Editorial Board
The 2026 US midterm electoral farce is unfolding in the context of continued economic crisis, greater accumulation of wealth among the top monopolists, and worsening general conditions for the masses. This antagonism is reflected in a political situation characterized by growing imperialist militarization and aggression amid its strategic defeat in its war against Iran, increased reactionization and repression, hysteria around electoralism, and disconnected rebellions and protests across the country verging on a situation of countrywide mass rebellion.
This two-part series explores why the elections are a farce and the need to boycott the elections in service of the reconstitution of the Communist Party USA.
The Farcical Nature of Bourgeois Democracy
Bourgeois democracy arose as a revolutionary development in contradiction to the despotism of feudal lords. In the ideological field, the greatest conquest of its demolition of the feudal system is the affirmation of popular sovereignty, that the people have the right to determine their own fate, up to and including the right to rebel and violently overthrow unjust leadership.
The propagation of this and other democratic principles were necessary for the bourgeoisie to mobilize the masses behind its leadership to overthrow the feudal lords and their privileges, securing conditions favorable for the development of capitalism.
With the formation of the bourgeois republic on the basis of bourgeois principles, the capitalist class formally enshrined freedom and equality of all people, and the bourgeois state was put forward as being in service of all people. The distinctions between the feudal estates were formally abolished and a parliament claiming to represent the whole of society was established. This was to be mediated through bourgeois democracy, separation of powers, and checks and balances to prevent a return to feudal tyranny.
However, the preservation of private property as a fundamental right negated all other rights. The concentration of ownership in the hands of a few nullifies the principles of freedom and equality underpinning popular sovereignty. Capitalists are free to exploit while workers are free to sell their labor-power. Bourgeois democracy is in essence democracy for the rich and dictatorship over the people. Bourgeois rights exist only for those who can afford them.
The formal recognition of freedom and equality under bourgeois democracy is a mask to legitimize the domination of the bourgeoisie over all other classes, ruling in the name of representing all society. Bourgeois rule relies on philosophical idealism, suggesting that because freedom and equality are guaranteed by law, they are therefore materially in effect.
In the United States in particular, these rights were further mutated by the stamp of slavery, which has left an indelible mark on the specific form of bourgeois democracy that continues to this day. The electoral college mediates the vote for presidency on account of equalizing representation between voters in slave vs free states, as slaves did not count as whole persons.
Through their domination of economic life, the bourgeoisie exercises its domination of political life by fusing capital with state power. This takes the form of corruption (campaign donations and lobbying), the alliance and interdependence of the state and capital, and securing positions in the state bureaucracy through elections. Politics is concentrated economics.
The state is the armed administrative wing of the ruling class. The bourgeois state is tied by a thousand strings to the stock market and therefore cannot be independent. Regardless of who fills its seats, the class character of the state machinery does not change. It is this “indirect” rule of the bourgeoisie that makes its dictatorship so secure. By propagating the view that it represents all people, it promotes the possibility of change through peaceful means and through electoralism in particular as opposed to the very means by which it seized power itself—violent revolution.
Universal suffrage under the conditions of bourgeois dictatorship—when a handful of families own almost all of the means of production and its distribution, media, education (all the means needed to run a successful campaign)—becomes a process for the masses to choose the representatives of the exploiting class. This is not only because they are typically the ones who can run campaigns, but also because of the class character of the state. Bourgeois bureaucracy is established to maintain and expand the interests of monopoly capital.
The attacks on voting rights have served to cause some confusion on the question of bourgeois democracy. Electoral cretins spread confusion on voting by conflating the formal right to vote with self-determination. The proletariat lacks political power, which remains the case regardless of whether they have the right to vote or not. Fundamentally, all workers are disenfranchised because there is not equality in the electorate between the few who own everything and the many who own nothing. Whether the bourgeoisie organizes itself as a democracy or otherwise does not change the nature of their rule as a bourgeois dictatorship.
The ongoing reactionary attacks on voting rights (through gerrymandering, various legislation and maneuvers) are carried out by both parties against the voting base of the other. The attacks highlight the farcical nature of bourgeois democracy, where candidates aim to win elections in part by restricting the ability to vote. In the US, the exclusion of the masses has been the most perfected on racial and class lines, making its electoral system particularly farcical.
