course, the shutdown doesn’t actually incapacitate the government — the executive branch (the White House) marks certain agencies as “essential” and continues funding them despite the lack of the funding bill. This reveals what the ruling class actually sees as the “essential” functions of the US government.

The Department of the Interior has furloughed most of its employees, leaving federal parks understaffed but open (64% of staff). National parks also maintain their law enforcement, fire suppression, emergency response, and power maintenance staff. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will furlough all but 33,500 of its employees and those will be working without pay to ensure that air travel remains operational.

The Department of Education will continue to collect student loans and send out billing statements.

The Pentagon will be unable to pay over one million people serving in the US military, to award new contracts, or to start new programs. Elective surgeries and procedures in military medical and dental facilities are being postponed. If the shutdown is not resolved by October 15, troops will miss their first paycheck.

The IRS will keep all of its employees.

The Department of Health and Human Services is sending 40% of its workforce on furlough. The National Institutes of Health is putting three quarters of its staff on furlough and stopped basic research. Two-thirds of the CDC is being furloughed. The FDA will continue to function, but its staff will work without pay.

The VA (Veterans Affairs) has separate money available that was provided by Congress.

All workers tasked with processing oil and natural gas drilling permits and coal mining operations will continue to work. Regulatory and enforcement work of the EPA will cease. The FTC, which is currently overseeing the prosecution of big cases against tech companies, will furlough all but its commissioners and a small pool of staff. Lawyers who are litigating must request suspension of dates in cases like the FTC’s antitrust case against Amazon. Wall Street regulators are suspended with only 9% of the Securities and Exchange Commission remaining in place and 6% of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission workers remaining on the job.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will continue to employ less than 900 of its 2,500 people.

HUD’s Section 8 housing budget will rapidly be depleted. All processing will be halted at HUD. SNAP and WIC will continue to run until the end of October, when the funding for those programs is in question. When they will cease is not yet public.

Why Did the Government Shut Down?

The Democrats have finally taken a concrete action “against” the MAGA government — or at least, so it would appear. The bourgeois news media has announced the loggerheads between the GOP and Democrats over the past few weeks, ostensibly over extending healthcare tax credits (which makes health insurance cheaper), reversal of cuts to Medicaid, and opposition to spending cuts in health agencies.

This disagreement, with the Democrats loudly proclaiming they will not fund the government unless the GOP makes concessions here, is the public reason for the budgetary fight. The Democrats claim they will not agree to any budget bill that doesn’t address these three concerns.

What, however, is the material result of the shutdown? The Trump White House has been slashing government spending and firing federal workers since the beginning of the term. The GOP brought in private capitalist and apartheid billionaire Elon Musk, along with a hit squad of finance and business children, to attack the bottom line of many executive agencies. The shutdown is an exercise in “belt tightening” of a kind that the right-fascist coalition has been craving since the beginning of this presidential term.

Why would the GOP cave on any budgetary issue when the president is attempting to dismantle the federal executive agencies anyway? This is the culmination of decades of “lawfare” and legal maneuvering by the Federalist Society, a clave of lawyers and judges that seeks to return more direct power to the ruling class capitalists by dismantling the safety rails constructed over the 20th century and bring the US back to its early 20th-century roots, before the triumph of the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions made waves around the world, forcing the imperialist countries into a stage of imperialist bribery for portions of their populations.

Any and all “temporary” measures taken by the White House during this “crisis” stand a chance of becoming permanent. The Democratic Party will eventually capitulate in the face of the shutdown, funding the government without winning any significant reforms. They will then turn around and try to fundraise on their “bravery.”

Organize Mass Meetings

As a result of the shutdown, the government will at least temporarily cease issuing reports on market data, which will cause confusion among its central bankers and may lead to sharp declines on the stock market. If the shutdown goes on for long enough to cause furloughed government workers to miss pay day on October 15th, we should expect a sharp contraction in the economy. Many families and individuals will be unable to secure Section 8 housing or other federal benefits and the strain on local social services will increase, requiring extra help that Communists should stand ready to provide. Federal workers will be in a state of emotional and economic vulnerability and shock. Ideologically Democratic workers will be confused and angry. Petty-bourgeois and small-time government contractors will begin to fail as their sources of income dry up. This will free at least some of these petty-bourgeois workers and small owners from their present ideological shackles. They too easily slide into reaction, but this can be overcome if there is a Communist movement present to educate them.

This is the time to vigorously attack the legitimacy of the government in which this kind of disarray is a regular risk, but even more it is the time to expose the logic of class warfare that underlies government action. The main questions that present themselves are:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. What can we do about it? Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?

Organizations should be agitating on these lines among their communities. This is the time to call mass meetings to help address the problems that will begin to arise as a result of the shutdown, as well as to answer the questions the shutdown presents. Literature should be distributed on street-corners and government offices. Meetings should be held about the failings of the federal government and both bourgeois parties that led us to this impasse.

The bottom line is that the country — the US and all its legal forms and structures — doesn’t exist to help the working class; it exists, at bottom, for the wealthy. It takes its shape from the needs of the wealthy, the capitalist class, and whatever is agreed upon is best among them. This land is not “our” land. In a very real sense, it’s theirs. It is the task of the decolonial Marxist-Leninist to ensure that “they” — the ruling class — no longer controls it and the land itself is rematriated to the Indigenous peoples through a comprehensive system of land and political reform: the social revolution. We can make ideological inroads on this process now.

When the ruling class is flush and internationally powerful, it sends its client politicians to dispense largesse. When, as now, it is embattled, its politicians push austerity and white nationalism, which is the semi-concealed principle upon which the US state is built.

As the capitalists attempt to reorganize their imperial system, they are uniquely vulnerable. The working people of the US are primed to accept arguments that will break them away from the labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois class standing that leads them time and time again to align with their own ruling class against the world in the hopes of receiving good jobs, artificially cheap televisions, computers, and cars, and all the other fruits of empire. If we build this subjective consciousness now, while the iron is hot, we can temper it to resist later reversals and blandishments.

Sample Literature

Understanding the Shutdown

The federal government has been shut down by an apparent disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. After ten months of lying down in front of the MAGA agenda, the Democrats have chosen to take a stand to help Trump and his White House dismantle the federal government by shutting it down.

This government isn’t by the people or for the people. That’s a misunderstanding, one that the ruling class is only too happy to perpetuate. When the founders of this country said that, they meant it was a government by and for white settler land-owning men. Not much has changed!

When the ruling class is strong and successfully bleeding the world, it is “kind” to us — out of self-preservation! When it’s weak, like today, it takes that kindness away.

Come to a mass meeting! We will ask — and answer — the most important questions about the shutdown and all the schemes of the ruling class:

1. Why is this (the shutdown) the only option to get the kinds of change the Democrats are trying to get? That is, why is the US government structured in such a way that this can happen, and why are regular working people shut out from any means to influence its outcome?
2. What is the strategic reasoning behind this shutdown? It intensifies the contradiction between the capitalist and the workers.
3. Why are the corporations and capitalists organized to achieve political ends in this fashion, but we are not organized enough to have our needs met?
4. Most importantly: What can we do to fight back?

The time has come for all principled Marxists to engage directly with the student movement and aid it in its self-organization. The student movement  must now adapt and advance to address the new needs it has called forth. The state is using  a two-pronged assault on the movement: the first prong is the use of the legal repressive apparatus — the courts, the police, deportation — and the second prong is the use of the civil institutions acting  as state agents (in this case the universities) which are expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of student radicals.

