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!

When CHALLENGE identifies U.S. rulers as mass murderers in imperialist genocidal wars from Vietnam to the Middle East and South Asia as well as executioners on the streets of U.S. cities, they have a direct link to Hitler’s Nazis as revealed in a just-published book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. It reveals that U.S. government officials employed “approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the [World War II Nazi] genocide” (New York Times book review, 11/2) against Jews, communists, trade unionists and anti-Nazi resistance fighters. After World War II, the CIA and FBI worked hand-in-glove with top Nazis who were guilty of mass murder. This included “more than 1,600 scientists….[who] had developed the chemicals for the gas chambers, or conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners” (NYT review).
“U.S. agencies…hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes” (NYT, 10/27).
CIA director Allen Dulles and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover “aggressively recruited…Nazis” from the highest levels “as secret, anti-Soviet ‘assets’” (NYT, 11/2). They hired over 1,000 Nazis as anti-communist spies and informants, beginning even during World War II. “In March 1945,…American spy chief…Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat…with Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of SS leader Heinrich Himmler...[and] a leader of the Waffen SS [Gestapo]….When prosecutors sought to try Wolff at Nuremberg” as a war criminal, Dulles intervened and “worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants” (NYT).
Dulles’s CIA hired SS officer Otto von Bolschwing as a spy in Europe, knowing that he “was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the ‘Final Solution’” and who “wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.” The CIA then relocated him in New York City as “a reward for his loyal post-war service” (NYT, 10/27).
“In Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia….In Virginia, a top advisor to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains” (NYT, 10/27).
CIA files linked senior Nazi collaborator Aleksandras Lieikis “to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked ‘under the control of the Gestapo during the war’…. Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany…and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America….[where] he lived quietly for nearly 40 years” (NYT).
FBI director Hoover “personally approved…ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed…their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda.” In 1980, “FBI officials…knew about 16…Nazis living in the United States…. [and] memos show…the 16 men had all worked as FBI informants, providing leads on Communist ‘sympathizers.’ Five of the men were still active informants.”
According to Florida University historian Norman Goda, “The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher…but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible” (NYT, 10/27).
All this U.S. government use of Nazis in the name of anti-communism occurred for 50 years since the 1940s under every U.S. president, whether Democrat or Republican. Voting for any one of them meant voting for rulers who collaborated with racist mass murderers. This should leave no doubt among workers in the U.S. and worldwide that the U.S. ruling class will be ready and willing to employ full-blown fascism to maintain its profit system. It was the communist leadership of the working class in the Soviet Union and China that defeated Hitler’s Nazis and the Japanese fascists in World War II. Only a communist revolution can smash these barbarians now.

One hundred years ago, four million soldiers were facing off in frozen trenches stretching over 800 kilometers (500 miles), from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. By December, 1914, World War I had killed or wounded 85,000 British, 850,000 French and 677,000 German soldiers on the Western front.
As Joseph Stalin later said, the world socialist misleaders betrayed the working class and made the slaughter possible: “On the very eve of the war,…the workers were given a new slogan — to exterminate each other for the glory of their capitalist fatherlands.”
One soldier remembered, “In Christmas time, on the 24th of December… [we] were not at all unfriendly…against the enemy. There was a feeling in the air: ‘we can’t go on killing each other today.’ And this was a mutual feeling on both sides.”
Rank-and-file soldiers began spontaneous, unofficial truces all along the battle line. Lance Corporal George Ashurst, of the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers recalled: “It started by ‘Well, Merry Christmas, lads!’ You know, talking in the trench. We can hear Jerry [German soldiers]…chatting quite loudly….singing a Christmas carol, you know, in German. And damn good singing, too. We’re shouting: ‘Go on, Jerry!’…. ‘Encore!’ we’re shouting. And a fellow comes next, playing a cornet…. It was beautiful to hear him play it. And we were shouting: ‘Hurray!’ And there was no more shooting.”
Once it stopped, they came out of the trenches and met.
German artillery officer Richner remembered: “The fraternization between the both lines came to a climax when at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon about ten or twelve soldiers of our trenches and about the same number of French soldiers came to the middle of the two lines. The trenches were about 300 meters from each other, and [they] met there on the barbed wire and had champagne and wine and cigarettes to exchange, and then they came back.”
But fraternization continued. Ernie Williams, of a Cheshire regiment reminisced: “Somehow, this football appeared,….But we didn’t form a team.… It was a kick-about, everybody was having a go. … Boy, it was grand.… Kicked it about on top. Just to keep warm, of course.… And do you know, there were fellows walking about on top of our trench,….at tea time, and not a shot had been fired.”
….The soldiers began talking….One began to think that these chaps, who were like ourselves, whom we liked, and who felt about the war as we did…”
As the soldiers met, they questioned what they were being told and realized they had more in common with the working-class soldiers across the battlefield than with their own capitalist politicians and commanders.
Ernie Williams remembered: “I was thinking it was altogether wrong that we were having this war. Them fellows don’t want to fight us…. They’re ordinary people, like me. And they don’t want to fight. It’s the generals and them people that started this scrapping.”
The military command on both sides moved quickly to end the Christmas truce.
George Ashurst remembered: “We got orders: ‘Get back in your trenches, every man!’ The generals behind must have seen it and got a bit suspicious. Oh! We were cursing them to hell. Cursing the generals…. ‘Want to get up here in this stuff? Never mind your big giving orders in your big chateaux and driving about in your big cars.’  Yes. We hated the sight of bloody generals. We always did, all through the war! They gave orders for a battery of guns behind us to fire and the machine gun to open out…. Officers fired their revolvers at the Jerries, you know. Course, that started the war again.”
The 1914 Christmas truce demonstrated both the immense potential of the working class — able to halt a ferocious world war after five months of bitter combat — and the cruel weakness of spontaneous, unorganized action.
In 1917, Russian soldiers through the Bolshevik revolution exposed to communist refused to continue the war against Germany. But later, turned their guns against the Russian tsars and formed a workers’ state on one-sixth of the earth’s surface. It is only by organizing a revolutionary communist party that the working class can realize decisive victories over the ruling class.


(Note: All of the men who fought in World War I are now dead. This article is based on oral history recordings made after the war.)

Brooklyn, December 22 — “No justice, no peace, no racist police!” rang out loud and clear on the corner of Church and Nostrand in East Flatbush tonight, as members and friends of Progressive Labor Party broke Bill DeBlasio and William Bratton’s “ban” on protests (click here to view video). The politicians want to honor the cops shot on December 20. As speakers pointed out time and again, where was the bosses' time of mourning and concern for the children of Eric Gardner and so many other victims of racist police terror? Passing cars honked in support of the protest. People passing by joined the picket line for a time or two around, chanting and raising their fists in unity against racist murders by the police.