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?

Nonetheless, liberals are broadly treating the verdict announcement as a holiday — practically christened by the fact that it’s already been used as cover for imperialist war crimes, as the U.S. and U.K. empires bombed the Yemeni capital Sanaa during the same news cycle, hiding in the shadow of the verdict, and killing at least 16 and wounding 30, with more expected to die from critical condition. The capitalist mass media is flooded with inane updates on all things Trump, with virtually all social media sites replacing trending topics of Rafah, Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen (if they were ever even trending) with “TRUMP IS GUILTY” or “TRUMP IS NOT GUILTY.” Both sides have committed to the belief that whether Trump was found guilty or not, whether this represents an overdue triumph of justice, or a cynical sham, the trial and its consequences are very important. 

But we can’t accept this at face value. The question is: is this true? Will this alter the course of life for the millions of working class people within this country, the millions of colonized and imprisoned trapped in this prisonhouse of nations, and the billions more held at gunpoint by the same empire where such absurd soap operas play out? The answer is, of course, no.

What is this trial? It is the spillover of a protracted fight between factions in the ruling class. It is the brawl in the country’s high-end country club that has just happened to spill out onto the street. Yes, they often bicker over the little details of which method to use to maintain their power. What’s different about yesterday’s display? Merely that they’re using the very public machinery of the state, rather than backroom double-dealing. The faction of our enemy that currently holds power is the side that emphasizes decorum and state legitimacy, and is excited to give Trump his slap on the wrist and claim it as a symbolic victory. Extra emphasis on symbolic, as Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of Trump’s sentence, has already admitted he won’t deliver any sentence that could impact the former president’s ability to run a campaign, like travel bans, house arrest, or a prison sentence. It’s more likely that Trump will receive a fine (the maximum amount he could be charged with is $170,000, or $5,000 for each charge) and be barred from voting for himself — though even that remains to be seen. 

The figurehead of the “Democratic” faction, Joe Biden, is likely to hammer the fact that his opponent is a “criminal” in the upcoming election. Yes, one becomes a criminal for embarrassing the “sanctity” of this country by financially silencing a porn star, but the gleeful commission of genocide goes unpunished by bourgeois law. That makes sense, as it is only the latter that is the sworn duty of all true presidents of this country. 

With all this in mind, what do we do? Ignore the pageantry of our enemies. Focus all attention and energy on what really matters. Condemn and organize against the imperialist war machine that such pointless noise exists to distract us from. Fortify the ranks of the student movement this summer, join it to the growing militant labor movement, form organizations of community awareness and education, and know now and forever that our salvation will not be won through an election between two fascists. 

Fight real battles. 

Seize real justice.  

To deny, however, that the candidates are different — to simply and blankly shout at the masses that they should ignore the imperialist elections — is to make a different kind of mistake. We must analyze and consider the positions of each candidate, determine what class-forces they represent, and articulate actual responses to their policy considerations. To stop our argument a stage short, to argue flatly that the political system is worthless without explaining in detail why and how, is to surrender the entire battlefield to the liberals, who will do their best to rehabilitate it in our absence.

There are also those who call themselves Communists who believe that, first and foremost, the duty of a Communist to achieve real reforms, now, for the working classes, the poor, the nationally and sexually oppressed. They are wrong. Winning reforms is not an end in itself. This debate was already fought, many times, in the past two centuries — from Bernstein’s initial betrayal all the way up through the economists blasted by Lenin. We will fight it again now. Winning reforms is a goal only insofar as it assists the organizing of the revolutionary classes and prepares them for the final battle with their intractable enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie. So, our question should never be, “how can we win reforms,” but must always be “how does this or that action further the cause of organizing the people for revolution”?

The political crises of the last decade have dealt sledgehammer blows to the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system. Debates over the Electoral College began as angry mutters from the Bernie supporters and took on new life after the 2016 general election when the Clinton dynast, Hilary, won the popular vote but lost the election. This breathed new life into the debate from 2000, in which Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election through the interference of the U.S. Supreme Court. We must not let up in our criticisms of the U.S. electoral process. Having shed its democratic disguise, we can’t afford to give the ruling class time to craft a new one.

In 2024, there are two “outliers” — candidates who have been thrown up by the “crisis in democracy.” These third-party candidates will run against the big machines, although in this case, like Bernie, one will run from “inside” the Democratic party. On the right flank we see another political dynast from a ruling house, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., our own little American Hitler; on the left flank, Bernie Sanders’ one-time vocal supporter, Cornel West.

How should we Communists treat the campaign of Dr. Cornel West? Our guest contributor, P. D. Goselin, wrote that Dr. West’s candidacy may “bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people.”

Dr. West is a bourgeois academic. West enrolled in Harvard in 1970, entering the social ranks of the ruling class, rubbing shoulders with the big, the “haute,” bourgeoisie. From Harvard, West went on to his graduate studies at Princeton. He is firmly ensconced in the world of ruling-class academia, and has worked as a professor at various Ivy-league institutions. That being said, he remains a left-wing public intellectual, and not a genuine progressive force. He was at one time an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and has claimed to be a socialist, although it’s not quite clear what trend of socialism he claims to follow. Materially, he appears to be another in a long line of imperial socialists or Revisionists, seeking minor social reforms to the domineering U.S. Empire.

