We say that we must come to know the difference between mobilization and organization because the enemy will use mobilization to demobilize us. Mobilization is very easy. Very, very easy. Since we are a people who are instinctively ready to respond against acts of injustice, any time there’s one little act of injustice, we can blow it up and we will find people who will come and make some mass demonstration around it. […] And this is what mobilization does, it mobilizes people around issues. Those of us who are revolutionary are not concerned with issues, we are concerned with the system. The difference must be properly understood. […] Mobilization usually leads to reform action, not to revolutionary action. […] We must transform mobilization to organization. We say the enemy will try to use mobilization to demobilize us. Many brothers and sisters who’ve been to the million and more march will say to you, ‘I was there.’ Well, what are you doing today my sister?

— Kwame Ture

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.

Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”

All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.¹ The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.

As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”

It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.

In Minneapolis, there was a massive wave of homelessness at the beginning of COVID. Networks of mutual aid popped up because of that. Then the uprising happened, and people started figuring out how to take care of each other. Figuring out food, how to handle work, those networks were built by organizers, and after the mobilized masses disappeared in 2020, these networks remained.

The remarkable pace at which these networks expanded, from the handful of organizations to the intersecting community webs connecting every single city section, neighborhood, and block proves the lessons that Kwame Ture described so perfectly more than half a century ago. It also shows all of us, empire-wide, a roadmap for how to prepare as these “occupations” escalate. Every city on this land is a garrison fort, palisades replaced by cameras, automatic alarms, and barbed wire, so to call any concentration by the federal government an “occupation” is essentially a misnomer. It is merely a reinforcement. It is a concentration of already-existing state repressive powers. But we must not ignore the difference in form. The organizers in Minneapolis have adjusted to the reality of their new opponents.

All law enforcement in this country can and will kill you, we know that. They’re parts of the same arm in this imperialist state. However, what has become clear with these federal agents is that they do not function on the same playing field as a local PD. They do not operate on the same playing field as the National Guard. […] I don’t know if it’s a martyr complex or just talking shit, but I see this tendency from people who don’t live here when they say, “Stop filming and go de-arrest.” Or, “I wouldn’t let this happen.”

I’ll tell you: you would let it happen, or you’ll get killed.

De-arrest is more common in anarchist circles; anarchists here are not calling for de-arrest anymore that I’ve seen, because it’s understood in the city that we don’t stand any chance. You can de-arrest with the local PD. Not with ICE, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll kill you and the person they’re trying to kidnap. In the end, you still won’t stop who they’re trying to kidnap.

The organizers in Minneapolis understand fundamentally the dialectic between theory and practice. They have gathered experimental data from their lives, developed practices, tried and applied this theory, analyzed the results, and developed new theory and new practices. They are at the forefront of the fight against the bourgeois government.

The Four Opportunists and the Spontaneous Movement

As the press organ of the All-Empire Worker’s League, we have already taken a stand against the Four Opportunists, those “organizations” that capture revolutionary and radical energy, sweep up developing Communists and the newly class-conscious, and then negate them by combining them with liberals, by denying them access to the levers of power in their own organizations, by teaching them bad theory, and by burning up their energy through endless mobilization with no strategic goals. The Four Opportunists are the CPUSA, the PSL, the FRSO, and the DSA. (See “The 2026 Outlook of the Central Press” and “Liberalism and Fascism With Communist Characteristics” in the Red Clarion).

In Minneapolis, the growth of the spontaneous movement has continued in the face of the Four Opportunists, specifically the FRSO and DSA. USU has had contact with other Communists in Minnesota who tell us that…

De-legitimizing action and organizing is being done by individuals acting on the behalf of FRSO (DSA was also involved on this front). The hegemony held by FRSO makes this possible, as their cadre members are involved in other orgs. There’s another Somali group in Cedar Riverside who call themselves the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, but are democrat adjacent and pro assimilation. They were attempting to de-escalate by gathering all the African folks into their homes for that day, telling them to stand down and not confront [Jack] Lang.² Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance was doing flyering, circulating statements via signal group chats or boosting messages that were calling [an] org ³ outside antagonists with no right to organize in Cedar. They cut off supply lines and disrupted organizing work doing this.

When the fascists came to town, Jack Lang and co., the Coalition Against the Trump Agenda (A group made up of a lot of FRSO front orgs) enacted the strategy of “shadowing” the fascists.

Basically, this amounted to them just following them around and yelling stuff at them. However, things did not play out as FRSO planned. Roughly 1000 folks showed up (the divide between the masses and org affiliated was obvious) to counter around 10 fascists with a banner. The FRSO marshals protected the nazis’ banner from the masses, until they eventually lost control and the banner was destroyed in spite of their efforts. Extreme peace policing.

An additional note to further illustrate the resource strangulation and white chauvinism of FRSO: [a] Somali organization that led the defense action against Jake Lang in Cedar Riverside reached out to the SRA [Socialist Rifle Association] of Minneapolis for a firearms training. They later learned that there is a strong FRSO contingency in SRA. Once SRA realized this Somali organization was the one that held the defense action, SRA informed the organization that they would not move forward since they “created confusion and gave other (FRSO) organizations a hard time.”

From the comrade in Minneapolis:

One thing I can speak to is, right now, not just in Minneapolis, but nation-wide — we’re seeing opportunism. There’s this tailist need to use this term “general strike“ to try and illicit buy-in from people. For these days of action. We saw this last Friday. The labor unions involved, the orgs involved, it was never called a general strike. It was clear we weren’t calling for one. There were outside groups that decided to call it a general strike. […]

When we mislead people into thinking a day of vacation is the same as a general strike, we do an insurmountable amount of damage to education and getting working people to understand the actual risk-reward of going on strike. And dealing blows to capital which is the point of a strike. That is the big criticism I Have right now. The organizations that should and do know better, continue to use words like general strike.

PSL has pursued a similar strategy in Minneapolis: more than any other group, they have misrepresented the effort to organize petty-bourgeois businesses to voluntarily close as a “general strike.” They encouraged people to use paid time off to participate in marches. This is the PSL’s strategy of class struggle — not as the struggle of the lowest elements of the proletariat against the imperialist system, but as the struggle of the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic layers to achieve limited political aims. This is not revolution. This is counterinsurgency.

