Farce is Dead! Long Live Farce!

Introduction

“The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realize the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph.” – Vladimir Lenin, “Left” Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. We have just witnessed one such week. In a matter of days, the political apparatus of the United States was shaken to its core; first by the Presidential debate between incumbent President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump; and second by the Supreme Court decision in the case Trump v. United States. Both events carry equally serious implications for the future of this demented country.

Readers of our previous article will know that we are quite critical of electoral politics, especially in the US. Nonetheless, we feel that the 2024 US Presidential debate to be a significant moment in US politics, whose substance demands the attention of Marxists in the US. The decision to hold a debate at all is strange in a way, as these are the same two candidates as the last election cycle, and they make many of the same promises as the last election cycle. The men are the same, but the times have changed. The decision to hold a debate was motivated less by the need to learn more about the policy plans of each candidate, as the policies are largely the same, and more by the Democratic Party’s desire to relieve the concerns of their supporters that Biden is too old and senile to serve a second term as President. For Trump, the debate was an opportunity to reintroduce himself to the American public in his own words.¹

We will not be bothering to fact-check Trump's more outrageous statements from the debate, as there is already an entire industry devoted to doing so. We would not be contributing anything to the discussion by trying to fact-check him. Biden is also a pathological liar anyway. As Marxists, we understand that lies can betray their tellers. What we are truly interested in here, what we wish to focus on, is the substance of the debate.

The entirety of this essay was written before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. So it does not factor into any of our analysis here. At the time of writing, we feel that the event was rather inconsequential, as we were already forecasting a Trump victory in the 2024 election. If the assassination attempt proves to be more consequential once more information comes to light, we may decide to write on the subject, but nothing about the event stands out to us at the current moment. If we have one thing to say on the matter, it is that this is yet another reminder to never individualize systemic issues. If Trump had fallen, it would only be a matter of time before someone else took his place.

1. The Debate

1.1. Economy/Jobs:

Trump is correct in asserting that employment rose during his first term, at least prior to the pandemic. However, he omits the fact that employment had been rising under his predecessor as well.² Another convenient omission is the fact that the rate of job growth slowed under Trump. We also cannot ignore how employment plummeted with the onset of the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020. Even those who may be critical of Trump may wonder why we draw attention to this fact. We do so because even though the President only has indirect control over much of the economy, there were still measures which Trump and his administration could have undertaken, which were undertaken by other countries, that would have prevented many job losses, such as offering subsidies and other incentive to companies who kept employees employed through the pandemic. When the pandemic struck, there were many helpful things that could’ve been done. But to the extent that Trump’s administration did anything helpful, they deliberately undercut these measures by also being unhelpful in other ways.

Biden’s claiming to have added jobs to the economy is equally as erroneous as Trump’s. Record breaking job growth is no herculean accomplishment when your predecessor lost just as many jobs, and this is reflected in the job statistics. The Jobs which Biden has added to the economy, do not appear to be new jobs, but, rather, jobs that were lost at the beginning of the pandemic. Biden also makes a convenient omission of his own: that employment is beginning to trend downwards as the business cycle is now giving way to another crisis cycle.

In short, Trump is correct in attacking Biden on the state of the economy, but for all the wrong reasons. True, the economy is in bad shape. True, the current state of the economy is unbearable for the poorest members of American society. Even Trump’s scaremongering that things could get even worse is also true, firstly in the sense that things can always get worse, and secondly in the sense that economists of varying tendencies have been forecasting a massive recession since before the pandemic. In actual fact, the economy is where it likely would have been had the pandemic never happened in the first place. To the extent that this can be credited to Biden, it is only because it is happening under his administration; it is a mere correlation, not a causation.

It is hardly even worth dwelling on monetary inflation here. While rising prices are a very real problem for those who survive by selling their labor power, Trump’s using it as a means of attacking Biden is just as erroneous as his attacks over unemployment. Inflation, like unemployment, is a Capitalist problem to which there is no Capitalist solution. Because Biden and Trump are both Capitalist candidates, they have no interest in solving such problems, only managing such problems as their wealthy backers see fit, as well as invoking said problems for the purpose of scoring cheap political points. The same goes for all discussion of the national debt in this debate.

1.2. Roe v. Wade:

Discussion of family planning by both candidates was more or less incoherent during this debate. They were more interested in using it as a springboard to discuss other topics which we will cover later. What we wish to dwell on here is Biden’s promise of restoring Roe v. Wade, the 50 year precedent which was overturned by the Supreme Court in its decision in the Dobbs case in 2022.

We don’t fault Biden for thinking that it was a good idea to make such a promise, as it is abundantly clear that thinking is a skill which no longer comes easily to him, but we are truly baffled that those who were helping him prepare for this debate thought this was an acceptable response to questions about abortion access. If Biden or the Democratic Party had truly wanted to protect abortion access, they would’ve tried to codify Roe v. Wade at the beginning of Biden’s term, when the Democrats still held a majority in congress³. The odds that it would have succeeded are questionable, as the conservative-controlled Supreme Court could still potentially strike down any attempt at codification, but at least an attempt at codification would’ve been better optics than standing by as 50 years of legal precedent was thrown out the window! Additionally, Biden can still attempt to codify abortion access unilaterally via executive order at any time. The fact that an executive order can also still be overturned by the Supreme Court does not change the very observable fact that Biden is not fighting for any of the things he told voters he would fight for. This is also true in regards to packing the Court, something which legal scholars agree the President has the power to do.  If he isn’t doing any of it during his first term, what reason does anyone have to believe that his second term will be any different? All Biden did by promising to restore Roe v. Wade was put his and his party’s opportunism on full display. Roe v. Wade is dead, the Democrats were accomplices to the murder, yet they somehow think that it is a winning issue for them!

It is also worth dwelling momentarily on what is meant by “restoration of Roe v. Wade.” Many will probably assume that he meant: to codify Roe v. Wade into law. But restoration could just as easily mean to restore Roe v. Wade as legal precedent, which, in addition to being a more precarious legal status, is a power that the president doesn’t have because legal precedents are set through judicial review. Actions aside, Biden’s promises to the American people are not even as strong in word as they once were.

1.3. Immigration/Border security:

The topic of immigration in the US is often a site where the Republicans and Democrats draw a false dichotomy between each other, but not during this debate. The oft-discussed, but never-to-be-platformed, immigrant is once again relegated to little more than a political prop as both candidates compete to display their racism before a national audience.

This portion of the debate begins with a very loaded premise: that the US border with Mexico, a very heavily policed border, is somehow not secure, that “illegal” immigrants are “pouring” into the US at record rates, and that this poses a problem. What kind of problem? We do not know for certain as it is never explicitly stated. A problem for whom? Vague allusions are made to “overburdened border states”, and that is all the specification we are given.