As repression intensifies, it becomes clearer and clearer that we Marxists have not learned the correct lessons from the initial attacks on the movement (see our prior article, “Join the Student Movement!”). The movement must become organized to a high degree. Organization must develop in a particular direction and particular fashion to address the attacks the movement is now suffering.

That means the movement must develop to address:

• Organizational safety from the university system’s discipline;
• Physical safety from federal and state agents of repression (police, ICE, etc.) as well as paramilitary responses from private citizens;
• Anonymity of the leadership cadre and opacity of plans of action;
• Open lines of retreat after actions, and cessation of all action that results in identification or arrest.

To the purpose of addressing these issues, we have put together the following plans that Marxists involved in the movement should pursue. As always, we encourage to the strongest degree that any Marxists involved form separate, Marxist-Leninist organizations that are not directly integrated into the student movement and that can guide and coordinate the actions of the individual Marxists involved.

Organizational Defense Against the Universities

The universities are the second rank of defense for the state against the advent of student radicalism. In particular, elite universities like Columbia serve as the center of social reproduction for the ruling class, and thus are very concerned with the needs and demands of that class. These universities obviously have a class-character and a class-standpoint; their faculty are overwhelmingly high petit-bourgeois or bourgeois and their class standpoint is direct adherence to the haute bourgeois imperialists.

Despite the fact that they are “private” institutions, the university system is very malleable to the wishes of the government (and thus, the ruling class through its government agents). They have traditionally been the seat of reproduction for the reactionary vanguard, the CIA, and have always acted hand-in-glove with the state itself. Thus, we should not view the university system as separate from the state, but rather an extension of the state’s power into the social life of society. The university is the agent of the state. In this way, they act as machines of repression like the courts and prisons.

Columbia in particular has increased its repressive activities against student radicals: they have fired the leader of a student-worker union, issued expulsions, suspensions, demanded in-class attendance despite the threat of federal agents prowling the campus to deport radicals, private hearings with students, etc.

Defense against these tactics cannot arise spontaneously; it must be coordinated. The universities, as de facto agencies of the state, are too large and powerful to bend to pressure unless that pressure is exerted on a mass scale. Even the student population itself may be too small to draw the necessary concessions. Thus, the defense against the universities requires the utmost in organizational advancement and will also require the development of direct ties between the student-radicals and the masses of workers in their immediate area. Luckily, even the petit-bourgeoisie is likely to be outraged at the encroachment of the universities on the traditional “liberties” (as liberals understand them) of the students, particularly those who are members of the petit-bourgeois or bourgeois ranks of society. This represents a contradiction which must be exploited, a wedge which must be leveraged against the universities to the greatest degree possible.

1. Internal Solidification and Resilience

Resiliency is the order of the day. Withstanding legal or quasi-legal pressure requires resilience, specifically the organizational resources to ensure that everyone involved in the radical project stands in solidarity with one another. There are several components to a resilience of this type. The first is organization.

Organized groups are more resistant to repression. By organization, we mean a determined set of relationships and rules by which decisions are made and authority is delegated. The student-radical groups must be democratic, they must have defined membership, and they must have defined leadership and delegated channels of authority. This is the first step toward resisting the quasi-legal pressure being brought to bear by the universities.

This organization should then proceed to hold meetings with all involved and ensure that everyone understands the necessity of absolute solidarity. These meetings can boost morale, bring everyone on the same page as to strategy, and collect reports of issues being faced by the student-radicals.

The second component of this resilience is support. Once an organization is functioning, it must begin to garner material support for the radicals being targeted by the administration. This works in concert with component III of this proposal, the existence of Safehouses. In essence, those targeted by the administration should be assured of 1) housing, 2) income or essentials, and, where possible, 3) paid work. In order to achieve this, the organization should pool the resources of its individual members and solicit resources from outside in an effort to prepare for the necessity of material support. This should be done before it is necessary to draw on these resources, but that moment may be behind us.

2. Aggressive Legal Defense

The student-radical organizations must also prepare to strike back in the bourgeois courts with an aggressive legal strategy. The maneuvers currently being undertaken by the administrations are quasi-legal at best, and are subject to challenge. They can be slowed by entangling them in preliminary injunctions and litigation, particularly in federal courts where the local federal judiciary may be seeking to prove its independence from the central government.

This arm of the strategy should be carried out by trained movement lawyers who understand the necessity of militancy in the face of the current repression. We would recommend speaking with the National Lawyers Guild in detail about the potential for pro bono representation.

3. Prepare Plans for Tuition and Labor Strikes

The prior two stages should prepare student-radical organizations for the next stage of escalation: tuition and labor strikes. Unlike regular capitalist businesses, the universities have a flow of income that is independent from their labor-force. This often comes through the state apparatus itself (witness Washington’s attempts to interfere with Columbia’s internal operations by threatening to withdraw funding). However, there is a reliance upon both tuition and student labor in the allocation of university resources.

Tuition and labor strikes must be highly coordinated to be effective, and a large minority of student-workers and tuition-paying students must be prepared to expose themselves to the potential repercussions before they can be successfully carried out. However, given a high degree of organization, they can be extremely effective in bringing the administration to the bargaining table and forcing concessions. 

4. Connect with Unionized Workers on Campus

Other workers on the campus — faculty and staff — should be brought into the movement. Any student-radicals that are not yet in deep dialogues with the unionized workers on their grounds are cut off from the wider pool of labor solidarity and the above-listed labor strikes under C will be far less effective. The survival of the student movement relies on it connecting with the broader struggle of working people and uniting both of those struggles together.

At this stage, with many imperialist unions disclaiming Palestine solidarity, it is important that the student-radicals carefully assess whether the union leadership on their campus is friendly. If they are not, the radicals must bypass union leadership and instead establish connections directly with rank-and-file union members. They should be prepared to explain the manner in which the struggle of the student intifada is connected to the struggle of the unionized workers.

Student Self-Defense

In order to preserve their physical safety from state agents, the student-radicals must adopt modes of self-defense. We propose four steps or stages of heightening intensity to the student self-defense efforts:

1. Identifying the most vulnerable student-radicals;
2. Establishing a phone tree and lines of communication and warning;
3. Designating an on-call schedule for phone contacts; and finally,
4. Forming on-call defense brigades for physical confrontations.

1. Identifying the most vulnerable

The radical organizations, once fully formed, should reflect carefully on who is the most vulnerable to state action. Foreign nationals or anyone who could presumably be deported with a minimum of legal fiction should take precedence over others. Those who are being monitored by the state for any reason — plea bargains, court programs to get rid of cases, etc. — should also be considered. The organizations should privately draw up secret lists of those who must have the highest level of security.

2. Establishing the phone tree

An emergency phone tree must be established. Everyone in the organization should provide two phone numbers and at least one email address. The organization should then establish the call protocol in the case of any threat to an individual or group of student-radicals. Each person should have at minimum two other individuals to contact when an emergency begins. Once someone is contacted, they should immediately contact their listed “downstream” individuals. In this way, the entire organization can be alerted in very short order.

3. Designate an on-call schedule for the phone tree

Optimally, there will be one or two points of contact for the phone tree at any given time who make certain they are available. Anyone experiencing the threat of physical repression should call the on-call numbers; the on-call members may then communicate with the organization’s sitting body for self-defense to determine what actions are appropriate and then begin activating the phone tree. In most cases, physically assembling at the site of the emergency should be considered first.