The spontaneous development of the people is breaking free of the chains long cast over the struggle for liberation by the Four Opportunists. In every corner of the US Empire, the grip of the opportunists and the tailists is weakening. We must unite the most advanced theory with the most class-conscious elements of the people and we must fight against the settler-socialism of the opportunist groups. What is this settler-socialism? It is the Marxism of capitulation, a form of revisionism that sees reform as the only path forward and puts the question of revolution forever over the horizon. (See “Revolution in Our Lifetime” in the Red Clarion). In FRSO and PSL, this is partially accomplished through the deceptive organizational structure in which access to internal documents and planning is entirely isolated and inaccessible; day to day members of these organizations are encouraged to pay into them and attend marches, but the strategic and tactical level operates at one remove from the general membership. All decisions are made by a secret group of select few — Blanquism, in other words. (See, for instance, “The Cult Building Tendency” in the Red Clarion). Have you seen calls for marches spring up with less than 24 or 48 hours notice? That’s the work of the Four Opportunists. Whether it is their intention or not, the material result is the bleeding off of revolutionary energy into channels that are acceptable to the ruling class. In truth, it is an attempt to find accommodation with the ruling class and demand a different distribution of power within the imperialist system. It is the plea of the imperialist labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly command the Four Opportunists) for more spoils to be allocated to them and for a greater degree of input into the empire’s political system.

For more on the Four Opportunists and our criticisms, see generally “Stagnant Parties Don’t Deserve Your Time” in the Clarion, and…

CPUSA – “A True Accounting of the CPUSA In Its Members Own Words,” “Why I Left the CPUSA”

PSL – “Revolution in Our Lifetime”

FRSO – “The Settler J. Sykes and the FRSO,” “Forward Out of FRSO”

DSA – “Triumph For the Zionist Left”

We, and the organizers in Minnesota, reject this settler bargain.

The League Principle

We require a country-wide organization to fight both the Four Opportunists and their labor-aristocratic/petty-bourgeois base and the bourgeois state itself. The lessons of Minneapolis are clear: it is possible to bring elements of the imperialist working class into direct and antagonistic contradiction with the state when we move our strategic goals out of the narrow realm of wage increases and into the realm of the national liberation struggle. White anarchists and Communists, petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic elements, have joined the national liberation struggle against ICE. Breaking the law for the first time, acting directly against the state for the first time, opens a new world of revolutionary potential among the labor aristocracy. Show them that it is possible to oppose the state, rather than seek accommodation with it, and we develop the subjective awareness of revolution. Revolutionary potential is created within otherwise reactionary elements of the population.

However, this is only possible with uncompromising proletarian leadership. Without the anchor of a revolutionary, proletarian organization, opportunism is the unavoidable result. Those members of the imperial labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie who will not voluntarily surrender their class-outlook and who will not voluntarily subject themselves to proletarian class-leadership are our objective enemy.

The principle of the League is the intermediary principle between our present stage of development (scattered, ideologically incoherent, with the presence of small pockets of developed Communist organization at the local level) and the militant party-form. Yes, we need a party of the new (new) type, as the All-Empire Worker’s League has put it,

It’s not enough, though, to just state the obvious: that the US in 2025 is not Russia in 1917, it is not China, it is not Viet Nam, it is not a semi-feudal country or a country in the global periphery. The US is the center of world-capitalist reaction, an imperial hegemon that acts as the backstop and system of last defense for capitalism across the entire world. No metropolitan country has ever seen a successful proletarian revolution….

We must create a vanguard organization of the working class that can purge all opportunism and revisionism from its ranks, educate and elevate the working masses, defeat internal and external chauvinism, unite the liberation struggles of the colonies and semi-colonies, and prepare the reserves of the revolutionary proletariat for direct confrontation — for direct class war — with the enemy state, with bourgeois civil society, and with the world-bourgeoisie themselves, who largely reside within the US-Canadian bloc. In order to satisfy these requirements, we must creatively apply the lessons of 1905, of October, of the course of struggle in China, Viet Nam, Ghana, and the whole periphery.

While we work to create this party, we must organize our various local organizations together and take advantage of the benefits this centralization can provide. While a League is not yet a party, it is an organization of organizations. We have discussed the formation of regional leagues in the Clarion in the past (see “Towards a New York City League of Workers and Students” and “Towards a Boston League of Workers and Students”). It is through this process of regional organization that we can build our capacity to resist the state as well as the class forces that tend to drag Communist-oriented projects in the US empire toward opportunism.

Since 2025, the All-Empire Worker’s League has worked to integrate local organizations and propagate, develop, and advance the theory necessary to combat the opportunists and the bourgeois imperialists. In areas with a high concentration of developed local organizations that are actually engaged in class struggle against the state, we urge them to band together to resist opportunism and form centralized organs of class power.

In regions where the struggle has not yet been heightened to the same degree as in Minneapolis, we urge local organizations to prepare for the same degree of struggle. Our sources on the ground warn that unless we prepare in advance, we will be caught off guard. Washington is willing to kill to suppress class-consciousness and solidarity between the imperialist labor aristocracy and the US proletariat. We have to be ready to counter that violence with the main weapon we have: organization!

Footnotes:

1. Black, Too and Rasul A. Mowatt. Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits. Routledge, New York, NY, 2024. Introduction, xi-xxiii and 138-145. ︎
2. Jack Lang is a pardoned January 6th rioter and fascist agitator. ︎
3. “[…] a group of communists who have been organizing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul who are critical of the established Left in the region and are actively attempting to build a viable decolonial Marxist alternative[…]” — From the Communists in Minneapolis. ︎

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. ︎

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?

Traditionally, a good place to start would be to examine the candidate’s platform and consider its merits, point by point. The Harris campaign, unfortunately, does not appear to have a platform, at least not one posted to the public, and so we will have to rely mostly upon an analysis of her record as a politician, instead.