The struggle for democratic rights is a justified struggle, but can never be fully achieved under capitalism because the exercise of rights is contingent on the ownership of private property. The struggle for democratic rights must be combined with the struggle for the conquest of power in order for workers to exercise their power as a class.
Reactionization Further Negates Bourgeois Democracy
Bourgeois democracy has always been farcical because it has always been predicated on private ownership of property; it was always a democracy for a select few. The transition from free competition to monopoly capitalism at the turn of the 20th century and the onset of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, has made the elections even more farcical because even among the capitalists there is less of a difference. Imperialism is reaction all along the line. Today, in the final years of imperialism—the period of the Strategic Offensive of the World Proletarian Revolution, which began around 1980—imperialism is in its last 50-100 years of its existence, and the farce reaches new levels with every election cycle.
Imperialist decay is politically manifested in the process of reactionization: monopolization increases, greater power and wealth is concentrated in fewer hands around the executive branch, greater misery and poverty accumulates among more people, and the few who have everything strive for complete domination. This means the monopolists pour more money into the elections and compete with each other to exclude the masses wooed by the contending mafia while increasing hysteria to buy votes through empty promises, threats, and electoral blackmail.
Reactionization makes the elections more farcical. It negates the bourgeois principle of the separation of powers to manage the competing interests among the bourgeoisie and increasingly concentrates power in the executive as each political mafia strives to represent the ruling class more exclusively.
The growing contradictions between the three branches, trending toward the negation of the legislative and judicial for the executive branch, is the political manifestation of the growing contradiction within the US imperialist ruling class. Both parties aim to resolve this contradiction through the concentration of power in the executive branch toward presidential absolutism.
The imperialist ruling class is more united than divided on the basis of common class interests as the sole hegemonic imperialist superpower. The contradiction is more intense between the two mafias as each aims for control over the state bureaucracy while favoring those monopolies it aligns itself with most.
The number and duration of government shutdowns is an indication of this. Shutdowns occur when the legislature does not agree on legislation to finance the federal government before the next fiscal year begins. The first Trump administration had three government shutdowns, for a total of 71 days. At the time, two of these shutdowns held a record for the longest government shutdown in US history, each for 35 days. Now, less than two years into Trump’s second term, there have already been three shutdowns, for a total of 123 days. Once again, two of these held the record for the longest shutdown, first the 2025 government-wide shutdown for 43 days, and more recently the 76-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. The number of total government shutdowns in the 21st century is equal to the total number of prior shutdowns, while the total number of days of the former (212) far exceeds the total number of the latter (37), showing that both the frequency and extent of the shutdowns are increasing.
Corresponding to this is the increase in the use of executive orders and the reach of these orders to bypass the other two branches. The second Trump administration signed more executive orders in his first year alone (232) than during his entire first term (220), and signed more executive orders in his first 100 days in office (143) than any other president.
Trump’s executive orders have aimed to expand the executive branch and have increasingly come into collusion and contention with the other two branches.
Examples of increased contention include waging war without declaring war to bypass congressional approval; freezing federal grants and foreign “aid” without congressional approval; mass deportation efforts evading congressional approval and Supreme Court decisions; attempting to override established decisions around citizenship and asylum; and imposing sanctions (tariffs) on more than 90 countries, which were reimposed in a different form after being blocked by the Supreme Court.
In an example of collusion, the Supreme Court ruled in June 2026 in the case Trump v. Slaughter that Congress cannot limit the president’s ability to fire federal agency commissioners, stating in the majority opinion, “Neither Congress nor the courts may saddle him with those with whom he cannot work. Subordinates who exercise the President’s power are subject to removal by him.”
Such a decision had been previously rejected by the Supreme Court on several occasions, with a 1988 majority opinion explaining that such an “illimitable power of removal” would lead to a “coercive influence” and threaten commission independence.
The June ruling intensifies the contradiction between the political factions of the ruling class, allowing the ruling party to use its position to further centralize power around the executive and enhance its domination of the state bureaucracy. It also allows the monopolists to clutch its strings on those representatives they bought all the more tightly, to let them know they will be cut loose should they disobey. This also strengthens the basis for the officials of the legislative and judicial branches to undercut their own branch and their relative independence of the executive.