He began his candidacy by a call for a “united front” strategy against fascism. This was a self-conscious reference to the United Front strategy of the 1930s Comintern. It’s not clear exactly what West wants to unite in his united front, since he has publicly recognized the Democrats as “milquetoast neoliberals,” but the sentiment is that all democratic elements, all radical elements, and all progressive elements — those bourgeois and capitalist forces dedicated to democratization, all anti-capitalists, and all socially progressive forces, regardless of class — must combine to stand against the encroachment of the Trumpist clique into mainstream politics.

Even since beginning the draft of this article, West has revised his campaign goals. Those he lists on his campaign website are Dismantling the Empire, Unleashing Democracy, and Saving the Planet, which sound vague and hopeful.

In a previous iteration of his website, he listed a goal to End the Wars, which included disbanding NATO. This version of his anti-imperialist platform was manifestly more politically advanced than the one that is now contained under Dismantling the Empire. Although his call for the dissolution of NATO and the end of the U.S. global military presence remains unchanged, he has added “increasing humanitarian aid to poor and vulnerable peoples,” which all Communists recognize as a neo-colonial stratagem in the U.S. Empire’s strategy of global domination.

Unleashing Democracy reads like a litany of late 1920s social-democratic programs: quality education, housing, a living wage, paid leave; curbing inflation, supporting unions, expanding social security, forgiving all student debt. These are all obviously desirable elements of a program, but on their own, again, do nothing to advance the cause of revolution. Still, they are political goals that Communists can, with some reservations, generally support. For our purposes, the most exciting part is the brief line that he will democratize unaccountable monopolies and oligopolies “with workers’ control.”

Lastly, there is a somewhat meaningless Save the Planet plank, which promises “invest[ment] in clean energy” and ending fossil fuel subsidies. Even if keeping such promises was possible, West’s demands are far too minor in the face of mounting ecological catastrophes.

In only a few days, West has reduced his demands from their previous iteration, which amounted to a meager but passable socialist minimum program, to nearly completely writing out any mention of economic justice. Further, West has no corresponding maximal program, a commitment to Communism, or any kind of socialist construction. This is no surprise, as he is not a Communist, nor, really, any kind of socialist. He has, in the past, made a number of anti-Communist remarks. In these things, Dr. West is not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses — those workers who profess some degree of Marxist education or self-education, such as the membership of the DSA — of workers in the U.S. Empire.

To that end, if his candidacy attracts a widespread following in the intermediate working masses — the not-yet-Marxist but class-conscious — it would not be correct to ignore it. Because his minimal program has some policies with which Communist organizations can present principled, limited agreement; because his positions are not significantly different from the non-Marxist advanced masses who must be educated as to the correct, Marxist positions; because West can bring these issues to the forefront of public discussion, if West’s campaign is at all successful, it would not be incorrect for local and regional Communist organizations to support those initiatives while maintaining their revolutionary commitments. That is to say any truly Communist organization should not endorse him. To do so would be to join forces with our bourgeois class enemies. But we may loudly proclaim those parts of his program with which we agree — and just as loudly denounce those parts with which we disagree.

Of course Dr. West is not “correct” in any of his policies or positions. But if those policies and positions become topics of widespread discussion among the intermediate working masses, this will present an opportunity for Communists to explain the correct positions — so long as we: 1) are not seen as unduly pessimistic, 2) maintain operational and formal integrity apart from any campaign, and 3) maintain, at every turn, a commitment to a maximum program and never stray from explaining the necessity of revolution. It is not, therefore, that Dr. West can lead the masses. It is, rather, that Dr. West can be instructive for the masses. Through Dr. West, Communists can teach and help the proletariat and working classes to achieve that basic consciousness which they currently lack in the United States: consciousness of their class-in-itself, of their shared commonalities, of their shared economic, social, and political interests. Were our movement more developed, Dr. West would represent a regressive element that we would otherwise clearly shun, and clearly demarcate ourselves from. As it is, should a genuine connection between Dr. West and the masses manifest, and we have little reason to believe it will not, we should be prepared to make use of that connection and publicly state our agreement such as it is with his program. We should be preparing for the hour that Dr. West betrays the people or is betrayed by the bourgeois political class and be ready to make use of it to further help instruct the people.

The battle over gerrymandering has been fought since the introduction of the current political machine by antebellum Democrats in the early mid-19th century. In fact, the term comes from 1812 and the redrawing of Massachusetts electoral districts by Governor Elbridge Gerry, when he redrew a district in Boston to look like a salamander on a survey map. The practice is designed to combine various districts so that the voting population of the enemy — the party not currently in power, whichever that may be — is concentrated in the fewest number of districts or broken up so that they are counteracted by larger numbers of the party doing the drawing. Gerrymandering is nearly as old as elections in the U.S. and almost coeval with the founding of the U.S. settler-republic itself.

It has always caused righteous and justified outrage among the people who are actually doing the voting. By its very nature, Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. In electoral regions where the ruling party has a safe majority of the votes, there’s no reason to Gerrymander. It’s only where the ruling party is slipping from power or foresees a loss in voters that it goes to the district maps and tries to draw the borders in its own favor.

In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States, stacked with right-fascist jurists, ruled that partisan gerrymandering, even when “excessive,” was “nonjusticiable” and involved “political questions.” This was the case of Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2491, 2507 (2019). In the everyday language of human beings, this tortured legal-speak means that, should a political party redistrict your entire state to make sure it, and it alone, can win elections in the future, the courts have no power to aid you. “Nonjusticiable” means there is nothing the court can do; a “political question” is one that the courts have decided must be fixed by elected representatives. Never mind that the gerrymandering itself makes it impossible to elect representatives who would undo the partisan redistricting.