Political operatives of the Republican and Democratic parties have written much about Harris’ six-year stint as California’s Attorney General, and her own campaign frequently refers to that period when trying to build the case of her competence for office. Harris herself isn’t shy about discussing her work as California’s top cop, but her characterization of her work during that period the years before, when she worked as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, shifts with the political winds. One year, she describes herself as a progressive and a reformer who bravely took on the worst excesses of the Californian carceral state. When it suits her, however, the story changes, and we find instead that she had always been a hard nosed cop who worked tirelessly to protect California’s pristine suburbs. It is therefore difficult to get the measure of her without investigating this record directly.

Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General from 2011 until her election to the United States Senate in 2017, and before that was the head prosecutor for San Francisco from 2004 until 2011. Her record during these years reflects the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990’s and 2000’s — a period which might, arguably, be said to have opened with Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, now famous as the racist “superpredators” legislation which saw incarceration rates across the country soar to barbaric new heights. This was a time which, like today, saw Republican and Democratic politicians, from the Clintons to the Presidents Bush, in open competition to determine who could be the toughest on crime, lay down the longest and most draconian sentences for the most minimal offenses, and take the most racist political positions. During Kamala Harris’ tenure as the top prosecutor in California, Black people were incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than their white counterparts. They were far less likely to have positive outcomes at parole hearings, and far more likely to be subject to police violence.

Then, as today, California state law mandated that prisoners do labor for the state and for private companies who contract with the state for that purpose. Refusing to work can result in write-ups, housing changes, stripping of the inmate’s rights to phone access, visitation, and ordering food or supplies. It can also affect parole considerations.   

Involuntary servitude (the term ‘slavery’ apparently having been too on the nose) is legal in California under Article I Section 6 of the state constitution, and under the 13^th Amendment to the federal one. It has been so since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was written to provide a direct means to reinstate the slave relation that the Civil War had recently abolished. It served the triple purposes of producing a fungible, renewable, and cheap source of labor for the country’s growing economy, codifying a legal avenue for the appropriation of what meager properties Black people were then permitted to own, as well as to shore up a white supremacist hierarchy that had been teetering on the verge of collapse.

Under Attorney General Harris’ oversight, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Californians were shuttled into the carceral system and subject to this “involuntary servitude.” Inmates were paid on average between 8 cents and 32 cents per hour, or between 12 dollars and 56 dollars per month, for their work for the state and the private corporations who contract with it. The jobs they were assigned then as now are menial, physically demanding, and often extremely dangerous. Prisoners are regularly deployed as firefighters during California’s increasingly severe wildfire season, cannon fodder in the capitalist state’s halfhearted fight against climate change.

Not only did Harris fail even to pay lip service to abolishing this abominable practice, she actively defended it from those who worked to curtail its worst excesses. She fought bitterly against a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, filing obstructionist, frivolous motions to delay or derail the order entirely, and flirted with the idea of denying that the Supreme Court even had the authority to order such a thing.

That the Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans in 2011 (and hardly a bastion of progressive or liberatory thought at any time), even ordered such a thing is telling. In the majority opinion written by conservative Justice Kennedy, it was observed that Californian prisons were over 200 percent capacity, that they saw inmate deaths due to inadequate medical facilities and staff on a weekly basis, and that they had an inmate suicide rate nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. Kennedy wrote that “…in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12-by-20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment… A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with ‘constant and extreme’ chest pain died after an 8-hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a ‘failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.’”

Harris’ office acted with such intransigence in defying the order that the Court considered finding the State of California in contempt. Observers noted that her behavior may have fallen afoul of Californian legal and ethical standards against filing motions “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay’” The State Government was eventually defeated and forced to reduce the prison population, but not before her office argued in court that extending the proposed inmate release programs “…to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought”.

Simply put, the State and its Attorney General were reluctant to release any of their cheap, disposable “involuntary servants.” The regime of slavery was simply too profitable to allow it to be undermined without a fight. It is worth noting that the institution of involuntary servitude persists in California to this day. When, in 2024, she stands on stage and portrays herself as a “tough on crime top cop”, this is the record that she is looking back upon so fondly.

Shifting the focus away from Harris’ violent, racist record inside the United States, we now examine her record and position on the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Kamala Harris has sat now for three years as the second-in-command to President Biden, during which time the administration has dispatched at least 25 billion dollars to Israel in military aid, and recently authorized at least 20 billion more. Israel has long been, since its inception in 1948, the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, but the pace of this aid has accelerated dramatically in the wake of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Between October of 2023 and May of 2024 alone, aid to Israel totaled 12.5 billion dollars, though this data is provisional, and the actual amount is almost certainly higher. This tranche of aid accounts for about half of the total amount sent over the course of Biden’s presidency.

As evidence of Israeli atrocities mounted, as the world watched the undeniable ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in real time via live-stream and reacted with indignation and rage at the inhumanity of it, Harris never broke with her President or changed course.

Rhetorically, Harris has tried to play both sides. She’s commented more than once on the need for a ceasefire. When mounting pressure from student protests across the U.S. threatened to destabilize the country and, horror of horrors, her own political prospects, Harris paid lip service to the notion of establishing a ceasefire, or, more often and more tellingly, a “pause” in the Israeli extermination campaign.

Liberals and optimists alike might have been tempted to find some small shred of hope at that, and perhaps by Israel’s apparent willingness to discuss the possibility, but those fantasies were blown away when, on July 31, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas and the negotiator on their behalf, in his private room in Tehran.

Harris was now caught in a difficult position. Her halfhearted calls for a ceasefire suddenly seemed less convincing when her side had just murdered the very man that ceasefire negotiations might be made with, and therefore foreclosed on the possibility of any negotiations in the most spectacular possible way. Indeed, her refusal to denounce Israel in the aftermath of Haniyeh’s assassination, or for that matter the assassination of senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr the day before, reveals the naked cynicism of her words.

She has hardly had a sharp word for Israel since. Not since the clearly terroristic assassination of its negotiating partner, not since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and members of his government on war crime charges, not since the release of reports estimating that over 186,000 Palestinians, fully 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been shot, starved, beaten, and bombed to death. She didn’t even have anything to say on July 29 when, in a fit of sociopathic rage, mobs of Israeli fascists stormed a prison facility to release a soldier who was being held there on charges of brutally gang raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Since then, the most notable thing the Harris campaign has had to say on the matter of the ongoing genocide is that she is categorically opposed to an arms embargo on Israel. Publicly, she shouted down a group of pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan on August 7, admonishing them for mentioning the genocide of the Palestinians and telling them that “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” before security ejected them from the event.