4. Forming on-call defense brigades

Once the organization reaches a certain degree of development, the decentralized phone tree method should be transitioned to the formation and training of on-call defense brigades who can be called up to respond to emergencies. These defense brigades should be armed with some hand-held striking weapon (bats are a perennial favorite) and trained in defensive tactics. They will be called to rapidly assemble to sites where individuals find their safety threatened.

Safehouses/Underground

The student movement has called forth the need for a functioning underground. Those exposed leaders who now stand subject to vigilante threats or state action must have somewhere safe to retreat to until the crisis subsides. The construction of an underground now will provide the infrastructure for underground actions in the future and will heighten the degree of development of any student-radical organization.

We propose the following phases or schedule of establishing an underground:

1. Establish the network of safe locations available for long-term occupation;
2. Establish safe practices for moving between locations;
3. Prepare retreat plans for people who have been identified under II(1) above;
4. Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning.

1. Establish a network

This requires drawing up the names and addresses of everyone with space that can be used to hide people moving into the underground. A network of 5+ locations is required for this to be effective. These people must be trustworthy and developed, and must realize that they may be seriously inconvenienced for an extended period.

2. Establish safe practices for moving

The organization must establish a protocol for the safe transfer of radicals from safehouse to safehouse. This includes communication between safehouses (to be done in person at pre-arranged locations) as well as what physical routes will be taken and measures taken to obscure the identity of the people being ferried between safehouses.

3. Prepare retreat plans for those identified as most vulnerable

Everyone on the high vulnerability section of the organization’s vulnerability chart should have immediate emergency plans in place should they feel their safety is compromised, with predetermined signals and safehouses to arrive at.

4. Transition to in-person meetings for all action planning

No actions should be planned on any electronic media. All actions should be planned face to face and in person. Communication by digital media should be minimized as much as possible.

This is the Hour

We do not have much time. The student movement is under threat and must radicalize or it will be excised from the universities. Trained Marxists should endeavor to teach themselves the skills necessary to perform the tasks outlined above and should integrate themselves and offer their services to the student movement immediately. If you have resources or access to spaces that could be used as safehouses, you should make that known and contact student-radicals with that information immediately.

A luta continua!

Although the objective conditions exist to consolidate the proletarian class as class (a class-in-itself) in the United States imperialist bloc, the subjective conditions do not. The working classes are divided, scattered, and unconscious. They have been put to sleep, pacified, and anesthetized by the cunning of the ruling class and its many lackeys. Even petit-bourgeois professionals are watching their class-position crumble beneath them. The machinery of empire is breaking down.

Reading this now makes you an outlier among the working classes of the imperialist centers. You cannot afford to be complacent. Something shook you awake; do not go back to sleep.

Many forces tell  you not to act. They weave a siren song of false complacency. From the right, they tell you that you can’t possibly have an effect on the great movement of history, that things are too big and you are too small. From the left, they tell you that you aren’t equipped, or you don’t know enough yet, or you are from the wrong background to be of assistance. Ignore them.

No one changes history alone, but together we can alter the destiny of peoples.

If you feel as if you have not studied enough, your first action should be to study! Find others to study with you. Learn how to organize together, then take the next step.

Don’t let the size of the task ahead overwhelm you. The social revolution is possible; the complex systems erected by history that make up our current society can be analyzed. If they can be known, studied, and understood, they can be destroyed! It is through conscious analysis, the application of science to socialism, that we can work toward our collective liberation. That same science allows us to build a future society, one without class and national oppression. We can, for the first time, consciously design the society in which we live, rather than simply inherit the rotten accretions of the past.

Work to expose the machinery of the state for what it is! Lenin said that, “[w]hen we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors, are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react.” (emphasis added).

No one is precluded from working for liberation, regardless of their socio-economic background. If you have economic advantages, if you’re from the “wrong” class, if you’re from an oppressor nation, then you must spend time purging yourself of the ideological standpoint of that class, of that nation. In fact, you have resources you can put at the disposal of the revolutionary movement — but you cannot do that alone!Do not accept inaction. Go forth. Study. Organize. Act. Arise!

Social revolution does not exist in the abstract; social revolution is always a concrete, embodied event or sequence of events. Those Marxists who make of revolution some nebulous virtue, rather than recognize it as a real process, are doomed to remain on the sidelines of the actual revolutionary movement. The social revolution comes clothed in actual struggles, and special tasks depending on where and when it occurs. This fundamental idealist error – the “pure class revolution” – has permitted the noxious rot of opportunism to destroy any chance for the Communist movement in the western imperialist powers. Because the leading “communist” organizations in those states refuse to grapple with the reality of the class structure in the imperial centers, they spend their time daydreaming, marching, and idling their time until a future where pure class revolution becomes possible – a future that will never arrive.

We Marxist-Leninists who truly understand historical materialism are left to pick up the pieces. For us to bring about the revolution in the imperial centers we must not only combat the powerful forces of the enemy state, but also their auxiliaries, the pure revolutionists, who insist on ignoring all existing conditions and carrying out their revolutionary daydreaming in a fantasy land based on their misreadings of past revolutionaries. Wherever these hollow revolutionaries spread their doctrine, they draw emerging class-conscious workers into their way of thinking; soon, these newly class-conscious workers are miseducated into becoming further ambassadors of the “pure revolution.”

While it is our task to build the revolutionary party in the United States-Canadian bloc, we must build it in such a way as to forever combat this source of opportunism and revisionism. Decolonial Marxism-Leninism is the only tool we possess that can inform the construction of such a party. Where the pure revolutionists decry that decolonial theory is the bane of Marxism, we know that it is only the bane of their fangless Marxism. They are terrified of it because it restores the fangs in the doctrine of social revolution.

Decolonial Marxism-Leninism embraces the two special tasks of the social revolutionary in the U.S.-Canadian bloc, namely the resolution of the national/imperial question and the woman question (which could more properly be phrased the domestic labor or reproductive labor question).

Decolonization is simply the national question applied to the conditions of the U.S.-Canadian bloc. The revisionists deny that there is a national question to address today. They often dress this denial in many colors; some say that there is no such thing as settler-colonialism, or that the period of settlement has ended and therefore settler-colonialism is wrapped up and done with. By this they mean that oppressed nations within the U.S. are not actually nations and therefore do not require self-determination. They subordinate the national question to the class question, and demand a pure social revolution in which the oppressed nations within the imperial centers must place their concerns for sovereignty aside. In fact, they deny a national struggle at all – these nations, which they have downgraded to ethnicities, must set aside their national demands. According to these revisionists, only the proletariat of each ethnicity need be approached and brought into the movement.

Do we need a special term to denote a kind of Marxism-Leninism that recognizes the need for the national struggle? Is that not the essence of Marxism-Leninism? Sadly, the term has been so perverted by the century of false struggle in the U.S.-Canadian bloc that we do need a special term. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxist-Leninists” (don’t laugh!).

Although we must draw from the entire corpus of works from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we must also incorporate the critical analysis of the later 20th century from Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and George Jackson. The Russian and Qing empires did not engage substantially in the African slave trade or the Scramble for Africa – which is one of the reasons they lagged behind development of the European and colonial slaving powers – so the special task of national liberation did not take the form in the Tsarist or Qing empires that it must take here in the United States and its satellites.

To put it simply: the legacy of slavery and genocide at the hands of the settler population in the United States and Canada is not merely past, but continues on into the present. Combating this special form of national oppression is the task of Decolonial Marxism-Leninism. 