Under a little-used and even less-granted rule of procedure, the legislature of North Carolina asked their state supreme court permission to re-argue a case that had been decided once already last year, when the judges of that court had held a Democratic majority. That case, Harper v. Hall, 380 N.C. 317, 390 (2022), had determined that the North Carolina constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering.

On 28 April, 2023, the Supreme Court of North Carolina, newly-packed with pro-gerrymandering right-fascist Republicans, overruled Harper v. Hall. The new Harper v. Hall ruling explicitly mirrors the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause — that is, since the redistricting has already been done, there’s no way to fix it. The question is, in the twisted language of the law, “nonjusticiable.” In other words, to those who have lost the ability to have their voices heard in even the meager and anemic elections we’ve become accustomed to in this dying bourgeois republic, the answer is: “Too bad!”

Gerrymandering: the Legal Landscape

The most prominent gerrymandering cases were, of course, all within the territory of New Africa — that band of fertile soil in the U.S. South where the biggest and most prosperous slave plantations were founded, which imported the most Black African slaves, and which are, consequently, today the regions where most Black people in the U.S. Empire live. The practice of redistricting to disenfranchise Black voters came under federal scrutiny in the 1960s and was explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Under the liberal order, any victory secured by the oppressed, by the laboring masses, is subject to reversal. Liberalism, and in particular the brand of left-liberalism popular among the functionaries of the Democratic Party, functions on the level of form rather than content. To the left-liberal, there is no higher principle than applying, however unequally, the same form to many situations and arguing, from the fact that the form remains unchanged, that this, in some abstract and metaphysical sense, represents equality. 

It was only a matter of time before this liberal mania of honoring procedure and process over results caused an utterly ludicrous shift in the very meaning of the law. Although the fight against gerrymandering had taken on an explicitly anti-racist cast, it would, in 1993, be used to deprive a Black population of its political power.

Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, was a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case that came up out of North Carolina. In the 1990 census, North Carolina qualified for a new electoral district. This district was drawn by the North Carolina state legislature in a “snake-like” manner to create what is called a “majority-minority” district; that is, the new electoral district was majority Black. North Carolina was under the rule of the Voting Rights Act, which meant any redistricting had to be approved by the federal government, which would approve or deny the redistricting based on a test as to whether the new districts jeopardized minority presentation. The Justice Department accepted this new district.

Ruth O. Shaw and a group of other white residents sued the U.S. Attorney General and various state officials over the plan. The Supreme Court, then under the conservative right-fascist leadership of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ruled that the electoral district, because it separated out Black voters, was an effort to segregate races and was therefore a violation of the white resident’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law. You’re reading that right: the redistricting was held to be unconstitutional because it violated the white resident’s rights by attempting to ensure that Black voters were heard in North Carolina, a state with a historical record of suppressing the Black vote.

Now that the reactionary elements had realized they could use the anti-gerrymandering rules to their benefit, a drive kicked off to make gerrymandering illegal on its face and reverse the gains made by the Black voters of the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This legal push has resulted in the modern division of gerrymandering into two categories: the legal, and the illegal.

Racial gerrymandering is still per-se illegal. But, thanks to a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions culminating in Rucho v. Common Cause, politically partisan gerrymandering is not. That is, it is illegal to design an electoral district such that Black voters are concentrated and can form a majority, but it is not illegal to design an electoral district such that Republican voters can form a majority.

Under the hood of the bourgeois democracy under which we live, district-drawing is one of the mechanisms used by both parties to try to gain an advantage in the federal government. Both Democrats and Republicans aggressively redistrict to shore up seats where they’re weak. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans have been pursuing a united strategy for redistricting since 2010. REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) was founded in that year and the Republican party has poured some $30 million dollars into this project. Over the past 23 years, REDMAP has used computerized mapping software to help redraw hundreds of districts in each round of redistricting. By 2012, the Republican party had already received an enormous benefit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, many states that were formerly controlled by Democrats are now bastions of Republican power thanks to this, and other efforts to control which votes are counted and which are neutralized.

Voting in the Bourgeois Republic

Once every few years, the workers in the United States Empire have been accustomed to being given the opportunity to engage in a piece of political theater: voting which wing of the great vulture will be in charge of our oppression. State ideologists, textbook authors, and talking heads on television cloak the bourgeois republic in the dizzy and eager language of democracy. We, the working people, know better. This is shown in every election in our lifetime. Voter turnout in the presidential elections, for instance, has hovered between 50 and 65% throughout the entire 20th and 21st century. Why don’t people vote? Because they know, both from history and experience, that their votes don’t matter.

Why don’t the votes of the working people matter? There are numerous ways and means used by the ruling class to denude, sift through, sort, and screen the votes of the working people. To address them all would be an involved exercise, but some of the ways the power of the democratic vote is reduced and winnowed away include: first-past-the-post elections, election days coinciding with work time, polling stations that are inaccessible, the electoral college, huge costs of running a campaign for office, and the worst and most potent tool of the ruling class of all: backroom dealing. We all know that the way politics works in this country is that moneyed interests talk directly with politicians outside of the view of the public. Even supposedly “progressive” politicians take pride in their ability to manipulate the system of deals, bargains, and secret handshakes that pervades the halls of power. The fact of the matter is, all the decisions made by our politicians are made in private. We are never in the room. The money is.