The process of reactionization is accelerated when the ruling party holds a trifecta, meaning control of the presidency, House, and Senate (a term that aptly comes from horse betting). While Trump has had a trifecta for the first two years of his second term and has made the most of it with the rapid centralization of power under the Republican mafia, the midterm electoral farce threatens this control.
The increased emphasis on loyalty to the party (and in the case of Trump, loyalty to him) and its favored monopolists is seen in the rapid hirings, firings, and resignations of officials under the Trump administration. The turnover rate of the second Trump administration has hit a record, surpassing the previous record under his first administration.
The “nonpartisan” nonprofit Partnership for Public Service writes, “Twenty-seven Senate-confirmed officials within the Cabinet departments have already departed the administration. This is nearly two and a half times as many as Trump’s first administration (11) and over six times as many as the average between the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations (4.3).”
The report adds, “Rising departures and falling nominations feed the same problem: a widening set of vacant posts increasingly filled by acting officials the president can install without Senate confirmation.”
All of this is part of the process of concentrating power around the executive: 1. The president can remove commissioners at will, 2. Increased emphasis on loyalty to the party and the particular interests of its favored monopolists, which ultimately amounts to subservience to the executive, and 3. Vacated positions are filled with acting officials, bypassing Senate confirmation.
A Note on Reactionization vs. Fascism
Reactionization is different from fascism. Fascism is corporativism, the restructuring of the state, economy, and society on corporate lines, forcing monopolization and the incorporation of the masses into the state under a single direction. It arises on the basis of a threat of revolution.
Today, the main trend promoting fascism is social democracy (also known as social fascism), which pushes for the nationalization of the means of production under the imperialist state and the mobilization of the people behind the state. While such a trend has some ascendancy within the Democratic mafia, it is mainly weak and secondary at the moment, but will continue to gain traction as the conditions of the masses worsen and rebellions become more frequent and violent.
What Verein der Neuen Demokratic Peru (Association for New Democracy in Peru based in Germany, known as VND Peru) said about the 2024 presidential elections still holds today: “in these elections, the problem that has been at stake is under which banner was this greater centralization of Power in the Executive going to occur as part of the process of reactionization of the imperialist bourgeois State. It has not been, therefore, a struggle between reactionary democracy or fascism.”
The Fusion of Private Monopoly Capital and the State
The rise of monopoly capitalism at the turn of the 20th century reflected in the superstructure by increasingly blurring the boundaries between the state and the economy. Today, in the final years of imperialism, that of its extreme decomposition and its sweeping away by World Proletarian Revolution, this trend reaches monstrous extremes.
The fusion of monopoly capital and state power aims to maximize profits (increase exploitation) and increase militarization through greater centralization of power around the executive branch. This takes on a variety of forms in the US today.
One form is the increase in state monopoly capital, with the federal government under the Trump administration taking a stake in industries deemed critical to “national security”: US Steel; MP Materials, Lithium America, Trilogy Metals, and Vulcan Elements (rare earth monopolies); Intel and xLight (semiconductors); and Westinghouse (nuclear reactors). The administration has also suggested the possibility of taking a stake in arms monopolies, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick commenting in 2025, “Lockheed Martin makes 97 percent of their revenue from the US government. They are basically an arm of the US government.”
Such schemes build off record subsidies granted to monopolies under the Biden administration, which the Trump administration in some cases directly cited as justification for federal ownership.
This trend is generally championed by social democrats. In June, Bernie Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the US government 50% ownership of the largest artificial intelligence (AI) monopolies in the country.
While the US ruling class overwhelmingly prefers private monopoly capital, state monopoly capital develops in industries critical to military production and logistics, in service of preparing for and carrying out war.
On the flip side of this is privatization and deregulation, which serves the same end by allowing monopolies to broaden their abilities and reach. For example, a national security memorandum in August allows select monopolies to carry out cyber-attacks against foreign forces.
Another form of the fusion of monopoly capital and state power is the bourgeoisie taking on direct roles in the government. The “revolving door” between the state bureaucracy and monopolies is the rule rather than the exception, and the indirect rule of the bourgeoisie becomes more direct.
For example, according to the BlackRock Transparency Project, between 2004-2018 the world’s largest asset manager “hired at least 84 officials who served in various governmental roles including as policymakers in Washington, as central bankers, and as employees of foreign governments. The officials worked at many key institutions, including the Department of Treasury, the White House, government-sponsored enterprises (GSE), and central banks around the world. Some of those same officials met frequently with BlackRock employees while serving in government positions.”
