War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn’t have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. “Why should we tell you what our policies are?” they ask, their dead eyes mocking. “You know what our policies are: we’re not Trump.”

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of “progressive” labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what’s become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we’re told one story — the one that we all learn in high school history — but the truth is quite something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We’re told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he “saved” the country from the Great Depression. This isn’t just the story told by the Democrats, it’s also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”

But the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the ‘30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor — the AFL and other unions, primarily — and the old Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market — and keep funding the social democratic project FDR had promised.

“The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process,” wrote the Marxist-Leninist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the “Third Way” Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It’s easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe — despite Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees… until Carter signaled the Democrats’ willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party’s commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state’s repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it “bailed out” banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this “foot on the gas” position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on “aid” while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO — the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — was a trade union operating from 1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter’s torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden’s assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a “former” lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden’s relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020 — a devaluation that is now almost the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn’t make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party’s ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden’s watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he’s worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd’s death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire’s intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

“We have nothing to offer you. Don’t look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren’t Trump.”

That’s not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

Israel alleges that twelve of those 13,000 relief workers played some role in the October 7 attack against Israelis by the Palestinian Resistance.

These allegations – which remain unproven, to say the least – implicate slightly less than one-tenth of one percent of UNRWA employees. Even so, the UNRWA has already fired nine of the twelve accused. But the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania are using the unproven allegations as the basis to cut off funding for UNRWA.

That’s two-thirds or more than $760 million cut from the budget of the primary organization providing humanitarian aid in Gaza. The chief of the UNRWA says that with the funding cuts the agency may be forced to “shutter” its operations within a month. Current levels of aid are already a trickle compared to the period before October 7, and the people of Gaza are facing famine and the spread of preventable diseases in addition to the ongoing deaths caused by Israel’s bombing and its ground operations.

The corporate media has described Democrats in Congress as “divided” over support for UNRWA funding. So far, though, it appears the only public appeal for restoring UNRWA funding has come from congressperson Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes.

“Cutting off support to UNRWA—the primary source of humanitarian aid to 2 million+ Gazans—is unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on social media. “Among an organization of 13,000 U.N. aid workers, risking the starvation of millions over grave allegations of 12 is indefensible. The U.S. should restore aid immediately.”

Common Dreams, “Ocasio-Cortez: US Should Restore UNRWA Funding ‘Immediately,’” 1/29/2024.

NOT ONE of Connecticut’s Democrats in the House and Senate have said they support restoring US funding for UNRWA. When urged to support a ceasefire these elected officials insisted they were doing the most good by supporting humanitarian aid. Now humanitarian aid has been cut and they are silent.

During World War I, Vladimir Lenin dedicated pages to exposing the mechanisms of opportunism. He showed methodically how opportunism reflects a position of class collaboration, taking, often surreptitiously, the side of the oppressor over the side of the oppressed. In doing so, opportunism sows confusion among the working class. It limits the development of coherent political positions, and ultimately resolves in actions that betray the working people in their moment of need. 

Opportunism, Lenin showed, often comes wrapped in the language of class struggle. It promises to secure short-term gains for workers — higher wages, lower working hours, or better working conditions. But its class essence is bourgeois. In other words, it does not seek to challenge the ruling class, because it sustains a confidence in the ruling class that it does not extend to working people. And so it seeks not to liberate workers, but to redirect crumbs from the tremendous profits of the bourgeoisie towards them — a temporary and ultimately fruitless strategy of lowering the temperature of class struggle to preserve the ruling order. 

That ruling order is imperialist. According to research carried out by Dr. Jason Hickel

and others, the old colonial powers of the Global North have drained $152 trillion from the Global South since 1960. These super-profits, fueled by the systematic looting of former colonies, also sustain the exploitation of the workers in the imperialist heartlands. Sometimes, the workers are bought out with the kinds of reforms Sanders supports; or, their leadership is bought out, creating a “labor aristocracy” that acts as a brake on revolutionary consciousness within the labor movement. Other times, workers are repressed as the technologies of violence honed in the colonies come back home. 

As an imperial outpost, the Zionist state is a central piece of the puzzle. Its existence prevents regional integration and suppresses the self-determination of its neighbors — sustaining a zone of imperial extraction where states lack the power or unity to build an alternative, sovereign political project. The weapons routinely tested on a caged Palestinian population then make their way back to the U.S., where they become the instruments that disperse protestors or police borders. This is what Aimé Césaire meant when he said that fascism is colonialism turned inwards. 

“Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism,” Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution in 1917. In other words, opportunism is the repudiation of the very possibility of victory. So, when Sanders voices his support for the Israeli regime, he not only stands against the liberation of Palestine, but also against the very possibility of liberation anywhere. It is precisely because of this that Lenin described opportunists as the “principal enemy” of the proletarian movement — of the movement towards liberation. 