But because the power of the vote is often useless or meaningless, that doesn’t mean it’s always meaningless. There have been times when the vote has mattered. There have been times when the vote has shown an expression of collective rage, even of class power! Those times are few and far between.

More importantly, though, the franchise, the right to vote, has expanded significantly since the settler-republic was first founded. Initially, only propertied white men of English heritage could vote in most states (and, consequently, in federal affairs). As this changed, the power of the vote was reduced, to prevent what the liberal hysterics refer to as “mob rule” or the “rule of the many.” (Why are they so afraid of the rule of many? Because they are the few!) In liberal democracy, enfranchisement is not political power in its own right, but rather an indication of which segments of the population the ruling class deems important enough to placate. 

So why should we be up in arms about voting rights, which we have just agreed don’t mean much, being taken away? Here’s why: Those rights have been secured through bloodshed. They are the concession, wrung through the centuries of hard class struggle, that we have forced from the ruling classes. It’s not so much the fact that we begrudge the blood-suckers and parasites in our government or the bloated hypocrites that own the companies and thus the country the right to participate in their dog-and-pony show. But winning the vote was a step toward winning the political battle. Losing the vote — watching them strip it away from us with gerrymandering and other tricks — that demonstrates not only the disdain in which they hold the working people and the nationally oppressed, the disgust they have for you and I, but it is the worrying and dangerous call of the rise of open violence and reactionary attack.

What should stir our blood is not that our voices carried weight with the ruling class, but that we are now being told not to talk at all. The fact that they feel no need to operate under even the scant theater of pluralism and popular will should concern everyone.

The Sharpening of Partisanship 

Since the 2016 elections, following on the heels of Republican victories in redistricting in the early 2010s, partisanship has sharpened on the right side of the aisle. The GOP has been tilting steadily rightwards into more and more brutal forms of right-fascism since 2001, and in 2016 the far-right fascist element within the party won control, not only of the party, but of the entire country.

We are now in an era where the entire U.S. government at all levels stands divided between the left-fascists, who merely want to see a stabilization in the current capitalist world-order, and the right-fascists, who call for increased exploitation, white class collaboration, and much more vigorous suppression of the growing Communist movement within the empire.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina lost two of its Democratic Justices last year, and these were replaced by Republican Justices. This is what enabled the clever maneuvering by the North Carolina legislature to get the case in which gerrymandering had been rendered illegal under North Carolina law heard for a second time before a new, sympathetic — we might even call them co-conspiratorial — court.

This battle between the left-fascists and the right-fascists is playing out not only in the political arena, where it traditionally has been fought, but also in the country’s courts. Long having pursued a project of planting arch-conservative lawyers into positions of high authority in both state and federal courts, the GOP is now poised, pushed by its dominant far-right wing, to deliver body blow after body blow to their political opponents. The reversal of Harper v. Hall is one such stroke; and because the Democrats had relied upon the oppressed Black masses to support their capitalist program, it is also a blow against the already-shaky structure of the bourgeois “democracy” enjoyed under the empire.

Harper v. Hall

The Democrats, and by extension (though of course, not by design) the people of North Carolina, won Harper v. Hall in 2022. This was a case brought in 2021 by the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and individual voters joining together to file suit against the president of the North Carolina senate, the speaker of the North Carolina house, and the chairs of the redistricting committees, challenging the constitutionality of the redistricting maps that were drawn. The maps, of course, only got that far because the U.S. Supreme Court had repealed key sections of the Voting Rights Act, mentioned above.

On 20 January, 2023, the legislature of North Carolina filed a motion for rehearing before the new, right-fascist Supreme Court of North Carolina. The court gave no real reason for its decision to rehear the case (“a recently issued opinion appropriately is reheard if the petitioner makes a satisfactory showing that this opinion may be erroneous” was all the logic it provided). It needed none! The GOP-controlled court reheard the case because they wanted to reverse it. On 28 April 2023, they did exactly that.

In its new decision, the Supreme Court of North Carolina sneers, “such claims ask courts to apportion political power as a matter of fairness…. Individuals have no constitutional right as members of the public to a government audience for their policy views.” Harper at *48 citing Minn. state Bd. for Cmty. Colls v. Knight, 465 U.S. 271, 286 (1984). (emphasis added.)

The left-fascists still cling to a form of bourgeois democracy, but increasingly the right-fascists have determined that even the shreds of participation in government that have been won over the past century and a half are too dangerous to the ruling class. This is a naked, undisguised attack on democratic participation in government. We should read the decision of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the same terms that they state it: 

As long as you get to cast a vote, the fact that it is purely symbolic doesn’t matter.

The upcoming criminal trial, The People of the State of New York versus Donald J. Trump, is the first in U.S. history against a former U.S. President.