Kamala Harris is guilty of lying about many things, but when she says that her support for the genocidal Zionist project will never waver, she does appear to be speaking the truth. This steadfast and unbreakable support for the blood soaked colonialists occupying Palestine is hardly unique among American politicians, and a particularly generous (or naive) reader might be tempted to point this out. But then, vocal and energetic opposition to racial genocide has rarely been common among politicians who are actively engaged in it. One wonders who among the active politicians in 1940’s Germany might have represented the “lesser of two evils.”

Harris has walked in lockstep with Joe Biden and the right wing of the Democratic party every step of the way. She issued vocal support for Biden when he crushed the nascent rail workers strike in 2022. She’s been actively heading up the administration’s approach to immigration along the U.S. southern border, where ever more draconian tactics dominate. Deportations are on track to be higher under Biden’s administration than they ever were under Trump and, having apparently forgotten that she once pretended to have a problem with “children in cages,” Harris now weaponizes this brutal and racist record to outflank her Republican opponent on the right.

Recently, the Vice President was subject to a substantial amount of pressure from the U.S. working class over her choice of running mate. For a time, there was every indication that Josh Shapiro was her favored candidate, being as how he is the governor of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state. Shapiro hit immediate opposition from the left, who cried out that he is a fanatical zionist who volunteered for and served six months in the Israeli occupation military earlier in life, and who penned racist tirades against the “battle-minded” and “belligerent” Arab people.

This didn’t seem to change Harris’s calculus on the issue though, and for weeks it seemed she would name him as her running mate at any moment. Shortly before a decision had to be made, however, a story broke about how in 2022, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office concluded that Ellen Greenberg, a victim who had been found in 2011 dead with 20 stab wounds on her body, had died by “suicide” rather than been murdered by her fiancé. Shapiro later had to refer the case to a different office after it became public that he had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family, and thus had a conflict of interest.

This, apparently, was too much for the Harris campaign, and shortly thereafter they announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate instead. Walz cuts a public persona as an affable, easy-going, white suburban dad. He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, a position that he’s held since 2019. While he hasn’t, as far as this author is aware, covered up any murder cases for family friends, he isn’t free of the zionist charge that marred Shapiro either. On August 6 of this year, Yinam Cohen, a Consul General of Israel to the U.S., publicly thanked Walz for “deepening the Israel-Minnesota partnership” and “…for standing with Israel during our darkest hour.” The Twitter post was accompanied by a photo of the two, shaking hands in front of the United States and Israeli occupation flags.

Tim Walz is likely more recognizable, though, as the governor who called in the U.S. National Guard without hesitation to put down the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and to occupy the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding areas. Thousands of National Guardsmen stormed the streets and fired indiscriminately into protesters and uninvolved onlookers alike. They demonstrated spectacular brutality, beating and arresting hundreds and abandoning even the pretense of acting within legal or proportional bounds.

A recently viral audio recording of then-President Trump from that period is enlightening. In it, Trump recounts how he had been in regular contact with Walz during the protests, how he’d asked the Governor to send in the National Guard, and how deeply impressed he’d been with the way that Walz had handled the events. He said that Walz is an “excellent guy” and that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.” He goes on to explain that Walz is on the phone and, addressing the Governor, says “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Odd Trumpian language notwithstanding, it is very clear that in that acute moment of crisis for American capitalism and class society, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are much more similar than they are different. At that juncture, when the structure of capital itself was at risk — when the colonial capitalist state’s inherent antagonism towards the working and racialized masses was exposed — the party lines disappeared and Walz, and the rest of the Democrats, joined hand in hand with Trump to put down the threat from below. The Harris-Walz campaign intentionally shared that audio clip to make a hypocrite of Trump on the campaign trail, but all it does is show the complete moral bankruptcy of both campaigns, both parties.

Harris claims to be a progressive, but she has the record of a brutal reactionary. She pretends that her campaign is about smashing glass ceilings and empowering women and people of color, but she has made a career of oppressing women and Black people, and is directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. She begs the workers to believe her when she says that she is the sane alternative to another four years of a fascist Donald Trump, but then she positions to the right of his campaign and criticizes him for being weak.

Like a chameleon who never really got the hang of its trade, Harris shifts her colors but never very convincingly, and hopes her audience has forgotten how she appeared a moment before. Unfortunately for her and her ilk, the working class and the oppressed of the world aren’t that gullible.

It wasn’t. Warren’s politics were class peace and reform. He treated Communists as class agitators, but he also ruled consistently to “soften” the excesses of capital.

The Warren court went on to decide some of the most important cases in modern Statesian jurisprudence. Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal segregation, Loving v. Virginia, outlawing antimiscegenation laws, Griswold v. Connecticut, establishing the right to birth control, and four major criminal cases that established the rights we think of as fundamental to the criminal process: Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to a court-appointed attorney, Brady v. Maryland, the right to be given exculpatory evidence held by the state, Wong Sun v. United States, granting the right to suppress evidence that was obtained by the police illegally, and Miranda v. Arizona, the right to be informed of your rights when you’re arrested, the famous Miranda warning.

Among these progressive expansions of individual rights was Robinson v. California, the case that the current Supreme Court has just limited to its facts and robbed of any precedent-establishing power. What did the Warren court hold in Robinson? That it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th amendment of the federal constitution to criminalize a “status” over which a person has no control. In that case, the court struck down a California law making it a crime to be addicted to drugs. The fascist court of John G. Roberts, Jr., has just held, in the newly issued City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that the Robinson ruling doesn’t apply to the homeless. This is just the latest in the Roberts court’s piecemeal march against established Warren precedents, and represents nothing less than the sharp contraction of the U.S. empire.