History, of course, vindicated Lenin’s position. The same war-hungry Petrograd crowds that would have lynched him for his anti-war positions in 1914 welcomed him back as a hero in 1917, when the imperative of peace and liberation became blindingly clear to Russia’s working people. The work of exposition and organization had been done — by the Bolsheviks, and by the Bolsheviks alone. 

It is essential that we are able to identify opportunism, analyze it, and oppose it because the liberation of all workers and oppressed peoples depends on us not being lured into its soothing trap. This is the trap that whispers of the “lesser evil”, pinning competing forces within the ruling class against each other to obscure their antagonism to the working people. Again and again, it whispers, “both sides”, seeking to erase or obscure the dialectical opposition between oppressor and oppressed. This is true whether it applies to the Palestinians and the Zionists or the Soviets and the Nazis. 

Empire is undergoing a profound crisis — a crisis of military overextension, economic overproduction, and ideological delegitimization. If we are to take advantage of this moment to beat down the ruling classes in their moment of weakness, we need to resist not only the siren song of the fascists. We need to resist the gentler whispers of the social democrats, who seek to pull us back to a status quo that has proven, time and again, incapable of resolving the dilemmas of humanity. 

As the Bolshevik Karol Radek implored the workers of Europe in 1922: “You proletarians of the capitalist countries, you have no fatherland to defend; you must first conquer the land of your fathers.”

Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton Pennsylvania. Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., was an executive at the Sheene Armor Company, owned by his uncle Bill Sheene, Sr. The family purportedly went through a period of hardship; young Biden himself went to college (and did poorly) at the University of Delaware. He then went to law school, where he plagiarized a paper for one of his courses from the Fordham Law Review.

He worked very briefly as a public defender, then opened a law firm and began a small property-management business for landlords. In 1969, Biden ran as a Democrat for the New Castle County Council, and served on the council from 1970 to 1972. He entered the all-empire public stage in 1972 when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

It was in his 1973-2009 career as a U.S. Senator that his most vile qualities were encouraged, enlarged, and exaggerated — likely by constant exposure to the odious class politics of the U.S. political system. He wheeled and dealed with the lobbyists and developed the same cronyist habits that most lawyers and politicians eventually exhibit. In 1981 he became the ranking minority Democratic member of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and, by 1984, he took the lead as a “tough on crime” legislator.

During his time in the Judiciary Committee, he joined segregationist senators to help lock up Black Americans. “The truth is,” Biden said in 1993, “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” He was close friends with many segregationists: Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, whose foul, racist policies once led to him being accused of “Hitlerism” on the Senate floor, helped place Biden on that committee. He partnered with legendary hatemonger Strom Thurmond to author many crime bills.

In 1977, with Eastland’s support, he pushed for mandatory minimum sentence laws. In 1989, he criticized George Bush, Sr., complaining that he wasn’t doing enough to put “violent thugs” in prison. In 1993, he warned of “predators on our streets.” In a 1994 Senate speech, he said: “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Biden opposed the busing program in Wilmington, a plan intended to even out the racist segregation of schooling. “The real problem with busing is you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school, and you’re going to fill them with hatred,” he said in 1975.

He was responsible for the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which established mandatory minimum drug sentences, and the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created a disparity of one hundred times the penalty for possession of crack cocaine over powder cocaine. When working for Clinton’s disastrous and vile 1994 crime bill, Biden rhetorically asked the Senate “What do you need?” He answered himself: “The first thing we need is more cops…. The second thing we need is more prisons.”

During his time as president he has ruthlessly worked to suppress unions and prevent or end numerous strikes, all the while crowning himself the most union-friendly president since FDR.

But over the last few weeks, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., secured himself as one of the most bloodstained presidents of this bloodstained oligarchic republic in its history: he has given his explicit approval for the zionist state to exterminate, relocate, and ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population of Palestine.

Forget his time as a struggling lawyer; for 52 years, Biden has lived in the lap of luxury, first as a U.S. Senator, then as the Vice President, and now as the President of the U.S. Empire. This U.S. aristocrat has spent his entire political career as a vocal zionist. Now, on the eve of the zionist ground invasion of Gaza, after weeks of brutal bombing campaigns designed to terrorize, kill, and exterminate the Palestinian population in the strip, he has doubled down on his commitment to the zionist state.

On October 27, 2023, after zionist bombings of hospitals, during the intensification of the air campaign against Palestine, the White House said that it will not “draw red lines” for Israel. The Biden State Department instructed its representatives not to speak about popularly-demanded ceasefires or de-escalation. His government has been shipping weapons into the zionist state, and Biden himself has been on a tour of the legislature to argue for more appropriations for the zionist war machine. His support of genocide is so blatant, it prompted a senior member of the State Department to resign. “I cannot work,” wrote Josh Paul, “in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.”