The immigration policy of the US, regardless of who sits in the oval office, has always been abysmal from a humanitarian perspective. Much of it appears senseless if it is not understood as an extension of the US’ economic policy. At no point in the history of the US has there ever not been a two tier labor system in which there is a relatively privileged upper stratum of the working class, and a lower, more exploited stratum which is often employed the production of raw materials and simple goods such as cotton or foodstuffs. This serves two important purposes in a Capitalist economy: 1) the Bourgeoisie is able to use the threat of the expansion of this lower stratum of workers to divide the working class, as workers from the upper stratum of workers cannot compete with workers from the lower stratum on the labor market, pushing wages down for the entire working class as workers from the upper stratum are coerced into accepting lower compensation for their labor in order to remain competitive on the labor market; and 2) by lowering labor costs, the Bourgeoisie is able to produce cheaper commodities which are more competitive on the market, achieve a higher rate of profit, or some combination thereof. Much is often made about how this sleight of hand is given a racist flourish to complete the trick, but the mechanics of this tiered labor system would work the same way even without explicit racism. For example, while the European countries employ the same concept, relegating largely African and West Asian workers to a lower labor stratum, the countries of Western Europe in particular also relegate many Eastern European workers to a lower stratum of the working class. Many workers in the US are undoubtedly racist, this much is true, and we cannot forget that, but we must also remember that this racism is rooted in competition for employment. It is a dynamic that doesn’t exclusively exist between white and non-white workers, it is just the most pronounced between these two groups.

After the abolition of slavery, the American Bourgeoisie needed to find another way to maintain this two tiered labor system. Since the lower stratum of the working class was already racialized as a result of slavery, it was quite natural to substitute the immigrants of non-European countries for the slave. This is when the US passed its first racially targeted immigration laws in the late 19th century, which were targeted at the Chinese in particular, but was later expanded to include peoples from across Asia.⁴ These laws were never intended to keep Asian refugees out of the country, the only way to do that would’ve been to stop British imperialism in Asia. These laws were designed to make it so that these people who were looking for a new home would have no option other than to violate US law to settle in the US. Undocumented immigrants are less likely to strike, unionize, or organize in any way because they are rightfully fearful that they will be deported if they are discovered.⁵ US imperialism in Latin America has created a refugee crisis not unlike what was created in Asia by British imperialism, and so today the stereotypical undocumented migrant is a person of Latin American descent, but a difference of ethnicity does not change the underlying mechanics of the system that creates undocumented migrants.

While the upper stratum of the Proletariat may want stricter enforcement of immigration laws, the American Bourgeoisie does not want enforcement. Deporting too many members of the lower stratum of the Proletariat would reduce the Bourgeoisie’s ability to use the lower stratum to undercut the upper stratum.⁶ Instead, the Bourgeoisie simply want stricter immigration laws and harsher penalties for violators because this gives them leverage with which they can further coerce and exploit the lower stratum of workers. Enforcement of already strict immigration laws is only necessary insofar as it gives credence to the Bourgeoisie’s threats of deportation.

All this context is necessary to explain that when Trump and Biden speak of securing the US border with Mexico they are talking about class warfare. And wide sections of the American working class applaud!

Though it may seem only tangentially related, it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which asserts that there is a plot to replace the white population of the US with non-white people. Popular versions of the conspiracy theory assert that the Democrats are behind this plot because it will supposedly help them win more elections (as if it’s in any way unreasonable for racialized peoples to vote for the less overtly racist of two parties).

Many exponents of this conspiracy theory cite declining birth rates in the US as well as the fact that immigrants make up an increasing percentage of the population. The statistics are indeed true, birth rates in the US are declining⁷ and the immigrant share of the population is increasing,⁸ but the reasons for why this is happening have nothing to do with replacing white people and everything to do with Capitalism.

As Marx writes at numerous points in Capital, but particularly in Chapter 25 of Volume I,⁹ as the productive forces of Capitalism develop in sophistication, the demand for labor shrinks in proportion to the demand for machinery, resulting in a growing unemployed population as Capitalism develops. However, the creation of modern birth control methods subverts this tendency of Capitalism. People today are choosing to have fewer children, not only because of poor economic prospects, but also because many people simply aren’t interested in raising children.¹⁰

This poses a problem for Capitalism. The existence of a large unemployed population helped keep wages low by increasing competition in the job market. The shrinking of this reserve army of labor shifts leverage away from employers and towards workers, who can no longer be easily replaced. Furthermore, even though demand for labor drops as the sophistication of the society’s productive forces increases, demand for labor rises as the scale of society’s productive forces increases. Since production needs to continually expand under Capitalism, falling birthrates and the shrinking of the unemployed population pose an existential threat to Capitalism by starving it of the labor required to produce surplus value.

Therefore, as a Capitalist country, the population of the country needs to not only increase, but increase as demanded by the expansion of production, and since birth rates are not high enough to accomplish this, US Capitalism is making up the difference with immigrant labor.¹¹ In other words: US Capitalism is no longer capable of reproducing its own proletariat to the extent required by production. This indicates an immense crisis within US Capitalism.

Exponents of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory are also correct in asserting that the white population of the US is decreasing in proportion to the non-white population,¹² but they are wrong in ascribing any moral value to this fact. Over a long enough period of time, the disappearance of the white population would pose an existential threat to the US’ racialized two tier labor system. However, the disappearance of the white population, which we stress is the result of entirely predictable socio-economic causes, is happening so slowly at the time of writing that we consider it far more likely that US Capitalism succumbs to its many other existential crises before it is able to complete this demographic transformation.

1.4. Foreign Policy:

The portion of the debate concerning foreign policy was perhaps the most farcical of the night. Trump’s political brand has always been very nationalistic. He made waves during his first Presidential campaign and term in office by openly questioning the US’ international agreements with other countries, especially the US’ commitment to NATO. While Trump was candid about not having any pathological attachments to the US’ international standing, he still saw utility in honoring the US’ agreements with other countries as long as it benefited the US. He berates Biden for the US’ entanglement with countries like the Ukraine and Israel, but there is no practical distinction between Biden’s policy towards these countries and what Trump’s policy towards these countries would have been had he won the 2020 Presidential election. Biden is not giving money and weapons to these countries free of charge, he is selling them the weapons and lending them the money to pay for that which they could not otherwise afford. American business interests have profited handsomely from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the genocide of the Palestinians. Profit is what Trump, himself a product of the business world, is all about. If Trump were the president right now, his supporters would forsake their nationalism to defend his hawkishness, as all bourgeois nationalists do. It is only by the grace of his defeat in 2020 that Trump is able to absolve himself of any American militarism that has taken place since he left office. Biden is serving the interests of the American Bourgeoisie just as Trump would have, the only difference between them is in their pathology.¹³ This section of the debate is yet another example of the false dichotomy, and therefore the false choice, between him and Biden.

That essentially closes the substantive portion of the debate. Covering the debate beyond this point would only result in us repeating ourselves. We will instead move on to the reaction to the debate and its significance.