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

By 1953, the war had been over for eight years. Europe lay devastated. In 1948, Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, pumping U.S. capital into areas Washington’s elite thought might be vulnerable to Communism. It was a kind of economic GLADIO, a stay-behind program (and if you don’t recognize GLADIO, that’s worth reading up on). The world war hadn’t ended before the Cold War began, and the U.S., its domestic production untouched by the conflict, stepped out of Great Britain’s shadow to claim hegemony over the West and proclaim itself the sword and shield of the Euro-American capitalist class.

Eisenhower was the first truly post-war president to preside over this new American empire. In a sense Warren and his court, which lasted until 1969, was an extension of the ruling class politics of the age. What was this policy? The expansion of New Deal-type programs — which Warren had attacked before taking the bench — and the creation of a new Pax Americana. Under Eisenhower, post-war imperial wealth flowed from all corners of the globe and it was used to establish social security, the interstate highway system, and NASA. Instead of the growth of social democracy and the welfare state, as seen in Europe, class struggle was suppressed in the U.S. through the expansion of public infrastructure and the goodwill (read: self-preservation) of the capitalist class, which gave out robust pensions, employer-provided health insurance, etc. These benefits fell primarily to the “white” workers, which by now included formerly “non-white” ethnicities from Europe such as the Irish and Italians. The class struggle was thus forced underground during this period, and it manifested explosively in the struggles for national liberation that shook the country from the mid-50s until the end of the 1970s.

We needn’t prove Warren’s personal motivations as Chief Justice to make our case. In fact, from all outside appearances, he genuinely believed in the principles he espoused through his decisions. But such is the case with many bourgeois politicians. They earnestly believe their class ideology. The fact that it serves a class purpose operates on a level below their conscious understanding. It is typical for members of the ruling class to be thoroughly seduced by the self-justifications and illusions that make up their class morality.

Above all, it is this legacy of bourgeois morality that the ultra-fascist majority on the Roberts court have set as their target. As arch-reactionaries, they are working to roll back the clock and restore the early 20th century pre-Warren legal landscape. They are ushering in an era of naked class domination, stripped of the comfortable fat provided by the loot of empire.

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

To understand Grants Pass we have to look at the direct precedent that the Roberts court has overturned. The case in question is Martin v. Boise, a 2019 decision concerning unhoused people that was issued by the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit covers the geographical area of Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California, and Arizona. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40% of the country’s entire unhoused population lives within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. As the fascist justice Gorsuch, author of the majority opinion in Grants Pass, noted, “homelessness in this country has reached its highest levels since the government began reporting data on the subject.”

The Martin ruling made it unconstitutional (within the Ninth Circuit) for a state to enforce criminal penalties on public camping if the city in question lacked sufficient shelter beds to house its unhoused population. The legal rationale is dull, but in essence the court held that it was a violation of the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to jail houseless people simply because they had nowhere to stay, especially if the city lacked sufficient public relief. The Martin decision was predicated on the Warren court’s Robinson ruling, where the court held it to be a violation of the 8th amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize addiction.

City of Grants Pass arises from a Martin injunction brought by Gloria Johnson and John Logan, who challenged the city’s public-camping laws. They brought a suit as a federal class action, representing “all involuntarily homeless people living in Grants Pass.” A panel of the Ninth Circuit found that Johnson and Logan faced a credible threat of punitive action from Grants Pass and that all unsheltered people in the city were “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s unhoused population exceeds available shelter beds. The city, desperate to retain its punishment power and other tools of state repression, sought a rehearing en banc by the entire court; it was denied. 

Grants Pass filed a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari (certification that the issue be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States). The cities of Albuquerque, Anchorage, Chico, Chino, Colorado Springs, Fillmore, Garden Grove, Glendora, Henderson, Honolulu, Huntington Beach, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Murrieta, Newport Beach, Roseville, Saint Paul, San Clemente, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Westminster, the National League of Cities (representing over 19,000 other American cities and towns), the League of California Cities (representing California’s 477 cities), the League of Oregon Cities (representing Oregon’s 241 cities), the Association of Idaho Cities (representing Idaho’s 199 cities), the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (representing all 91 municipalities in Arizona), the North Dakota League of Cities (representing 355 cities), the Counties of Honolulu, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Orange, the National Association of Counties (representing all 3,069 counties of the U.S. empire), the California State Association of Counties, the Special Districts Association of Oregon, the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, California Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and 20 other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia) all joined the city to support the petition for certiorari.

All the lackeys of law and order, all the petty bourgeois strivers and graspers, all the pigs and their captains, all the fascist forces of the Western United States, put their names on the petition and many of these wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, begging for Martin to be overturned. The Roberts court was only too happy to oblige.

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

The unhoused generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to class. Either they are themselves working class proletarians, who work by wage labor, or they are sub-proletarians, thrown out of the labor force entirely and denied any means of support. These are people who would otherwise live by wage labor, who have no substantial property or investment in the machinery, land, or other tools by which society produces the commodities that are its lifeblood. Many unhoused people were sheltered proletarians or even petit-bourgeoisie only a short time before they became unhoused. With the dismantling of the feeble safety nets erected during the imperial apogee by the “liberal” crowd of Clintonites in the 90s, it has become easier than ever to fall out of the sheltered working classes and enter the ranks of the sub-proletariat, the great unhoused.

The unhoused already suffer a number of critical disabilities inflicted on them by “civil society” before we reach the question of criminalization. Lacking a permanent address and in many times deprived of a stable telephone number, the unhoused are generally prevented from voting by registration requirements. This means the lofty list of cities, towns, counties, etc., that filed to support the City of Grants Pass in its bid to criminalize homelessness were elected without input from the very population they want to police. This is what we mean by class domination. (In the case of the rest of the working proletariat, this relationship is slightly more disguised; because we can technically cast a ballot, and we are often duped into thinking the ballot matters.)

Marx calls those who are kept out of work the relative surplus population (meaning, those people who are, relative to the active work available, kept as extra or surplus without employment) or the industrial reserve army. By limiting the number of jobs available and ensuring that every proletarian and sub-proletarian who isn’t working lives in squalor and near-death, the capitalist class “forms a disposal industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost…. [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3. At the same time, this industrial reserve army creates a source of extra labor with which to break strikes and serves as a club to discipline the labor force. 