Although in the past few days, Biden has made some mealy-mouthed asides about “protecting civilians,” as the zionist state annihilates Palestine, in the first hours of the brutal air assaults, he pledged public “unconditional” support.

Godfather of mass imprisonment, gleeful participant in wiping out Palestinian lives. The message is clear: Joseph Biden is not merely an enemy of the American people — he is a genocidaire.

The bankruptcy of the supposed representatives of the U.S. Empire is on full display. Biden, at the head of a lockstep contingent of almost the entire Democratic caucus, have been baying for blood. They applaud the salivating “Bibi” Netanyahu as he calls for extermination on zionist television. They upbraid the handful of politicians who dare to challenge them. They support the silencing of pro-Palestinian and antizionist voices. This country is exploding in protest. The world is exploding in protest. Biden, one hand gripping the wheel with white knuckles, continues to drive the U.S. into deep, criminal complicity with the worst and most genocidal acts of the world’s most heinous regime — because he is, at heart, himself a killer. Joseph Biden is a blood-soaked enemy of the people.

Representative Schiff has been at the head of Democratic lawfare efforts against the Republicans, which marked him as a target of the extreme right wing of the Republican party. He took charge of the 2020 Senate trial of Trump and also served as a long-time member of the dreaded House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the actions of the executive-branch intelligence agencies like the CIA, Defense Intelligence, FBI, and Homeland Security. It also has authority over the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State.

Schiff became a proponent of lawfare — the use of legal proceedings to wage political warfare on an opponent’s party — in 2018 with his “Open Letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” This was essentially a love letter to the FBI from Schiff, who had started his political career as a prosecuting attorney, a cop in a suit.

There is a narrow difference between the normal operation of the U.S. state regarding political corruption and the more aggressive lawfare that has been increasingly carried out by both parties since 2016. Only in periods of extreme internal dispute have the courts and intelligence services been used by one party against another. Examples of this escalation include Watergate and the Clinton impeachment. More and more routinely, on a more and more regular basis, both parties have begun using legal procedures to attack their ruling class opponents directly.

Schiff may have begun this last round of lawfare by opposing the Trump regime, but he now faces the sharp edge of the sword his party drew. The far-right clique in the GOP that has governed the party for the past six years brought a motion to censure Schiff; this resolution held that he should be fined $16 million if it’s determined he “lied, made misrepresentations, and abused sensitive information.” Although the resolution was voted down on Wednesday, it signals an increasingly sharp battle within the legal structures of the U.S. Empire. The ruling GOP clique alleged that he “purposefully deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people” and “used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

Schiff warned that the motion represents a “clear attack on our constitutional system of checks and balances.” Although it’s usually a mistake to lend credence to the words of any bourgeois politician, Schiff is waving the flag in warning because he knows the Democrats are in danger of being outflanked. Their devotion to process and norms, to playing “within the rules” of the bourgeois republic laid down by the slave owning founders they revere almost as gods, has hampered the Democrats’ ability to respond to the far-right clique in the GOP.

This ruling clique is preparing a war on two fronts, and the lawfare front represents only one. The second front is extra-legal: the paramilitary and military wing of the ruling clique (we can’t yet call it a self-contained and actualized party) that exists in every police station and gun club in the Empire. This illegalist front has already flexed its strength once on January 6, 2020. It’s only a matter of time before these two fronts opened by the GOPs ruling clique — the legalist and illegalist — meet.

We can take some comfort knowing that the illegalist wing suffered setbacks in the wake of January 6, but those setbacks are temporary. The men who have been incarcerated are biding their time, strengthening their ties to active white supremacist militants in the prisons, and waiting while the legalist, lawfare strategy proceeds. Although the Congressional lawfare front is in the ascendent and dominant position, it won’t be long before these two frontlines switch places again.

The second distinguishing characteristic [of the state] is the institution of a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes… This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which [pre-state] society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped class antagonisms… [but] it becomes stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger and more populous.

[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 labor 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. Some may consider this farfetched. I do not consider it nearly as far-fetched as the decision which applied the antitrust laws solely to trade unions, or used the Inter-State Commerce Acts to prevent strikes upon railways.

—James Connolly, Irish Marxist and founding member of the IWW, Ballots, Bullets, or –?, 1909.

The Supreme Court of the United States grants nine rich, unelected, effectively unrecallable, Ivy-League-educated lawyers ultimate judicial power over the entire country, as well as the power to nullify laws it deems unconstitutional. Liberals uphold the Court, one of the most anti-democratic state institutions in the U.S., as the crown jewel of “American democracy” and the “rule of law.” Yet, for all their proclamations, this elitist, anti-democratic institution primarily exists to work out disputes among members of the ruling classes, not to uphold “liberty and justice.” 