What Are the Central Tasks?

The formation of a guiding party is imperative for the revolutionary movement. It is impossible to form a militant revolutionary party while still being unclear about who our friends are and who our enemies are. Therefore, it is critical to the establishment of the revolutionary party-to-be for us to flush our enemies out into the open and draw a firm line against them. We want nothing to do with these pseudo-Marxist neocons, these Marxists-without-national-liberation; instead, we must actively seek to exclude them.

This can be done by openly embracing the two tasks of the social revolution in the U.S.-Canadian bloc: the liberation of the nationally oppressed through the establishment of national sovereignty (what our enemies contemptuously call “Landback ethnonationalism”) and the complete depatriarchalization of society. We must proclaim these tasks as the baseline for unity.

These tasks are the clothes that the revolution comes to us wearing, and they form a suit that would have been easily recognized by Marx or Stalin. They are the national question, as applied to the U.S.-Canadian bloc, and the question of reproductive/domestic labor, or the woman’s question, as applied to that same region. They manifest in the West as the tasks of decolonization and depatriarchalization, which are each composed of several necessary elements.

Departiarchalization must take the form of structural social changes, focused on true emancipation for women and LGBT people, the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor along gender-equal lines, the abolition of all outmoded institutions, industries, and medical, professional, and cultural practices that rely on gendered violence and maintain gendered oppression; the exact programmatic answers to these questions, however, are outside the scope of this present manifesto. The need is currently to break with the opportunist elements of the Marxist movement, and that requires a firm and explicit program of decolonization.

Decolonization

Decolonization is the task of establishing national self-determination for the oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canadian imperialist bloc. The desirability of the national self-determination of oppressed nations is beyond the scope of this article. We urge you to study Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and the other Marxist-Leninists for the answer to this question.

Here we are speaking of real nations, not, for instance, the reactionary projects of Cascadia or the secession of California or Texas. The really-existing oppressed nations within the U.S. and Canada are the Indigenous nations, the Black nation, and the Puerto Rican nation. There may be others, but such a determination would need to be made by careful examination of the national question in each individual instance.

As for the Black, Indigenous, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican nations, decolonization means:

1. Economic sovereignty – that is, land reform;
2. Political sovereignty – that is, the freedom to establish politically independent states; and,
3. Cultural sovereignty – that is, the freedom to engage in culturally significant practices.

To achieve these three parts or elements of the task of decolonization, we must commit firmly to a program that guarantees them. The party-to-be must promise, in action, that Decolonial Marxism-Leninism means:

1. The establishment of Land Tribunals to be carried out by the existing Indigenous nations and the guarantee to abide by all their decisions; these Land Tribunals to distribute the geographical territories of the continental U.S. and Canada, excluding the Black Belt, to the apportionment of the Indigenous nations or, should the Tribunals so decide, to set aside geographical territory for the  construction of a plurinational socialist state where no Tribune claims that territory as national;
2. The redistribution of all land in the Black Belt to the benefit of Black workers and farmers;
3. The redistribution of all lands in Puerto Rico and Hawai’i to the benefit of Puerto Rican and Indigenous Hawaiian workers and farmers;
4. The support of all forces that are actually national-liberationary in character regardless of their class composition;
5. The complete  destruction of the U.S. state and its departments at all levels; and,
6. The incorporation of national proletarian elements into the party-to-be with the structural guarantee of authority over all programs and strategy concerning land and liberation.

This struggle cannot be downgraded to a mere aspect of the overall class struggle. It is a task separate and discrete from the final social revolution — and a task that, if not undertaken, precludes the possibility of a successful revolution. The proletariat of the oppressor (“Great”) nation (the imperial whites) must be made to join with the struggles of their nationally oppressed siblings to control their own national destinies. This is the meaning of proletarian internationalism at this stage of the revolution. To the greatest extent possible, the party-to-be must encourage and prepare the oppressed national proletariat to command the new states that emerge, but this is not a necessary outcome, so long as the nation is freed from the shackles of economic and cultural control. Should it prove impossible to establish socialism in one blow, we must commit to a longer struggle. It may be that we must win each national revolution as part of a nation-democratic front and the struggle must then move to the contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the national proletariat. This would not be a defeat, but a victory! However, should we correctly navigate the struggle for self-determination, there is no necessary barrier to the emergence of the social revolution at once from the many national revolutions; that is, each national revolution may pass over into the social revolution.

On that same line, we Communists are not in a position to insist on the establishment of socialist construction within any of the resultant territories after a decolonial revolution. Without the establishment of sovereign national territories, national oppression will continue to persist and mar the construction of socialism. Should the Land Tribunals and land redistribution set aside or grant territories for the establishment of plurinational socialism, that will form the basis for a post-revolutionary socialist state. Should they decide against this, it will then pass to the proletariat of the former nationally oppressed nations to struggle within the new context for the victory of the social revolution.

What Is the Demand?

Marxism-Leninism is already decolonial at its very core. It is the science of liberation and its core is anti-imperialism. Decolonization is nothing more than anti-imperialism applied to the conditions of the United States and Canada. It is self-evident for any Marxist-Leninist who cares to apply the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to our current time and place. Why, then, must we add Decolonization as a term? Because of the perversion of Marxism-Leninism in the West.

Revisionist organizations have threatened to prevent the emergence of a real militant people’s party by devouring all the oxygen in the room, by misrepresenting the meaning of Marxism-Leninism, and by burying the truth in mountains of lies. Marxist-Leninists must not allow ourselves, the heirs of Marx and Lenin, to be drowned out by opportunists and chauvinists. Just as the Russian movement was forced to adopt the term Communist as opposed to Social-Democrat to distinguish itself from the social chauvinism of the Second International, we must do the same. The lessons of the Second International were never really learned in the West. We are fighting that same battle today in a disguised form.

So we say, down with the traitors of the Second International who dress up their chauvinism in fine-sounding socialist phrases and reduce the movement to serve as the ineffectual lapdog of empire! Instead we must forward our demands for self-determination and openly require the task be set forth as the foundational one for the establishment of a militant, revolutionary, Marxist party.

When you were young, you were taught to believe in the truth and goodness of the American way. Like many things we were told as children, that turned out to be a fairy tale. You care about people — about the people who are out of a job, the people who live day to day and hand to mouth, about the Black people who have been mistreated for so long in this country, about Indigenous people who are still being exterminated, about gay people and trans people who are being forced to hide who they are and face daily violence, about people with student debt, with medical debt, about the little children forced to mine Coltan to make our phones. You care. And you’re upset! You’re confused. Things have stopped making sense.

That’s because the story you were told was a lie. When our understanding of the world no longer lines up with the things we see, we have to rethink that understanding. When our internal narratives no longer match objective facts, we have to acknowledge they were wrong. We were wrong. It’s hard to be wrong, but only when we bravely confront our errors can we try to correct them.

What did we believe that was wrong?

That we were the good guys.

What? But surely we are! We care! We want to help. We’ve done everything we can! We’ve been shocked at the way our country has shifted ever rightward. We’ve supported peace, we’ve been against bloodshed, and for justice… haven’t we?

No.

No, because there is no truth, no justice, no American way. There’s no such thing.

The fact of the matter is, to the great masses of people all around the world, we are the bad guys. That hurts to hear — that people see the United States not as a beacon of freedom, but as the Angel of Death. But we can’t afford to lie to ourselves anymore. We have to wake up. We have to understand.

