The 2014 U.S. Congressional or “midterm” elections were the most expensive non-presidential elections in history, costing a total of at least $3.67 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. To many workers, that sum of money is enormous, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the total wealth the capitalists have stolen from the working class.
By understanding how and why elections are funded, we can gain a clearer picture of their role in the dictatorship of the capitalist class. The bosses’ elections will never serve workers’ needs. By sharing this knowledge with our co-workers we can help free them from the illusion of voting and win them to fight for true workers’ power — communism, the dictatorship of the working class — under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party.
Democracy: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose
Elections are an important aspect of capitalist state power as a way to both resolve disputes between the rival capitalist factions and to exert ideological control over the working class. In dominant capitalist countries like the United States, where genocidal levels of Black working class youth are gunned down by the police and immigrants are being deported in record numbers, the bosses hold voting up as the height of all social progress.
Workers in these countries are all too familiar with the campaign circus every two years or so that really amounts to giant advertising campaigns to convince workers to support one ruling class faction versus another. Karl Marx, one of the founders of revolutionary communism, once remarked that in elections “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”  All of these politicians and the immense campaign machinery behind them are merely the puppets of the most powerful — the capitalist class.
One way to understand the power of the rich is to look at how much wealth they have stolen from all that the working class has produced. Net U.S. household wealth – the value of homes, stocks and bonds, cars, bank accounts, etc. minus debts and other liabilities – was $81.5 trillion in June of 2014. The richest one percent of U.S. families own 40 percent of that, about $32 trillion.
“The one percent” vs. The Concept of the Capitalist Class
But merely looking at the “richest one percent” is to ignore the class role of most of the people in the so-called “one percent.” The richest one percent includes small business, doctors, lawyers and so on.  The vast majority of these people may have large individual sums of money, but are not in control of the institutions vital to U.S. imperialism such as Citigroup, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, etc, which collectively have or control trillions of dollars and determine the course of U.S. government policy.
This number of people is much smaller! Members of the ruling capitalist class are closer to the richest one percent of the one percent, the wealthiest one-hundredth of one percent. That would be roughly one out of every 10,000 U.S. citizens. According to the graph below, these 16,000 families own 11.1 percent of U.S. wealth, or about $6 trillion dollars.
If these top capitalists and their families spent only one dollar for every thousand dollars they own on electing candidates favorable to their interests, they could spend $6 billion a year on elections. However, there is no need for them to spend that much, since for the moment a much smaller amount gives them the control they want. In addition, the capitalists have other resources on their side.
The elected politicians are just one facet of capitalist state power, which as CHALLENGE has analyzed (see CHALLENGE 12/10/14) includes not just all levels of government, but also the so-called justice system, the police, the military, the schools as well as the media of both the liberal and conservative varieties.
The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalist state power and replace it with a workers’ dictatorship where in one stroke the unnecessary waste, corruption and ridiculous media frenzy that accompanies it are all done away with. In a workers’ dictatorship, instead of elections and glitzy ad campaigns that revolve around individuals claiming to represent the working class, all workers will be encouraged to take leadership and responsibility for building a new communist world where exploitation, racism and sexism are abolished.
Workers will use state power to repress and eliminate remnants of the old capitalist class and the me-first selfish ideology that supported their rule. To do that we must continue to build the international revolutionary communist PLP, and we invite all workers, students and soldiers to join us!