By Jeff Mackler, National Secretary Socialist Action
With less than two weeks from the U.S. midterm elections, the base corruption of capitalist politics is in full view. The race, according to multiple pollsters almost daily cited by the New York Times, boils down to some dozen or even fewer contested states. The rest are deemed virtually secure for the Democrats and Republicans alike. That is, the interests of the contending ruling rich in the remaining 40-45 states are secure — secure in the sense that the fundamental financial structures of the corporate billionaire elite who divide up the nation’s wealth will not be threatened.
In truth, neither will they be threatened in the contested states! Here we would be remiss to not state bluntly and unequivocally that U.S. capitalism’s “two party system” is rigged from start to finish, with realistic participation from non-capitalist opposing parties either banned outright via reactionary legislation, corrupt judges, near zero access to the basic media, not to mention systems of vote counting that largely exclude all but capitalism twin party representatives.
An August 2026 Gallup poll reported that 57% of all adults aged 18 to 34 view socialism positively, compared to 43% who view capitalism favorably.
These stunning statistics alone inform us yet again that capitalism’s “democracy” is for the super rich only — that is, the rare few who own and control the nation’s basic wealth and administer its basic institutions.
The world’s richest person, the trillionaire Elon Musk, last week announced he would contribute $158 billion toward the lagging Texas Republicans’ election campaigns. But Musk is still a bit player in the crisis-ridden world capitalist system. The record shows that he contributed some $278 billion in the 2024 election cycle, matched in one form or another by the Democrats’ royal donors.
The Trump-created DOGE (Department of Governmental Efficiency) originally headed by his appointee, Musk, was assigned to lead this new institution purportedly to eliminate previous Democratic Party administration waste. It lasted less than one year during which time Musk’s maneuvers provided $billions in tax break for his own corporations, Tesla and Space X. Musk also engineered dubious cryptocurrency schemes, granted his allies illegal access to Social Security data and otherwise advanced the interests of the superrich. No doubt his early departure, and soon after DOGE’s demise, touched on his differences with Trump over Musk’s Tesla Corporation, with Trump’s personal financial interests geared to promoting the fossil fuel industry and gas guzzling automobiles while Musk preferred to negotiate deals with China over who would dominate the Electric Vehicle industry
As we shall see the outcome of the 2026 midterms, whoever “wins” the House and/or Senate, will not fundamentally alter the relations between capitalism’s key powerbrokers, for whom the health and well-being of the American people is never a factor.
“Genocide Joe” Biden and “Killer Kamala” Harris affirmed this essential truth with zero doubt, as did the “Deporter-in Chief” Barack Obama and the racist Southern Democrats turned liberals, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The Democrats’ latest iteration of an “honest capitalist politician,” an oxymoron term if there ever was one,” will likely emerge from the current crop of campaigners currently touring the states. Presenting themselves as fully capable of ruling the world’s richest economy, or perhaps the second richest economy, they can at best be compliant figureheads on top of an inherently corrupt system. This holds for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsome and Pete Buttigieg to the lesser known “left” or “right-wing” figures among the currently “divided” Democrats. We say “divided” in quotation marks here to mark their claimed ideological divergences and not their fundamental loyalty to the capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party. This basic truth has been confirmed with literally every U.S. election since Lincoln in 1860.
“The rich essentially don’t pay taxes.”
Biden himself, pretending to introduce significant changes in the tax system, proclaimed a never rebutted truth: “The rich essentially don’t pay taxes.”
Here’s some data according to an Americans For Tax Fairness’ analysis of Forbes Foundation data that presents a semblance of this truth: Entitled, “America’s Oligarchs Are $2.2 Trillion Richer Since June 2025, $864 Billion Went To Musk Alone, Making Him First Trillionaire,” the article begins:
“Nearly a year after President Trump and Congressional Republicans passed their $5 trillion tax cut package, billionaires’ wealth is soaring even as many working families find it harder than ever to keep up with rising costs. As of June 16, 2026, America’s 977 billionaires held $9.24 trillion — up $2.2 trillion (32%) from a year ago. Over the last 12 months, U.S. GDP (unadjusted for inflation) rose just 6%, meaning this wealth expansion is not trickling down to broad based prosperity.”
The article continues:
“With SpaceX going public last week Elon Musk has now become the world’s first ever trillionaire. Previous ATF reporting revealed Musk spent $278 million to influence the 2024 elections, more than any other individual. That political investment has clearly paid off handsomely, with his wealth exploding by 205% ($864 billion) in just the last 12 months.
“Even among the richest of the rich, wealth is being concentrated at the very top. America’s 15 centi-billionaires [$100 billion] and now1 trillionaire alone make up 43% of all billionaire wealth—an astounding $4 trillion—and their wealth is growing over twice as fast as fellow billionaires in the past year. Just these top 16 billionaires hold more wealth today than every U.S. billionaire combined in September of 2020, less than six years ago.”
I caution that this data, however damning, in reality omits other critical facts. The tax code itself is replete with innumerable exceptions drafted by the elite or their tax agents that allow the super rich to avoid taxes entirely, not to mention other schemes that do the same including offshoring entire industries like garment, and/or corporations like the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Corporation.