To make sense of the twin nightmares of Biden and Trump, of the ludicrous pageant of the Harris “campaign,” we have to go back and actually grapple with the truth — the truth that the United States and its ruling class have been enriching themselves at the expense of the other nations and peoples of the world since the day the country was born. To understand today, we need to understand yesterday. To predict tomorrow, we have to have a clear comprehension of our trajectory. History isn’t static. It isn’t a single moment in time. It is the weight of every yesterday carrying it inexorably forward into tomorrow.

So, how do we make sense of this?

First, we have to discard one of our most cherished illusions: the illusion of democracy. It is of great importance to the people who own the vast majority of this country (the top 10 largest individual landowners in the U.S. own 15.5 million acres of land, roughly the size of West Virginia, more than the land owned by all racial minorities combined) that we believe that we have an investment in its government. The truth is, we do not. This country is now and always has been a democracy for the rich. In the 18th century the U.S. was founded as a democracy for southern aristocrats and northern lawyers and merchants. Today, it is a democracy for property-owning capitalists. And they own a lot more than you.

If it’s all a sham, why do they bother keeping it up? For one thing, our ruling class isn’t always on the same page about what policies to pursue. They have legitimate disputes between themselves, and they resolve these disputes by throwing money at them and mobilizing “votes” in support of their preferred policies. As a result we, the regular, non-owning, working people in this country, are lobbied and pleaded to. We are treated as a passive, inactive mass to be cajoled, guilted, and outright tricked into putting our support behind a certain candidate, one preselected by our ruling class. Because of this, we develop a psychological attachment not only to that candidate, but to the whole system. It’s like watching a TV show that you talk about at work. We, the audience, feel a sense of involvement and connection. We discuss it, we theorize about it, we engage. However, we’re just the audience. We have no say in how the story unfolds — the bourgeois electoral system is no different. Our participation is strictly limited. At best, we are background actors, playing the part the scriptwriters and stage managers permit — but despite what we may do or say in those roles, the show will always go on.

There are certain things those stage managers will never allow. It is, after all, their show. We’re invited to come on from time to time, but we all know who owns the studio.

Among the things we cannot contest are the following: we aren’t allowed to object to all the wars our country has engaged in; we aren’t allowed to demand the forgiveness of debts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the decisions of the courts; we aren’t allowed to challenge the choice of candidates we are presented with; we aren’t allowed to contest the omnipresent armies of the police on our streets or the theft of land by huge corporations like Mandy Realty or Blackrock. We aren’t allowed to object to the burning of the planet for profit, or to argue for equality between the sexes, for freedom of choice and conscience, against racism, against transphobia. But why? Why aren’t we allowed to challenge these things? Because of a more basic assumption that’s key to the existence of the United States. We cannot challenge these things, we cannot be allowed to begin down the road to liberation from any of these assumptions, because that road ultimately threatens the very existence of the United States and its underlying system. It threatens the U.S. “way of life.” This system, this basic assumption, this underlying bedrock, is capitalist property.

What is capitalist property? It is the dividing of the world (of land, of productive machinery, of resources) into the individual hands of a select few. It is the source of the capitalist relation, the rule that says one man owns while another person works. It is the source of all social oppression – racism, sexism, anti-trans and anti-gay bigotry — and it arises from the property relation of capital.

What would happen if we challenged this property relation? If we could, by vote, abolish this root evil, if we could help every one of the people we said we cared about, what would happen to the wealthy? The wealthy capitalists, who own everything, would be at the same moment and by the same vote, disinherited of all the wealth of the world. Through their bankers and colonial agents, they command almost every source of wealth there is. This is what they stand to lose. Why, then, would they design a costume ball where the rules permit them to be disenfranchised? They wouldn’t. They haven’t.

Above everything, this is the one outcome they will not allow. Nothing that might open the door to begin that process can be permitted. War, from which all the wealthy profit, is a universal policy.

What we must understand is that the politics of Washington are the politics of wealthy white men. They have spent the last two hundred and fifty years ensuring they remain in control, and they inherited a social system of rules from Europe that were designed to keep European men in command. Through the import of Black African slave and marginalized European wage labor, these white, mostly English, men built the United States.

It is theirs. Root and branch.

Oh, they may have let some of those European immigrants into the club — after all, it’s hard to tell an Italian from a southern German at a distance — but they strengthened the barriers they could and clung to whatever rules they were able. Make no mistake — the United States still belongs to a handful of wealthy families. It isn’t yours, and it isn’t mine.

So we have the two wings of the owning class, the “left” and the right. Since the late 1930s, these two branches of one single American “business party” have taken contrary positions on certain issues, but when the chips are down, the Democratic Party has not actually, institutionally, protected or advocated for any marginalized group since 1950. The achievements of subject nations, sexes, and sexualities — the Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation — have been forced on the ruling class by concerted struggle.

It has been the working people of this country that have won every meaningful reform. As soon as we relax, snap! The ruling class takes it away!

No more. We are done with the bait and switch. We are done with the ruling class. Now it is time to take matters into our own hands.

We must have a militant party of the working classes! Our enemies are not only the Trump bloc, but all the capitalists behind them. We oppose not only the Trump government, but any Democratic Party government. Our enemy is the capitalist state, which is nothing more than a machine to mediate the disputes of the ruling class and to keep the workers from taking the rightful fruits of their labors.

But where to begin?

We must each study the question for ourselves. We recommend you find some like-minded friends who are equally disgusted at the trajectory of this country. We suggest you form a study  circle. Read articles from the Clarion. Debate them. Decide if you agree. Write counter-articles. Study your own workplaces. Write reports about them. Share them. Debate them again.

Read radical literature together.

Learn.

Organize.

Prepare.

Suggested Reading

• A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
• Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels
• Liberalism, a Counter History, Domenico Losurdo
• Class Struggle, Domenico Losurdo
• Dialectical and Historical Materialism, J.V. Stalin
• Dawning of the Apocalypse, Gerald Horne
• State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin

As with so many of the crises in our movement, this issue of inconstancy, of failure to advance a truly revolutionary strategy, is at heart a failure to forge an organization with the basic revolutionary commitments necessary to see the task through. Because the flaccid “parties” intermingle both revolutionary Marxists and reformist counter-revolutionaries, they are incapable of acting except in vacillation. Indeed, these very tacking maneuvers reveal to us the truth of these “parties” — they are not only inconstant, but they have made inconstancy their overriding nature. As the fascists in power have expanded their suppression of the working  classes, the “Communist” parties in the U.S. capitalist empire have filled up their undisciplined ranks with “red” liberals.

What is the task of the Communist? It is to stand out at the forefront of the progressive movement wherever it manifests, and to ensure that movement remains firmly oriented to true north, to revolution. “But,” I hear you cry, “that kind of purity of vision requires unity, militancy, and organization that we lack!” And that is, in a sense, true. But which must come first? Which is primary? Organization or firmness of purpose? Only once the lodestone of revolution has been sighted and a core of committed revolutionists begins to plot a course (no matter how much they may mistake the road) is such a revolutionary organization possible. Before revolution, must have a mass movement; before a mass movement, a militant revolutionary organization; before a militant revolutionary organization, a revolutionary theory and firmness of purpose.

