When they first become radicalized, many progressives adopt a well-meaning, but fundamentally naive analysis of U.S. politics. Although they acknowledge the rampant conservatism, avarice, and imperialism guiding modern-day America, they often refer to our system as “broken,” as if these tendencies violate society’s intrinsic logic. In this view, our country has no structural bias towards any given class, and it would provide a democracy for everybody if it could only work “properly” again.
For example, when Ted Cruz raised $31 million right after launching his bid for the presidency, scores of progressives denounced this as a tremendous insult to fair elections. Yet only a few extended this to a broader critique. Most of them continued to treat the capitalist U.S. as an inherently good system gone bad.
Unfortunately, a cursory overview of U.S. governance, both historic and contemporary, paints a far more horrifying picture. The United States never sought to give everybody an equal voice. Further, its socioeconomic makeup will prevent this from ever happening, unless we upend the present order to build a new one.
Make no mistake: the system works beautifully, for the capitalists who constructed it.
“But wait,” your inner history student might say. “Didn’t the founding fathers draft a constitution geared towards universal equality?”
First of all, we should put little stock into what the word “equality” must have meant to white, patriarchal slaveholders, who certainly didn’t view the people they shackled and slaughtered as human beings. Still, their anti-democratic inclinations ran even deeper, as exemplified by James Madison’s claim that the U.S. senate should “be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
Statements of political intent rarely arrive with such clarity.
In addition, these words reflected more than the subjective wants of a few would-be oligarchs: they came to define this country’s central structures.
While the system has a democratic “shell,” and while this apparatus has become more inclusive over the past two centuries, it also features strong bonds between the capitalist system and state institutions.
These connections constantly secure and reproduce the dominance of money in the political process, such as when one branch of government rebuffs growing progressive sentiments in another by delivering reactionary verdicts based on a constitution that enshrines private property. If this sounds absurd, one should remember the Citizens United verdict, or read last year’s Princeton study on the lack of statistical impact by the popular will on Congressional activities. The researchers found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
As Lenin wrote, capitalist states boast an innate, class-based orientation, since they find themselves “bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie, permeated through and through with routine and inertia.”
So when we see presidential candidates rapidly raising millions, or elected officials routinely betraying campaign promises for corporate interests, we should hold no illusions about the system’s ultimate function. The rich built it to keep the working class away from the seat of power, so our perpetual oppression represents a feature, not a defect.
Capitalism is compatible with one form of democracy, and one form only: the democracy of the bourgeoisie, which necessarily implies their dictatorship over the toiling masses.
Where, then, do we go from here? Although reforms can be beneficial in the short term, only revolution can build a new structure, a structure that will allow and depend upon the mass participation of workers in politics.
The system ain’t broken, but it sure as hell needs to be smashed.