That the system is rigged from top to bottom is almost daily revealed by Trump’s announcements that he is negotiating deals with Russia to purchase previously banned oil, supposedly to lower ever-rising fossil fuel costs to beleaguered U.S. consumers who Trump hopes to placate. Just last year the same Trump hailed rising fuel costs as a boon to the corporate fuel industry.
“War is Good For Profits”
The same Trump, as with every Democrat before him, promotes the U.S. military-industrial complex, an institution run exclusively by the super-rich as with the banks and all other financial institutions. These institutions preside over all U.S. wars and military operations in some 110 nations, overt and covert. They operate as virtual monopolies, selling their weapons of mass destruction at prices qualitatively above anything resembling their real values. Indeed, the maxim, “War is good for profits,” holds true for U.S. wars with zero exceptions.
The most recent kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and stealing its fossil fuel resources, perhaps the largest on earth, is matched over and over by U.S. imperialism’s endless wars across the globe. Today’s Congo war, to name a single example among hundreds, is fought by U.S. paid mercenaries in neighboring nations. It is aimed at securing for U.S. capitalists that nation’s rare earth and other critical minerals. There are no exceptions. All U.S. troops everywhere are present to guarantee U.S. corporate profits, across Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Arctic Circle and now, perhaps in the not too distant future on the moon or Mars.
There are few, if any, exceptions with Trump threatening and imposing sanctions, if not invasions against enemies and allies alike. Revolutionary Cuba, today viciously embargoed, blockaded and sanctioned, ranks high Trump’s list of nations to invade and conquer, returning Cuba to its pre-1959 status as a Batista-era U.S.-run whorehouse for the U.S. rich and famous, presided over by U.S. monopolies like the United Fruit Corporation privately owned by U.S. top officials like CIA Director Alan Dulles and Kennedy’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
The same with capitalism’s destruction of the environment either by endless fossil fuel burning that raises the earth’s temperatures to deadly irreversible levels to poisoning its waters with deadly chemicals.
Nothing is excluded from imperialism’s calculations, from the Democrat’s election time promotion of No King’s Days to Trump’s populist rallies aimed at rousing Republican supporters. The ruling class has learned its lessons from decades past when both capitalist parties largely abstained from organizing mass public rallies to maintain the fiction that elected politicians represent all the people. Today’s capitalist-organized large rallies are aimed at co-opting important social movements into safe electoral channels that promise reform but deliver nothing. This is especially the case with pseudo-socialist electoral organizations like the Democratic Party-affiliated Democratic Socialist of America that operate to graft a left face onto the Democrat’s imperialist, racist, sexist, homophobic reality.
Capitalism’s core reactionary values are consciously embedded in every aspect of life, from the “entertainment” industries to the sports arena, where multi-millionaire and now billionaire corporations and ballpark owners are in control – buying and selling star players at astronomical salaries to maintain their team’s market dominance.
For the imperialist elite almost everything and everyone has a price as evidenced by Trump’s ceaselessly proposing “deals,” as in Iran, promising to either make that beleaguered nation a paradise or destroy it outright, as it has done since the onset of the U.S. slaughter in that barely disguised oil war. As we go to print, October 24, the NYT reports that the U.S. and Zionist Israel are planning yet another murderous attack on Iran, aimed at further crippling that beleaguered nation’s basic energy infrastructure and its UN-certified peaceful nuclear reactor systems.
At the onset of the U.S.-Zionist war U.S. warmongers predicted that their unprovoked slaughter would be welcomed by claimed U.S. allies inside Iraq, a prediction that has been dramatically refuted by the Iranian people, who, while suffering massive damage to their country, their homes, lives and and well being, have nevertheless inflicted repeatedly unexpected blows on their would-be conquerors. Still undefeated, and daily inflicting retaliatory blows against U.S. military bases in neighboring Middle Eastern nations, as well as reducing by some 25 percent U.S. and allied fossil fuel supplies, Iran, unbelievably, has forced the imperialist beast, with its previously inexhaustible supply of drones and related modern war devices, to announce that its major weapons have been largely depleted.
Origins of Ukraine War
The same with Ukraine when the U.S. under President Obama backed and financed the 2014 fascist-led coup that removed the elected president, banned the two majority parties in the Rada (parliament), appointed leading fascists to the new regime’s top posts and ordered the fascist-led Ukrainian Army to march on the Eastern Ukraine to slaughter the largely Russian-speaking population.
Twelve years later that war continues with Trump ever posing new and barely disguised deals with the lesser capitalist-imperialist Russia aimed at advancing U.S. oil interests in the region, temporarily assuaging mass public opposition to ever-escalating gas prices as well as secretly negotiating decisions regarding which competing capitalist entities will control Ukraine’s fertile agrarian regions that supply vast portions of Europe’s basic foodstuffs. A front-page October 23, 2026 NYT headline said it well, “Putin Nearing Revived Links With the U.S.”