So we say to you; Do not waver! Now is the time for real Communists to show their mettle. Demonstrate the firmness of purpose and unity of conviction across the U.S. capitalist empire, in every conversation. Why now? Because the ruling class is engaged in naked infighting that it barely attempts to disguise, because the future of the capitalist empire’s dominion of blood, terror, and looted treasure is in doubt. The time is critical. We must make hay out of the indecision of the U.S. ruling class. It is now divided and its partisans are lobbying for support from us workers in the hope of overthrowing their opponents. Yet, today more than ever before in our lifetimes, the ruling class stands exposed, their differences held up as relatively minor deviations from a general plan they all share. The working classes have seen that unified plan of Trump and Harris, and it is genocide in Palestine, extermination of gay and trans life (by neglect under Harris as the GOP runs rampant, by design under Trump), the destruction of all vestiges of labor organizing, even their pet unions, the annihilation of the environment in the pursuit of wealth, and the installation of a country-wide police state in which surveillance, arrest, and extrajudicial murder are no longer reserved for Black and Indigenous populations, but are extended to all.

In light of this increasing disillusionment of the working classes and the unfiltered bloodlust of the ruling class, it is more important than ever that all Communists who lay claim to that title spend their energy exposing the bourgeois state for what it is. We cannot make exceptions. We cannot equivocate. We cannot waver.

The United States is a bourgeois republic. It is a class dictatorship. It can only be overthrown, not reformed. As John Brown said, the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.

For every five minutes we spend speaking of reform, of strategic and critical support, of mitigating the fascist onslaught at the federal level, twenty-five minutes must be spent pointing not to tomorrow but the tomorrow after that — to the coming revolution. The ruling class elections are not a time to compromise or moderate, but a time to demonstrate our principles, and to help the rest of our fellow workers see the puppet show for what it is.Do not step back. Do not waver. Confront the enemy wherever it lies, and accept no treasonous, temporary, class peace!

In the year since Al-Aqsa provoked the zionist drive to complete the genocide, we have been taught the meaning of revolution. Through the bravery and diligence of Hamas, the resistance coalition, and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine we have watched as revolution has been made reality in occupied Palestine. More than that: although the forces of the enemy — our own imperialist forces, hiding behind the zionist banner — have been confronted by the forces of revolution, it is not only in Palestine that we have seen the empire challenged. Iran, Ansar Allah, Russia, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the People’s Republic of China have all contributed to the successes of Palestine.

No, we have learned the meaning of revolution at home in the United States and all its vassals, partners, and imperialist allies. In our solidarity with the besieged people of Palestine, we have all provoked the repression of the bourgeois capitalist state. It is through that repression that we have been taught the lessons of revolution.

In the last year, the movement has grown in leaps and bounds, has matured and spread from its initial blossoming among the student-radicals into every aspect of the anti-imperialist left. There is no revolutionary organizing that neglects the needs of Palestine. Should any claim to exist, we can dismiss it at once as an agent of reaction. Palestine is the forefront of the global class war, and the domestic struggle to halt imperialist violence is our front in that war. 

The complacency of the liberal democrats has been shaken. Kamala Harris has replaced the tottering Biden in the left aisle of the imperialist war machine, promising to be a competent administrator of genocide, a tough policewoman who will plunge the southern U.S. border into bloody chaos, and an iron fist when it comes to repressing the anti-zionist Left. In the passenger seat of that war machine but jockeying for a place at the wheel, Donald Trump shouts a guarantee of return to form — a disastrously uncontrolled foreign and domestic policy but with the firmest commitment to completing the U.S.-zionist genocide in Palestine.

Nearly the entire capitalist class has closed ranks and united around this issue. They cannot brook the slightest dissent. Those members of the ruling class that don’t share this opinion are subjected to censorship; those of us in the working and petit-bourgeois professional classes that challenge it are arrested, fired, suspended from work, or hounded by the FBI. This is the sharpest point of contradiction, and it sharpens us as well.

We must take our lessons and carry them forward. We must train the movement to avoid arrest. We must educate the movement on strategy and ensure to record all victories and defeats so we may study them and draw lessons from them. Above all, we must organize together to form a coherent network of anti-imperialist action across the country and the larger imperialist bloc.

We stand together now to say: death to the occupiers, the colonialists, the imperialists, and freedom for the peoples of the world that work under their lash. The working classes of the big imperialist countries are learning, through this struggle, where their interests lie: not with their own, lying, bourgeoisie nor with the gifts they promise, but with the working class of the world; with the working class of Palestine.

We have already discussed the executive branch of the federal government in a prior article. Citizens of the U.S. are told from the time we’re old enough for a civics lesson that this is not only a democracy, but is the democracy, the pattern upon which all modern democracy is based, the model to which all modern democracies should aspire. This series is written with an eye to answering a question: is the United States a democracy? Is the power of the state vested  “in the people,” as our civics teachers say? What does that mean? If the U.S. is a democracy, then a democracy for which class?

The U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, with two major “layers” of politics: federal and state. Each of these layers has its own “branches” as theorized by Montesquieu in the 1700s (for more on this, refer to our article, The Executive Gambit). The Congress is the legislative “branch” of the federal government, which makes laws and sets budgets. But let us see how exactly the senes, the old men, of Washington and the representatives in the House control the affairs of the U.S. state. Are they, in truth, exercising a power that is ultimately vested in the people, or are they merely the representatives of a moneyed — that is to say bourgeois — class?

The Functions of the Congress

Neither of the houses of Congress begin their work in full session. Rather, the partisan process requires that a bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the House and the same bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the Senate. The composition of these subcommittees is rigorously controlled by agreement between the Democrats and the GOP. That is to say, anyone who is not approved of by one or both of the two sitting bourgeois parties will not sit on a subcommittee and therefore will lack the power to review legislation.

A draft bill must first make it out of the subcommittee, which requires the approval of one or both parties (depending on the current political landscape and the makeup of the subcommittee). From the subcommittee, the bill is moved up to the committee that oversees it. There, it must be forwarded by majority vote to the full body of the House or Senate (depending on which chamber the bill is in). The majority leadership determines the calendar for when a bill is heard in the full session. This means that, if a majority of the party with a majority in the House does not wish to pass a bill, even if a majority of the House members are in favor, the Speaker of the House can simply refuse to bring it to the floor for a vote and let it languish and die. This has been codified as the so-called Hastert Rule. Because a bill must pass both houses of Congress in order to be given to the president to sign, a derailment at the House by the Speaker kills all legislation.

The House has strict rules about speaking on bills… the Senate does not. This means that the Senate can kill a bill exactly like the House does, but rather than through the maneuvering of the Speaker, this is done through the Senate filibuster. Because debate is generally unlimited, the Senate can only bring a bill to vote if the body invokes the rule of cloture. It requires three-fifths of the Senate to vote for cloture to end debate.

The Congress also has the power to impeach and try federal officers, such as the president, as well as to investigate and exercise oversight on the administrative and executive agencies (which were discussed briefly in The Executive Gambit). Although the Congress technically declares war, since the Korean War at the earliest, the executive office has unilaterally decided when the U.S. capitalist empire is at war, even though no formal declaration of war has issued. Declarations of war as a matter of state are passé. This is because the U.S. is in a state of continuous warfare, against all peripheral states. The only question that is left to decide is when and where that simmering war requires the use of open violence.

Congressional Elections

The amount of money involved in Congressional elections is estimated at between $8-10 billion USD for 2020-2022, or half of one percent of the entire gross domestic product of the U.S. in any given year.