2. The Significance of the Debate

As stated in our introduction, the reasons for why this debate was held were not the usual political reasons. Before the debate, the only difference that existed on paper was that the roles were reversed from what they were in 2020; whereas Biden was the challenger to Trump in 2020, he is now the incumbent President; and whereas Trump was the incumbent President in 2020, he is now the challenger to Biden. Rather than be a forum for “serious” political discussion, this debate was organized by the Democrats to quell concerns that Biden is losing his mental faculties; that he lacks the vitality necessary to serve a second term as President. Concerns which we consider well-founded, as Biden frequently struggles to read his own speeches from a teleprompter. Given that context, it may seem like a debate was a bad idea, and it was a bad idea, for if Biden can not deliver his own prepared speeches, why would he perform any better in an unscripted setting? On the other hand, refusal to participate in a debate would be an implicit admission that Biden is, in fact, unfit to serve as President, that he is incapable of acting as anything besides a face; a mascot.

News coverage leading up to the debate was not unlike the pregame coverage of a sporting event, highlighting how Biden had assembled an entire team to help him prepare for the debate at Camp David. Measures were also taken to put Trump at a disadvantage, such as having no live audience, or limiting question response times so that Trump could not dominate the conversation by rambling or interrupting Biden. Even if unintentional, it set an expectation. No sane person was expecting a dynamo, but they were expecting that their concerns about Biden’s faculties would be laid to rest.

The outcome of the debate was very much the opposite. Biden was frequently incoherent; he was unable to complete a thought at many points; and spoke in a muffled monotone the entire night. He looked alive, albeit barely alive. To be fair to Biden’s supporters, Trump was not exactly “sharp”  either in this debate. He had moments in which he rambled and misspoke just as Biden did. But even a butterknife may assume the appearance of a razorblade when studied in relation to Joe Biden.

The sting of this embarrassment is made all the more intense for the Democratic party by the fact that it was self inflicted. The Democratic-leaning media apparatus of the US¹⁴ portrayed younger primary challengers to Biden such as Marrianne Williamson as unserious candidates that no sane person would vote for over an incumbent President, and chastised those who voted “uncommitted” in protest of the Biden administration’s policy towards Israel. The party did not sanction any official primary debates, again sending the message that Biden was the only serious candidate. Then, knowing that Biden was facing increasing scrutiny over his health, but delusionally thinking that this scrutiny was misplaced, and also knowing how afraid Biden’s base is of Trump, decided to put the two men on stage together for a televised debate. What did the Democrats expect to happen? Did they think that Biden would suddenly become fifteen years younger and make an ass of Trump? Don Quixote had more common sense!

Did the Democrats really convince themselves that this debate wouldn’t go Trump’s way? He showed during his last two Presidential campaigns that he has little interest in debates. What Trump wants is the spotlight, the attention, nothing more. He said himself during the debate that “there’s nothing to debate.”¹⁵ And on this point we agree. From a purely strategic standpoint, it was a bad idea to even schedule a debate. All Trump had to do to get what he wanted was show up, and he did just that.

People who still support Biden try to brush aside criticism with the phrase “do not compare Biden to the almighty, compare him to the alternative.” They should be careful what they wish for. As we alluded to in our last article, and as the debate between Trump and Biden also makes clear, the two hardly differ at the policy level. Biden’s policy towards the border with Mexico has been more draconian;¹⁶ he has increased police funding and overseen the construction of “Cop Cities” across the country against the wishes of the racial justice advocates who helped deliver him to the white house;¹⁷ he has continued American militarism abroad and facilitated the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.¹⁸ Lending further credence to our analysis are the statements made by Biden himself during this debate, which essentially amount to “if you like Trump, you should vote for me instead, because I’m just like him!” As if the people who voted for Biden in 2020 wanted four more years of Trump, and as if the people who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 have any use for a cheap copy that won’t last another four years!

The dissonance is palpable. Biden’s every statement is contradicted in the same breath; each promise broken before it is pledged. Biden calls himself the most pro-labor President since Franklin D. Roosevelt and makes campaign speeches before conferences of UAW and IBEW workers as if they’ve forgotten how his administration stopped a rail workers’ strike that was making extremely reasonable demands;¹⁹ he promises to restore Roe v. Wade while knowing full well that the current Supreme Court will never allow it. If Biden’s word were currency, it would not be worth the paper it is printed on. The harder he tries to prove his worth, the more he displays his bankruptcy.

Upon first glance, Biden’s campaign strategy seems to be in open antagonism with the traditional voting base of the Democratic Party, and it very much is in many respects, but that does not mean that there is no underlying logic to Biden’s campaign messaging. Historically speaking, financiers, labor unions, NGOs, the media, and lobbyists have constituted the Democratic Party’s base of support,²⁰ though it is important to note that none of these groups are monolithic and some of these groups fluctuate more than others in terms of the extent to which they lean Democrat. All of these groups were part of the coalition that delivered Biden to the White House in 2020, with a singular irregularity, the addition of some Republican leaning groups, particularly within the Chamber of Commerce. Here’s how Time Magazine tells the story:

“About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer²¹ received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.

The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of antagonism. Though neither organization is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nation’s unions funnel hundreds of millions to Democrats. On one side is labor, on the other management, locked in an eternal struggle for power and resources.

But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder. “With tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted.”²²

Despite having run on the rhetoric of “law and order” since the Nixon administration, the economic disruption wrought by the Coronavirus pandemic caused Republican-leaning Capital interests to throw their weight behind Biden in 2020, fracturing the traditional Republican support base and tipping the scales in Biden’s favor. As the British Marxist collective Prolekult described this politically divided coalition: “they were united around a mutual disdain for civil unrest rather than any coherent political project.”²³ With centrist and conservative interests, Labor and Capital, represented in his constituency, the Biden administration was placed in an impossible balancing act, hence the frequent mixed messaging from the Biden administration. Despite being the face of America’s Party of Order, important Republican donors had lost faith in Trump’s ability to restore order, so Biden was elected to be the President of order. Despite having a challenging task laid before him, Biden has essentially succeeded in his mission, but in doing so, he has destroyed the material basis for his successful 2020 Presidential run. Metaphorically speaking, and probably literally speaking as well, Biden does not know what year it is. He is basing his campaign strategy on 2020 even though the current state of the country more closely resembles 2016, Democratic President and all. He has, more or less, restored the US back to its pre-pandemic conditions, back to the conditions that propelled Trump to the Presidency. Without these conservative deserters, it is reasonable to assume that Biden will not win reelection in 2024, given that 1), Biden’s 2020 election victory was remarkably narrow even with these conservative deserters in his bloc; and 2), the usual Democratic support base was not enough to put Hillary Clinton in the White House in 2016.