In a nutshell, the Supreme Court, and the legal system it sits atop, works like this: The justices who sit on the Supreme Court, like all judges in the federal courts, are nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. The U.S. federal court system has jurisdiction over federal law, crimes and civil offenses that cross state lines, and, critically, the authority to interpret the U.S. Constitution. If an issue of constitutional magnitude arises in a state court, that issue can be argued in a federal district court. The parties involved can petition a decision of the district court, further elevating it to a federal circuit court. Lastly, circuit court decisions can be petitioned to the Supreme Court, whose decisions are theoretically final.

Liberals almost always frame these issues as disputes between differing political and legal “philosophies” on issues of human and civil rights — for instance, the right to healthcare, the right to be housed, the right to well-paying and safe employment, the right to own and carry a gun, the right to freedom of religion, the right to equal treatment before the law, and so on. Public discourse focuses almost exclusively on these rights, treating them as though they were real, tangible things that can be given and taken away, and that can take up three-dimensional space. (Think of the common refrain, “Your rights end where mine begin.”) In this discourse, the Supreme Court is upheld as an almost sacred institution, vested with a divine inspiration that empowers it to resolve questions about the very nature of justice; to decide, with a sort of historical finality, which rights are the most important, and which rights trump other rights; and to guide us toward the “ideal” social order, as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

This is a fantasy version of the Supreme Court — the version taught in elementary schools to indoctrinate our children into the cult of the “American dream.” Regardless of whether the ruling-class propagandists who peddle this fantasy in the capitalist media and academia actually believe it, the fact remains that what they’re selling is a fantasy. The Supreme Court is not a forum for debate between competing legal “philosophies” (say, “conservative” versus “liberal”) of “rights,” “justice,” and the ideal social order, but rather a hall of compromises. The true purpose of the Supreme Court is the same as the purpose of all the machinery of the State generally: to maintain and reinforce the existing class dictatorship. To this end, the Court serves to mediate and resolve “normal” legal disputes that arise among members of the ruling class — in our time, the monopoly capitalists; in earlier centuries, the Northern merchants and new bourgeoisie and the Southern planter-aristocracy — in order to maintain a cordial “peace” among the rulers and to thereby avert potential crises. Furthermore, the Court serves to mediate and suppress the continuous struggle between the ruling class and the working and dispossessed classes. By handing down occasional “just” decisions, and by occasionally upholding basic human and civil rights, the Court effectuates legal compromises made to placate the masses, who would otherwise rise up in rage against all the daily injustices we face. In this way, the Court pacifies the class struggle, in order to protect the rule of the capitalists and the privileges of the other propertied classes (for example, small business owners and landlords) from the oppressed masses. On the other hand, when the struggle of the oppressed masses stagnates, withers, and fades, and the existing class dictatorship is no longer threatened, the Court is always ready to rescind every protection it previously granted, to “take away” even the most basic civil rights, and to reassert every legal privilege enjoyed by the capitalists. In sum, from time to time, the Supreme Court may “force” the ruling classes to make concessions to the poor and oppressed masses — but only when it has no other choice. On the other hand, as soon as the ruling classes get the opportunity, as soon as the masses no longer pose an immediate threat to the established order, the Court is there to snatch away every concession, and to enforce the absolute rule of our capitalist oppressors.

Historical Origins of the Court

The Supreme Court originated in the conflicting class interests that arose in the early U.S. settler-republic’s politics. The federal government was, by design, relatively weak when it was first created. The federal court system was likewise comically weak when it came to imposing rules on the newly created “states.” The planter-aristocrats, the ruling class in the U.S. South, whose entire lives and livelihoods were based on the regime of chattel slavery, and who therefore relied on a captive human workforce, favored recourse to their own state and local courts — courts staffed and bought by, and beholden to, the interests of the planter-aristocrat dictatorship.  

The newly forming Northern U.S. bourgeoisie had a fundamental interest in destroying the slave system and its mode of production. From the bourgeois perspective, slavery impeded the development of capitalism, the nascent mode of production. Wage-labor, the productive mode growing in the North, was far more productive. On average, wage labor was more skilled and much less deadly to the laborer. (Life expectancy for slaves, upon landing in the U.S., was, variously, only around seven years.) However, merchant and bourgeois capital had other reasons to push for a strong central court system: standardization of contracts and law, the evening-out of unequal legal regimes, so that shipping companies could anticipate the outcome of suits and so forth in all the regions they had to travel, and the establishment of rules concerning investment and exchange, among other things, were all powerful incentives.

