The USA is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, this is known. From the vast sums of money dumped into political campaigns by monopoly capital, to the cushy corporate lobbyist jobs awaiting elected officials after retirement, to the huge gulf between the values and desires of the people and the voting records of their so-called representatives. But there’s one thing that I heard a lot of “progressive” liberals (or whatever you want to call them) saying over my many years in the USA: if voting didn’t matter, they (referring to the republican party, naturally) wouldn’t be trying to stop you from doing it.
Voting, and the outcome of elections in the USA, matters to somebody. Again, the capitalist powers that be invest quite a bit of money and effort into these political campaigns. But why? Why should contests over political office be so expensive and complicated if the result – that imperialism wins – is a foregone conclusion? Is it just the battlefield for the redivision of the domestic markets? How do the fights over civil rights issues and such factor in, or is it precisely because capital doesn’t really care either way that bickering over those issues is so fierce?
This is exactly the answer I was looking for, thank you! I recently re-read Dialectical and Historical Materialism but learning how to actually apply those principles to analyze the world isn’t easy.
Do you have any further reading on the disagreements within the bourgeoisie? The “attempts to eat each other’s lunch”, as you say? I’d like to dig more into the gritty details of such things.
There are many examples! Two interesting ones are the North vs. South bourgeoisie leading up to, during, and after the US civil war and the overall competition between countries (imperialism), where a national bourgeoisie is at odds with (yet aspiring to) the international bourgeoisie. Russia’s in that situation as a resource-rich and fairly developed country that has been forcefully isolated from the international bourgeoisie. Consequently, they act more in the interests of their national bourgeoisie (who Western capitalist media hypocritically calls oligarchs).
I think Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai (mentioning both because they’ve been collaborating recently) speak on this well, particularly around imperialism and finance. Michael Roberts does as well. I don’t think I have one particicular reading rec on the civil war. Perspectives that treat it as a bourgeois revolution are interesting and that goes back to Marx and the people he was reading at the time.
I guess Lenin writes about this as well, ha.