Imagine, for instance, that you work in a McDonalds or an Amazon warehouse. The conditions are atrocious in this particular location. Wages are being docked or withheld illegally, people are being disciplined for nothing, and you aren’t being allowed to take your breaks. You decide to unionize to force the owners to the table; after all, if everyone threatens to walk off the job, they’ll have to make concessions. If you’re in a city where there is a very large unemployed or under-employed population, the owners might simply say “Fine,” discharge you and all your fellow would-be unionizers, and hire replacements from that unemployed labor force — that industrial reserve army.

This helps keep down wages even before we begin to account for the widespread U.S. practice of utilizing basically free prison labor. Criminalization gives capitalists the chance to make use of that free labor because the habitually unhoused will be arrested again and again, and eventually be given sentences of imprisonment that turn them into a state workforce. This is state-labor-for-hire without compensation, all perfectly legal under the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. After all, about one-third of all California’s firefighters are judicial slaves.

The effect of this ruling on wages and benefits occurs purely by operation of the underlying political economy that will result. It doesn’t require an active conspiracy on the part of the court, the cities, the sheriffs and police, or anyone in the entire chain of command that will ultimately enforce the punitive bans that wind up criminalizing homelessness. Even if, at each step in this process, the agent of the state is merely expressing an honestly-held dislike of “public vagrancy” (and the Gorsuch opinion is brimming with classist descriptions of public defecation and children wading through used needles), it will have the same ultimate effect. More enforceable criminal penalties means more prisoners; it means more court fees; it means, therefore, in states where inmates are forced into slavery, a larger free laboring population. This means the cost of labor will fall relative to its value as more laborers enter the market. Businesses will have the choice between hiring free workers, who might be disobedient, agitate for a rise in wages, etc., or paying the state money to make use of a captive work force. The market price of labor will therefore fall. This, while we are experiencing the sharpest rise in cost of living since the inflation crises at the close of the 1970s, ensures that more workers will be made unhoused as their wages fall, and a downward pressure will continue to be exerted on wages.

The more precarious a workforce is, the more subject to random arrest and search or other punitive measures, the less likely it is to seek redress through unionization and organization. That lesson was demonstrated by the poultry industry when they simply had their unionizing workers deported en masse.

Marching Counter Clockwise

This decision is part of the court’s broad assault on the Warren-based state, the administrative state (that is, the delegation of rulemaking authority from Congress to the administrative agencies), and, critically, the legal regime of unionization. The ultra-fascist justices have rejected a century of precedent and appear intent on ushering in an era of labor-discipline that resembles the U.S. of 1900, before the labor struggles that established the legal right to unionization and prior to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. The Grants Pass decision fits neatly into this plan to march backwards, into a pre millenarian century.

The door now stands open for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison in name as well as form. Although the judicial system has long practiced a kind of debt imprisonment in actuality, in form the debtor’s prison is often seen as a quaint Victorian curiosity. There is much less need for covert imprisonment-for-debt now that the highest court in the country has ruled that it is permissible to make homelessness illegal. Yes, certainly, there is an act that these laws proscribe (sleeping in public), but the act is inextricably tied to the status that Gorsuch claims they aren’t criminalizing. The Supreme Court has legalized the debtor’s prison, has given its blessing to the mass incarceration of the unhoused, and has created the conditions for a massive reactionary backlash.

We can see it in the language the majority uses, through Gorsuch. He disdainfully complains that a Chico, California homeless shelter wasn’t sufficient under Martin, even though it “included protective fencing, large water totes, handwashing stations, portable toilets and a large canopy for shade…. Why? Because, in that court’s view, appropriate shelter requires indoor, not outdoor spaces.” Gorsuch has described a concentration camp for the unhoused and mocked a court for holding it insufficient.

This is the future imagined by the Roberts court. Of course Gorsuch defends the concentration camp. When the Supreme Court issues a decision, it isn’t merely making a legal ruling, it is communicating with the parties and potential future parties. The parties to this case weren’t merely the City of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson, and John Logan, but also every one of the thousands of cities and counties, sheriff’s associations, police groups, district attorneys, state’s attorneys, and other agents of the bourgeois state apparatus. The lurid language that Gorsuch uses is a signal. Justices choose their words carefully. We must be prepared. The state is. They are preparing labor camps for the houseless, “shelters” with protective fencing and a canopy for shade. Taken in the light of the other rulings the Supreme Court recently decided, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which we discussed when the year began, the intention of the court is clear. They aim to strip administrative agencies of their power, destroy the NLRB, and subject working people throughout the country to a regime of labor discipline by police control.

Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers. 

The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.

A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.

Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant. 

This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.

But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit. 

Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.

In 2013, Barnett was demoted and removed from his management position for writing an email that documented quality control issues with the 787. He was suggested that he “shouldn’t put problems in writing.” In 2017 he filed an FAA whistleblower complaint against Boeing with OSHA. That same year, he retired from Boeing, after his doctor said that job-related stress would be responsible for a heart attack unless he quit.

In 2021, after a four-year investigation, OSHA found in favor of Boeing and closed Barnett’s complaint. He immediately appealed the decision, claiming the firm had “undermined his career because he had raised safety concerns at the Charleston plant.” Barnett was a featured interviewee on the 2022 Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

On March 9, 2024, Barnett was in Charleston as part of a week-long series of depositions for his suit. He had another deposition scheduled that day, but he didn’t respond to calls from his lawyers on the 9th. He was discovered in his truck, in the parking lot of the hotel where he had been staying, with a pistol in his hand. He had been shot in the head.

Official reports from the police all claim that Barnett killed himself in the middle of his suit. His lawyers, friends, and family disagree.

On January 5 of this year, at 5:07 p.m., Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took off from Portland, Oregon on its way to Ontario, California. At 16,000 feet, an emergency exit door blew off the side of the plane. Flight 1282 was a Boeing 737 Max 9, and within days the FAA ordered all Boeing 737 Max 9s to be grounded for checks. Boeing admitted that all the Max 9s may have “loose hardware” — meaning improperly fastened bolts that could lead to just such an explosive decompression.

