Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. The result is reaction all along the line, whatever the political system, and an extreme intensification of the antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the parasitism and decay of the capitalist countries.”

— Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 10

Today in the United States we live in a decaying capitalist society. A process that will not relent until the whole edifice is kicked over by the future proletarian dictatorship. The ascent of the Trump dynasty, from real-estate speculators and television personalities to the gilded hopeful sovereigns of a degenerating republic, is not an episode of corruption; it is the symptom of capitalism’s terminal senility. Since January, Joe Biden, Bernie, AOC and the liberal democrats have not stopped croaking about the oligarchy in the United States which they would like us to believe has only sprung up as a result of Trump policies. The progressive democrats present Trump and the Republicans as somehow an anomaly to the normal order of things. The solution they claim is anti-trust laws and redistribution of wealth to break; however, historically such reforms have only ever had cosmetic results and ultimately only worked to further the concentration of capital into a few monopolies.

Despite capitalist distortions about the New Deal and the Great Society programs, there has never been a massive redistribution of wealth in the United States where workers received “their fair share”. No, the affluence for some workers in this era was due to their allotments of imperialist plunder after the last world war, given to a section of the proletariat called the “middle class”, in exchange for total subordination in the slaughter of their class brethren in various imperialist wars abroad. Far from harming the capitalist class and its profit making ability, these programs were counter revolutionary and designed to ensure accumulation, not thwart it. This continued until the onset of the current overproduction crisis in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This period witnessed massive interclass movements in the United States, which we are told succeed thanks to democracy, not as a result of proletarian combativity.The delusions of the social democrats is fueled by the fictitious stories told in bourgeois schools, that it was the non-violent student protestors who ended the Vietnam War, not the demoralized proletarian conscripts blowing up their commanding officers who made the war unfightable, that it was the nonviolent civil disobedience and votes of white liberals that ended segregation not the real threat presented by the waves of black proletarian rebellions during the long hot summer of 1968 and the threat presented by the black power movement.

Throughout U.S. history, waves of reform movements and populist campaigns have been launched under the banner of fighting “corruption,” yet these struggles have often served to preserve rather than challenge the capitalist system itself. From the Democrats’ attacks on Grant’s administration and the spoils system during Reconstruction, through the Progressive Era’s anti-trust crusades under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the rhetoric of purging corruption was used to delude workers into the illusion that capitalism could be cleaned up. Roosevelt’s New Deal later revived this tradition, portraying regulation and public works as means to restore fairness rather than dismantle class domination. Even the post-Watergate outrage over Nixon’s corruption promised moral renewal without confronting the deeper economic contradictions that sustained political rot. In each case, the call to reform capitalism diverted working-class anger into faith in “good government,” while wealth and power continued to consolidate into ever fewer corporate and financial hands. The same process is playing out again today.

Since their return to the apparatus of state power, the Trump clan has openly transformed bourgeois public office into a mechanism for direct personal accumulation, with all levers of the state secured under their party and fully and explicitly put to the political and economic interests of themselves and their insider circle of the big-bourgeoisie. Their rule is marked by an unprecedented intertwining of public authority and private enrichment: the payments channeled from foreign governments to Trump-owned businesses during the presidency, including from Chinese government-controlled entities alone. The monetization of the presidency through licensing, donations, and international deals; the placement of family members like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in key advisory posts to advance private holdings; and the use of state intelligence for financial leverage, all these exemplify a new level of bourgeois parasitism, one where the state apparatus is openly ran like a family business. The Trump network of shell companies and Super PACs, his manipulation of tax loopholes and offshore accounts, and his open extortion of foreign governments for personal political and economic gain exemplify this.Trump-linked entities have engaged in insider trading around defence and energy contracts, have funneled state subsidies into private ventures, and have turned campaign funds into revolving doors of personal enrichment. Their associates have trafficked in influence, selling access to the administration through the Trump family’s social orbit and fundraising galas. As Trump-aligned corporations and hedge funds become among the largest holders of Bitcoin and defence-industrial stocks, the more or less open sale of pardons, ambassadorships and regulatory exemptions reveals the real content of “America First”: a racket for the financial oligarchy.

But in the last act, the Trump policies represent nothing truly new or unique, only a more honest portrayal of the real relations between capital, its state and the individual billionaires who do its bidding. Capital, increasingly concentrated into an ever smaller circle of firms managed by a clique of financiers orbiting Mar-a-Lago, now rules unmasked, capital as emperor with no clothes, As the big bourgeoisie advance their interest the petty-bourgeois cries of corruption and unfairness. The proletarian on the other hand have no interest on either side of this dispute.

As hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned for the construction of new monuments amid a government shutdown that will leave millions of workers without food stamps and pay-stubs, the so-called “Arc de Trump,” the vast palatial complexes and ballrooms planned for White House renovation, are not anomalies but expressions of parasitic, decayed capitalism. The gold-plated offices, the nepotistic contracts awarded to family firms, the indulgent use of military funds to host political rallies, and the laundering of donor money through real-estate projects stand as Versailles reborn under the neon light of late imperial America. There, amidst chandeliers and mountains of debt, the courtiers of finance capital and bourgeois propaganda dance while the proletarian masses, dispossessed and atomised, are told to worship the splendor of their masters. The bourgeois White House, the so-called “People’s House” now converted into a palace, is not an aberration but the logical terminus of capitalism intoxicated with its speculative madness. And like the French and Tsarist courts before their revolutions, it prefigures its own downfall, not through moral awakening, but through the irresistible contradictions of a system that can no longer reproduce itself without spectacle, graft, and absolute moral decay, which will only continue until the whole rotten edifice is removed from the historical stage by the future proletarian revolution, no matter how much the petty-bourgeosis attempt to bring back “normalcy”.

The maniacal bourgeois will never relinquish control of its state and will never itself be able to escape the economic laws of Capital accumulation which drive it to immiserate the working class, to continue to accumulate wealth into the hands of an ever smaller and more isolated clique of ultra-wealth who flaunt its opulence, to engage in imperialist wars and ultimately to set the material conditions for future proletarian revolution; however, the proletariat cannot be deceived that revolution will somehow ever come via the ballot box without a real and serious class struggle and vicious battle with the class enemy.