As the drive to abolish the slave trade and the slave-plantation system gained traction, both internationally and in the early U.S., the Southern planters were increasingly driven into class conflict with the liberal-democratic merchants, lawyers, small artisans, and bankers of the “free state” North, where capitalism was beginning to develop, and where slavery was, slowly but surely, one reform at a time, nearing abolition. The planters were correct to anticipate their own demise. John Marshall, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was a wealthy Virginia lawyer whose interests were represented by the Federalists, the party of the Northern merchants and developing bourgeoisie. In the landmark 1803 decision, Marbury v. Madison, Marshall transformed the relatively weak Supreme Court into the ultimate instrument of class rule. The Marshall Court determined, in that decision, that the Supreme Court had the authority to rule on the constitutionality of every single action of every branch of the United States government. By this measure, the Supreme Court transformed itself from a relatively ordinary court of appeals, tasked with handling mundane matters like contract disputes, into a body of ultimate judicial power, which could unilaterally strike down laws, overturn elections, and unseat sitting Presidents.

Class Characteristics of the Justices

The U.S. Supreme Court is a panel of “justices” who serve for as long as they wish, accountable only to articles of impeachment in the United States Congress. Historically, these justices have been drawn exclusively from a small, insular social elite: they’ve all been graduates of top-ranking law schools, they’ve all held partnerships in top-earning law firms, and they are almost always elevated to the Supreme Court from existing positions in the federal court systems. Justices are appointed by the President, the nominal head of one of the two bourgeois political parties that are permitted to run candidates in the U.S. Empire; this is the only sense in which the Court could be called “democratic.” Finally, the justices are confirmed by the Senate, the upper house of Congress that has historically represented the interests of the most powerful capitalists (and, prior to that, planter-aristocrats) in each U.S. state.

All current justices sitting on the Supreme Court are, of course, lawyers, and all past justices have been lawyers. It behooves us, then, to look at the class forces at play in the practice of the law.

In 2019, the average cost of law school was just under $50,000 per year, and a juris doctor (professional law degree) course takes, at minimum, three years to complete. But, of course, Supreme Court justices don’t come from just any law schools. Since 1900, sixteen (16) justices have graduated from Harvard, eight (8) from Yale, and five (5) from Columbia University. That alone accounts for 51% of all justices who have been sworn in since 1900. The current court graduated from Yale (Alito, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, and Thomas), Harvard (Jackson, Gorsuch, Kagan, and Roberts), and Notre Dame (Barrett).

Harvard Law School costs $70,430 per year — nearly six times the total income of someone at the federal poverty line. Columbia Law, meanwhile, costs $75,572 for each year. This puts the price tag on an Ivy League law degree at $211,290 for Harvard and $226,716 for Colombia. Furthermore, as a professional degree, JD programs require students to have earned a bachelor’s degree, which means that those who graduate from Harvard and Columbia must be able to afford to be removed from the workforce for 4 years and to pay for undergraduate before spending over two-hundred thousand dollars and three more years on law school. These costs increase every year, and the gap between “public” law schools and the “Ivy League” continues to widen. Even after law students graduate, most take additional time to prepare for the bar examination, which certifies them to practice law in a given jurisdiction. 

Many of these schools also reserve so-called “legacy” seats. “Legacies” are students, typically at an elite university, whose parents also attended the school, and often stand out among its graduates as wealthy private donors. The Wall Street Journal calculated that “[sons] and daughters of graduates make up 10% to 15% of students at most Ivy League schools,” and it is common knowledge that even the most elite universities frequently overlook subpar grades and standardized test scores if an applicant can fill a “legacy” seat.

In sum, the vast majority of people in the U.S. could never hope to afford law school, let alone a degree from an elite university. This means that all justices on the Supreme Court, as well as most judges and attorneys active within the U.S. judicial system, are inevitably drawn from wealthy backgrounds — i.e., from the property-owning and ruling classes.

But we have only discussed the class background of law students and graduates. What about practicing attorneys?

Most lawyers are petit-bourgeois — that is, they both work upon and substantially own their instruments and conditions of production: the licensing, schooling requirements, examinations, and bar admissions. These are a holdover from the old medieval guild system, and they ensure that every lawyer who has been licensed to practice law has the capacity to immediately raise capital in the form of a loan, and to strike out on their own and open a law firm. When working in a firm, a lawyer expects that their own work will be rewarded with equity in the firm (“partnership”) and that they will then be given a share in the profits generated by all the other lawyers. Those lawyers who do become partners are transformed fully into members of the bourgeois capitalist class: owners of the licenses, premises, computers, social connections, and so forth which make up the means of production of legal services.

It should be no surprise that those lawyers who make it all the way through the many, increasingly restrictive tests and requirements, have come up with the money to go to college, to law school, used their personal relationships and worked as a clerk for a judge, become a judge themselves and received judicial salary for working as an agent of the bourgeois state, and at last been selected by a sitting president and cleared through the confirmation proceedings in the Senate, those who become Supreme Court justices have become fully and completely permeated with petit-bourgeois and bourgeois ideology; they have become themselves legal agents of a class or fractional class-interest. They serve, in other words, a class function.