In the week since the indictment was announced, the capitalist media’s sensationalizing headlines have promised the public a political-procedural melodrama of Shakespearian proportions: “A President Faces Prosecution, and a Democracy Is Tested” warns the New York Times, and almost jubilantly exclaims that a “taboo has been broken” and a “new precedent has been set.” “Trump indictment marks a first for U.S. democracy. It may not be the last,” the Washington Post foretells, pondering “whether the case will ultimately strengthen or weaken the rule of law.” The Wall Street Journal proclaims, “Donald Trump Indictment Sets Historical Marker,” and argues that the indictment “represents an extraordinary moment for America.” We could go on…

Even some in the “socialist” press have been swept up in the latest Trump sensation: For instance, People’s World, the not-quite-official online paper of the more-or-less-official Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), boldly asserts that “a group of ordinary citizens on a Manhattan grand jury [yes, that is how juries are selected in the U.S. — randomly] exercised democracy [??] by indicting former President Donald Trump,” and warns of “a new threat to democracy” — glossing over the obvious question: What democracy? — should Trump evade trial.

Sensationalism gets views and clicks, which translate into profits for corporate media shareholders. But sensationalism doesn’t lend itself to establishing a straightforward timeline.

In 2016, near the end of that year’s general elections, Stephanie Clifford (better known as Stormy Daniels), a celebrity pornographic and television actress and director, memoirist, and lapsed Republican Party politician, claimed that Trump, then running for President of the United States, had solicited sexual services from her in 2007. Clifford gave several interviews, and later detailed her allegations in her 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure.

Trump has maintained that the affair never happened. But the evidence against him is, if not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” still extremely damning. (And “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a standard, let us be clear, that means something much different to a billionaire than it does to millions of Black people prosecuted and incarcerated by this country’s inhuman state machinery.)

According to the New York Times, Clifford first attempted to sell her story as an exclusive to the National Enquirer, a right-wing tabloid, in October 2016. David Pecker, then CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company and publisher, American Media, Inc., and a long-time personal friend of Trump, intervened on the Republican candidate’s behalf.

Pecker shielded Trump from other sexual affair scandals with what’s called the “catch and kill” tactic — purchasing exclusive rights to a story specifically to not publish it, so that it gets buried and an individual’s reputation is protected — multiple times: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2016 that Pecker had paid $150,000 for the rights to a story from Karen McDougal, a celebrity model and actress, about a 2006 affair with Trump, but never published it. The New Yorker magazine similarly reported later in 2016 that Pecker had paid $30,000 for the rights to a story from a Trump Tower (Manhattan) doorman, alleging that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child during an affair with his housekeeper. Both stories eventually surfaced regardless, and Pecker was removed as American Media, Inc.’s CEO in 2020.

But when Clifford offered to sell her story to the Enquirer, Pecker instead arranged for Trump’s personal lawyer, advisor, and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, to meet with Clifford’s attorneys to offer her a large sum in “hush money” — $130,000. After taking office as President in 2017, Trump reimbursed Cohen.

Obviously this is all incredibly scummy — scummy in a way that only the extremely rich can afford to be. And it is only one of many instances of Trump’s personal depravity.

The Stormy Daniels scandal was followed by the so-called “golden shower” rumor, which Trump also denies. The rumor gained mainstream and social media attention especially after former FBI director Robert Mueller’s 2019 Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. The so-called “Mueller Report” alleged that Russian government agents had blackmailed Trump during and after the 2016 elections with an as-yet-unpublished video, supposedly recorded at the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow hotel, in which Trump admits his “golden shower” kink.

We hardly need to state that Trump, like all billionaires and high-level capitalist politicians, is a pervert, a reprobate, and, in all likelihood, given his connections to the “late” Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, a serial rapist and pedophile. It can surprise no one when a man with almost unlimited wealth and power is corrupted, not only politically, but in every possible sense, and beyond any semblance of humanity.

But proving that Trump’s actions, and those of his agents — paying off past escorts — were illegal under U.S. (federal) or New York (state) law, within a legal system designed to protect the wealthy and powerful, while criminalizing the poor and dispossessed, is another matter.

As it happened, the U.S. Department of Justice was then investigating Cohen for a number of felonies relating to tax and bank fraud. Because the “hush money” Cohen paid to Clifford and another woman directly aided Trump’s presidential campaign, federal prosecutors treated it as an illegally outsized campaign donation, and thus further charged Cohen with breaking campaign finance laws, namely “causing an unlawful campaign contribution” and “making an excessive campaign contribution.” In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies, and, looking to secure a lighter sentence for himself, turned and ratted on his former boss — then-President Trump.

Almost immediately after Cohen’s guilty plea, on the basis of his assistance to federal prosecutors, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, in turn, opened an investigation into Trump himself. That investigation has lasted almost five years.

The first major push came in August 2019, when the Manhattan District Attorney subpoenaed the Trump Organization. The next month, Trump’s lawyers filed a countersuit to avoid handing over his tax returns. This suit made its way slowly through the U.S. court system, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in July 2020 that holding the office of President of the United States does not grant Trump the right to refuse to comply with a criminal investigation. Trump’s lawyers then filed a second countersuit, which was again defeated in the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2021. Trump’s lawyers were then immediately forced to submit eight years of documents to the Manhattan DA. By July 2021, the DA had charged the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, with running a massive, 15-year-long tax scheme. Weisselberg would plead guilty and agree to testify against the Trump Organization (but not Trump himself) in August 2022; the Trump Organization would be convicted in December 2022.

The investigation appeared to be barreling directly toward Trump. But then, last February, two high-profile prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, resigned from the Trump investigation in frustration when the new Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, brought the investigation to a halt and refused to indict the former president. Pomerantz stated in his letter of resignation that he believed the DA’s office had obtained ample evidence of multiple felonies committed by Trump, sufficient to secure convictions, and branded Bragg’s decision to halt “a grave failure of justice” that ran “contrary to the public interest.” Pomerantz later detailed his account of the investigation and his decision to resign in a book, published in February this year.