At the time of writing, there is much speculation over whether or not Biden will allow someone else to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President following his embarrassing debate performance. Many establishment Democrats have publicly called for Biden to step down from campaigning, but Biden has recently said in an interview with George Stephanoppulos that it would essentially take an act of God to make him step down.²⁴ We are very much of the opinion that it makes no difference whether or not Biden steps down from campaigning. Since 2016, the Democratic Party has consistently marginalized its more left-leaning representatives at every level, twice denying Bernie Sanders the Presidential nomination, allowing progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives to get redistricted, and not supporting Jamaal Bowman in his recent bid for reelection. The members of the Party who would most likely succeed Biden, such as Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsome, or Pete Buttigieg, are little more than younger versions of Biden. They offer no resolutions to the current crisis in US politics, which itself is born of a larger economic crisis. The fact that there is no political alternative to Biden, along with the fact he is politically no different from the last several Democratic nominees for President, makes it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party has no plans for the future. They are unable to offer anything other than the same impotent solutions that helped give political momentum to the Republican Party.

On the other side of things, Trump represents a similar phenomenon. In many respects, he is the culmination of a project that started with the Goldwater campaign in 1964. On the other hand, he came to power as an aberration in 2016, becoming the Republican nominee for President despite not securing the party’s support during the primary elections. The high turnover of his administration served the purpose of a political purge, reconstituting the party in his image. The only figures likely to succeed him in the coming years are sycophants who are quite adept at tailing, but not at leading. Just as Biden represents the Democratic Party’s final solution to all political crises, so too does Trump for the Republican Party. Unable to adapt to worsening conditions, the two parties are doomed to make the same tired motions while the rest of us are left to feel the worst effects of economic decay. It is abundantly clear: the old status quo is dead and the ruling class can no longer continue in the old way.

3. The Thermidorian Judiciary

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…” — US Declaration of Independence

As alluded to in our introduction, the political apparatus of the US was not only shaken by the Presidential debate, it was arguably shaken more by the Supreme Court decision in the case Trump v. United States. The case dealt with the subject of Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. The basis for the case arised when Trump invoked Presidential immunity from prosecution for his attempts to interfere with the 2020 Presidential election and his incitement of the January 6 Capitol Putch. Before Trump could be prosecuted for said infractions, the question of his immunity had to be settled. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the President is indeed immune from criminal prosecution for “official acts” even if said acts violate US law.²⁵

The Court’s decision has been the subject of much news and discussion since it was released. Many pundits have slammed the Court's decision, saying that it flies in the face of precedent. Many have said that this is a “bad decision” by the Court. But what exactly constitutes a “bad decision”? The US Constitution is already very vague about the powers and privileges that it grants to the President. The Constitution has nothing to say about what the President can’t do. Article II, Section 4, says that the President can be “removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”²⁶ This is the full extent to which the Constitution makes any mention of Presidential accountability. Impeachment is not a criminal/legal process, but a political process. If the President is impeached and found guilty of committing a crime, that isn’t the same as a felony conviction. All of the problems relating to partisan policy-making apply to impeachment, hence why it amounts to nothing in practice. Trump himself has survived the impeachment process twice. Since the Constitution makes no mention of it, there are only two ways to determine whether or not the President is immune from criminal prosecution: 1) amending the Constitution to include a clause on criminal immunity for the President, a process that presents all the same problems as impeachment; or 2) leaving the issue for the Court to decide, and the Court has made its decision!

However true our above point may be, critics of the Court’s decision are correct in saying that it flies in the face of precedents set by previous cases. But the Supreme Court is not bound by precedent. It is the highest Court in the country. Deciding whether or not precedents are to be upheld or overturned is the job of the Supreme Court. The only way to strip the Court of this power is by Constitutional amendment. The bottom line is that, regardless of what anyone thinks of the Court’s decision in this case, it was well within the current framework of the Constitution and the legal system.

So what can the President get away with now that the President is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts? The dissenting opinion from Justice Sotomayor gives a few examples:

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in ex- change for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”²⁷

While the Court’s decision was within the framework of the Constitution, the significance of the decision cannot be overstated. One of the few truly revolutionary things to come out of the American Revolution of 1776 was the idea that the State could be held to limited account by its citizens; that there were certain rules to which even the State was bound. But with this Supreme Court decision, the Court has declared that the executive is above the law, that the State is no longer accountable to its citizens. In that sense, in the sense that the central idea of the American Revolution is dead, it can be said that the American Revolution is dead. And just as the overthrow of the Second French Republic was accompanied by the cry “long live the Republic”, the overthrow of constitutional rule in the US will be accompanied by the cry “long live the Constitution!”

As an officer of the US, the President swears an oath to uphold the Constitution, but through the Constitution the Court has created a framework by which the President can overthrow the government and Constitution. It is contradictory, but it should not come as a surprise. Would the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte have been possible were it not for the powers already vested in him as President of the Second French Republic and the repressive laws passed by the National Assembly? Was it not with the powers of the Chancellery that Hitler established the Third Reich? The constitutions of all Bourgeois republics contain the seeds of their own abolition because these constitutions, if not produced by multiple warring classes, are produced by the Bourgeoisie, a class that is constantly at war with itself.

Many will soon be asking: “what will Biden do to obstruct the further shifting to the right of politics in this country?” Why he will do exactly as he has done when he is not actively facilitating this rightward shift: nothing!

Now that Trump is leading Biden in some polls, many political pundits are crying that democracy is under threat, but they forget that this country’s current political crisis is the product of that very same system of democracy. A system in which the demands of the great majority of people go unheard; in which someone can become Head of State with fewer votes than their opponent; where the candidates presented to voters and to the public are consistently unpopular. How do you expect anyone to seriously believe it’s worth saving? What good was US democracy in the first place? What use can there be for the useless?

4. The Historical Significance of an American Bonaparte

4.1. Defining Bonapartism

“If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état.” — Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

There are few Marxist concepts as frequently misunderstood as Bonapartism.²⁸ Some assert that it is simply “rule by the sword” (as if rule could be maintained by any other means in a class society!).²⁹ It is alternatively described as a Peasant or Petty-Bourgeois dictatorship, “the State fully alienated from society”, one-man dictatorship, among many other things. Many of these descriptions actually do correctly identify aspects of Bonapartism, and many of them can also be argued as having basis in Marx’s writings on the phenomenon. At the same time, all of the aforementioned descriptions are varying degrees of incomplete, especially when taken independently of each other.

In order to begin to draw a complete picture of the Bonapartist phenomenon, we must start where Bonapartism starts: the Peasantry. 

“The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself” (our italics).³⁰

In short, the Peasant mode of production does not draw the Peasantry into relation with itself the way that industrial Capitalism draws the Proletariat into relation with itself. The Peasant class is so diffuse that it cannot exercise its political will itself. The Peasantry is a working class, but it is not a social class. Thus, conditions are created for something like a State to bring the Peasant class together in a way that the class would not otherwise be capable of. On the other hand, the uniformity of interests in the Peasant class means that the Peasantry does not require democracy to resolve contradictions among itself in the same way that the Bourgeoisie does. And, finally, the fact that the Peasantry is one of the propertied classes means that it cannot exist in any capacity without the State, as without the State the Peasant’s claim to his property has no legitimacy. A Peasant with no property is just a Proletarian.