Sam Salehpour, who worked for Boeing for 10 years, came forward in 2019 after sending his concerns to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and said publicly that Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 could “break apart” due to its safety flaws. He also sent his allegations to the FAA, telling them that changes in the construction process had introduced shortcuts that caused parts of the fuselage, the plane’s body, to be improperly fastened together. Salehpour was transferred to work on the 777, and he said he found safety problems with that plane too.

“This is a culture,” said Debra Katz, Salehpour’s lawyer, “that prioritizes the production of planes and pushes them off the line even when there are serious concerns about the structural integrity of those planes and their production process.”

The corporation’s public response to all this was to fire the executive in charge of the 737 Max program. It was only when Boeing’s major buyers — Southwest, United, Alaska, and American — demanded to meet the board without the presence of the CEO that the CEO, Dave Calhoun, was quickly fired by the board.

In the past three years, Boeing has been the subject of an unprecedented 32 whistleblower claims. Of these, 13 were related to aviation safety. Fifteen were related to workplace safety, two were filed as claims of fraud, and one was filed concerning the handling of toxic chemicals.

If you guessed the root cause behind all of these problems, the driving force that has spurred Boeing to make these disastrous changes was the profit incentive, you guessed correctly. The COVID pandemic saw Boeing deep in the red for several years, and even as it began to recover, its margin of profit is in the toilet. Even today, the stock price (which helps us track how bourgeois economists value the company) of the Boeing Corporation is half of what it was in 2019. But the trends run even longer — and we can see the precipitous rise in Boeing’s stock prices starting in 2016, after the illegal, dangerous, and poor manufacturing techniques took hold and began paying off.

Of course, this isn’t all. Boeing is not only the enemy of the people here at home, where they steal, lie, cheat, and sell planes that fall apart in the air — they are the enemy of the world proletariat, as they sell their ramshackle planes to the U.S. empire, where they are used to defend global capital. They also produce a $5 billion missile defense system and other tools of empire.

   No American corporation would be complete without its direct connection to U.S. imperialism abroad. In 2023 alone, the Boeing Corporation received $2.35 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense (DoD) to produce planes for the U.S. war machine. In 2021, Boeing was awarded a $23 billion DoD contract. Despite the whistleblowers, the government continues to award these enormous contracts. Will Boeing cheat the DoD and the imperialist armed forces of important parts and safety checks to pad their accounts? If they do, we must be ready to take advantage of it.

Last year, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. (2023), which held that negligence could never be the standard for First Amendment cases. Essentially, SCOTUS said that, in order to hold someone accountable for their speech, malicious intent must be proved. Under Anglo-American law, there is a differentiation between general intent (intent to do an action) and specific intent (intent to bring about a result). Under the standard decided in Counterman, speech-related acts must have the specific intent of bringing about the complained-of result.

What does that mean in the case of DeRay Mckesson? If the fascist Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit had followed this decision, it would have meant that Mckesson could not be found liable to Officer Braindamage unless the officer could prove that Mckesson had organized the protest specifically with the intent of hurting him, or had otherwise directly urged the protestor who threw the concrete to do so. In fact, the District Court did hold that, and dismissed the suit, but Officer Shatterface appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a ruinous decision. The Fifth Circuit covers the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and in their 2022 decision they held that protest organizers owe a duty not to “negligently cause a third party to commit a crime that is a foreseeable consequence of negligence.” This means, as far as federal law is concerned in those three states, protest organizers are civilly liable for any damage caused by a protest.

Furthermore, it is possible that this will establish the basis for criminal liability. It is an echo of the RICO prosecutions in Georgia. It is not impossible that prosecutors’ offices throughout the South now possess the weapons to indict and charge any participant in a protest as part of a domestic terror plot.

This Monday, the nine robed fascists on the SCOTUS declined to review Mckesson’s case, denying certiorari, and permitting this Fifth Circuit decision to stand. The entire swathe of the U.S. South, the stronghold of the most powerful elements of right-fascistic reaction, will now treat all of its citizens the way it has long treated its Black and Indigenous citizens. The age of the settler-compromise is coming to an end, and the age of open warfare between the proletarian class and the state has returned.

Solidarity to all in the fortresses of fascism — we urge all aid in this hour of war to be sent to them. We will defy the tools of the enemy state, spit in the face of its bourgeois masters, and the masses will have no choice but look into the eye of their propertied enemy, and decide: Whose side are you on?

The liberal process-worshippers immediately deployed their spin doctors to explain why their so-called liberal justices on the court, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom this paper has already explained was appointed as a sop from Biden to the left wing of his party, also voted to keep Trump on the ballot. Despite the fact that the pro-Biden chorus has consistently made the claim that Trump and his ilk are a “threat to democracy” (they mean bourgeois democracy!) their appointed justices closed their eyes, held their noses, and voted to leave this “threat to (bourgeois!) democracy” on the ballot in Colorado.

Factions at Play

The ruling class is divided into groups, factions, and cliques. It has never been homogeneous, and the geographical layout of the U.S. Empire has played into the division of interests. As crises grow more acute and the contradictions sharpen — that is, as the divisions become more and more pronounced and the system of U.S. imperial capitalism decays — the ruling, capitalist class will be riven apart by its own internal contradictions and then, as the threat of losing power becomes real, will suddenly be welded together again into a single fighting force.

What are the factions currently on the stage? Obviously, we have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which at one time represented functionally different interests and ideologies within the ruling class. However, as we have seen, these names — Democrat, Republican — no longer correspond in any meaningful way to policy positions by the ruling elite. They are, more and more, losing their attachment to the real world.

So, then, we have 1) the Democratic-centrist faction, embodied in President Biden and the DNC and 2) the Republican Old Guard centrist faction. Biden is the president of compromise between these two groups. Each party then has its flanks — on the left, weakening and atrophying within the Democratic Party, are the so-called “progressives” and on the right of the GOP are the growing and strengthening MAGAcrats. The Democratic-centrist faction dominates the Democratic Party, while the MAGAcratic faction dominates the GOP.