The capitalist media declared the criminal investigation dead. Democratic Party politicians and media talking-heads, as well as the party’s supporters, were livid. 

However, in January 2023, the DA called a grand jury to consider charges against Trump. When it became clear that an indictment was likely, political attention, from both the Republican and Democratic parties, and media coverage returned to the case.

Speculation as to political motives aside, the timing is undeniably convenient.

Trump is no longer President, but has announced his plans to run for a second term in 2024. Given his popularity among the Republican voter base, would be very likely to win his party’s nomination, should he face a primary challenger. Meanwhile, as the cost of living across the U.S. continues to explode, and the next periodical capitalist economic crisis looms, Trump’s likely challenger, incumbent President Joe Biden, becomes less popular with every passing day. A prolonged trial is likely to damage public opinion of the Republican Party, at least for a few months — and that might be just the boost the Democrats need to keep hold of the Presidency and to avoid outright losing their one-seat majority in the Senate. (On the other hand, the renewed press might benefit Trump, who has proven his ability to turn any controversy into free advertising.)

Yet, of course, Democratic Party politicians and their corporate media talking-heads are insisting, with one voice, that the investigations into Trump and the recent indictment against him are not at all politically motivated, and certainly not the result of a political conspiracy to take down the former President.

But anyone with any sense knows, at the very least, that there’s something fishy — something too convenient — about the Democrat line.

We are not arguing that Trump didn’t break the law and commit several felonies — he certainly did. That, in fact, is just the point: Individual capitalists and entire capitalist firms break their own laws every single day, habitually, as a simple fact of doing business, and most never see the inside of a courtroom for it. Trump is, of course, a slimy, stinking monster, but he’s by no means an extraordinary monster, and his personal stench, however foul, is, putting aside all pretenses, indistinguishable from the common stench of Capital.

What makes Trump’s case special? What makes this moment special? Why was Trump only indicted now, when, according to the very prosecutors investigating him, he could have been indicted well over a year ago?

Lenin once wrote, “When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: Who stands to gain? In politics it is not so important who directly advocates particular views. What is important is who stands to gain from these views, proposals, and measures.”

Who stands to gain from Trump’s recent indictment? That remains to be seen. But we certainly know which forces hope to gain, and which stand to lose.

Clearly, the Democrats hope to preclude the threat of another Trump campaign, in which the one-term President would face an increasingly unpopular Biden. Clinging to their narrow hold on the Federal Government, which already slipped significantly in the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats hope to bring widespread disrepute to the Republican Party generally, retain the Presidency for another term, and win back some of their lost ground in Congress in the 2024 general elections.

Meanwhile, Trump is attempting — successfully, it would seem — to turn his indictment to his advantage. His main base of support, the most reactionary elements among the majority-white middle classes, widely and unquestioningly believe that a government captured by various boogeymen (the the “deep state,” George Soros and a cabal of “woke” Jewish financiers, funding “critical race theory,” “antifa,” and “gender ideology” in schools, and so on) is out to get Trump, in order to destroy America, and that the forces of patriotism, under the MAGA banner, must unite to restore the country. Trump has proven capable at tapping into this mass delusion and converting it into real mobilization: such conspiracy theories are what inspired Trump’s failed Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021, in which some 2,000 fascist rioters (assisted by police), believing that the election had been “stolen” from Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building. Trump is now, as always, presenting himself as a fighter for white America, and rallying his voter base behind him, raking in donations and creating a groundswell of energy for near-future fascist mobilizations. In mid-March, Trump predicted that he would be arrested “within three days” (needless to say, he wasn’t, and hasn’t been), and called for his supporters to prepare to riot.

Other high-profile Republican politicians are looking to seize their moment in the spotlight. Most notably, the fascist Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, who’s risen to federal prominence in recent years by riding the wave of post-Trump reaction, announced that he would not allow Trump to be forcibly extradited to New York, even though Trump himself announced plans to fly to Manhattan and turn himself in. Desantis is widely believed to be planning a run for President in 2024, which means that he is likely to challenge Trump in the Republican primaries.

In sum, the two major factions of the ruling monopoly capitalists — the “moderate” fascist Democrats and the extreme-right fascist Republicans — are transparently vying with each other to come out on top in the coming legal and political battle.

But what about the working classes and the poor? What about the masses? What do we have to gain? Where should we stand?

The truth of the matter is, either way, that the working classes and the poor of this country have nothing to gain or lose from this fight. “Our” “democracy” is not, in fact, “on the line,” because the U.S., from its origins and at its foundations a settler-colonial empire, a white supremacist dictatorship of the capitalists, was never a “democracy” to begin with. Just as the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the Carthaginian empire were “democracies” only for the small class of slave-owners, wealthy merchants, and military leaders, but never for the mass of slaves, propertyless free laborers, poor craftsmen, and the other lower and middle classes, or any woman, so is modern capitalist society a “democracy” only for the capitalists and some other propertied classes.

Let our rulers take their battles to the courts, and let the courts decide who will be the victor and who will be “vanquished.” That is, after all, the U.S. court system’s real purpose: to mediate disputes that emerge within the ruling class, between one group of billionaires and another, one monopolist firm and another, one of our two major capitalist political parties and the other.