As of June 2025, the Trump administration’s top officials had a total net worth of more than $450 billion. Within a year, one of these officials (Elon Musk) would go on to become the world’s first trillionaire. Trump’s cabinet alone had a net worth of $13.8 billion, compared to $118 million for Biden’s cabinet, $6.2 billion for Trump’s first term, and $2.8 billion for Obama’s second term. “As Chairman Gonzalo pointed out on one occasion, now these prominent members of the financial oligarchy are serving themselves directly from the pot” (VND Peru).
Finally, there is the expansion of repression, both in terms of its reach and intensity, in which the violent arm of the state is combined with the economic demands of the monopolists. The clearest example of this is the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror to enforce labor discipline, and specifically targeting workers (for example, Operation Highway Shield targeting foreign-born truck drivers) and union leaders. Other examples are the dismantling of federal unions and the mass layoffs of federal employees at the start of Trump’s second term, and weakening workers’ protections through attacks on the National Labor Relations Board.
More broadly, the increase in political repression takes a proactive approach to preempt and undermine mass rebellions against the actions and policies of US imperialism domestically and internationally. While such repression may initially target activists, it sets precedence to be used against the masses more broadly. This includes the state-sanctioned witch hunts against pro-Palestine activists (notably under the Biden administration) and those who spoke out against ultra-reactionary media personality Charlie Kirk following his annihilation; the Antifa executive order and presidential memorandum (NSPM-7) in September 2025, which broaden the scope of repression to anyone who is opposed to US imperialism or even just in contention with the ruling party (including in the context of carrying out legal activity), and increase the intensity of repression by tacking on domestic terrorism charges; and its expansion under Secretary of State Marco Rubio with the July summit on “far-left terrorism”, the report on Cuba as the “Capital of 21st Century Communism”, and the ensuing investigations and congressional subpoenas into organizations opposed to the Republican mafia.
That such precedence will be used to attack workers has already been revealed in the federal government’s investigation into unions in Minnesota on the grounds of their connection to alleged anti-ICE “domestic terrorism”, with the government scrutinizing and surveilling the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the AFL-CIO.
How Monopolists Gorge Themselves Through the State
The interdependence of the state and monopolies means that the state relies on monopolies for its functioning while monopolies rely on the state to manage its interests and boost its profits.
According to the Cato Institute, the US government gives businesses about $181 billion a year, which ballooned under the Biden administration. “More industries are becoming dependent on the federal government and driven by politics, which is a dangerous move toward central planning in the economy,” its report on “corporate welfare” says. The monopolists of course cannot have a planned economy in the way socialism does due to the speculative and profit-driven nature of capitalism, but what these bourgeois analysts point to is the greater fusion and inter-dependence of the state and monopolies.
The elections are the process by which the bourgeoisie settles its competing interests through democratic means. They pit their finances against one another for the appointment of their favored representatives to positions in the state bureaucracy in the hopes of gaining an edge over their competitors. “The spoils of the dispute are in the economy,” VND Peru writes, “The billion dollar sums of subsidies and protectionism that both factions promote”.
The US ruling class is more united than divided, and the factions primarily collude in their common interests as part of the general competition among the imperialist powers internationally. Between the two parties, there is generally even support for and from finance capitalists, arms monopolies, and auto monopolies, to name a few. However, there is still contradiction within each of these sectors and within each of these parties, so while overall there is “bipartisan” support, certain monopolies’ interests are better represented by one party than another.
The Biden administration channeled over a trillion dollars in grants, subsidies, and loans to monopolies in tech, renewable energy, automotive manufacturing, utilities, telecommunication, healthcare, and others through legislation such as the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Enhanced Affordable Care Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Democrats received record bribes from the tech sector in 2020—about three times as much as the Republicans—and Biden faithfully delivered to those who bought his way into office.
Biden’s subsidies set the precedent for the Trump administration, who would take this even further. According to the Cato Institute, “Biden’s corporate welfare laws created subsidies for industries that had not previously received regular federal subsidies, including semiconductors, freight rail, and electricity transmission. These industries may become dependent on subsidies and lobby to expand them, and that will encourage other industries to seek their own handouts,” highlighting the role of the expanded subsidies in deepening the interdependence of the state and monopolies.
