“Democracy” or a dictatorship of big business?
by Jeff Booth and Sam Kidd
Boston, MA
Economic power is political power. The recent elections revealed this once again. Under capitalism, big money distorts and dominates elections, damaging or destroying civil rights in order to maintain capitalist ownership and control over our labor, land, and natural resources. At this moment, the billionaires blatantly show their political rule through the Trump regime.
The current price to become an unelected Vice President in the United States: $290 million+. “Elon Musk spent a total of more than $290 million on the 2024 election, new federal filings show, boosting President Donald Trump and Republicans in a staggering effort that has helped to secure unprecedented access for the world’s richest person in the new administration.” (CNN 02/01/2025).
Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, has a net worth of around $400 billion, most of which is from his ownership of Tesla. He’s the co-founder, CEO, and largest individual shareholder. However, this wealth is tied to funding from the government. It’s estimated that Tesla has received at least $3 billion in tax subsidies and grants from the federal government. Musk also owns SpaceX, an aerospace company that contracts with the government. SpaceX received at least $15 billion in the past decade, including at least $3.6 billion from the Department of Defense for military contracts. Musk’s wealth would be impossible without inheritance, exploiting workers’ labor, and massive corporate welfare (federal funding).
Trump, the Republicans, and their Democratic Party enablers are spearheading a new wave of anti-worker policies, including more tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, privatization, and destroying jobs and services. They’re accelerating attacks on workers’ rights and living standards, continuing and intensifying the dominant political trend in the U.S. for over 50 years of stealing more value from the labor of workers regardless of the effect on working people and the environment. The Trump regime is building on past policies from both corporate parties to weaken the labor movement and co-opt its leadership to support the duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties. Anti-worker policies, the lack of a labor or workers party to fight back, and no mass socialist movement have allowed the capitalist class to use and abuse working people, claw back democratic reforms, and massively increase wealth for the rich.
The capitalist class has always exerted primary control over the political system in the U.S., but the working class has also shown that it has political power. Some examples include the Civil War abolishing slavery, strike waves and union organizing during the last “Gilded Age” and also in the 1930’s and early 1970’s, the Civil Rights movement, and other mass protest movements. These struggles carved out some democratic rights, expanded civil liberties, and won economic gains for working people.
However, the default for the U.S. political system is profits over people. Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court represent, first and foremost, the millionaires and the billionaires. The billionaires behind both corporate parties are more than willing to bet on an unstable Trump leadership. They’re already cashing in. Trump’s cabinet includes 13 billionaires. Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest billionaires, are all $242 billion richer since Trump’s inauguration. Together, they own $932 billion, more than 170 million people combined, the bottom half of the U.S. population.
According to an Oxfam report, in January 2025, billionaires’ wealth grew by over 2 trillion dollars in 2024. Within the next decade, there will be the first trillionaires. The ten richest men’s wealth grew an average of 100 million dollars per day throughout 2024, and even if they lost 99% of their wealth, they would remain billionaires. The Oxfam report also found that a similar number of people are living in poverty today as there were in 1990. The wealth the millionaires and billionaires accumulate is staggering, but the average worker does not see that wealth leading to improvement in their own lives. On a world scale, the wealthiest 1% now own almost 45% of all wealth, while 44% of humanity lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of $6.85 per day.
The need for no billionaires
Millionaires and billionaires only exist through inheritance, the ruthless exploitation of labor and nature, and the support and protection of capitalist government. The rich owners are not “talented.” They do no real work. They hire and use workers for the physical labor, thinking, research, designing, etc., necessary for production. It’s no mystery why capitalists spend billions on keeping the political system and government under their influence and control. It’s not just the millionaires and billionaires’ inhuman greed and hoarding of resources. It’s more that the capitalist class owns the factories, land, transportation, storage, housing, hospitals, stores, etc… the production and distribution of what people need. Without the two capitalist political parties in the government, millionaires and billionaires would not have the political power, including the violence of the state, to keep the system going. The alternative to the rule of the capitalists would be a socialist economy and society, where the means of production are publicly owned, planned, and run by direct and real democracy of the working class. In a socialist society, there would be no room for millionaires or billionaires and their capitalist system generating poverty, inequality, racism, wars, and the destruction of the environment.
Independent Socialist Group 