Our battle is in our workplaces, our communities, our homes, and our streets. Our enemies are the bosses who exploit us, the cops who police and terrorize us, the landlords who squeeze us of the greater part of our incomes, while we take refuge in hovels, and the politicians, on “both sides of the aisle,” who serve Capital. Our enemy is the whole rotten political system of the illegitimate U.S. Empire, and our true political war is the class war: the war to abolish the existing, unjust order and to establish a new, just order — a truly democratic republic, a socialist republic — in its place.

Last week, left wing capitalists announced, through their decrepit mouthpiece Biden, that their lackeys were finally prepared to forgive a limited amount of student debt. Working people in the U.S. Empire have had predatory loans pushed on them by their own government and the capitalist class for decades, forcing them into impossible repayment contracts and perpetual debt peonage. Many have their loan repayments calculated so that they never repay the loan’s “principal,” instead forever on the hook for the growing interest payments. The plan unveiled by Biden would make $10,000 ($20,000 for those with Pell Grants) of student loan debt held by families making less than $250,000 and individuals making less than $125,000 forgivable by the government. This announcement comes after over a year of pressure from the public for the doddering and largely absent Biden administration to fulfill the promises made on the campaign trail.

The Biden Department of Education has canceled $32 billion in student loan debt since October of 2021. Biden’s lackeys, through their Department of Education, forgave the following debts:

• $7.3 billion to individuals who are now working as public servants;
• $5.8 billion in loans for disabled borrowers; and,
• $11.45 billion in loans for individuals who went to schools that defrauded students.

The new plan dwarfs the prior debt cancellation. It makes, by one estimate, $486.6 billion in debt eligible for loan forgiveness. In total, this brings the regime’s various cancellation and “forgiveness” programs to $518.6 billion. As of the first quarter of 2022, student loan debt stands at $1.75 trillion. Thus, the new plan brings the Biden administration’s debt cancellation or forgiveness to cover just over one fourth of all outstanding student loan debt.

At first, this would seem to go some way toward fulfilling the promise the jackal Biden and his cronies made to the debt-burdened working classes on the campaign trail. In his bid to gain control over the criminal U.S. settler-government, Biden promised full student loan relief — that is, the forgiveness of every penny of the $1.75 trillion owed to the federal government by those earning $125,000 a year or less. Even the reactionary AFL-CIO has been pushing Biden to forgive at least $50,000 in student debt — five times what his Dept. of Education is prepared to forgive.

The difference between the promise — $1.14 trillion dollars (the amount of debt owed by families making less than $97,000) and the $486.6 billion available for forgiveness under this new plan — is huge. We’re used to empty campaign promises by now. That’s the stock and trade of the Democrats, who have to lie to the working classes to whip votes for their dying party. (Republicans don’t need to lie about what they’ll do: they quite boldly proclaim their plans to cut social service programs, launch new wars, and reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans). In essence, the Biden White House has provided yet another empty promise with their loan forgiveness scheme. Not only does the plan fail to live up to the lofty lies of the campaign trail, it doesn’t even live up to its own numbers. By the time anyone actually receives loan forgiveness, it will be nowhere near the order of $486.6 billion that media outlets are calculating. Why?

You have to apply.

None of the loan forgiveness is automatic. It doesn’t merely happen. That $486.6 billion that Biden is set to forgive is only potential forgiveness. Even if you qualify for debt forgiveness, if you don’t go through the steps the way the government wants you to and the channels the government has provided or pre-approved (and, as we will see, the government has been purposefully vague about how to do these things), you don’t get loan forgiveness.

This method of offering something and then requiring a series of difficult-to-follow steps and extra work to achieve the initial promise (we might call it “weeding people out”), is one that corporate advertisers have used for half a century. We’ve all seen “free” products that you need to send away for, fill out forms to get, or talk to someone on the phone to actually receive. In the same way that cable companies increase their rates and only decreases them again after a long, painful conversation with their representatives, the Biden financiers expect the extra work, the long and complicated processes that people will have to try multiple times, and the fact that people will have to affirmatively apply to greatly reduce the number of individuals that seek and are ultimately granted debt relief. That $486.6 billion dollar number doesn’t take any of this into account.

The window for applying for loan forgiveness is set to begin at some point in October of 2022. There is no set date yet. The loan repayment pause ends on December 31, 2022 and the window to apply for loan forgiveness will close on December 31, 2023. That is, if you do not successfully apply between October of this year and the end of next year, your loan will not be forgiven.

You have to be approved.

Being considered for forgiveness does not mean your loans will be forgiven. Right now, the only published criteria for the forgiveness program is that you, as an individual, have student debt owned by the federal government (it doesn’t apply if your debt was sold to a private collections agency), you have an individual income of $125,000 a year (or, if you’re married, a household income of less than $250,000 a year), and you file your application.

The state hasn’t made any other requirements public, but it has indicated that it will look at past years tax returns to ensure that the applicants really do make less than $125,000 or $250,000 a year. Although Biden and his lackeys have put it out that 43 million people are “eligible” for student loan forgiveness under this new plan, the Biden Department of Education has only pre-authorized 8 million people. That means, for the vast majority of the people Biden claims are eligible, we do not yet know whether they will be approved.

Your loan servicer probably doesn’t understand the way the plan works.