All that being said, however true it may be, it is still a mystification. The Peasantry is not unique among propertied classes insofar as it is dependent on the existence of the State. The Petty-Bourgeoisie and big Bourgeoisie, similarly, require a State to protect their property, create a trading space for these classes to sell their commodities, and enforce the use of a single currency within this trading space. And indeed, once it does emerge from the Peasantry, we see Bonapartism get embraced by other classes throughout history. When the Nazi Party began their Bonapartist experiment in Germany, they first emerged as a Petty-Bourgeois movement, only to be embraced by Germany’s monopolists later on.

This prompts the question: why does Bonapartism emerge from the Peasantry or the next most similar class?

For the simple reason that the Peasantry is the propertied class which is the most vulnerable to the crisis cycle of Capitalism.

As Marx writes in The Class Struggles in France, the Peasantry exists in a constant state of crisis even during the boom cycle of Capitalism:

“The country folk – over two-thirds of the total French population – consist for the most part of so-called free landowners. The first generation, gratuitously freed by the Revolution of 1789 from its feudal burdens, had paid no price for the soil. But the following generations paid, under the form of the price of land, what their semi-serf forefathers had paid in the form of rent, tithes, corvee, etc. The more, on the one hand, the population grew and the more, on the other hand, the partition of the soil increased, the higher became the price of the parcels, for the demand for them increased with their smallness. But in proportion as the price the peasant paid for his parcel rose, whether he bought it directly or whether he had it accounted as capital by his co-heirs, necessarily the indebtedness of the peasant, that is, the mortgage, also rose. The claim to a debt encumbering the land is termed a mortgage, a pawn ticket in respect of the land. Just as privileges accumulated on the medieval estate, mortgages accumulate on the modern small allotment. On the other hand, under the system of parcelisation the soil is purely an instrument of production for its proprietor. Now the fruitfulness of land diminishes in the same measure as land is divided. The application of machinery to the land, the division of labor, major soil – improvement measures, such as cutting drainage and irrigation canals and the like, become more and more impossible, while the unproductive costs of cultivation increase in the same proportion as the division of the instrument of production itself. All this, regardless of whether the possessor of the small allotment possesses capital or not. But the more the division increases, the more does the parcel of land with its utterly wretched inventory form the entire capital of the small allotment peasant, the more does investment of capital in the land diminish, the more does the peasant lack land, money, and education for making use of the progress in agronomy, and the more does the cultivation of the soil retrogress. Finally, the net proceeds diminish in the same proportion as the gross consumption increases, as the whole family of the peasant is kept back from other occupations through its holding and yet is not enabled to live by it.

In the measure, therefore, that the population and, with it, the division of the land increases, does the instrument of production, the soil, become more expensive and its fertility decrease, does agriculture decline and the peasant become loaded with debt. And what was the effect becomes, in its turn, the cause. Each generation leaves behind another more deeply in debt – each new generation begins under more unfavorable and more aggravating conditions; mortgaging begets mortgaging, and when it becomes impossible for the peasant to offer his small holding as security for new debts, that is, to encumber it with new mortgages, he falls a direct victim to usury, and usurious interest rates become so much the more exorbitant” (Marx’s italics).³¹

Even when Capitalism is in the middle of a boom cycle, the division of the soil that occurs as the Peasantry grows makes it increasingly difficult for the Peasant to produce any kind of surplus product to sell on the market. The Peasant needs to be able to sell his surplus to pay his taxes. The Peasant has to pay his taxes to fund the State. The State cannot operate without funding. And if the State cannot operate, it cannot protect the Peasant’s claim to his property. This contradiction in which the Peasant needs money, but his mode of production actively frustrates his attempts to make money, makes the Peasant vulnerable prey for the Usurer. Debts accumulated by the Peasant in the form of mortgages become another mechanism for his further immiseration.

In a rural country like France in the mid-19th century, the stability of the country was very closely linked with the stability of the Peasantry. A collapse in farm mortgages would decimate wide swathes of the French financial sector. Impoverishment of the Peasantry could undercut the State’s ability to fund itself through taxation, endangering all French property. And a collapse of French agricultural output would send the whole country into famine. Or as Marx put it: “[w]ith the progressive undermining of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses.”³²

The Second French Empire was not the dictatorship of the entire Peasantry however. To the extent that it was a dictatorship of the Peasantry, it was a dictatorship of the conservative Peasantry, who wanted to consolidate their holdings, as opposed to the revolutionized Peasantry, who had joined ranks with the industrial Proletariat against Capital and private property.

Again though, the Peasantry is not unique in this regard. All of the middle classes, the Petty-Bourgeoisie, the Artisan, the Shopkeeper, to the extent that they oppose big Capital, oppose it with the intention of safeguarding their current place within Bourgeois society.³³ As Marxists, we are accustomed to thinking of the State as the dictatorship of a particular class, yet to the undiscerning reader Bonapartism does not appear to fit this description even as Marx describes it in exactly these terms.

We are still far from uncovering the essence of Bonapartism though. We know that it arises first out of small property, but this is not enough for Bonapartism to overthrow Bourgeois democracy. The Second French Republic alienated the Peasantry and Petty-Bourgeoisie shortly after the founding of the Republic, but the Republic would exist with these class antagonisms until late-1851. In Germany, Bonapartist sentiments were widespread among the Petty-Bourgeoisie in the early-1920s, but Bonapartism would not overthrow Bourgeois democracy until 1933.

The Second French Empire could only come into being once the parliamentary Bourgeoisie, embodied in the Party of Order, had, by their constant infighting, created a political gridlock that alienated them from the extra-parliamentary Bourgeoisie the Party of Order was supposed to represent. In Germany too, Bourgeois democracy had to fail for the Bourgeoisie to embrace Bonapartism. Wherever it has appeared, Bonapartism has been unable to assume power without the active or passive consent of the big Bourgeoisie. As Marx put it: “[t]he overthrow of the Bourgeoisie had as yet only been decreed; the decree had not been carried out” (our italics).³⁴

The most surprising addition to the Bonapartist class structure is the Lumpenproletariat, that most diffuse stratum of the Proletariat not directly employed in production, but, rather, comprises thieves, beggars, and criminals of various stripes. How can it be that the lowest stratum of the propertyless class could comprise part of the joint dictatorship of all propertied classes? For the simple reason that the most diffuse and destitute stratum of the population makes the most humble demands. The most immediate interests of the unemployed are not the seizure of the means of production and smashing of the Bourgeois State, but, rather, securing employment, and the Bonapartist State can do this quite easily by employing the Lumpenproletariat in State organs such as the army, national guard, and police.