Meanwhile, U.S. imperialism is increasing challenged by China, today the first, or perhaps second largest capitalist-imperialist economy on earth – certainly first with regard to dominating the world’s export markets.
Not a day passes when China and its leaders are cast as either bitter enemies or gracious friends – when competing tariffs are either viciously imposed or gratuitously withdrawn.
Capitalism’s deadly law of the rate of profit to fall.
The once dominant U.S. economy stands in constant retreat as profit rates in the face of endless competition worldwide decline and decline and decline.
Capitalism’s solutions are short-lived, whether they be offshoring traditional industries to other countries with lower labor costs, to union busting, wage freezes, speed-up, automation and now AI, all increasingly futilely employed to counter capitalism’s inherent contradiction – the operation of the deadly law of the rate of profit to fall. Again, over time, as Marx repeatedly demonstrated, capitalist profits are based on the exploitation of human labor power, with the latter inexorably and inevitably replaced by machines of one sort or another.
No nation has escaped this crisis of profits. Last week several of France’s major trade unions joined with protesting high school students to bring an estimated 800,000 protestors into the streets, according to the General Confederation of Trade Unions [CGT]. These actions, a week later were complemented with similar protests in eight European nations. All were initiated by students but soon encompassed trade unions and broad sections of the working class masses. They were largest anti-capitalist mobilizations since the near-revolutionary mobilizations in France in 1968. With even larger working class mobilizations announced for next week, the French government has threatened to ban all mobilizations except those sanctioned by the Macron government. In several major cites all protests were banned outright with the government falsely claiming they were organized by terrorists. French officials deployed unprecedented numbers of brutalizing police who arrested thousands. The leading student and union organizers, from the CGT to the teachers’ unions, repeatedly countered that the vast majority of protestors were peaceful.
The Trump administration as expected condemned the French protests as terrorist while essentially praising Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Rally party, currently polling 35 percent in the run-up to the French presidential elections next year. The far left socialist France Unbowed, today second in the polling and therefore likely to participate in the April 2027 runoff, is polling 27 percent.
Similar polls in Europe show gains by the far right and left in comparison to capitalism’s traditional “centrist, left centrist and right centrist” capitalist parties that have largely dominated governments in Europe for most of the past century.
In the U.S., Trump’s net approval rating is minus 27, down 0.2 points since last week. 34% approve, 61% disapprove, 4% not sure, according to the Economist.
Today, we live in a time of great contradictions. The vast majority of the populations stand opposed to capitalism’s endless attacks on the quality of life of the people, from its endless wars and racist ICE deportations to its deepening racist-sexist, homophobic attacks. For the first time in the modern era they stand opposed to U.S.-backed Zionist Israel’s genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people.
All this notwithstanding, the level of democratically organized independent united front mass mobilizations has far from reached its full potential as its did during the mass protests initiated by the Black Lives Matter mobilizations and the huge protests over the police murder of Oscar Grant, George Floyd and countless others daily executed by capitalism’s racist cops. But in the absence of a deeply rooted mass socialist leadership these vital struggles were inevitably channeled into the Democratic Party, aptly named “the historic graveyard of all social movements.”
Still, the process of initiating the kind of broad working class, immigrant rights and student unity proceeds uninterrupted across the nation, from growing campus and community educational events to regular citywide mobilizations of every type.
Today, some modest forces with significant experience in building mass opposition to capitalist prerogatives is underway, including the united educational efforts of organizations including Socialist Action USA, Revolutionary Workers, Workers Strike Back and Socialist Action Canada. Plans are underway for a nationally coordinated Zoom webinar, national speaking tours and other events that focus on the following:
1) Unconditional opposition to US capitalism’s twin imperialist parties of war, racism and oppression. Working class independence from all from all capitalist parties. For a labor party based on fighting unions in alliance with the oppressed and exploited. For support to Workers Strike Back as perhaps an initial mass working class organization that would pose the need for independent working class action to defend workers’ rights.
2) Self-determination to poor and oppressed nations facing U.S. imperialist intervention, sanctions, war, etc. While we unconditionally support this right to self-determination, including supporting military aid to all poor and oppressed nations facing imperialist intervention, we simultaneously aim to build mass revolutionary socialist parties aimed at winning the masses to end capitalist rule.
3) United front mass action as a central vehicle to challenge capitalism’s horrors, win the vast majority, build the confidence of the working class that it can rule in its own name and build a deeply-rooted revolutionary socialist party on the Leninist/Trotskyist model aimed at challenging capitalist rule and ushering in the socialist revolution
4) Defense of the environment, civil and democratic and LGBTQI+ rights, the rights of women and the nationally oppressed.
5) Freedom for all political prisoners.
6) Abolition of ICE, police repression and all other repressive capitalist institutions. No human being is illegal!
7) End all aid to apartheid, Zionist Israel! Free Palestine from the river to the sea!
8) $Trillions for human needs, not one penny for imperialist war! Bring all the troops home now!
Join us! Socialist Action at: socialistaction@lmi.net and Revolutionary Workers at: solidarity@