The Legal Function of the Court

Usually, only cases which contain nominally unresolved legal questions are heard by the Supreme Court. In order to appeal the decisions of a lower court, that court must grant certiorari (certification) for the case to advance. Aggrieved parties may appeal to the next higher court if “cert” is not granted at the lower level, or if the court of appeals rules against them. However, the Supreme Court chooses not to take most of the cases which are presented to it. The Supreme Court Justices purposefully accept cert only on cases where there is confusion in lower courts (because Circuit Courts responsible for different parts of the U.S. have ruled differently on the same issue) or where they believe they can make a landmark change that will affect the entire U.S. socio-political system.

The current Supreme Court is dominated by a right-fascist supermajority — a situation that will most likely last for decades to come. In effect, this means that this supermajority has the power to reinterpret virtually every area of U.S. law. It has already taken full advantage of its position: throughout the U.S. court system, from the state to the federal level, the right-fascist camp in American politics is purposefully initiating challenges to long-held legal precedents, including past Supreme Court decisions, that uphold basic civil rights, with the intention of having the current Court eliminate these protections.

For instance, although the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade established that state laws criminalizing abortion prior to the end of the first trimester (in that instance, a Texas law) are unconstitutional, in September of 2021, the state of Texas enacted a new statute penalizing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The Texas legislature enacted this law knowing it would be challenged. This year, the super-right Supreme Court overturned Roe altogether in a decision that lays the legal groundwork for attacking the “rights” to contraception, legal gay sex, “inter-racial” marriage, and gay marriage (Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, and Obergefell v. Hodges, respectively).

Thus, under the current super-right composition of the court, many cases that would otherwise have been decided according to the more mainstream liberal consensus that has prevailed in the country since the 1930s will now never be heard. Other challenges to prior, more liberal, Supreme Court rulings are being set up to provide the super-majority with the cases it requires in order to overrule prior decisions of the court, and therefore revoke many of the so-called “rights” that had been recognized by the Supreme Court in the 60s and 70s in response to intensifications of the class struggle in the middle of the last century.

When the Supreme Court makes a decision it becomes the binding law of the land. Federal courts must follow the rulings of the Supreme Court. However, there is considerable leeway in the way in which federal courts interpret Supreme Court rulings and the pay of many a lawyer hinges on parsing and splitting precise language, determining what is a “holding,” that is binding and therefore controlling, and what is mere “dicta,” essentially extra words that don’t have any legal force. This is of particular moment when the Supreme Court interprets the U.S. constitution, since that document is considered to guarantee the bedrock minimum rights and how they must be applied.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court decide cases by reaching a common consensus about the outcome. They gather together and talk about what they agree on and what they disagree on. They consult one another and construct a set of minimum points of agreement. These are drafted into what is called a majority opinion. Those justices who agree with the majority may also write concurrences, which expand upon the majority points in ways that were not agreed-upon by all the justices. The justices who disagree may write dissents.

This means that the position which garners the most “votes” among the justices is the one which prevails. The super-majority of right fascists currently on the court guarantees that they will collectively decide the outcome of any and all cases that come before it. In the past, this has meant that justices have sometimes sat on the court for many years before becoming active as their power-bloc changes with the death or retirement of the elder justices.

It is worth noting the ages of the currently serving justices and their political affiliations:

• Clarence Thomas, 73 – generally ultra-right;
• Samuel Alito, 72 – rightist;
• John Roberts, 67 – rightist;
• Sonia Sotomayor, 67 – progressive left;
• Elena Kagan, 61 – progressive left;
• Brett Kavanaugh, 57 – ultra-rightist;
• Neil Gorsuch, 54 – ultra-rightist;
• Ketanji Jackson, 51 – progressive left;
• Amy Barrett, 50 – ultra-rightist.

The eldest justices are two rightists (Alito, Roberts), an ultra-rightist (Thomas), and two “progressives” (Sotomayor, Kagan). The outgoing center-leftist Stephen Breyer retired at the age of 83 and the average age that a justice leaves the court is 81. The current court makeup has presumably at least a decade before the next judges retire (Thomas and Alito, 73 and 72 respectively). At 6 rightists to 3 progressives, even the departure of Thomas and Alito, given that they’re replaced by progressives or even moderates (not a guarantee in any world), would not significantly rebalance the court, for it would leave the count at 4-5. Such court compositions generally grant the most power to the justices with the most moderate, centrist views, as they become a decisive “swing vote.” The most “centrist” of the current court are, by a long shot, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch — they represent the leftmost flank of the ultra-right bloc.