Finally, there is the context in which Bonapartism usurps Bourgeois democracy. As Lenin states in “Left” Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder: the fundamental law of revolution is that revolutions happen when not only can the oppressed classes no longer continue in the old way, but when the ruling classes also cannot continue in the old way. When the Proletariat is sufficiently organized into a party and armed with revolutionary theory, these massive Capitalist crises should result in the establishment of a dictatorship of the Proletariat. But what we see in virtually all historical examples of Bonapartism is that the phenomenon emerges after an unsuccessful Proletarian revolution. It was in the midst of another economic crisis that fear of another June insurrection convinced the French Bourgeoisie to abolish their own class rule and embrace Bonapartism. In Germany, it was in the midst of the Great Depression that the German Bourgeoisie decided to embrace Naziism rather than risk another Spartacist Uprising. It matters not that the Bourgeoisie often detests these Bonapartist movements before finally embracing them. Bonapartism is an attempt to subvert a revolution from below with a counterrevolution from above. The Bourgeoisie only embraces Bonapartism once it has exhausted its own class rule.

We now have everything we need to understand the class structure, and therefore the political and economic character of Bonapartism. The archetypal class structure of Bonapartism consists firstly of the conservative sections of small property in Capitalist society. A large portion of the Bonapartist vanguard’s foot soldiers come from the Lumpenproletariat, but they have no class interests to advance, as their interests are met by their employment in the Bonapartist vanguard. Lastly, relatively late in the development of the Bonapartist vanguard, the big Bourgeoisie embraces Bonapartism after having failed to enforce its class rule through the medium of Bourgeois democracy. The decision to suspend Bourgeois democracy, however, does not mean that the contradictions among the Bourgeoisie are “resolved” (the only way to achieve that would be to abolish Capitalism). Rather, the suspension of Bourgeois democracy is the ultimate proof that these contradictions are irreconcilable within Capitalism, and so they must simply be settled. Insofar as Bonapartism is a vanguard of the propertied classes, the Bonapartist State can be said to be a dictatorship of Capital. But insofar as these classes still have opposing interests, the interests of one class must still sometimes supersede the interests of another. In this regard, Bonapartism can also be said to be a dictatorship over Capital.

Bonapartism is a dictatorship of and over Capital.

4.2. The Historical Significance of an American Bonaparte

In the last chapter of The Class Struggles in France, Marx asks the question of why the commercial crisis of 1847 caused a revolution in France, but not in England. It is often stated that Marx believed that Communist revolution would occur first in the most developed Capitalist countries (we are also guilty of repeating this idea as well), so the occurrence of a revolution in France rather than England, even if said revolution was not fully communist, should pose a challenge to Marx. In actuality, this interpretation of Marx stems from a misreading of the Communist Manifesto. When confronted with the reality of the French Revolution of 1848, Marx did not blink when he wrote:

“Just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England, so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. On the Continent the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form. First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more than to any other country. This export to England, however, depends on the latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market. England exports disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent on England's foreign trade. Hence when crises on the Continent produce revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England. Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which continental revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations” (our italics).³⁵

In other words, the most dominant Capitalist countries are actually less likely to experience revolution for the same reason that a monopoly is more likely to survive an economic crisis: because of their command of the market, they enter the crisis in an advantageous position, and, in fact, frequently emerge even stronger from crises once the crises have decimated their smaller competition, who experience crises more intensely due to their subordinate position in the market. This is not identical to the Marxist-Leninist idea that “the Capitalist chain breaks at its weakest link”, but it is in agreement insofar as it asserts that underdeveloped Capitalist countries are likely to have revolutions before their more developed counterparts.

As we have seen, Bonapartism is essentially a result of the same thing as Proletarian revolution: economic crisis. But these crises need to be strong enough that it becomes impossible for the Bourgeoisie to enforce their class rule through the medium of Bourgeois democracy. If the Bourgeoisie are still able to rule with Bourgeois democracy, then the Bourgeoisie will be able to crush the Proletarian revolution without having to resort to Bonapartism.

Since Bonapartism and Proletarian revolution are the products of the same material conditions, the two cannot be completely separated, the two are dialectically interconnected. Bonapartism emerges as the antithesis of Proletarian revolution. And just as all examples of Proletarian revolution have hitherto come from Capitalist countries which were comparatively underdeveloped for their time, so too do all historical examples of Bonapartism thus far. France had Louis Bonapart, Germany had Hitler, Hungary had Horthy, and so on. And just as Bonapartism tends to emerge from countries that are in a precarious position in the world market, it finds its first home among the classes who occupy a precarious position in the domestic market: the Lumpenproletariat, Peasantry, and Petty-Bourgeoisie (who sometimes embrace Bonapartism even during periods of prosperity).

As we saw during the first half of this essay, the conditions for revolution are developing in the US; the oppressed classes can no longer continue in the old way, and neither can the ruling class. Conditions are developing in which a crisis could uproot the entire Bourgeois order here in the US. As the world’s largest and most developed Capitalist country, the development of revolutionary conditions in the US is likely indicative of global breakdown conditions. The 2023 collapse of the Swiss bank Credit Suisse could also be proof of this breakdown, as it was one of 30 “global systemically important” banks.³⁶

If the conditions for revolution are developing in the US, then the conditions for Bonapartism are as well. But is there a figure leading a Bonapartist movement? Indeed there is, and it is none other than the person that stood across from Joe Biden on debate night: Donald Trump.

Let us be very clear about something here, we are not simply basing our assertion that Trump is a Bonaparte on superficial observations about Trump’s rhetoric. No Marxist would dispute that Trump styles himself as a Bonapartist, but any idiot can be a Bonapartist. Being a Bonapartist is not the same as being a Bonaparte. Rhetoric does not make a Bonaparte, material conditions do. The Bonaparte is not a person, but a process personified.

Whether or not Trump truly has the potential to become a Bonaparte can be gleaned from the class composition of his movement. We can get a sample size of Trump’s movement from those who participated in the January 6 Capitol Hill Putch, of whom the Bourgeoisie³⁷ and Lumpenproletariat³⁸ constituted significant percentages.³⁹ Between 2016 and 2020, Trump also became more popular among Black and Latino small business owners, as well as former industrial workers in the rust belt.⁴⁰ Seeing as how Biden has not offered these groups any alternative to Trump, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Trump is even more popular among these groups now. Lastly, the financial sector of the economy is currently leaning Republican according to Open Secrets.⁴¹ The last time finance leaned Republican during a Presidential election, the Republicans won.

Are we saying that it is a foregone conclusion that Trump will win the Presidential election and use the new sweeping immunity of the executive office to abolish Bourgeois democracy in the US? No. The question of what could happen is impossible to answer in advance. Something could happen tomorrow, or the day after that, that changes everything and makes everything in this essay irrelevant. To us, the question of whether or not an American Bonaparte will emerge is secondary to the directly observable fact that all of the necessary pieces are now in place.

