“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.” A majority of Americans would agree with this description by Lenin of so-called “democracy” under capitalism.

Over the last decade, illusions in all the institutions of American bourgeois democracy have collapsed. A record 89% say that corruption is widespread in the US government, up 30 points since 2006. Less than three in ten Americans have any confidence in the presidency or Supreme Court. Just 15% have confidence in the media, and a pitiful 9% have confidence in Congress.

Workers don’t feel represented by out-of-touch politicians. They feel they’re being robbed, that the system is rigged for the rich. And they’re right.

Record spending by “dark donors”

Who does American democracy serve, billionaires or workers? Six in ten Americans say billionaires have too much influence over US politics. The eyewatering sums of billionaire super-PAC money thrown into the midterms make this abundantly clear.

By mid-October, 172 billionaire families donated a staggering $1.7 billion to candidates, party committees, and super PACs for the midterms. And these are just the legal, publicly reported amounts.

On the eve of the midterms, Elon Musk donated a record $474 million—the largest amount any single donor has given who was not also running for political office. Among 2026’s other ultra-donors are hated AI–venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who funneled $126 million to Big Tech allies, and the notorious Soros family, propping up the Democrats with $103 million. Then there are the “special interest groups,” like the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which raised $233 million, and the consortium of crypto, AI, and online gambling industries, which spent $377 million.

These hated individuals and corporations are the ones with real power in the game. Since the year 2000, 93% of seats in the US House of Representatives have been won by the candidate with deeper pockets. It’s the votes of the rich that decide, and it’s dictatorship for the rest of us.

Wall Street to Washington

The capitalist class also exercises its control over the state apparatus through the alliance between Washington and Wall Street. Already in his 1884 work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels explained: “Wealth employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and stock exchange.”

Trump’s 2025 cabinet was packed with billionaires, who together held $7.5 billion. And this doesn’t even include unofficial advisors like Musk, Witkoff, and Kushner—or Trump himself.

Although Trump’s insider trading and “dealmaking” is unabashed, it is par for the course among US presidents. Notably, Eisenhower’s 1953 cabinet was made up entirely of CEOs, excepting only the Secretary of Labor. This cabal became known as “nine millionaires and a plumber.”

Joe Biden’s team used identity politics to pose as “progressive” with his “diverse” cabinet full of women and people of color. But only two of them were non-millionaires. Among Biden’s wealthiest cabinet members was his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She moved from academia to the Federal Reserve, then to the Brookings Institution to give multimillion-dollar speeches for Citigroup and Citadel LLC, and back to Brookings after Biden’s presidency.

This is just one example of the bipartisan revolving door between corporations, the federal bureaucracy, and lobbyists. From 2011 to 2022, three-quarters of the war industry’s lobbyists had worked in the federal government. Vice President Dick Cheney famously made billion-dollar deals with his old company Halliburton during the Iraq War. From oil executives to weapons contractors, you can bet a lot of people are striking it rich from the Iran and Ukraine wars today.

Former White House advisor on cryptocurrency, Bo Hines, now works for the digital assets giant, Tether. Michael Jensen, who held a top post in the White House for Latin American foreign policy, took a lucrative post plundering Venezuela’s oil after Maduro’s capture. The full list of Trump officials who have transitioned from “public service” to corporate swindling is too long to enumerate.

“Deep state”

The vast majority of the capitalist state is composed of unelected bureaucrats. The Executive Branch appoints some 4,000 officials to the country’s top posts, most of whom don’t even require Senate confirmation. They manage everything from the State Department to the Pentagon to the Postal Service. By comparison, a mere 537 federal officials are elected.

Some people refer to this as the “deep state,” but there is no need for conspiracy theories to explain this phenomenon. It’s how the capitalist state apparatus has always functioned.

This unaccountable bureaucracy is controlled by the banks and Fortune 500 CEOs. Obama’s first-term cabinet provides an instructive example. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan were among Obama’s top donors for his 2008 run. A Citibank executive then wrote an email to Obama providing the finance capitalists’ top choices for his cabinet, saying, “The lists will continue to grow, but these are the names … recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

From that list, Obama filled the posts for Homeland Security, Defense, Justice Department, Chief of Staff, Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, Education, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Domestic Policy Council. This is the same administration that bailed out the banks after the 2008 economic crisis—with Citigroup the largest “aid” recipient of them all.

A sham democracy

Lenin described the bourgeois democratic republic as the “best possible political shell for capitalism.” It allows people to think they have a say through supposed “free speech” and “fair and free elections,” while ensuring the domination of the property-owning minority over the working-class majority.

The ruling class owns and controls the media and both parties, and they set the rules of the game. A mere five corporations control 90% of US media. They get to decide who to platform, which ads get airtime, and who to allow on the debate stage.

PSL candidate Joe Tache is running on an independent socialist ballot for the US Senate for the state of Massachusetts. The bar to make it into the debate was $250,000. In a sign of socialism’s appeal and widespread anti-capitalist sentiment, Tache was able to raise more than that amount. So television networks GBH 2 and Boston 25 canceled the debate altogether! They preferred to close up shop rather than allow an anti-imperialist,  pro-Palestine anti-imperialism socialist to explain his program to the public—which includes seizing the top 100 corporations, jobs, and wages for all.

Even voting rights are limited. As of 2024, four million Americans are disenfranchised because of their felony convictions, despite the guarantees made by the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. One-third of felony convictions are disproportionately meted out to Black Americans, who only account for 13% of the population.

Tax-paying citizens of the five inhabited American colonies—3.5 million across Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—do not have the right to vote in federal elections. Some 28 million immigrants, including undocumented and legal residents, don’t have the right to vote at all, even though the US economy couldn’t run without them.

In short, the capitalist state decides the parameters for who gets to be on the ballot as well as who gets to vote. As Lenin wrote, “Bourgeois democracy … is always narrow, hypocritical, spurious, and false; it always remains democracy for the rich and a swindle for the poor.”

“Two great cartels of politicians”

Engels once described American “democracy” in the following terms:

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states …

 

We find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends—and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.

The capitalists may set the rules of the game for now, but millions are beginning to see through it. As they stop believing that change can come through the system, many are concluding the system itself must be torn down altogether.