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

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

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

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

The IRS will keep all of its employees.

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did the Government Shut Down?

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

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

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

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

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

Organize Mass Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sample Literature

Understanding the Shutdown

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

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

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

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

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

Last week the Federalist (a right-fascist magazine) published a new fascist manifesto. This boldness follows the capture of the United States Supreme Court by the similarly named Federalist Society and lays out the future these so-called “Federalists” imagine for their movement. The manifesto isn’t aimed at the left-fascist Democrats, but rather at other, recalcitrant members of their own right-fascist clique: the “Grand Old Party” (GOP). They stand ascendent in the most reactionary institution of a reactionary government and are poised to sweep the statehouses and legislatures of the country, to be followed by the United States Congress next month. The political content of their message is clear. To other Republicans, they say: Fall in line now with the right-fascist program, or you will be treated like more of the same left fascists that we despise.

Who are the Federalists?

More fully the “Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies,” this lawyer’s guild was founded in 1982 by a collection of students from Yale, Harvard, and University of Chicago Law. These were the dialectical opposite of the Students for a New Democratic Society, the reaction to the left-wing movements of the 1960s and 70s, and the self-professed vanguard of the right reaction. Although it began with the typical right-wing objectives of “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty, and interpreting the constitution to its original meaning,” these slogans have only ever been an obfuscation, kind sounding words to mask their real aims and interests. The Federalists are nothing more than the tip of a spear of counter-revolution that has been wielded against the working classes for decades.

Six of the nine sitting members of the Supreme Court are members or former members of the Federalist Society: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Their presence is ubiquitous on the campus of every law school in the country. Their initial funding came from Olin Industries (an arms manufacturer and industrial chemical producer) and the Society is given donations by Google, Chevron, the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and the Mercer family. It claims something in the order of $20 million in annual revenue. Federalist Society members have served in both the George W. Bush administration and the Trump administration.

This far-reaching organization is the sharpened spear tip of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois reactionary intelligentsia. They are the driving force behind the rightward lurch in the federal judiciary, and they have finally made their statements clear, open, and unambiguous: they are the violent and repressive wing of U.S. fascism, prepared to sweep the slate clean of their ineffectual forebears and ensure that the rising class-consciousness of the working people is defeated once and for all.

Although there are no official links between the Federalist Society and the Federalist, their membership has contributed writing to the Federalist (for instance, “I Thought I Could Be A Christian And Constitutionalist At Yale Law School. I Was Wrong”) and the magazine has been a loud supporter of Federalist judges and legal vision. They share a name, but more importantly, they share a movement between them.

The Fascist Vision

What kind of movement, asks fascist John Daniel Davidson, should the conservatives adopt? “For starters,” he answers, they must start thinking of themselves as “radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries.” Lest the message be missed, he is clear: “that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.”

Davidson rejects the small-government libertarianism of his movement as counter-productive. He argues that the right fascists must get “used to the idea of wielding power…. [b]ecause accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible.” He explicitly calls for counter-revolution, because “periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.”

Along with the rejection of the libertarian right’s commitment to small government, Davidson rejects the “freedom of the market” and moans that it has allowed more popular but “anti-Western” ideas to flourish. This is the most troubling and dangerous part of the manifesto and comes close to being programmatic. The rough program he describes is one that:

• Uses anti-trust powers to break up Silicon Valley firms because they are petit-bourgeois strongholds, producing “woke” ideology;
• Cuts off all public funds to universities;
• Makes no-fault divorce illegal;
• Subsidizes families with children, with the clear fascist intent of “preserving the race”;
• Expands the criminal code to outlaw all abortion, everywhere, under every circumstance;
• Outlaws drag shows;
• Promises the arrest and prosecution of parents who take their children to drag shows;
• Outlaws gender-affirming care for both children and adults and makes it punishable by incarceration for the doctors performing it;
• Outlaws “teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material” — here, a coded whistle for the existence of gay and lesbian and gender-varient persons.

As the markets lurch from impending crisis to impending crisis and as the housing situation in the U.S. Empire becomes less and less tenable for more and more working people, voices like Davidson’s will only get louder. It is this very list of policies that differentiates left- and right-fascisms. Ultimately, it is the left fascists’ (like the Democrats) inability to hold an ever-vanishing center that has led and will continue to lead to the right fascist seizure of power. While Democrats and Republicans both agree on the continued liquidation and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement and colonization of New Afrika, and support for the vast imperialist war-machine abroad, it is here where they, for the moment, diverge.

Until this point, fascism in the U.S. Empire has been content to ride quietly behind all politics, right or left, and suffuse all political decisions with its implications. It has been a secure fascism that has no need of intricate repressive machinery, because it has relied instead on an all-powerful control of the economy, on the renewing and regenerating powers of the settler-state to confront its crises by bringing new land under its control, by endless fascist war-mongering and the conquest of new markets, and so on. This has allowed the economic features of fascist organization to do most of the work and permitted the public face of the empire to wear any expression it desires. The publication of this manifesto is an important and dangerous step in the end of this self-delusion among right fascists. It represents a level of clarity and self-awareness so far lacking in modern U.S. politics; it sets out not only the fundamental ideological groundwork of fascism, exposing it to the public so it can be addressed and argued over, but also describes the basic methodology by which fascism will tighten its grip on the people of the U.S. Empire.

The day is soon coming when even the left-fascist Democratic Party will polarize and fracture into that vanishingly small group willing to stand for the liberties of the masses, and those who will ally with or become right fascists to preserve the dying order.