What is the point of all this talk about Bonapartism if its economic basis is the same as Bourgeois democracy? Why should the working class care about the abolition of Bourgeois democracy when they continue to be systemically barred from participation in that system? The success of Bonapartism in any country, but especially in the US, is a pressing concern for workers everywhere because the rise of Bonapartism has always coincided with inter-imperialist war. Under Louis Bonaparte’s rule, France saw itself involved in the Crimean War and later in the Franco-Prussian war, the former being the bloodiest war in Europe prior to the First World War. It was under the leadership of the German Bonaparte, Hitler, that Germany launched the Second World War. Bonapartism and war cannot be separated because both are products of Capitalism’s crises. This is a direct concern for the Proletariat because the Bourgeoisie has never been capable of waging war by itself. The armies of Capitalist powers have always consisted largely of Proletarians.

But why does Bonapartism inevitably end in war? Let us look again at the conditions that give rise to Bonapartism.

Bonapartism arises when the ruling class can no longer continue according to the old status quo, but when the working class is not yet ready to take political power in its own hands. The goal of the Bonaparte is to manage contradictions which could no longer be managed through the medium of Bourgeois democracy and reconstitute Capitalism according to a new status quo. But that last part is impossible. Reconstituting Capitalism would require resolution to the contradictions that give rise to Bonapartism, and Bonapartism arises because these contradictions are irreconcilable. When the Bonapartist administration is unable to find a suitable solution to the domestic crisis, it must externalize the volatile class forces created by the social upheaval of the crisis that births Bonapartism. In other words, the last project of Bonapartism is to turn the civil war into an imperialist war.

Many will correctly assert that the US and any country likely to ally with it in a World War does not currently have the capacity to wage a war of such a scale, as the US and its client-states have failed to meet their military recruitment goals⁴²⁴³ (as if conscription doesn’t present the countertendency to this “problem”). Even if the troop numbers were deemed sufficient for war, there is still the fact that the US does not currently have the productive capacity to wage war on the scale of a World War. The US is currently in the process of reindustrializing,⁴⁴ but it is not where it needs to be in order to wage a World War.

And, on the other hand, as the US reindustrializes, it further creates the conditions for Proletarian revolution. The rebirth of American industry cannot happen without an accompanying rebirth of an American industrial Proletariat. The industrial Proletariat is the most revolutionary section of the Proletariat by a wide margin. Being directly employed in production, they have the means to stop production under Capitalism, but also the means to jumpstart the production that will be required by the dictatorship of the Proletariat. Industry is also where the Proletariat is at its most social. Industrial production demands that workers associate and cooperate in order to accomplish feats that would be impossible for any individual. By associating and cooperating as industry demands, the industrial Proletariat becomes aware of itself as a class and becomes more than the sum of its parts. It is only really in industry that the possibility of Proletarian class consciousness becomes a reality. It is impossible for the class to really become a party without industry. It is not hyperbole to say that by reindustrializing in preparation for World War, the American Bourgeoisie is creating its own gravediggers.

But just as American industry is currently still underdeveloped, so too is the American Proletariat. The American Proletariat is not a party, but a coterie, barely having achieved a semblance of trade union consciousness. The most organized section of the American Proletariat can be found in the trade unions, but this is only about 10% of the workforce in the US.⁴⁵ And, as is shown in many of the sources we’ve cited thus far, American trade unions overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, a Bourgeois party that does not serve the interests of the working class! Strong unions have never been sufficient for waging Proletarian revolution though, a strong, disciplined, and advanced workers’ party is also necessary, and the American Proletariat is no better-off on this front either. The percentage of the American population organized into anti-Capitalist parties is so small that reliable statistics are hard to come by.⁴⁶ And as we made clear in our last essay, the US simply has too many parties. The anti-Capitalist Left never has been and never will be completely unified as a political front, but it is abundantly clear that the sheer number of parties, each with their own political line, in the US is only further dividing an already diffuse working class. A single, centralized, and theoretically disciplined Communist party could act as a counterweight to this diffuseness, but we don’t even have that yet! All we have are a coterie of parties that are Communist in name only.⁴⁷

But even if we had more of the workforce in unions, even if those unions were stronger, and even if the Proletariat was guided by a truly revolutionary party, there would still be the problem of American industry. In the US economy, it is finance rather than industry that dominates.⁴⁸ The Bolshevik Revolution showed that the industrial Proletariat doesn’t need to be a majority of the population, but the Bolsheviks themselves understood the importance of the industrial Proletariat to Proletarian revolution. Successful Proletarian revolution is the product of having a reasonably developed industrial Proletariat that is also guided by a really revolutionary party. This sort of revolutionary front simply doesn’t exist in the US yet. We can readily observe all of the constituent pieces of such a front, but it is apparent upon observation that all of these pieces are extremely underdeveloped. For such a front to emerge, the unions would have to divest from the Democratic Party and join forces with a nationwide revolutionary party which does not yet exist, and domestic industry needs to develop beyond its current state of maturation.

So here we are, in a country where Bonapartism is developing with no real counterweight. When November comes, Americans will be given two choices. There are the Democrats on one hand, a party of necromancers who want to return to the status quo that existed before 2016, to the status quo that created our current Capitalist hellscape, with the shambling corpse Biden at their head. They can shift their platform to the right all they want. The American Bourgeoisie has no use for two Republican Parties. On the other hand, there are the Republicans, who also do not offer any resolution to our current Capitalist crisis. Their only promise is to prolong the current crisis until they no longer have the capacity for the violence necessitated by such a project. The US is the most advanced Capitalist country in history thus far, yet it arguably has the least developed Proletariat. This country’s current crisis is less a result of inter-class conflict, and more a result of intra-class conflict, as members of a bourgeois Bourgeoisie daily become less able to manage the contradictions they have created by themselves, thus giving further thrust to this country’s descent into Bonapartism. Their decadence is punctuated by their every move. 

So we stand in anticipation of Trump’s 18th Brumaire. May he stand as a monument to all of this country’s failures. The only silver lining to his ascension will be that as he prepares this country for World War, he will simultaneously create the conditions in which Capital can be overthrown. So long live our farcical Bonaparte! May he work in spite of himself to create the conditions for Proletarian revolution! The more international competition forces the US to reindustrialize, the more its State apparatus embraces Tsardom, the more it lays the foundations for an American Bolshevism.

Bluebird,

July, 2024

1. In reality, the American people never forgot about Trump. How could they? His legal battles have been a mainstay in mainstream news since he left office, especially among 24 hour news outlets like Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. For Trump, the debate was little more than an opportunity to reassert himself as the main character of his story, rather than be confined to a side character in the country’s story.

2. All references to employment levels in this section are based on statistics from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.

3. The Democrats also had other opportunities to codify Roe v. Wade under several prior administrations during which there was also a less conservative Supreme Court than we now have.