The Class Function of the Court

Now, to the question: what is the class function of the court? How does it manifest?  What are its specific features? The capitalist media and education system is not equipped to answer these questions; capitalist education lacks the basic analytical tools and framework to make sense of how the court behaves, and instead, as we mentioned above, frames every issue as a “battle” between various rights. The closest that bourgeois-capitalist scholars have come to an actual understanding of how and why the court system functions is the often-derided school of legal analysis known as “legal realism” which refuses to take at face value the long documents issued by the justices called “decisions” and instead seeks to understand why the decision was made, ignoring the high-flown legal language about precedent, Anglo-American common law, and so on. Still, even legal realism often grounds itself in individual psychoanalysis of the judge, or at most in the ideological issues of a movement.

As we have seen, the Supreme Court is a class-captured instrument. It should come as no surprise to Marxists that it is also a tool of class rule. It fulfills several functions:

1. Adjudicating inter-bourgeois disputes (contract law, election law);
2. Presenting a shield of legitimacy to disputes between the bourgeoisie and other classes (contract law, tort law) or bringing the most excessive and open abuses of the bourgeoisie to heel (contract law, tort law, criminal law);
3. Protection of private property, productive relations, class barriers, and cisheteronormative patriarchal white supremacy (criminal law);
4. Organizing retreats in the class struggle by recognizing changes being forced by the working class (any expansion of proletarian “rights”); and,
5. Pressing home victories in the class struggle by rolling back rights, attacking the organizational capacity of the working classes, and permitting intensification of exploitation.

Because the court has been captured by right-fascist interests, its most visible decisions of late fall under the fifth and first criteria, that is, the intensification of fascism and capitalist exploitation. The current Supreme Court is attacking the left-fascist faction of the bourgeoisie by degrading the powers and authority of the federal government and elevating state governments which are easier to capture and less subject to the stabilizing influence of the entire U.S. bourgeoisie, and at the same time by attacking one of the perceived power-bases of the left-fascist alliance: the U.S. working classes.

At the same time, the court attacks the working classes, particularly the racialized nationally oppressed groups, and permits the monopolist bourgeoisie to intensify their exploitation of U.S. workers. This is an aggressive strategy in the new COVID-wracked world where unionization drives and the social murder of one million U.S. workers and counting have given labor a new power. The court is attempting to counteract this power even as U.S. prominence abroad slips, its neocolonies suffer invasions, its allies begin to reconsider their priorities, and the market wobbles on the verge of a worldwide depression.

I. Inter-Bourgeois Disputes

The court system, like the bourgeois state itself, serves a dual purpose. The first and most basic is suppression of the working classes by the ruling class. The second, however, is to sort out its own affairs without disturbing its security over the other classes. Should fighting between individuals or factions within the capitalist class get out of hand, become too violent, vigorous, or open, it is possible for the state apparatus to break down or for the laboring classes to take advantage of the opening to overthrow their rulers.

When the rich fight among themselves, they normally rely on the courts. After all, the courts were originally fashioned to settle their disputes over property rights, contracts, and so on. In the European middle ages, petty feudal lords sometimes waged small-scale wars against each other, but this only served to weaken either lord and, critically, to sow discontent among their serfs, free subjects, and vassals; a much better option for the petty lords was to appeal to regional Church authorities to settle their disputes on amicable terms, above the heads of the laboring classes. In our modern capitalist society, where such petty warfare is impractical, the bourgeoisie has various other extralegal means of settling disputes among themselves: committing industrial espionage, employing the mob to intimidate or murder their opponents, bribing police officials, etc., but all of these things tend to destabilize the established order, to invoke public outrage, and consequently to loosen bourgeois control over the workers. Thus, the legal system — the courts, as well as the bought-and-paid-for legislature — is, from the bourgeois perspective, the preferable way to handle “normal” day-to-day disputes between competing capitalists on more or less amicable terms.

Importantly, the courts are also tasked with overseeing the manner in which elections are run. Politicians in the U.S. serve the interests of the bourgeoisie and the other propertied classes (small business owners, landlords, etc.): Local and municipal politicians serve local interests, state politicians serve regional interests, and federal politicians serve the interests of the monopoly capitalists, who rule the entire U.S. Empire. But among the dominant classes in a given locality or region, differing interests exist, leading to conflicts. Maintaining a balance in local and state governments between the sometimes competing interests of the various dominant classes is yet another way the courts serve as mediators in the existing class dictatorship. At the federal level, in its current iteration, the right-fascist Supreme Court and right-fascist federal courts have gradually shifted the balance of power in favor of the right-fascist bourgeois party, the Republican Party, through legal maneuvering. For example, in the Black-plurality region of the south commonly called the Black Belt, the courts have helped entrenched GOP dominance by repealing the Voting Rights Act and approving gerrymandered districts designed to severely curb the Black vote. This exceptionally fertile area is where the highest concentration of slave plantations were located in the United States, and remains to this day as the region where the Black population of the U.S. remains most concentrated.