If you have student loan debt, you know you don’t repay the federal government directly. Instead, the government contracts a loan servicer to keep track of your debt, collect your payments, and call you at inopportune times. Policy changes can’t just percolate down from the Department of Education and flow to you directly. The servicers, the managerial middlemen who make their living by serving as the government’s hired leeches, need to enact Department policies, except right now they have no idea what those policies are, how they’ll be applied, or how to make them a reality. Every step of confusion runs to the benefit of Biden and his smirking capitalist handlers.

Servicers have an incentive to keep people on the hook. Student loan borrowers are often put into “suspended payment” plans and told they don’t have to start repayment for many years (so they can accrue interest for the lender) and are never told of the income-driven repayment plans that federal law requires these servicers to offer. Loan servicers often enroll borrowers in forgiveness plans that already exist knowing they won’t be eligible. In 2017, the servicer Navient was discovered to have collected $4 billion in incorrectly calculated rates.

Biden Never Intended to Forgive Student Loans

Behind President Biden’s vacant stare and his jackal grin, he is a creature of simple drives and interests. He holds the presidency by the grace of the class he serves, and he has served those class interests well. His extremely long career as a representative of the capitalist class has seen him not only support, but design some of the most repressive laws to make it through the U.S. Senate. Recall that, until 2005, federal student loans were subject to bankruptcy protections. Then-Senator Biden pushed for the so-called “Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act” which made it almost impossible to discharge student loans under bankruptcy.

When he stood before the public and promised to forgive student loans in their entirety, he knew his handlers would never agree to any such thing. Student loans are a powerful tool in the arsenal of capitalist control. The price of tuition has increased exponentially as the logic of capitalism has gutted U.S. higher education and transformed it into an investment opportunity. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1980 the average cost to attend a four-year college full-time (including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for present inflation) was $10,231 every year. As of 2019-20, that average has increased to $54,500.

The average student loan debt owed is $28,950 — more than even the most generous amount of forgiveness Biden is pretending to offer would cover. This loan could be refinanced – but the only way to do that is to give the debt over to a predatory private collections agency. The average household in the U.S. with student loan debt owes $58,957. This ballooning cost of education necessitates taking out loans. The government swept in to provide a financial market for unscrupulous loan servicing companies and capitalists fleece students coming and going: through hugely inflated costs, and through the unfair and impossible-to-repay rates of the loans they’re forced to take to compete in the increasingly narrow job market.

People with student loans have to work. They are forced to work for lower wages than they would otherwise accept. They have to work for longer, and may not be able to retire. This reinforces the power of the capitalists over the working class. Anything that makes labor weaker makes capital stronger.Biden did not ever intend this promise to be something he could fulfill. His handlers knew he needed “progressive” sounding campaign promises that would get fouled up in the details. The only reason that the Biden camp is now offering this hollowed-out loan forgiveness program is the November elections.

This Is A Scheme for Midterms

The Democratic Party is situated to lose badly in the November midterm elections. Biden’s slumbering administration has allowed COVID to surge again, has sent the economy on a roller-coaster, has permitted inflation to run riot, and has, just last week, promised to engage in the kind of economic policy that destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1970s — the “Volcker Shock.”

The Democrats represent the left wing of the capitalists. Since the 1930s, they have attempted to fuse the interests of the working classes, the petit-bourgeoisie, and labor unions with those of the big capitalists by dominating the working classes in a collaborationist party, submerging the real interests of the workers beneath the leadership of the left wing of capital. During the Nixon years, the Republicans surrendered the field when it comes to social issues and the Democrats have positioned themselves as the “progressives,” championing working class values in their speeches without ever following through on the real material change they promised, partly for fear that a communistic revolution might rise up inside U.S. borders. Since the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union, however, the Democrats have seemed singularly uninterested in providing any relief to the working class. They have no more U.S.S.R.-financed revolution to worry about. Clinton and Obama both turned up their noses and turned up the heat on war and incarceration.

One of the ways the Democrats controlled the workers was to corrupt and undermine the labor movement. State-controlled or infiltrated labor unions integrated with Communist-led unions; the CIA worked to purge Communists from union organizing, the second “Red Scare” drove Communists out of the AFL-CIO, and CIA support for a mafia takeover in union organizing eventually corrupted almost all labor and industrial unions in the U.S. These captured, capitalist-friendly (what are called “business” unions by the I.W.W.) unions were tasked with representing the workers demands while ensuring those demands were never voiced too loudly and the workers remained shouting rather than striking.

Since Biden took office, outside groups have joined voices with the AFL-CIO to demand the administration take action. The ruling clique has become so removed from the everyday needs of the working people that even their pet unions have begun to clamor for the barest consideration.

As though finally waking up to the fact that the party has neglected to do anything noteworthy since the defeat of the reactionary Trump clique in 2020, Democrats have put on a blitz of electioneering. Democrats have war-baited like the best Republicans by flying repeatedly to Taiwan, in violation of agreements with the People’s Republic of China, hoping that the threat of looming war will convince voters (and, more importantly, bourgeois donors) to “stay the course.” This latest feeble noise from the Biden White House is part and parcel of a last-minute plan to bring scorned allies on board: the unions.We cannot allow the naked ambition of the Biden clique to fool us. We must reject these scraps, these illusory crumbs. We do not accept the little the capitalists give us. We must take what we are owed — as the man once said, “Our demands most moderate are: we only want the earth.”