Colorado Takes Action

Last September in the lead-up to the Colorado primary election, Republican voters in Colorado filed a petition against Trump to the effect that the 2021 January 6 putsch made him constitutionally ineligible to serve as the president of the U.S. Empire for another term. The legal theory, which is less important than the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with them, relies on Section 3 of one of the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. imperial constitution. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and designed to prevent treasonous Confederates from holding office, states that “No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

The Colorado Supreme Court agreed by a 4 to 3 vote. All seven of those justices were appointed by Democratic governors of the state, and only two are registered Republicans. However, the Colorado Supreme Court is, by and large, a club of former Assistant Attorneys General and District Attorneys. The four judges that voted to strike Trump from the ballot were Richard Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Marquez, and William Hood. The three who disagreed were chief justice Brian Boatright, Maria Berkenkotter, and Carlos Samour.

Richard Gabriel was a private business lawyer in Colorado; his wife is a Federal public defender in Denver, Colorado.

Melissa Hart is a Harvard law graduate, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney, and Associate Professor Law at University of Colorado Law School.

Monica Marquez is a Yale graduate who clerked for federal judges and then worked as an attorney in Colorado’s Attorney General’s office for eight years. She was president of the Colorado LGBT Bar Association and board member of the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association before she was elevated to judgehood in 2010.

William Hood is a former prosecutor who worked for the D.A. in Colorado for ten years before becoming a District Court judge in Denver.

Maria Berkenkotter was a member of the Colorado Attorney General’s office before becoming a judge.

Carlos Samour is another former prosecutor, who worked for the district attorney’s office in Denver for a decade before becoming a judge.

Brian Boatright. The chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and a registered Republican, he worked as a prosecutor for nearly a decade, and then was appointed to be a judge.

We can see the intraclass battle being waged here amongst representatives of the ruling bourgeois elite. On the one hand, the centrist Democrat-aligned justices have every reason to want to exclude Trump from the ballot and, even more, those who have significant vectors of social oppression have an added incentive to see Republicans broadly disempowered. Keep in mind how the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, because this is how a party must and should act to retain power.

On the other hand, the Republicans of Colorado are divided into two groups. Overall, Republican politicians are generally weak in Colorado, and have been in a sharp decline. Indeed, after the 2022 midterm elections, a Republican state representative said “Colorado Republicans need to take this and learn the lesson that the party is dead. This is an extinction-level event.” The majority of the rump Republican party is very far to the right in Colorado, and has embraced MAGA-Republican far-right positions.

However, just as there exists a federal-level “left” wing of the Republican party — the old guard who want a return to the vaguely bipartisan system of suppressing the workers together with the Democrats in a friendly sparring match over policy and the distribution of money — there exists a much smaller “left” wing of the Colorado GOP. Norma Anderson — the Anderson of Trump v. Anderson — is a former state lawmaker and a “diehard Republican,” which should give you an idea of the animosity on the Republican right between MAGAcrats and the old guard.

The Supremes Say No

Every “progressive” “left-wing” justice (!) on the Supreme Court of the United States had less courage than their Colorado counterparts Gabriel, Hart, Marquez, and Hood. The Democratic party spin machine is repeating SCOTUS’ own tortured logic: that the decision to enforce the 14th Amendment is one that has to come from a federal body, not a state one.

The majority, excluding Republican Barrett and Democrats Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, went on to decide that only the U.S. Congress can disbar someone for seeking office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — that no court, no agency, and no other authority has that power. This makes Section 3 a dead letter as there will never be an alignment of political forces that permits both chambers of the Congress to act together to ban a candidate for office, short of a single-party coup of the government.

These “progressive” justices did not act to preserve party power the way the justices in Colorado did. Why not? Because at the federal level the Democratic Party is unable to give to the left in any meaningful way. The potential of the party to act to smooth harsh conditions created by the decay of the U.S. imperial order has been totally exhausted. In essence, had the Democratic justices been successful in keeping Trump off the ballot the federal party would be forced to use further effective political tactics to give working people, students, immigrants, and the increasingly-exposed groups of the socially oppressed, who are all in peril, some kind of relief. It would prove that they, the federal-level Democrats, are capable of acting outside the barriers of propriety, and then they would be asked to do that for the benefit of their supposed constituents.

They know they can’t.

Fault Lines

We are seeing a division opening up between the state-level Democratic parties and the federal Democrats. The Colorado party is substantially more progressive and sits to the left of the federal party; it embodies the local interests of local bourgeoisie within Colorado, of which the elite financial/imperialist bourgeoisie play a very small part. With this smaller strata of imperialist bourgeoisie, the needs of the upper and middle ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are much more strongly expressed, and thus we can see that state party politics in Colorado trend toward petit-bourgeois vacillation rather than open bourgeois reaction, which is the current trend in the federal party. 

The petit-bourgeoisie are business owners and professionals. Anyone who both owns the means of production (shops, specialized technical skills, small capital) and also works to support themselves are members of this class between classes. They have interests in common both with workers and with owners, which explains why their political consciousness tends to be confused. These include middle and small-time lawyers, accountants, etc. The big bourgeoisie are those who own big capital — major firms, investments, etc. — and who do not work. Petit-bourgeois political consciousness trends toward that brand of liberalism that demands equality for women by calling for “more women prison guards!”

The lower bourgeois/petit-bourgeois makeup and ideology of the state Democratic parties means these parties trend toward faux-progressive stances. They are now progressive, now regressive in turns, because the petit-bourgeoisie is caught between the truly progressive interests of the working class and the reactionary interests of property. Open bourgeois reaction is embodied by the Biden-”left” GOP alliance, and outright counter-revolution is embodied in the MAGAcrats.

At the state level, there is still some flexibility for the dying Democratic machine. There are funds to redistribute, there are enemies to expropriate from, and there are bases of power that don’t rely directly on the imperialist ruling class of the U.S. Empire to draw from. The glacial fracturing and break-up of the Democratic Party will see increased tension between state-level Democrats and their federal counterparts as their interests diverge.

Nevertheless, the federal party is still in the driver’s seat, as the outcome of Trump v. Anderson demonstrates. There may yet be a benefit in showing state-level Democrats that they do not have to align themselves with the corpse of their federal-level party. This is something that the masses of working people in the U.S. are more and more coming to realize: that the Democrats themselves must be rejected if the working people are ever to see relief.