C99% readers, I don't know if you caught Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's piece "Seven Theses on American Politics" over at NLR. But it's important. It's important because Riley and Brenner are willing to admit what others don't, which ends up with a revelation of how pathetic the current situation is.

The piece begins with an analysis of the outcome of the midterm elections, but then goes on to state the "larger issue": "American politics has undergone a tectonic shift over the past twenty years, linked to deep structural transformations in the regime of accumulation." Here is how they summarize it:

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’.These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act.All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

Gee, don't the nice corporations make their profits putting out products which we use, to the vast improvement of our lives? Perhaps incidentally. The main source of their profits, the primary reason why they haven't all gone bankrupt by now, is government. The US government directs the Federal Reserve to print money, and hand it to corporations, who use this money to buy the government. There's no law against it, right?

The piece goes on to observe, correctly, that "neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party is, or has ever been, a ‘working-class party’; it is correct to interpret these parties as parties of capital," and then goes on to make a number of small-talk observations about how the Republican Party appeals to one fraction of the working class while the Democratic Party appeals to another such fraction. The train of thought that proceeds from these observations is only once interrupted by the authors' "Thesis Six":

Positive-sum class compromise is impossible in the current period.

It must be this "thesis," and not the others, which terrifies the various ruling classes of America today. It's certainly not democracy, as the United States is not a real democracy (a fact which was made most obviously apparent during Bush Junior's tenure). However, the weakness of dictatorship, even oligarchic dictatorship (which is what we have now), is that the dictators must focus all of their energies into staying on top of the heap, a fact which appeared more obvious during the January 6th insurrection. If we are frightened that they will try to do away with us in the course of maintaining their power, well, therein lies our power; perhaps our guide to the future will be Elizabeth Janeway's Powers of the Weak.

The system will therefore come under increasing stress, and this stress will appear not as a shift in electoral politics, but rather as thermodynamic breakdown as the consent of the governed goes slips-slidin' away. This is, no doubt, what they're afraid will happen.