4. “MAJOR US IMMIGRATION LAWS, 1790 - PRESENT.” 2013. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/CIR-1790Timeline.pdf.

5. The fact that deportation is the punishment for immigrating to the US illegally is also noteworthy. Immigrating to the US illegally is a victimless crime whose penalty should, at most, be a small fine and some paperwork for citizenship or a work visa. But immigrant workers may be more likely to organize and demand rights if the penalty for illegally immigrating were so lenient, so the victimless crime of traveling is given the draconian punishment of deportation.

6. Mass deportations of undocumented migrants would also mean the end of agricultural production in the US as it currently exists. This is reflected in data from the US Department of Agriculture, who estimate that roughly half of all workers employed in the agricultural sector are undocumented migrants.

7. “Births - Health, United States.” n.d. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/births.htm.

8. Budiman, Abby. 2020. “Key findings about U.S. immigrants.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/.

9. Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Five. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm.

10.  This is admittedly only our best guess. Ordinarily, we would blame falling birth and fertility rates on pollution and contaminants in people’s diets. However, in the United States, what we see is birth and fertility rates falling among the white population, who have the most access to clean food and living space, whereas birth and fertility rates are stable or rising among racialized groups despite their poverty and poor standard of living. The only thing that can explain this in our opinion is that white people are far more likely to be able to access contraceptives and family planning as a result of their privileged position in the racial hierarchy of the US.

11.  We arrived at this conclusion by examining raw statistical data, but since initially publishing this article, we have stumbled across an article in ProPublica which vindicates much of our analysis in this section.

12. https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?category=Demographics#Population-by-race

13. Trump’s style of rhetoric around foreign policy is probably also a reflection of his past as a businessman. His outrageous statements, deliberate or not, make his true intentions more reasonable by comparison. For example, if I ask for a delivery of a million Sherman tanks, that would be an unreasonable request to make of whoever I am getting the tanks from. But if I only want a few thousand tanks, I start by demanding more than I want, and then letting my supplier talk me down to something that is closer to what I really wanted. So when Trump threatens to withhold support for NATO unless member-countries increase their contributions, it is quite immaterial whether or not Trump’s demand was serious, the result is the same: NATO countries increase their military spending because they are in no position to refuse.

14. Yes, US media does lean heavily Democrat. This is directly observable in not only who the media gives positive coverage to, but also, more importantly, in who they give money to. This is confirmed by even a cursory look at the data collected by Open Secrets.

15. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr9d79TNPfc&list=WL&index=1

16. Debusmann, Bernd. 2024. “How Joe Biden and Donald Trump's border policies compare.” BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65574725.

17. Manthey, Grace. 2022. “Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities.” ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-increased-us-cities/story?id=91511971.

18. Maizland, Lindsay, and Jack Guez. 2024. “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts.” Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts.

19. Shepardson, David, and Nandita Bose. 2022. “Biden signs bill to block U.S. railroad strike.” Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-railroad-strike-2022-12-02/.

20. “Interest Groups • OpenSecrets.” n.d. OpenSecrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries.

21. Mike Podhorzer, a senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO.

22. Olbrysh, Ryan, Molly Ball, LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA, and SIMMONE SHAH. 2021. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Time. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/.

23. Prolekult. “The Soul of America.” 2021. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=visOwngzG8c.

24. “Full interview: One-on-one with President Biden l ABC News Exclusive.” 2024. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kpibhlagG0.

25. “23-939 Trump v. United States (07/01/2024).” 2024. Supreme Court. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf.

26. “Article II - Executive Branch | Constitution Center.” n.d. The National Constitution Center. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii.

27. “23-939 Trump v. United States (07/01/2024).” 2024. Supreme Court. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf.

28. Because of how deeply intertwined the concept of Bonapartism is with the State and Capitalism, a full explanation may be beyond the scope of this work. To streamline our exposition of Bonapartism in this essay, we are going to assume that the reader is already familiar with the Marxist critique of Capitalism and the State.

29. The idea of “rule by the sword” may also be a reference to the Sword of Damocles, a metaphor used by Marx to explain Bonapartism. We still feel, however, that it is ultimately a reductive understanding of the concept.

30. Marx, Karl. 1852. “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm.

31. Marx, Karl. 1895. “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 - Part III.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch03.htm.

32. Marx, Karl. 1852. “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm.

33. “The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.” — Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1

34. Marx, Karl. 1852. “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm.

35. Marx, Karl. 1895. “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 - Part IV.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch04.htm.

36. “2022 List of Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs).” 2022. Financial Stability Board. https://www.fsb.org/wp-content/uploads/P211122.pdf.

37. Since our source does not specify between big and small business owners, we have opted not to differentiate between the Bourgeoisie and Petty-Bourgeoisie here.

38. We are referring primarily to the percentage referred to as having a criminal record by my source. There is a high likelihood that the majority of them are members of the Lumpenproletariat. There’s also an argument to be made that those referred to as having a background in law enforcement and/or the military could also be counted as members of the Lumpenproletariat.

39. Ricciardelli, Michael. 2023. “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions.” Seton Hall University. https://www.shu.edu/news/a-demographic-and-legal-profile-of-january-6-prosecutions.html.

40. Davis, Mike. 2020. “Mike Davis, Trench Warfare, NLR 126, November–December 2020.” New Left Review. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/mike-davis-trench-warfare.

41. “Interest Groups • OpenSecrets.” n.d. OpenSecrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries.

42. Vergun, David. 2023. “DOD Addresses Recruiting Shortfall Challenges > U.S.” Department of Defense. https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/3616786/dod-addresses-recruiting-shortfall-challenges/.

43. Besch, Sophia. 2024. “Europe's Conscription Challenge: Lessons From Nordic and Baltic States.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/07/europes-conscription-challenge-lessons-from-nordic-and-baltic-states?lang=en&center=middle-east

44.  Harris, Johnny. 2024. “Joe Biden’s Radical Legacy.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHUGVEThmsg

45. Hsu, Andrea. 2024. “Only 10% of U.S. workers belong to unions despite growth in union membership.” NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226034366/labor-union-membership-uaw-hollywood-workers-strike-gallup.

46. Lack of reliable statistics regarding size is probably actually a good thing for these anti-Capitalist parties, at least from a security perspective. However, not even being able to estimate the size of the organized anti-Capitalist Left does not inspire any confidence in us that the US is on the eve of a Proletarian revolution.

47. And that’s to the extent that they even call themselves Communists. Many parties don’t even bother. Although we suppose that actually makes them more honest.

48. Of course this depends somewhat on how you define finance. We referenced three sources, and while they varied slightly, they all agreed on the general fact that finance accounts for a larger percentage of GDP than industry. Source 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-to-the-us-gdp-by-industry/ Source 2. https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gdp-industry Source 3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-industry-in-2023/