II. Legitimizing Class Rule

The courts also legitimize the class rule of the bourgeoisie. First and foremost, by acting as an “independent” agent that pretends to be above the petty concerns of financiers and tycoons, the courts can give the appearance that it is not, in fact, the ruling capitalist class that is waging a war on the poor, on the Black, Indigenous, Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and other nations; it is not the capitalists who are doing the oppressing but the “legal system.” Capitalist-aligned legal reformers can then get on the rostrum and give heartfelt speeches about “criminal justice reform” to further confuse the issue.

When exploitation is too intolerably naked, or when extreme injustices arise, the court system gives an avenue for those from other classes to attempt to vent their anger. Tort cases can be brought against the businessman in his Mercedes who drunkenly damages property; in theory, it is possible to bring a lawsuit against an employer who commits wage theft. Although it is more often than not the case that the party with the larger pocketbook wins the court case, the court system permits the capitalists to pretend that a general sense of “justice” prevails in the U.S.

Open and flagrant violations of the social compact and the law are punished by offering up sacrificial members of the ruling class — take, for example, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who procured children for abuse by the members of the ruling class. None of their clients have been indicted, and it is likely none will. They have become sacrifices for the sins of the ruling class.

To a certain extent, the courts also appear as a kind of public service to the other classes, allowing petit-bourgeois businesspeople, craftspeople, smallholders, and even laborers, to bring suits against one another before what purports to be a neutral arbiter.

III. Protecting Property and Property Relations

The primary purpose of the criminal law system is to protect the social, economic, and property relations of the ruling class. It works in conjunction with the police to act as the enforcement arm of the state. Property crimes account for roughly 7/8ths of all prosecutions in the United States in 2019 according to the F.B.I.’s own statistics — 6,925,776 property crime offenses against 1,203,808 violent offenses. This number is even higher when one takes into account that some of these “violent offenses” also constitute the policing of property — for example, charges that arise when someone is physically stopped by loss prevention, or for attempting to prevent police from slamming their head into the curb. Some of these violent crimes result from the enforcing of social relations, and so on.

Without the power of the police and the court to prevent the working class from rising up and taking what they need to live, without the threat of hoses, rubber bullets, police tanks, live ammunition, police terror, and the accompanying complex of courts and prisons that then levy punishment, incarceration, and judicial slavery, the mansions of the rich would soon be torn down and their wealth given to those they kept it from.

For instance, the Supreme Court, in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson defended the “right” of states (Louisiana in Plessy) to establish laws that required “equal, but separate” racial segregation to protect the property interest and social relation of whiteness.

IV. Making Strategic Retreats and Class Concessions

Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case which ruled that racial segregation in public school was unconstitutional, was decided in 1954. In 1950, Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India and the first question he was asked was “Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negros?” In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (“RCNL”) led a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide bathrooms for Black persons. The RCNL then led campaigns against the state highway patrol and a segregated Nashville bank. By 1953, Soviet media began a full-on assault against this racism and colorism — it has come down to us as the alleged (but not actual) tu quoque fallacy “and you are lynching Negroes.”

When the imperialists are flush with plunder, when the imperialist wars were at their height, when the organized power of the U.S. working class threatens either through its own internal strength or the borrowed strength of lands where the revolution triumphed, then U.S. Supreme Court is prepared to give up concessions, sometimes quite large; to allay the intensity of class struggle, it extends crumbs to the working classes, oppressed genders, and the nationally oppressed. These were the conditions when the Supreme Court granted the “rights” to interracial marriage, to contraception and birth control, to abortion, to gender equality, to equal treatment before the law.

Those conditions will likely never return. Now, the U.S. empire is contracting. The rate of profit continues to fall. The only way such concessions will be won again is in the teeth of organized, working class power — the kind that threatens the homes of senators and the existence of the U.S. state itself.

V. Engaging in Class Warfare

And what does the court do when the rate of profit is falling, when the organized, class-conscious members of the ruling class need to intensify exploitation? We have witnessed it. The Supreme Court acts as both the sword and shield of capital. Now, as the U.S. monopolists falter on the world stage and at home, besieged by the contradictions which cannot be suppressed, the most reactionary element rises to the fore and demands outright domination and rule. So, the court strips away all protections, little by little, and subjects the working classes to the unmasked brutality of the U.S. terror-dictatorship; the same brutality that has been, for nearly two centuries, visited on other nations now returns home, a thin and wretched vulture, to pick at the domestic carcass.

The U.S. Supreme Court is not the last, best, hope of the left-leaning bourgeoisie or their dying class-collaborationist alliance. It is a lance that has been tempered and fire-hardened by fascists to drive into the heart of the working class.