The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed in July 2025 provides a glimpse into the allegiances of the Republican mafia. Jon Whiten, deputy director of the think tank Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told CBS news, “The top 1%, in fact, are in line to get $1 trillion in tax cuts from the law over a decade” and that the law “included a potpourri of special subsidies and tax breaks that have slashed the tax bills of many hugely profitable corporations,” noting that “Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla together took home an astonishing $51 billion in tax breaks in 2025, much of it from the new law.”
The Wall Street Journal included in its list of “winners” of OBBBA monopolies in oil and gas, tech, arms, airlines, private schools, sports team owners, private equity, and real estate. Agribusiness monopolies are another big winner. These sectors either favor the Republican mafia or contribute generally evenly to both mafias. The one exception is the tech sector, which Trump succeeded in wresting from the Democratic mafia, lending itself to the latter’s worsening crisis.
The OBBBA is funded by cuts to social programs for the poor such as Medicaid and foodstamps, and through sanctions (the so-called tariffs) the Trump administration imposed nearly a year later. The bill also cut programs financing renewable energy monopolies, taxed private colleges and universities, and reduced the amount of Medicaid payments hospitals can receive—mainly the benefactors of the Democrat mafia.
Politics as Concentrated Economics
The economic interests of the monopolists manifest in specific policies carried out by the two parties.
The Trump administration’s increase in ICE terror targeting foreign-born workers is one such example. The industries with the highest concentration of foreign-born workers are construction and agriculture. These foreign-born workers are among the lowest paid, work in the most dangerous conditions, and have the least legal protections owing to their legal status, making their conditions in the US precarious and thus more exploitable. The use of ICE terror is a weapon in the hands of the state to increase labor discipline, to make workers afraid to rebel and organize, and has specifically been used to target labor organizers within these industries. Construction and agricultural monopolies support the Republican mafia over the Democratic mafia with 2-3 times more contributions.
Both mafias use ICE terror as a way to manage the flow of labor and labor discipline in accordance with the needs of monopolies, though the specific differences in which the two mafias use terror relate to the differences in their views on how to best maintain and expand US imperialism.
Who have been the top beneficiaries of Trump’s wars of aggression against Venezuela and Iran? First and foremost oil and gas monopolies, who contribute to the Republican mafia over seven times more than the Democrats.
The US war of aggression against Iran represents a synthesis of the processes outlined above—stacking the state bureaucracy with those loyal to the Republican mafia and to Trump personally regardless of qualifications, greater centralization of power around the executive to carry out war without the authorization of Congress, using the state to maximize the immediate interests of the monopolists most favored by the ruling party, all of which have helped contribute to a strategic defeat for US imperialism from which it cannot fully recover.
This is what underpins the Democrat mafia’s claimed opposition to the war—it has weakened US imperialism, and while some monopolies have profited immensely, others have been hurt. The Democrats prefer to wage war through starvation, sanctions, and arming their lackeys to minimize rebellion and risk to US imperialism.
The two parties vie to be the sole representatives of the imperialist ruling class. Each party has its own vision for how to best represent the interests of US imperialism. The increased contradiction between the two parties manifests in their sharper rhetoric and actions targeting each other. Under the Biden administration, multiple attempts were made to charge and imprison Trump and his supporters, with some success. Upon assuming office in his second term, Trump has expanded this scope, signing an executive order on his first day in office to, ironically, “end the weaponization of the federal government.” He overturned the sentences of his supporters from the reactionary January 6 riot while using the Justice Department to pursue his opponents, such as former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton—officials aligned with the Democratic mafia and/or who have betrayed Trump personally.
Finally, the increasing hysteria and individualist political violence surrounding the elections follows from the increased tension between the two mafias. There have been 18 reported assassination attempts against Trump, far more than any other president. While the validity of some of these attempts have been called into question from commentators across the political spectrum, arguing they are stunts aimed at either increasing his popularity or as a pretext to increase repression, the use of individualist violence to achieve certain political objectives is on the rise.
Because the contradiction between the two parties is on the basis of common class interests of exploitation and oppression, they will quickly unite against the people, and this is what is fundamental. There is no room for the masses’ interests in the electoral farce, a competition to see who can be the best representative of the imperialist ruling class.
Image: The United States Capitol, 2024. Credit: Oren Rozen on Wikimedia Commons.
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