Every two years, the entirety of the House (435 seats) is up for re-election. This ensures that House candidates must continuously spend money to stay elected. The average winner of a House seat must spend approximately $2.5 million every 2 years in order to stay in place. Senators, who are elected on a rotating basis with terms of 6 years each, spend on average $26.5 million to maintain their seats. The re-election rate of incumbents in the House is 93.5%, and in the Senate 100%.

In addition, House elections are dominated by political machines. These are disciplined and hierarchical party organizations that operate on patronage at the local level. Political machines control cities and neighborhoods through the patronage system (jobs, grants, etc., in exchange for the mobilization of votes) and through the coordination of campaign efforts. In machine politics, everyone marches in the same direction or they lose ballot access, find their office sidelined, or otherwise drop out of electability. The recent indictment of Eric Adams demonstrates the manner in which a political machine operates. Of course, political machines make a party vulnerable to the “law and order” elements in its opposite party, and the bourgeoisie take great delight in exposing the corruption of their neighbors while shielding their own rotten machinery.

The House is especially susceptible to this process because of the way state-level legislatures are in charge of shaping the Congressional electoral districts. On either side of the aisle, aggressive redistricting has been used to divide up large blocks of population that would vote for the party’s opponents into bite-sized groups that are then lumped together with friendly voters, essentially removing seats from the contest and “granting” them to the party that controls the state. The legislative warfare behind redistricting has been stepped up to a new height in the right-fascist strongholds of the U.S. South.

A System of Cooptation

As we have seen, because of the way the Congress is structured, all “progressive” politicians are co-opted into the fold of the Democratic Party or else find themselves sidelined. Empire-wide organizations exist to help corrupt these politicians and convince them to adopt the legislative agendas supported by these so-called lobbyists. Congresspeople need money for their campaigns. They must be supported by the business interests of their districts. They cannot turn their noses up at party politics for fear of being sidelined and replaced.

The function of the House is thus to absorb radical energy (where it exists) and to break it on the wheel of the subcommittee and the lobbyist campaigner. The show put on when votes are called is merely that; politics are not done in public in Washington, but behind closed doors where the working class is never admitted. All real politics take place at fundraisers and dinners, at donor meetings and lobbying events, at closed party palavers and in the palaces of the ultra-rich. Policy cannot be made in public because the ruling class cannot afford to show the people how its legislative sausage is made.

The mark of a real progressive or, heaven forbid, a Communist, would be that, after election, they stand in the way of all reactionary legislation. Such a politician (one we will never live to see) would use whatever influence they have to expose corruption and back-room dealing from both parties. They would attack the government itself, restrict the expansion of government bureaucracy, choke the state repressive apparatus of funds, and provide relief for the poor and working class while tightening the leash upon the most egregious of the capitalists.

The average age in the U.S. Congress is 58 years old. Over half the members of the Congress are millionaires. 72% of Congresspeople are men — whereas only 49.51% of the population is. 10% of Congress is Black — as against 12% of the U.S. population. 0.9% of the Congress is American Indian — as against 3% of the overall U.S. population. This is the effect of both history and the electoral process, which requires multiple millions of dollars to retain a seat in office. Congressional salaries are set at $174,000, but the expenses required to commute to the capital and live in Washington during Congressional session far outstrip this meager stipend; the cost of living in Washington D.C. is roughly $80,000 a year.

We are told that demographic representation is part of democracy. The ideologists of the bourgeois state (schoolbooks, the talking heads on television, and the political theorists in academia and the media that do their daily lip service to their bourgeois masters) insist that we can have a complete democracy where all demographic categories are represented in the institutions of power. My god, they complain, haven’t we had a Black president? This is meant to show that the injustices of the system are cured and the halls of power are not forbidden to anyone. Even if there were equal representation for women, for Black people, for any of the oppressed nationalities or those suffering from social oppression, in the halls of Congress, their representatives would still be of a different  class, a hostile class.

 The only way to break the stranglehold of these aged white capitalists on U.S. government is to undermine the power of the Congress itself, and eventually replace it with a truly representative institution: a single chamber that is both legislative and executive, which is elected by the working people, and in which each seat is subject to the instantaneous recall of the working people. There is, of course, no road to achieve such a state without the preparation among all the people to confront this corrupt government and do away with it. In short, the only way to sweep clear the encrusted privilege of the old order is to force it out. Until the day we do, we, the people, will always be subservient to they, the bourgeois capitalist class.

In order to answer these questions, we have to examine several different layers of government through several different “branches.” We’ve all heard the division of the U.S. government into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, a scheme that was originally put forward from the French monarchist and aristocrat Charles Louis de Secondat, better known by his title, the baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (generally, we just call him Montesquieu), in the middle of the 1700s. It’s from Montesquieu that we get our political theory of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances,” but originally the terms were used to mean checks and balances to prevent a monarchy from devolving into an autocracy.

Because the U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, it has two major “layers” of politics, federal and state, and each of these layers has its own legislative, executive, and judicial branches. There are also a welter of local offices at the state level which are generally swapped back and forth between the prominent petit-bourgeois lawyers, business owners, and members of the local Chamber of Commerce.

In order to narrow the topic and provide clear examples, we will focus on the federal level and its three “branches.” For now, it suffices to note that the lower down on the state scale that one descends, the more intimately full of graft and naked political repression the system becomes.

Since the 2024 U.S. presidential elections are coming up, we will focus on the electoral process for the country’s executive branch.

The executive branch is embodied in the presidency; all other federal executive officers of the U.S. government are appointed by the president, and most judicial offices are as well. Many of those officers can be fired for any or no reason, giving them a theoretical absolute loyalty to the person of the president. Violation of this loyalty, violation of a presidential directive, or even just irritating the president, can cause an officer to be removed from their job. 

Although the executive branch was initially conceived of as being fairly small and circumscribed to the power to execute wars and engage in foreign diplomacy, the power of the branch has grown in leaps and bounds since 1860 and it is now by far the most powerful constituent of the U.S. government. The executive branch now includes every administrative department of the federal state: the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. There are hundreds of executive agencies that fall under the president as well including the Administration for Children and Families, Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA, Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, NASA, the National Labor Relations Board, the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, the CDC, the Census Bureau, and on and on. This massive array of bureaucrats and functionaries answer to the White House.

Electing a President

How is the president chosen? Well, here we have one of the central myths of the American ruling class, and that is the primacy of voting during presidential election season.

By law, candidates for president must:

• Be natural born citizens of the United States,
• Be at least 35 years old, and
• Have been residing in the United States for 14 years prior to running.

These factors alone do not qualify someone to run for the presidency, however. They must also pass the hurdles set forward for ballot access in each of the 50 states and the city of Washington D.C. in order to appear on the state ballots. A candidate who does not appear on a presidential ballot materially is unable to win the presidency. It is functionally impossible to raise sufficient awareness among the entire voting population of the U.S. to get the number of write-in votes required to secure even a single state delegate, let alone the presidency. Some states do not permit write-ins — Arkansas, Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota do not permit write-in candidates.

Altogether, that makes 57 delegates unavailable for write-in candidates. A majority of 270 electoral votes, out of a total 538, is required to win the presidency. Thus, the total pool of available electors to those who do not make ballot access is only 481. A candidate that didn’t have ballot access would be required to win 56% of the electoral college (of which, more below) in order to win the presidency. If no one wins the required majority of electoral votes, the sitting House of Representatives elects the president.

In nine states, candidates don’t need to do anything special to be eligible to receive write-in votes. In fully 31 states, write-in candidates need to file special paperwork for write-in votes to count for their candidacy, which represents yet another hurdle to outsiders.

Ballot Access

What’s required for a candidate to appear on the presidential ballot? In the 2024 election, as in most U.S. presidential elections before it, the Democratic and Republican candidates appear on the ballots automatically. This is because the Democratic and Republican parties write all of the election rules and sit as the Secretary of State in every state.  In order to appear on the state ballots, independent candidates or those running from parties other than the two dominant ones are required, in most states, to garner a number of signatures to present to the state government. This ranges based on the state; Idaho requires only 1,000 “verified” signatures, while Florida requires an enormous 145,040 signatures and California an overwhelming 219,403 signatures.

To appear on every ballot in the U.S., candidates would have to collect a total of 952,807 verified signatures. To be verified, generally a signature must also have an associated street address which can be confirmed. In almost all states, these petitions are collected, examined, and processed by the Secretary of State — a state official appointed by the state governor and a member of one of the two major parties. How the Secretary of State confirms and strikes names off the petitions differs depending on the state, but typically one-third of the submitted signatures are immediately invalidated at random and the remaining half are checked to see if the names comport with state records of addresses. Should any address be incorrectly entered or not updated in the state’s own record, that name is struck from the petition. Petitioners generally understand that, in order to pass through these filters, they must gather double the number of signatures that the law requires. This means that, in order to appear on every ballot in the United States, a third party candidate must gather 2 million signatures. No third party candidate has ever appeared on every ballot; the most that any third-party ever appeared on was the run by Ralph Nader in the year 2000.

136 million people, 54% of the voting age population, voted in the 2016 presidential election, and that was a particularly high turnout. That means, before any vote is cast, third party candidates must gather roughly 2% of the eligible voting population, that is, the group actually voting, in signatures. The infrastructure required to stage even a preliminary campaign of this nature doesn’t spring up overnight, nor is it free of charge, and it only represents the very first hurdle for a third electoral party.

Again, it is impossible to stress strongly enough that these petitions are examined and often thrown out by party incumbents from one of the existing parties — parties that have automatic ballot access, and are integrated at every level with the state government and, in many places, with the state election machinery. Of late, Democrats have been suing to remove ballot access from third parties on various manufactured grounds: misleading petition-gatherers, voters who asked for their signatures to be removed, unverified signatures, etc. Anything to keep the monopoly of power concentrated in as few hands as possible.

The Electoral College and Delegate Apportionment

Should one, fighting off both the Democratic and Republican party machines, manage to appear on a ballot or become a potential write-in candidate, and should one win a portion of votes in any given state that would permit one to have presidential delegates sent to the so-called Electoral College, the electoral process presents itself as the next gatekeeper. Each state determines how the delegates it sends to the Electoral College (a meeting of “electors”) are required to vote. 

In most states, the political parties each create a slate of electors. Thus, there is a Democratic elector list and a Republican elector list. The U.S. presidential election is actually to pick which party will send electors to the vote for president. Some states have laws requiring the electors to vote for the party candidate that wins the state’s popular vote. 21 states have no laws preventing electors from voting for whoever they want to. Of the 30 states that have laws governing electors’ votes, many of them are non-binding and have no sanctions attached, relying on the elector’s pledged word.

In 48 states and Washington D.C., the winner of the state’s popular vote takes all the electors to the Electoral College. That means it is not enough for a third party candidate to build up a broad base of diffuse support; to win electors they must win states outright. The votes of these electors are then tallied and read into a joint session of the Federal Congress and the President of the Senate declares the winner of the election. At each step of the way, candidates may be disqualified by the hurdles they face, all of which are administered by partisan members of an existing bourgeois party.

The Cost

The biggest prohibiting factor is the cost of running an election. In 2016, Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign spent $768 million and Trump’s campaign spent $398 million. The analysts at MediaQuant estimated that Trump received approximately $5 billion in free media coverage through news and other sources while Clinton received around $3.24 billion. In 2020, the total amount of political spending rose to $14 billion by all parties. This money is spent on paid advertising, consultants, and travel, but it is also used to establish on-the-ground operations and campaign centers.

Who supplies the money for these campaigns? How is it possible to compete? The capitalist class overwhelmingly pays for presidential campaigns. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 run was financed by Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz ($35 million), hedge fund president Donald Sussman ($21 million), the Pritzkers ($12.6 million), the Saban Capital Group ($10 million), George Soros ($9.5 million), Slim-Fast owner Daniel Abraham ($9 million), Newsweb founder Fred Eychaner ($8 million), Euclidean Capital manager James Simons ($7 million), Henry Laufer of investment firm Renaissance Technologies ($5.5 million), Laure Woods ($5 million), etc.

The existing capitalist parties themselves devote resources to these campaigns. They are legal entities with a legal corporate existence under U.S. law. The Democratic Party, for instance, during the 2022 midterm elections, spent $200 million on administrative staff, nearly $100 million on campaigns, $200 million on fundraising efforts, $750 million on media purchases, $100 million on strategy, and $300 million on party salaries. Between Democrats and Republicans, nearly $4 billion dollars was spent during that election cycle.

It is impossible for a campaign to succeed without the backing of the moneyed interests of the capitalist class. There is simply no way to assemble enough resources in a single place to challenge this behemoth system — and this is on top of the other hurdles that the campaign faces above.

The Final Line of Defense: The Constitution

“Even if the capitalist class were law-abiding enough, or had miscalculated public opinion enough, to wait until the socialists had got a majority at the ballot box in some presidential election, they would then refuse to vacate their offices, or to recognise the election, and with the Senate and the military in their hands would calmly proceed to seat those candidates for President, etc., who had received the highest votes from the capitalist electorate…. We have often seen the capitalist class invoke the aid of the Supreme Court in order to save it some petty annoyance by declaring unconstitutional some so-called labour or other legislation. Now I can conceive of no reason why this same Supreme Court cannot be invoked to declare unconstitutional any or all electoral victories of the socialist party. 
… I consider that if the capitalist class appealed to the Supreme Court and interrogated it to declare whether a political party which aimed at overthrowing the constitution of the United States could legally operate to that end within the constitution of the United States the answer in the negative which that Court would undoubtedly give would not only be entirely logical, but would also be extremely likely to satisfy every shallow thinker and fanatical ancestor-worshipper in the country.”

James Connolly, Ballots, Bullets, or –, The International Socialist Review (Oct. 1909)

As we have outlined in other articles, the capitalist class has now, and has always had, complete capture of the United States Supreme Court. In addition, it has the loyalty of the highly reactionary caste of career members of the Armed Services and, as James Connolly noted as long as a century ago, it commands the allegiance of the entire legislative branch of the U.S. state. Further, it has control of an impressive apparatus of intelligence services created in the wake of World War II, which it, as we have covered, has parlayed into an all-pervasive system of repression.

The argument here risks expanding into other parts of the system of state control; the judicial and legislative branches are beyond the scope of the current work. The executive branch alone, however, commands sufficient power in the form of the police (which are part of the state-level executive apparatus), the armed forces (federal-level executive), and the intelligence agencies (federal-level executive as well) to act as a final backstop.

Should anyone ever manage to weather the storms listed above and, against the will of the moneyed owners of property, accede to the presidency, they would also be forced to face those three mighty arms of capitalist class-power. This is entirely discounting the possibility of what the kids are calling “ratfucking” — outright stealing an election for the chosen representative of capital.

Remember the limits, the horizon set by the owners of the real power in this country, when it comes to “elections.” Free and fair — but free and fair for which class?